Reclaiming Abandoned Mines: Turning Coal Country’s Toxic Legacy Into Assets

New legislation could help states and tribes clean up decades-old mining liabilities and restore the environment while creating needed jobs.

Mined lands reclaimed for biking trails, office parks — even a winery. Efforts like these are already underway in Appalachia to reclaim the region’s toxic history, restore blighted lands, and create economic opportunities in areas where decades-old mines haven’t been properly cleaned up.

The projects are sorely needed. And so are many more. But the money to fund and enable them remains elusive.

Mining production is falling, which is good news for tackling climate change and air pollution, but Appalachia and other coal states are also feeling the economic pain that comes with it. And that loss is more acute on top of pandemic-related revenue shortfalls and the mounting bills from the industry’s environmental degradation.

Local leaders and organizations working in coal communities see a way to flip the script, though. The Revelator spoke with Rebecca Shelton, the director of policy and organizing for Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center in Kentucky, about efforts focusing on one particular area that’s plagued coal communities for more than 50 years: cleaning up abandoned mine lands.

Shelton explains the history behind these lands, the big legislative opportunities developing in Washington, and what coal communities need to prepare for a low-carbon future.

What are abandoned mine lands?

Technically an abandoned mine land is land where no reclamation was done after mining. Prior to the passage of Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, coal-mining companies weren’t required to reclaim — or clean up — the land they mined.

What SMCRA did, in addition to creating requirements for companies to do reclamation into the future, was create an abandoned mine land fund to distribute money to states and tribes with historic mining so that they could clean up those old sites. The revenue for that fund comes from a small tax on current coal production.

The program has accomplished a lot. It has closed 46,000 open mine portals, reclaimed more than 1,000 miles of high walls, stabilized slopes, and restored a lot of water supplies.

It’s been a successful program, but the work is far from done. A conservative estimate is that there’s still more than $11 billion needed to clean up existing identified liability across the U.S. [for sites mined before 1977].

What are the risks if we don’t do this?

There are safety, health and environmental issues.

Just this spring we’ve already gotten calls from folks living adjacent to abandoned mine lands that are experiencing slides [from wet weather causing slopes destabilized by mining to give way]. People’s homes can be completely destabilized, and if they don’t get out in time, it can be really dangerous.

There’s also a lot of existing acid mine drainage across coal-mining communities, which is water that’s leaking iron oxides and other heavy metals from these abandoned mine lands. This is bad for the ecology of the streams, but heavy metals are also not safe for humans to be exposed to.

orange colored water — Acid mine drainage in a stream. Photo: Rachel Brennan (CC BY-NC 2.0)

There’s legislation in Congress now that could help deal with this issue. What are those bills?

One bill is the reauthorization of the abandoned mine land fund. That bill is absolutely critical because the fee on coal production, which is the only source of revenue for the fund, will expire at the end of September if Congress doesn’t take action.

If Congress fails to extend that, we may not see any more funding for the $11 billion needed to clean up abandoned mine lands. If passed, the bill would reauthorize the fee at its current level for 15 more years.

The challenge is that even if the fee is reauthorized, it’ll likely generate only around $1.6 billion — based on current coal-production projections — and that’s vastly inadequate to cover all of the liabilities that exist.

Also, when the abandoned mine land fund was first started, there were some funds that were not redistributed to states and tribes and have just remained in the fund — [about] $2.5 billion that’s not being dispersed on an annual basis.

So another bill, the RECLAIM Act, would authorize [an initial] $1 billion to be dispersed out of that fund that would go to approximately 20 states and tribes over the next five years. This money would be distributed differently than the regular funds in that any kind of project would have to have a plan in place for community and economic development.

So though the funds can only be used for reclamation, they need to be reclamation with a plan. There are so many high-priority and dangerous abandoned mine land sites that exist, and the RECLAIM Act funds would prioritize supporting community and economic development for communities adjacent to these lands.

How much support are you seeing for these bills?

We see momentum in this Congress, and there’s a lot of conversation around investing in our nation’s infrastructure. We see abandoned mine lands and their remediation as natural infrastructure that we need to invest in to keep our communities safe and prepare them for the future.

But we also see these bills as important pieces of an economic recovery package. COVID-19 has really exacerbated so many of the existing health and economic crises already in coal communities.

When we talk about economic stimulus and job creation, we also see reauthorizing the abandoned mine land fund as contributing to that because it takes a lot of work and creates a lot of jobs to do land reclamation.

steep slope — Abandoned mines can pose serious health and safety hazards, such as landslides, erosion and surface instability. Photo: USGS

We’ve talked about the legacy issues from lands mined before 1977, but what concerns are there from current or recent mining? Is that reclamation being done adequately?

That’s an area that also needs a closer look.

As the industry declines, we’ve seen coal companies file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy or reorganization. And when they do this, oftentimes they’re granted permission to get rid of liabilities that would affect their solvency. Sometimes those liabilities are reclamation obligations, pension funds or black lung disability funds.

And then what you see is smaller companies taking on these permits that the reorganizing company no longer wants. But many are under-capitalized and they sometimes don’t have the ability to even produce coal, or if they do they can’t keep up with the reclamation. And it’s dangerous for communities if there’s environmental violations that aren’t getting addressed.

I’ll give you a recent example. Blackjewel [the sixth-largest U.S. coal producer] went bankrupt in the summer of 2019. Since then there’s been very little done to address any kind of environmental violations existing on their permits.

Because of SMCRA, companies are required to have bonds in order to obtain their mining permits, but these bonds are not always adequate. The Kentucky Energy and Environment cabinet made a statement in the Blackjewel bankruptcy proceedings that it estimated that reclamation obligations on these permits were going to fall short $20 to $50 million.

What else is needed to help coal communities transition to a low-carbon economy?

That’s a big question. We have to address these legacy issues in order to help transition these communities into the future. And we have to address the problems right now of folks who are losing their jobs and need to be supported through training programs or through education credits.

But we also need to be thinking about the future more broadly. What will be in place 20 years from now for the younger generation?

There’s going to be a lot of gaps in local tax revenues because so much of the tax base has been reliant on the coal industry, which makes it really difficult for communities to continue to provide public services and keep up infrastructure as that industry declines. It’s going to be critical to think about that and invest in that.

I think the best approach is to find solutions that work for [specific] places. And to do that we need to listen to community leaders and folks in these communities that have already been working to build something new for many years. There are solutions that I think can apply to all places, but there also needs to be a targeted intention to create opportunities where communities can develop their own paths forward.

Are We Managing Invasive Species Wrong?

New research suggests that sometimes trying to completely eliminate a problematic non-native species may cause more harm than good.

European green crabs arrived on the eastern shores of North America in the early 1800s, likely as ship ballast stowaways or affixed to boat hulls. They found their way to the continent’s western shores by the 1980s, and they’ve caused trouble in every new ecosystem they invade.

Wherever green crabs (Carcinus maenas) land, scientists have documented them decimating food webs by devouring benthic invertebrates that provide nourishment for shorebirds, fishes and other species. Over the years, they have eaten their way onto a list of the world’s top 100 most unwanted species.

The economic toll of their appetite is large, too. European green crabs were estimated to have caused $22 million in damage a year to the East Coast commercial shellfishery alone.

Causing both ecological and economic harm has put green crabs in the spotlight, and a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis and other institutions have been studying how to best eradicate them. Along the way the scientists made a surprising discovery that they believe could change how managers deal with other invasive aquatic species.

Green Crab Revelations

In 2009 the researchers decided to see if they could eradicate the invasive species from a small area where the crabs had newly arrived — the Seadrift Lagoon in Stinson Beach, California, about half an hour from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

“We thought we could undertake this kind of proof of concept to determine how many bodies, how many traps and how much effort it would take to get rid of the green crab in a fairly small, contained area,” says one of those researchers, Edwin (Ted) Grosholz, a professor at U.C. Davis.

They were successful at reducing the population by more than 90% — from 125,000 crabs in 2009 to fewer than 10,000 by 2013. “We were feeling very good with ourselves,” he says, “But then suddenly the population exploded, and we were faced with even more crabs.”

holding a green crab — Catching invasive European green crabs. Photo: USFWS

By 2014 the number of green crabs in Seadrift Lagoon shot up to an alarming 300,000. Other nearby bays didn’t experience a similar population explosion, leaving the researchers wondering what the heck could have caused it.

It turns out that this rather counterintuitive ecological response — where removal efforts can trigger a steep population rebound — had been found in theoretical models, uncontrolled studies and anecdotal reports for decades. “But we were the first who showed in an experiment with controls that in fact, this can happen, it did happen,” says Grosholz.

The reason why they believe the population took off? Quite simply, green crabs are cannibalistic. Adults keep the population in check by eating some of the youngsters. But traps to eradicate the crabs caught only the adults, which left a slew of uneaten offspring ready to grow big and strong.

Given time things could have gotten even worse, as a female green crab that reaches maturity can produce up to 185,000 eggs.

These findings revealed important data for managing invasive European green crabs, which have now made their way to five continents, but the researchers believe the implications go far beyond one species.

“The results of this study provide an urgent warning to those involved in the management of invasive species,” they write in a new study in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Bigger Lessons

The factors that led to the population explosion — known as the hydra effect — aren’t unique to European green crabs. It could happen with other aquatic species, too, says Grosholz, including almost all crabs, lobsters, shrimp, and even a number of fishes.

And it’s not just species that eat their young, either. “You can see this response in any species where the adults consume a lot of the resources that their offspring might use,” he says.

Their findings, he says, suggest that ecologists and managers may need to rethink how they manage invasive species that fit these criteria.

“The bigger picture is that there are people all over the planet spending a lot of money trying to eradicate invasive species — in marine ecosystems in particular — and our message here is to stop, back away,” he says. “Let’s give up trying to fully eradicate these types of species.”

A better idea, he says, is to reduce the species down to a lower level where the harm they cause is eliminated or reduced, but not so low that the species have an opportunity bounce back.

Another recent study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, by Grosholz and University of Alberta biologist Stephanie J. Green, lays out how to undertake this strategy of “functional eradication.”

Grosholz and Green surveyed more than 200 aquatic invasive-species specialists about how they try to manage invasive species and whether they focus on eradication, containment or suppression. What was most interesting, says Grosholz, was that virtually none had specific population targets for the invasive species they were managing.

“It’s either ‘we’re going to go get them all’ or ‘we’re going to try to knock the population down,’ but they don’t have any specific number,” he explains. “So we actually provide a way of suggesting how managers who are undertaking these programs can use the data that they usually already have to come up with the best target.”

The goal is to determine the ideal range of population where managers can begin to recover the native species or ecosystem function that’s been harmed by the invasive species. And often the answer isn’t simply linear, he says. “It’s not like if you reduce the invasive species a little bit more, you can bring more native species back — there’s often a threshold you need to hit for recovery to begin.”

If the number is too low, the invasive species will still damage the ecosystem. If the number is too high, managers might be putting in more work than they need to.

Their research on functional eradication aims to help invasive species specialists more quickly find that crucial number.

lionfish on the seafloor — An invasive red lionfish in the Bahamas. Photo: James St. John, (CC BY 2.0)

For example, they calculate that reducing populations of another deadly invasive species, the red lionfish, to below 25 individuals per hectare in the tropical Western Atlantic “could prevent predation‐induced declines in native fishes and result in low rates of recolonization.”

Doing the Work

Having that data is a critical first step. But getting the work done on the ground is another issue. For managers working to control invasive species in aquatic systems it can be particularly challenging — and resource-intensive.

“With a lot of terrestrial invasions, especially involving things that don’t move like plants, it’s pretty easy to know when you succeed and when you’ve gotten them all,” says Grosholz. “But when you’re thinking about things in the water — in lakes or estuaries or oceans — you often can’t even see them. So in most cases, when the horse is out of the barn, it’s going to be very difficult to eradicate something in these ecosystems.”

That’s where community scientists can come in, he says.

“We have throughout this [work in California] relied on volunteers to help pull the traps and count the crabs. We put out 90 traps a day and pull in thousands of crabs a day,” he says. “Volunteers were really instrumental in reaching our goals for the project. And now they’re really instrumental in maintaining this low population level.”

The key to community science, though, is finding people who are concerned enough to do the work — and have the time.

When those two things align significant conservation work can be accomplished — and it’s work that will become increasingly important as climate change and other environmental pressures further threaten biodiversity.

Invasive species have contributed to many examples of loss of biodiversity, but driving species to extinction isn’t the only threat, says Grosholz. Invasive species can also cause “functional extinction” of native species.

“In other words, the role in the ecosystem — whether it’s exchanging energy biomass or contributing to trophic support — can be eliminated,” he says. “So we may not entirely lose the native species, but we may lose the function they provide to the ecosystem — and that’s really important, too.”

10 Environmental Books We’re Reading This Spring

From climate change to wildlife trafficking, these new books tackle the toughest problems of the day, along with vital solutions.

Spring has arrived, and while the rapidly improving weather begs us to spend more time outdoors and with friends and families, the ongoing pandemic also offers some good reasons to stay safe and indoors until most people have been vaccinated.

So let’s get out into the world virtually with the latest books about environmental issues we care about. Publishers have lined up a great set of new titles to read while you stay indoors during what we hope is the final phase of the pandemic.

We’ve collected ten of the best new books of 2021 to date. They cover climate change, the extinction crisis, environmental justice and a whole lot more. You’ll even find a cookbook to freshen up your mealtimes, a collection of comics to inspire the kids in your life, and some weird fiction to keep your blood pumping. Most are available now, with a few titles hitting the shelves over the next two weeks.

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E. Mann

We’ve been played, but we can fight back.

“A renowned climate scientist shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change and offers a battle plan for how we can save the planet.” (Check out our interview about Mann’s previous book, The Tantrum That Saved the World.)

Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World by Kathleen Dean Moore

What does the extinction crisis sound like?

“At once joyous and somber, this thoughtful gathering of new and selected essays spans Kathleen Dean Moore’s distinguished career as a tireless advocate for environmental activism in the face of climate change.” (Read our interview with Moore.)

The Bears Ears: A Human History of America’s Most Endangered Wilderness by David Roberts

A relevant book as President Biden looks to undo the previous administration’s damage.

“…acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes readers on a tour of his favorite place on Earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he’s explored for the last twenty-five years.”

The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption and One Man’s Search for Justice by Carey Gillam

Will the pen be mightier than the poisoners?

“Lee Johnson was a man with simple dreams. All he wanted was a steady job and a nice home for his wife and children, something better than the hard life he knew growing up. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world’s most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history.”

#EATMEATLESS: Good for Animals, the Earth & All by the Jane Goodall Institute

Honor your tastebuds and the natural world at the same time.

“…nourishing vegan recipes crafted especially for curious consumers looking to incorporate healthier dietary practices, those interested in environmental sustainability and animal welfare, and for fans of Jane Goodall’s work.”

Mutts Go Green: Earth-Friendly Tips and Comic Strips by Patrick McDonnell

Laughs and eco-lessons for younger readers, but the comic strips speak to us all.

“…a special kids’ collection of the popular comic strip MUTTS, featuring themes of ecology, environmental friendliness and animal education.” (Available 3/30.)

Gonna Trouble the Water: Ecojustice, Water, and Environmental Racism edited by Miguel A. De La Torre

A challenging book for challenging times.

“With compelling contributions from scholars and activists, politicians and theologians — including former Colorado governor Bill Ritter, global academic law professor Ved P. Nanda, Detroit-based activist Michelle Andrea Martinez, and many more — Gonna Trouble the Water de-centers the concept of water as a commodity in order to center the dignity of water and its life-giving character.” (Available 4/1.)

Lessons From Plants by Beronda L. Montgomery

Look into the green world and learn.

“Lessons from Plants enters into the depth of botanic experience and shows how we might improve human society by better appreciating not just what plants give us but also how they achieve their own purposes. What would it mean to learn from these organisms, to become more aware of our environments and to adapt to our own worlds by calling on perception and awareness? Montgomery’s meditative study puts before us a question with the power to reframe the way we live: What would a plant do?” (Available 4/6.)

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

An inspirational story that will echo around the world.

“The David and Goliath story of ordinary people in El Salvador who rallied together with international allies to prevent a global mining corporation from poisoning the country’s main water source.”

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Science fiction with a horrific real-world twist.

“Security consultant ‘Jane Smith’ receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.” Sales benefit two organizations working to fight wildlife trafficking, the Wildlife Conservation Society and TRAFFIC. (Available 4/6.)

Songs Whales Sing: The Peculiar History of Commercial Whaling

The story of commercial whaling and the iconoclasts who opposed it offers hope for whales facing today’s new threats — and the future of our planet.

“Turning Points” examines critical moments in environmental history when change occurred for the better — or worse.

The origins of commercial whaling trace back to the Basques of the 11th century. It’s a bloody history, one emblazoned in many peoples’ minds by the later image of Herman Melville’s tortured Ahab relentlessly hunting the beleaguered Moby Dick.

Sperm whale — Plate from the 1839 book, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. Public domain.

But this semi-Romantic image of 19th century whalers silently sweeping across the globe on unfurled sails in search of profit and adventure belies a truth.

The fact is that the decimation of whales occurred not in those days of the Industrial Revolution but in the mid-20th century. It was during the age of petroleum, not of kerosene, that whales were driven to near extinction by modern pelagic fleets that employed exploding harpoons, helicopters, sonar and stern-slipway factory ships.

International bodies, scientists, politicians and conservationists attempted to save whales from disappearing as early as the 1920s. Their orthodox efforts — employing diplomacy, science and reason — failed dismally. Instead, it took an unconventional troop of 1960s iconoclasts to rescue whales from the brink of annihilation.

With appeals to the heart, whales became a unifying symbol of not only a global environmental movement but also of a rejection of cultures of violence, war and death. It was a fleeting moment in time when traditional institutional hegemonies were vigorously questioned. By placing whales in the larger context of an antiestablishment appeal, commercial whaling effectively ended in 1986.

Perhaps the whale’s peculiar path to redemption offers a way forward for our planet.

The Whaling Club

To understand this, it helps to first understand how science and hard data failed whales, and that begins with the International Whaling Commission.

The International Whaling Commission was the first global body dedicated to the rational management and conservation of a biological species. Formed at the behest of the United States in 1946, the IWC was a governing authority made up of the world’s 15 major whaling nations. The commission’s objective was to regulate whaling to maximize “the interests of the consumers of whale products and the whaling industry.”[1]

Treating whales as a mere resource put the animals in a precarious position.

Despite the supplanting of whale oil as lamp fuel with the discovery of petroleum (1859) and electrical lighting (1879), human ingenuity kept finding new uses for whale “products.” Throughout the 1960s, nearly 70,000 whales were slaughtered annually for meat, margarine, soap, animal feed, fertilizer, ivory knick-knacks, perfume, liquid wax and high-end industrial lubricants.

Whale soap — 19th-century trade card for whale soap. Scan courtesy Boston Public Library (CC BY 2.0)

Emerging science made it clear that such butchery was unsustainable.[2]

Genuine concern for rapidly declining whale populations spurred Arthur Remington Kellogg, one of the earliest scientists to rigorously study whale biology, to become the force behind the establishment of the IWC. A master diplomat with many friendships and connections across governments, academia and industry, Kellogg understood that until that point legal norms treated any international common-pool resource as an open-access one. In other words, sovereign governments always enjoyed unhindered authority when making decisions about their use of these common resources, including whales, which mostly swam in international waters and therefore could be hunted without restrictions.[3] Kellogg organized the IWC so that whale science would nudge, not confront, nations to relinquish some of their freedom on the high seas. It would be difficult, but he believed scientific discourse would eventually help IWC members see the wisdom of maintaining a sustainable fishery.[4]

To accomplish this reasonable expectation, the IWC established two important yet contradictory permanent committees. The Scientific Committee, composed of leading cetologists from around the world, was charged with reviewing catch data and making recommendations on research needs, yield quotas and rates of stock depletion. The Scientific Committee then sent recommendations to the Technical Committee, which “consulted” and revised the report for final IWC approval. For the next 20 years the political appointees on the Technical Committee consistently ignored Scientific Committee recommendations in favor of the short-term interests of whaling nations. Promoting stable and resilient whale populations was of little concern.

Kellogg was not a Pollyanna. He and other prominent cetologists realized that science was never going to be the primary driver of the actions of the IWC. But they also believed that realpolitik compromises, like knowingly having the Scientific Committee recommend quotas that were too high, would eventually win them influence in the IWC.[5] Better to be insiders pushing the IWC toward reform, they reasoned, than scientific rabble-rousers causing recalcitrant reaction.

Unfortunately, the dream of being influential insiders would die hard as Kellogg and other well-meaning scientists were consistently politically outmaneuvered by cynical whaling states.

Enter the Pied Pipers of Whales

Without doubt the 1960s are mythologized. Yet the decade’s counterculture movement fundamentally changed the world in radical ways. Protests against capitalism, consumerism, authoritarianism, racism and war swept across the globe from Tokyo to Paris and Prague, and from Mexico City to Birmingham and Washington, D.C.

Coming out of this antiestablishment zeitgeist was neurophysiologist John C. Lilly. His role in the campaign to end international whaling cannot be overstated.

An LSD-dropping free-love practitioner, Lilly conducted pioneering bioacoustics research investigating cetacean intelligence and the possibility of interspecies communication. His ethically questionable and unorthodox experiments led to two hugely popular if scientifically dubious books, Man and Dolphin (1961) and Mind of the Dolphin (1967). Lillyists, as his disciples came to be known, believed that the weightlessness of ocean-dwelling mammals permitted them to overcome the terrestrial separation of the mind and body. This weightlessness, he wrote, allowed cetaceans to attain the highest level of consciousness, one free of alienation and violence. Bioacoustics would unlock the secrets of cetacean communication and, more importantly, would be the means by which cetaceans could then teach humanity to reach superior consciousness.

Ginsberg Leary Lilly — Lilly (R) with fellow counterculture figures Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary in 1991. Photo: Philip H. Bailey (CC-BY-SA)

Lilly’s message found a very receptive audience into the 1970s. In particular he influenced Scott McVay, a Princeton graduate in English. Trained in bioacoustics by Lilly, McVay, with the help of Roger Payne, became the first person to record the haunting and mysterious phonations of humpback whales in 1967.

These spectrograms soon captured the world’s imagination. They inspired music, cinema, literature, art — even NASA. It was a staggering achievement that eclipsed Lilly’s original ideas.

For better or worse the recordings effectively transformed whales into totems, dichotomizing humans into those who protected whales and those who did not. For the first time whaling nations faced real social condemnation. Empathy-driven boycotts, protests and violent confrontations with whalers produced tangible political pressure to not just maintain sustainable fisheries, but to ban whaling altogether.

Conflict With Science

The world of respected academic cetology rejected Lilly and his band of outsiders with prejudice.

In a 1961 review of Man and Dolphin, James W. Atz, an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History, dismissed Lilly for not presenting a “single observation or interpretation that could withstand scientific scrutiny.” For Atz and other elite sages it was important for scientists “to have a rational view of animal life,” and he lamented that “Dr. Lilly … felt called upon to put himself so prominently in the public eye.”[6]

Nothing captures the disconnect between the conservative world of academic scientists and an increasingly sympathetic public ready to save whales more than Prof. G. Carlton Ray’s (an expert in cross-disciplinary coastal-marine research and conservation) hostile reaction to McVay’s whale recordings in 1971:

I don’t find it very relevant to hear that whales produce music. Cock-a-doodle-doo produces music too. Whales are smarter than chickens, but it is not relevant… Neither is it relevant to say that whales have a complex social life. So do all the animals, including cows that we eat. The point is to talk good international research and management sense.[7]

But here’s the reality: Hyperrational, data-driven quantitative science like that advocated by Ray simply failed to influence society, culture and politics, even at a time when humanity was ready to radically question authority. It took the scientific taboo of empathy-driven anthropomorphism to compel sovereign governments to surrender some of their authority to make unilateral decisions about the use of open-access resources.

By 1974, 17 anti-whaling environmental groups with millions of members organized an international boycott of Soviet and Japanese products.[8] World opinion and economic pressure was building on the two countries most committed to whaling. The Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972.[9] Then, in 1978, the United States enacted the Pelly Amendment, which mandated economically crippling restrictions on imports from countries that violated IWC regulations or any international endangered or threatened species program.[10]

At last, legislation like the Pelly Amendment provided the IWC with indirect yet real regulatory power, which it had always lacked. Because of these and many other grass-root and legislative efforts, the IWC (which still exists) was finally able to ratify a 10-year moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. Since then only Japan and Norway have resumed limited commercial whaling.

The whaling vessel Petrel, shipwrecked on South Georgia Island. Photo: Christopher Michel (CC BY 2.0)

Politics, Our Planet and Songs Whales Sing

As historians Michael Brenes and Michael Koncewicz have noted, the demands of many contemporary and 1960s activists have been rejected and “labeled extreme” by political and social centrists. Yet historically, it’s these “extremists” who have pushed “the ideological boundaries of liberalism,” and driven progressive political and social change.[11]

In these bleak neoliberal and authoritarian times of mass extinction, we desperately need new summers of love like those that inspired change in the 1960s. Today’s warriors fighting to stop our slide toward ecocide will find in the story of whales that it was outsiders/extremists and their uncompromising appeals to the heart that smashed flawed and immoral political structures.

And like Lilly and other nonconformists of the 1960s, today there are persons and groups who are ready to push the envelope of the status quo and test what is politically and socially possible.

For example, desperate protests forced the shutdown of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016/17 and captured media attention from around the world. People traveled for hundreds of miles to join the protest camps, often spending months there standing up for the cause. But timid centrists at the time, like Hillary Clinton who was running for president, declined to support the demonstrators.[12] As with whales, a disassociation existed between the public and policymakers who failed to recognize that American society was still capable of being roused into action because of basic human empathy. Clearly, the sight of brutal police violence against peaceful protestors from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their many allies aroused the public’s conscience against the project.[13]

Then there’s the tragic story of Tahlequah and her dead calf, of the endangered Southern Resident killer whale family, in 2018. Like McVay’s recordings of humpback whales, the spectacle of Tahlequah carrying her dead child for weeks emotionally galvanized the world.

In an overwhelming response to the Seattle Times asking readers to recount their reaction to Tahlequah’s heartbreaking story, the universal sentiment was one of staggering lachrymose devastation: “I can’t stop crying. I can’t sleep,” said one respondent.

“I have been deeply affected by this,” wrote another. “As a mother of young children, I find myself moved by her grief and behavior… I am now extremely concerned about her health and well-being. I have called our elected officials’ offices to plead for immediate action to help SRKW population.”[14]

southern resident killer whale — A young resident killer whale chases a chinook salmon in the Salish Sea near San Juan Island, Washington, in September 2017. Image obtained under NMFS permit #19091. Photograph by John Durban (NOAA Fisheries/Southwest Fisheries Science Center), Holly Fearnbach (SR3: SeaLife Response, Rehabilitation and Research) and Lance Barrett-Lennard (Vancouver Aquarium’s Coastal Ocean Research Institute). Photo courtesy Oregon State University (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This spiritual anguish also had concrete political repercussions. In March 2021 Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, a Republican, unveiled a proposal to breach the Snake River dams that have choked off the Southern Residents’ salmon food supply. His proposal is deeply flawed, but signals an awareness of the broad popularity of the deeply charismatic orcas.

Many other species of whales continue to be in grave danger of extinction. Today it’s not so much the cruel harpoon that threatens them as ocean warming and acidification, ship strikes, plastic, noise, trash, fishing nets and pollution.

Here’s what else has changed: Thanks to advances in whale science, we now know they have complex and highly evolved clan and family structures. Their sophisticated cultures give us even more reasons to cherish these Leviathans of ocean storms, tides and depths.

It may not pass orthodox scientific and political muster, but it’s time for us to try to imagine what whales and other living beings think of our stewardship of the natural world and to harness the noblest of human impulses — mercy. Modern Western civilization, born out of the Enlightenment, wedded to the notion of rational reform, dismissive of what it deems as “irrational,” and attracted to mechanistic problem-solving, must dare to be profoundly different.

It worked to end whaling. It can and must work again.

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.

[1] International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling with Schedule of Whaling Regulations, December 2, 1946, Article V, Paragraph 2.

[2] 1956 IWC meeting: IWC/8/13, 108-9.

[3] Elliott, Gerald. “Fishing Control—National or International?” The World Today 28, no. 3 (1972): 133-38.

[4] D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 372-373.

[5] D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 372-373.

[6] D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale Science & Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 590.

[7] Grieves, Forest L. “Leviathan, the International Whaling Commission and Conservation as Environmental Aspects of International Law.” The Western Political Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1972): 721.

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/20/archives/japanese-and-soviet-whaling-protested-by-boycott-of-goods-85-of.html

[9] https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/topic/laws-policies#marine-mammal-protection-act

[10] https://www.fws.gov/international/laws-treaties-agreements/us-conservation-laws/pelly-amendment.html

[11] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/left-history-democratic-party/

[12] https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/28/what-crock-clinton-breaks-dapl-silence-statement-says-literally-nothing

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/12/north-dakota-standing-rock-protests-civil-rights

[14] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/i-have-not-slept-in-days-readers-react-to-tahlequah-the-mother-orca-clinging-to-her-dead-calf/

5 Things to Know About the Fate of Wild Salmon

Historical pressures combined with new threats from climate change have pushed more than a dozen species close to extinction.

It’s not too hard to find salmon on a menu in the United States, but that seeming abundance — much of it fueled by overseas fish farms — overshadows a grim reality on the ground. Many of our wild salmon, outside Alaska, are on the ropes — and have been for decades.

Twenty years ago Pacific salmon were found to have disappeared from 40% of their native rivers and streams across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California. In places where they remain, like the Columbia River system, the number of wild fish returning to streams is estimated to have plunged by as much as 98%. Today 28 populations of West Coast salmon and steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

New research is helping to put the problem — and solutions — into focus. But in some cases, policy to implement changes still lags.

1. Trouble in Washington

With 14 salmon and steelhead species listed as endangered in Washington, a new report by the state declared that “too many salmon remain on the brink of extinction. And time is running out.” Four key factors, the researchers say, have been attributed to their historical decline: habitat, harvest, hydropower and hatcheries.

2. Upstream changes

Along with historic threats, there’s another new factor making salmon recovery challenging for Washington and other West Coast states: climate change. Increasing temperatures are causing snowpack declines, resulting in warmer streams that can stress or kill salmon. Additionally, more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow causes rivers to run faster earlier in the season, which can wash away salmon nests and sweep young salmon out of their calm-water habitat before they’re ready — reducing their chances of survival.

3. Ocean woes

It’s not just freshwater habitat for salmon that’s changing. A recent study in the journal Communications Biology looked at how eight populations of wild spring-summer Chinook from the Snake River Basin fared during the ocean phase of their lives. And it’s not good. If ocean warming continues, by the 2060s mortality for Chinook could be as high as 90%.

4. Ripple effect

Pacific salmon are an integral cultural resource for Pacific Northwest tribes and provide thousands of regional jobs. But the fish don’t just feed people. They also nourish freshwater and marine ecosystems, along with more than 100 species.

And for one animal in particular, the critically endangered Southern Resident killer whale (Orcinus orca), the decline of Chinook is an existential threat. It’s been long known that Southern Residents feed primarily on Chinook — the largest Pacific salmon species — during the summer. But a new study published in the journal Plos One found that Chinook were also important year-round.

Two Southern Resident killer whales swimming — Southern Resident killer whales. Photo: NOAA

5. Implementing solutions

In an effort to help the recovery of Southern Residents and help boost salmon populations in the region, conservation groups have increased their calls to remove four dams on the Lower Snake River, a major tributary of the Columbia River in Washington.

While the science supports dam removal to save salmon, putting that into action has run into a wall of political opposition — mostly from conservatives. However, a recent plan proposed by Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson to breach the Snake River dams was a rare showing of Republican support, which could signal more bipartisan efforts ahead.

Other dam removals — both large and small — have proved beneficial for salmon in Washington and other states. In California a groundbreaking project to allow rivers to flood fallow farm fields in winter has helped provide both food and rearing habitat for salmon — and has helped prove that water managers don’t have to choose between fish and farmers.

There’s still a long road ahead to help keep our remaining salmon populations from the brink. For more on these issues, check out these stories from The Revelator’s archive to better understand the threats, what’s at stake, and what’s working to help save wild salmon.

Dams

A Dam Comes Down — and Tribes, Cities, Salmon and Orcas Could All Benefit

Boom: Removing 81 Dams Is Transforming This California Watershed

Drones, Algae and Fish Ears: What We’re Learning Before the World’s Largest Dam-removal Project — and What We Could Miss

What Would It Take to Save Southern Resident Killer Whales From Extinction?

The Elwha’s Living Laboratory: Lessons From the World’s Largest Dam-removal Project

Untangling the Politics of Dam Removal

Aquaculture

Farmed Fish Threaten British Columbia’s Wild Salmon Population

Tracking Superbugs: Antibiotic Resistance Spreads Among Marine Mammals

Artifishal: New Film Asks, Have We Reached the End of Wild?

Other Threats

New Research Shows Just How Many Fish Are Eating Plastic

Northern Fish Are Tough, But Can They Survive Climate Change?

Road to Ruin? State Plans Threaten Some of America’s Last Wild Places

Solutions

How Saving Southern California’s Steelhead Trout Could Also Help the State’s Watersheds

To Restore Salmon, Think Like a Beaver

Save Salmon, Save Ourselves

Why Indigenous Knowledge Matters to the Future of Fisheries

De Beers: Destruction Is Forever

The company claims to be restoring its former diamond mines to nature. My research revealed a still-barren landscape and shattered lives.

In early 2021, De Beers — the world’s biggest diamond company — achieved something of a public relations coup when it announced two new prestige jewelry lines intended to position the notoriously polluting corporation as environmentally friendly and responsible.

The first, the high-end “Reflections of Nature” jewelry line, supposedly celebrates the natural landscapes from which the corporation unearths its diamonds. It includes five unique sets and a total of 39 “exclusive” pieces that, according to De Beers, are meant to honor and “immortalize the glorious triumph… [and] raw beauty of nature untouched by man.”

De Beers also announced its “ReSet Forever Love” collection, a collaboration with three young designers on pieces that “celebrate love and sustainability.” According a recent article in Harper’s Bazaar, De Beers stresses that the diamonds included in this collection’s intricately shaped rings, necklaces and brooch were “sourced sustainably to ensure it has a lasting positive impact for people and the planet.” By “it,” one can assume the company means the jewelry itself, though this seems grandiose and makes no sense.

Harper’s Bazaar isn’t the only publication to fall under the spell of De Beers’ spin doctors. The Robb Report was also quite taken with the “Reflections of Nature” line and De Beers’ campaign to place “the source of its most magnificent gems front and center.” The Report further amplified the claim made by De Beers Jewellers CEO Céline Assimon, who said, “With this collection, we wanted to take everyone on a journey and escape to these locations that reside in the countries close to De Beers’ heart.” British Vogue has been seduced onto the bandwagon as well, gushing, “No one shows off the variety and natural beauty of rough coloured diamonds quite like De Beers.”

These pieces — rings and necklaces designed to reflect the dramatic hues and curves of the Namibian sand dunes, or diamonds cut to evoke a coral reef and its fish — range from $18,000 to $121,000 and are unlikely to save the Earth, mitigate climate change or have much of a “lasting positive impact” on humanity.

But such greenwashing rhetoric, when mapped over and onto the actual environmental consequences of diamond mining, does indeed emphasize the impact and audacity of De Beers’ PR machine.

Environmental Destruction Is Forever

This is just the latest example of claims laid out in what De Beers calls its “Building Forever” reports, wherein the conglomerate — in a forced nod to increasing public concern over sustainability and environmental ethics — purports to address the “environmental impact” of its diamond-mining business. According to Dr. Patti Wickens, De Beers’ senior environmental manager, the reports are “driven by our commitment to have a net positive impact on biodiversity.” But these reports are often scrutinized only by the company’s own stakeholders, not outside authorities who can verify the information presented.

The reality is that the landscapes De Beers claims it wants to “immortalize” via the “Reflections” line and “sustain” via the “Forever Love” line have been so thoroughly ravaged they’ve resisted nearly all efforts at rehabilitation.

I spent the better part of 2016 on South Africa’s Diamond Coast — one of the landscapes the corporation wishes to “honor” with its new collection — conducting research for my book, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers. There I interviewed Johann MacDonald, manager of the De Beers Namaqualand Diamond Mine, who had a slightly more nuanced view of the company’s environmental concerns. (MacDonald’s name has been changed here and in my book to protect his identity.)*

“It’s a bit of a challenge to wring life out of this at this point,” he told me, gesturing to the mine property, a landscape so arid and fallow it appeared more Martian than earthly.

The soil of South Africa’s Diamond Coast has suffered since De Beers took it over in 1925, and the Namaqualand mine is no exception. De Beers had recently deemed this 79,000-acre expanse of land to be “over-mined,” and MacDonald was responsible for slowly laying off the workforce and shutting down the mine (and, to some degree by extension, the entire town it once supported), and attempting to rehabilitate the desert soil after the decades of corporate pillaging.

Claims Fall Flat

The De Beers Family of Companies guidelines long stipulated, “We use lower hazard alternatives to high-risk hazardous substances when possible; We manage effluents, wastes, emissions and hazardous substances to prevent pollution wherever possible; We aspire to normal levels of discharges to sea, including sewage.”

Despite these claims, the soils around the mines have suffered for the better part of a century.

In Namaqualand the corporation’s Environmental Division has attempted to restore portions of the land via an agenda of phytoremediation.

Phytoremediation is the process by which a variety of plants are carefully sewn into a ravaged and contaminated soil in the hopes of eradicating said contaminants and restoring the soil to a “pure” and healthy state, capable of once again supporting the growth and subsequent thriving of endemic flora and fauna. If this rhizosphere biodegradation proves successful, then the plants will release nutrients into the soil via their root systems, essentially “defibrillating” the naturally occurring microorganisms therein and compelling the contaminants to degrade. In the successful application of phyto-stabilization, on the other hand, the plants yield specific chemical compounds that — rather than destroy the contaminants in the soil — entrap and paralyze them. In this way the toxins are still present in the soil but are — so to speak — cryogenically frozen within it.

Various other sub-processes of phytoremediation are employed if these two methods fail to clean the soil — from phyto-accumulation (wherein the plants actually absorb, sponge-like, the soil’s impurities), to phyto-volatilization (where the plants suck up contaminated groundwater, “clean” that water, and then discharge the contaminants into the air through their leaves), to phyto-degradation (where the plants take in the soil’s toxins and metabolize them within their tissues, therefore destroying them).

De Beers brags about its efforts, but none of these processes have restored the land.

A Bleak Landscape, a Bleaker Community

The De Beers Namaqualand mine, in fact, is the antithesis of a “pure” landscape. A description of the place demands prefixes — other, extra, pre and post: otherworldly, extraplanetary, prehistoric, post-apocalyptic. It is nothing more than beige barrenness, littered with holes, chemicals, explosives and decomposing machine parts.

rusting steel drum — Photo: Matthew Gavin Frank

The people who live in this region have also suffered. Beginning slowly in 2007, and accelerating in 2009, De Beers downscaled its interests along the Diamond Coast, compelling an already-exploited labor force into an exodus to other parts of South Africa, onto the couches of distant family members and friends, and into other possible occupations. The company did nothing to help these people find future housing or alternative work. Many once-thriving municipalities became ghost towns.

For those who remain, survivalist proposals hang over the towns. One suggests turning the pit mines into hazardous-waste dumps; another calls for converting the migrant worker dorm into a prison.

Terms like love and forever and sustainability, especially when applied to luxury jewelry lines, ring hollow to those whose land this once was, later indentured to the machine of corporate colonialism. It’s like an oil company claiming innocence of the environmental consequences of drilling into the seafloor by building a gas tank in the shape of a coral bed.

On the Diamond Coast, the Indigenous Khoisan populations told me they wish to try to once again farm using traditional methods. They’re busy fighting — likely in vain — De Beers’ efforts.

De Beers perpetuates the propaganda that the desert here has ultimately suffered not from mining, but from the grazing of the Indigenous population’s farm animals.

The corporation maintains ownership of the mineral rights here, and as such, controls the land and how it’s used. It has, in fact, gone so far as to compel local lawmakers to issue a ban on farming in the area. It doesn’t want anyone else making money off this land while it’s busy making claims about “restoration” and patting itself on the back.

Having successfully blocked Indigenous people from farming here, the corporation, after extracting its diamonds, appears to want to use the land as a private garden — a little spot to play in with their bulldozers, compost cocktails, cardboard “grow” circles, shovels and pails.

The Restoration Fallacy

Restoration and conservation seem to be fallacies here, mirages of corporate disinformation. To what level does De Beers want to restore this land, and why, after all these decades of plunder, should it be the company’s to manage in any case? Even if the stab at rehabilitation did work, and even if the company’s Environmental Division could make something verdant out of this havoc, wouldn’t that also be insufficient? Wouldn’t it be a case of environmental restoration as concealment of decades of gleeful corporate atrocity?

Even Namaqualand mine manger Johann MacDonald got frustrated beholding a plot of barren soil. He scooped up a fistful of sand and tossed it into the wind.

“This attempt to replant is a complete failure!” he told me. “The big challenge is to get things to grow. Some of these dumps have been reshaped and replanted for ten years, twenty years, and still nothing grows.”

Still, the PR machine chugs on, and this year gullible publications lauded the company for its supposed environmentally minded efforts, willingness to work with up-and-coming designers, and “fancy shapes and fancy colors.”

But in 2021, if you want to behold the once “lush” landscapes of the diamond-bearing lands that De Beers claims to honor and sustain via its two new collections, the closest you’ll be able to come is an image of a $100,000 brooch.

Which is all that’s left. No sunny rhetoric can change that.

* Editor’s note: A clarification on a source’s identity has been added.

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.

5 Things to Know About Plastic Pollution and How to Stop It

Researchers continue to find new information about how widespread plastic pollution has become, but also how we can help stem the tide.

Our plastic pollution problem has reached new heights and new depths.

Scientists have found bits of plastic on the seafloor, thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. Plastic debris has also washed ashore on remote islands; traveled to the top of pristine mountains; and been found inside the bodies of whales, turtles, seabirds and people, too.

Tiny plastic particles are now ubiquitous and insidious. And the mounting pollution that swirls in ocean gyres and washes ashore on beaches poses a big threat to wildlife and ecosystems. So too, does the production of that plastic.

A number of recent studies — not to mention articles and essays published here in The Revelator — have helped pinpoint just how bad things have gotten and also what we can do about the problem. Here’s what you should know about plastic:

1. There’s a lot of it.

In a September study published in Science about the growth of plastic waste, an international team of researchers estimated that 19 to 23 million metric tons — or 11% of plastic waste generated — ended up in aquatic ecosystems in 2016. And even with countries pledging to help cut waste or better manage it, the amount of plastic pollution is likely to double in the next 10 years.

A study about solutions to plastic waste, published in the same issue, attributed the plastic pollution epidemic to a rise in single-use plastic and “an expanding ‘throw-away’ culture.” The researchers also found that waste-management systems simply can’t deal with the onslaught of plastic, which is why so much of it ends up in the environment. We now know that only 9% of the plastic products we use actually get recycled.

2. The United States is a big culprit.

Plastic pollution is a global problem, but the United States plays an outsized role. In 2016 the United States was responsible for more plastic waste than any other country, a new study in Science Advances found. Some of that waste was dumped illegally within the country and some was shipped to other countries that lacked the necessary infrastructure to handle it.

“The amount of plastic waste generated in the United States estimated to enter the coastal environment in 2016 was up to five times larger than that estimated for 2010, rendering the United States’ contribution among the highest in the world,” the researchers concluded. Part of that is because the United States ranks second in exporting plastic scrap.

3. It threatens wildlife and ecosystems.

otter with plastic bottle — A giant otter plays with a plastic bottle. (Photo by Paul Williams, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Out of sight (for Americans) is not out of mind — and definitely not out of our waterways. An estimated 700 marine species and 50 freshwater species have either ingested plastic or been entangled in it.

“If we don’t get the plastic pollution problem in the ocean under control, we threaten contaminating the entire marine food web, from phytoplankton to whales,” George Leonard, the Ocean Conservancy’s chief scientist and coauthor of the September Science study about plastic waste’s increase, told National Geographic. “And by the time the science catches up to this, perhaps definitively concluding that this is problematic, it will be too late. We will not be able to go back. That massive amount of plastic will be embedded in the ocean’s wildlife essentially forever.”

Microplastics have also been found in terrestrial animals, soil, drinking water and, not surprisingly, in our own bodies, although it’s not clear yet just how dangerous that is for people.

4. The fracking boom is producing a plastic boom.

Despite the known risks of plastic pollution and concern over its mounting presence in the environment, plastic production — driven by fossil fuels like fracked gas and its component chemicals — is on pace to increase by 40% in the next 10 years.

The American Chemistry Council boasted that shale gas drilling is driving a surge in plastic production, including the investment of more than $200 billion to fund new and expanded operations at 343 production plants in the United States.

On the ground this means more harmful pollution along the Gulf Coast’s “Cancer Alley,” where petrochemicals have been manufactured for decades in low-wealth communities of color. And it means the build-out of new facilities in Rust Belt states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Fracking also causes harmful greenhouse gas emissions, like methane, to be released into the atmosphere — amplifying the climate crisis. The refining process and the incineration of plastic waste also further drives greenhouse emissions and hazardous pollution.

skyline of pollution from plant — A petrochemical plant in Houston’s ship channel. Photo: Louis Vest, (CC BY-NC 2.0).

5. Solutions are multifaceted.

Beach cleanups tend to make headlines, but it’s a losing battle as long as petrochemical companies keep producing so much plastic and we keep using plastic for products we’re meant to toss after a single use.

The September study in Science on plastic solutions found that it’s possible to cut plastic pollution — perhaps as much as 80% by 2040 — but it will take systemic change both in reducing the amount of plastic produced and in better managing the waste stream.

Regulatory efforts can help this process, including by regulating plastic as a pollution source under the Clean Water Act.

Efforts to ban single-use plastics, as the European Union aims to do by 2021, are another positive step. So too are “circular economy laws,” which have been introduced, but not yet passed, in the United States.

These laws would halt the production of new petrochemical facilities and encourage businesses to take responsibility for the full lifecycle of the products they produce by requiring them to be reused, adequately recycled or composted.

Getting circular economy laws enacted, though, will mean enough public and political will to counter the petrochemical, fossil fuel and plastic industries.

At The Revelator, we’ll keep covering the push for solutions to the plastic problem and new science to better understand the threats. And if you want to know more about how wildlife has already been affected, what laws could help, whether industry will be held accountable and more, check out these stories from our archives:

Laws and Regulations

Why Plastic Pollution Is a Producer Responsibility

Plastic Pollution: Could We Have Solved the Problem Nearly 50 Years Ago?

How an Old Law Is Helping Fight New Plastic Problems

New California Bill Could Revolutionize How the U.S. Tackles Plastic Pollution

What Laws Work Best to Cut Plastic Pollution?

Can Plastic Ever Be Made Illegal?

Impacts

New Research Shows Just How Many Fish Are Eating Plastic

Something Fishy: Toxic Plastic Pollution Is Traveling Up the Food Chain

Plastic Pollution: From Ship to Shore

Plans to Turn America’s Rust Belt Into a New Plastics Belt Are Bad News for the Climate

Trash in the Galápagos Reveals the Dark Side of Ecotourism

Elephant Seals: Diving Through Garbage

Taking Action

The Story of Plastic: New Film Exposes the Source of Our Plastic Crisis

How to Win the Fight Against Plastic

Can Cities Go Zero-waste? One Japanese Town Tried

The Secret Value of Trash

Junk Raft: A Journey Through a Polluted Ocean

Are Bioplastics a Better Environmental Choice?

Plastic Pollution Is a Problem — These Kids Are Working for a Solution

Thai Activists Fight Trash Taboo

Line 3: Stopping the Next Big Climate Threat Crossing the U.S.-Canada Border

An Indigenous-led resistance raises the alarm about a tar-sands pipeline that would cut through treaty territory of Anishinaabe people, threatening wild rice, fresh water and the climate.

One of President Joe Biden’s first acts in office put an end to a decade-long fight over the Keystone XL — a pipeline that would have carried climate-polluting tar sands from Alberta, Canada into the United States.

Biden’s Executive Order said the Keystone XL’s approval “would undermine U.S. climate leadership” and that instead he would instead “prioritize the development of a clean energy economy.”

Tara Houska of Couchiching First Nation hopes the Biden administration makes good on that promise — and its implications beyond Keystone.

Houska, an attorney and Indigenous rights advocate, is the founder of the Giniw Collective, an Indigenous-led resistance against another cross-border tar-sands pipeline — Line 3. Construction has already begun on this 340-mile-long Enbridge pipeline, which would carry nearly a million gallons a day of tar-sands crude across northern Minnesota — crossing 200 water bodies — en route from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin.

Environmental organizations have joined Native groups, including the nonprofit Honor the Earth, as well as the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and White Earth Band of Ojibwe in raising legal challenges and joining on-the-ground resistance efforts.

The Revelator spoke with Houska about what’s at stake with Line 3, how Standing Rock helped grow a movement, and why we should rethink what direct action means.

How did you get involved in being a water protector?

When I was in law school, I started doing tribal law work and ended up in Washington, D.C. representing tribes all over the country. At the same time there were serious environmental issues coming through D.C. My first internship was at the White House when Obama was reviewing Keystone XL and I saw a lot of breakdowns in the efficacy of the federal system and a lack of movement.

When the Cowboy Indian Alliance staged a protest in 2014 against the Keystone XL pipeline, I went. It was my first protest. After that I kept working on environmental justice issues for tribal nations, and then two years later a group of runners from Standing Rock came out to D.C. [to raise awareness about the Dakota Access Pipeline that would carry Bakken crude across the Plains].

I listened to LaDonna Brave Bull Allard [from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe] on Facebook Live ask for help. I could tell she meant everything she said, so I just packed up my stuff, rented a car and drove out to North Dakota.

I planned on being out there [at the Standing Rock protest camp] for a weekend. I ended up staying six months.

Something was different about this Native tribe saying no. There’ve been lots of tribes that have said no for hundreds of years, but these guys weren’t just saying it, they were putting their bodies in front of the machines and refusing to move. The groundswell of youth, the encampment, the legal fight against the federal government — it all came together in this moment.

I think for a lot of tribal people it felt different. We were very united in the struggle.

It was also eye-opening for a lot of other people around the world. Mostly because I don’t think a lot of people are even aware that Native people still exist. And that we’re still very much engaged in an ongoing struggle for our land and water against either the United States or these foreign interests.

And now you’re engaged in a similar struggle against another Canadian energy company — Enbridge. What’s at stake with Line 3?

After the ground fight at Dakota Access ended and they bulldozed our camp, I went back to D.C., but I had a hard time coming back to the world as I understood it, because it’d been changed.

So in 2018 I founded the Giniw Collective. It was in response to the Minnesota Public Utility Commission unanimously approving Line 3 after years of work and tens of thousands of comments and engagement against the project by Minnesotans.

I started building and finding others to build with, to create a strong resistance community that was also engaging in traditional foods and establishing foundational relationships with the land.

-30 today on the #StopLine3 frontlines here in Anishinaabe territory…stay warm, stay strong ✊🏽❤️ pic.twitter.com/OgZebBpnMF

— tara houska ᔖᐳᐌᑴ (@zhaabowekwe) February 11, 2021

Line 3 is much more personal because it goes through my own people’s territory. To me, the critical piece of this is not just the drinking water and the emissions and all those irrevocable harms of expanding the fossil fuel industry — particularly the tar-sands industry — but it’s also specifically about the threats to wild rice.

[Northern] wild rice is at the center of our people’s culture and connection to the world. This is the only place in the world that it grows. This is where the creator told us to come — to where the food grows on water. And to me, Line 3 is an extension of cultural genocide to put something like that at risk.

Construction has already begun. Where do things stand legally with efforts to stop it?

There’s a set of legal opinions due March 23 that are very critical in terms of the feds hearing what we are bringing forward, particularly from the tribal nations that have signed onto these lawsuits and are impacted directly by Line 3.

Then there’s also an ongoing lawsuit by the Minnesota Department of Commerce against the Minnesota Public Utility Commission. The state is actually suing itself for not being able to demonstrate that there’s a need for this project. The tar sands and oil products that will go through the pipeline are for foreign markets. They’re not for Minnesota or the United States.

What about at the federal level?

There’s also this huge push on [President Joe] Biden, who canceled Keystone XL on day one and has centered himself as the climate president. We’re looking to the administration to intervene on something that’s an obvious climate disaster.

How can we say we’ll cancel one pipeline but build another? It’s the same types of violations and the same types of climate impacts coming out of the Alberta tar sands.

Building Line 3 will have the equivalent emissions of building 50 new coal power plants. That’s insane.

We are seeing progress, though. We just secured another meeting with the Council on Environmental Quality. I had a number of meetings with members of the Biden transition team and different agencies. I know [National Climate Advisor] Gina McCarthy was just questioned a couple of weeks ago by Showtime about Dakota Access and Line 3. So the message is getting into their ears. It’s just that we need to hear some response.

Where are you finding inspiration now?

The pieces that inspire me the most and give me the most hope are seeing people engaged in resistance during a pandemic to defend the planet and defend life for someone who’s not even born yet. That’s incredibly powerful to be part of and to see that happen in real time.

line of protesters and trucks — Protest against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. Photo: Dio Cramer

To watch someone harvest wild rice for the first time, to watch someone stop destruction of a place in real time for a day — that’s really powerful. To see young people finding their voices and using their bodies to try to protect what’s supposed to be their world. They are literally fighting for life and their right to a future. That’s a really beautiful thing to see, and it’s really inspiring and hopeful.

We’ve trained hundreds of people over the last two and a half years in direct action. I try to push folks to think about direct action not just as being about getting arrested or something like that. To me, it’s about standing with the Earth in a real way, putting something at risk and being uncomfortable. I don’t think that we’re going to solve the climate crisis comfortably. I don’t think we’re going to solar panel or policy-make our way out of this massive existential threat we’re facing.

To take action is to do something in community with the Earth. To think about our own connection to her in everything that we do. I like to remind people that Native people are 5% of the world’s population and we’re holding 80% of the world’s [forest] biodiversity.

That isn’t by accident or happenstance. That is because we have a deep connection to the Earth and an understanding that the Earth is a living being, just like we are.

The Lost Lizard of La Désirade: An Extinction We Almost Forgot About

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.

Northern curly-tailed lizard — 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.

Will the Race for Electric Vehicles Endanger the Earth’s Most Sensitive Ecosystem?

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.

Two EVs charging — 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.

Two charging stations — 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.”