Animals, plants, and fungi depend on this humble tree, but its future — and theirs — is all but certain.
At first glance the hills and valleys covered in coastal sage scrub oak are little more than a featureless green swath. On closer inspection, however, you can recognize it for what it truly is: the beating heart of one of the most genetically rich ecosystems on the planet. Birds, insects, mammals, fungi, and even some other plants find refuge under the boughs of coastal sage scrub oak, while water drawn up from its deep roots spreads out to sustain ground-dwelling organisms.
Species name:
Coastal sage scrub oak or Nuttall’s scrub oak (Quercus dumosa)
Description:
The coastal sage scrub oak rarely grows more than about 7 feet tall, but it can spread outward a great distance thanks to its lateral branches and multiple trunks. The trees’ small, spiny leaves emerge in the spring soft and bright green, but gradually toughen and darken to a dusty dark green by summer. Their acorns tend to be thin and elongated, almost conical.
Q. dumosa acorn. Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
Where it’s found:
The coastal sage scrub oak, as its name implies, is found along coastal areas in Southern and Baja California. The full extent of its range is the subject of spirited debate, as it shares many similar physical characteristics with other scrub oaks found more inland. In San Diego County, the remaining populations of coastal sage scrub oak exist in fragmented populations, usually in wildlife reserves, like islands in a sea of urban development.
IUCN Red List status:
Endangered
Major threats:
Urban development destroyed much of this tree’s habitat, and its remnant population still faces this threat, along with several others. The introduction of grasses and other highly flammable nonnative species, like eucalyptus, have increased fire frequency and intensity. Escaped ornamental plants and grasses can outcompete oak saplings for light, space, and water. And climate change is resulting in disruptions to precipitation, which stresses all populations.
Notable conservation programs or legal protections:
The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is spearheading the development of new ex situ conservation methods, including the use of tissue culture and cryopreservation, to prevent further loss of the coastal sage scrub oak’s genetic diversity. Through partner networks, such as the Global Conservation Consortium – Oak and the Center for Plant Conservation, we exchange information and know-how with many partner organizations. Each organization can specialize in some method of preventing the loss of a species, whether that be working with local, state, or federal authorities; technology development and implementation; reforestation and land restoration; or what might be eventually the most important method, reaching out to the general public to show them how they can make a difference, large or small. The coastal sage scrub oak, as well as the other endangered species native to the coastal sage scrub and chaparral ecosystem, requires focused and sustained effort from all these methods, so, by participating in networks, we effectively pool our strengths.
My favorite experience:
While collecting tissue samples after a spring rain, I took a moment to look at the tracks imprinted into the soft ground. Animal prints were everywhere — mule deer, raccoon, fox, opossum, roadrunner, and what I hoped were those of an exceedingly large bobcat and not a mountain lion. I rarely saw any of these animals during the day but, thanks to the rain, it was clear that they were all around me — present but hidden within the oaks.
Q. dumosa amidst a rocky backdrop. Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
What I could see, however, were the many birds flying from tree to tree, reminding me of fish swimming among outcrops of coral. Insects buzzed all around. Galls created by tiny wasps were starting to grow from some of the oaks. By summer, some of these galls would grow to the size and color of a peach, bobbing slowly in wind scented with wildflowers, sunbaked dust, and sagebrush. I knew that under my feet deep roots reached toward the precious groundwater that would sustain the forest during the dry season, and spreading from those roots were mycorrhizal fungi that would work with the oaks to support each other.
I grew up among the firs, cedars, hemlocks, and maples of the Pacific Northwest. I always thought forests needed to be composed of tall, majestic trees christened with carpets of rolling moss. Yet this sea of small, scraggly oaks held so much life. My perspective grew. It’s one thing to read about this ecosystem and another matter entirely to truly see it and understand how precious it is.
Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
Citizen scientists are helping restore the ecosystem engineers to the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.
“What do you think about this?” My friend, Sonya Daw, had called out to me from where she was standing at the edge of Beaver Creek. I joined her. I had just scrambled over a massive log and was grateful for an excuse to catch my breath.
“Hmm,” I said, still breathing hard. In front of us, water burbled over some branches that had fallen across the creek. Had they fallen, though? Or had they possibly been placed there by beavers?
As one of 11 teams taking part in a “beaver scavenger hunt” across the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southwest Oregon, we were looking for any sign of beavers — willow stumps, sticks with “corn-on-the-cob”-style teeth marks, or even scent mounds, which beavers use to mark territories. What we and the other teams discovered would help the nonprofit Project Beaver focus their beaver-restoration efforts.
My team included Sonya, who writes for the National Park Service, her husband Charlie Schelz, the former monument ecologist, and Barb Settles, a spry 78-year-old and avid naturalist.
Photo: Juliet Grable
Charlie joined us, and we contemplated the creek. “I don’t think that’s anything,” he said. “But look how the sediment is piling up behind the branches; how cool is that?”
It was June 1 — not just a beautiful time to be hiking through the forest but the ideal window for beaver activity. Beaver moms have their babies in late spring and then send their older offspring packing. These dispersing youngsters are on the move, exploring new creeks and sampling the buffet of plants.
We took our time in flatter areas, especially where willows or red osier dogwood — beaver “dessert plants” — grew in clumps near the banks. We weren’t likely to find beavers along this steep stretch, but it was still fun to look and marvel at the enormous sugar pines, Douglas firs, and incense cedars that had escaped loggers’ chainsaws last century.
Wanted: Ecosystem Engineers
The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument encompasses 114,000 acres, mostly in southwest Oregon. The Klamath and Cascade Mountains converge here, creating a patchwork of oak woodlands, forests, grasslands, and wetlands support a dazzling array of butterflies, bees, birds, and plants, including many that are found nowhere else.
President Bill Clinton designated the monument in 2000, not for its stunning canyons or breathtaking vistas but its “outstanding biological diversity.” In 2017 President Barack Obama expanded the monument by another 48,000 acres.
Beavers undoubtedly once populated the many streams and meadows, but by the time the monument was designated, they had been all but eradicated — the case all over Oregon. Now there is only one known established beaver family in the entire monument, says Jakob Shockey, executive director at Project Beaver. There could be others; Shockey says he’s seen evidence of random individuals on several creeks.
The Bureau of Land Management manages the monument but has partnered with the nonprofit to help bring beavers back. The task has become more urgent in the face of recent drought, which has left its mark in swaths of dead conifers. This part of southwest Oregon is dry and hot in summer, and getting more so. Beaver dams could help hold more moisture on the landscape, attracting more birds in the process. Wet meadows engineered by beavers could even serve as a firebreak, helping tame the spread of catastrophic wildfires.
Friends of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, the group that hosted the scavenger hunt, is a key player in the project.
“We see our role as letting people know what makes the monument special and what’s needed to support the ecological integrity of this special place,” says Friends’ executive director Collette Streight.
Friends has hosted several “bio-blitz” events, where volunteers fan out in search of butterflies or reptiles. Streight wanted to create an event with the “juicy” energy of a bio-blitz that produced data with practical applications. After talking with Schelz, Shockey, and others, she honed in on beavers.
Photo: Friends of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument
Pond of Dreams
Ultimately, the key to attracting beavers — and more importantly, convincing them to stay and set up shop — is restoring habitat. This “build it and they will come” approach can attract beavers from miles away.
“One of the first steps is to get information: Where are the beavers, and what are they doing right now?” says Streight.
Last summer, they beta-tested the scavenger hunt with a “Hike and Learn” led by Shockey.
“We need to know this information, and it really will impact future restoration work,” says Shockey. “What I don’t have is the ability to walk a bunch of creeks by myself.”
We didn’t find any evidence of beavers on our steep stretch of creek, but after clambering back to the car, we had just enough time to check out a meadow on the upper portion of Beaver Creek, where last fall Project Beaver installed a series of post-assisted log structures, or PALS.
The broad, flat meadow was a totally different landscape from where we’d been searching. Our boots squished as we wandered through clumps of sodden grass. Soon Sonya and I were reaching for our binoculars. Birdsong filled the meadow: Lazuli buntings called from the willows; robins chortled from a massive pine at the meadow’s edge. I broke out the Merlin bird-identification app to sort through the confounding songs of warblers.
Charlie pointed out one of the PALS — several small posts pounded into the creek bottom, with willows woven between them. Water had pooled behind the structure, creating a shallow, murky pond full of bugs.
Photo: Juliet Grable
“This is great to see,” he said, as he bent low to admire butterflies dancing across the surface and examine willow stakes that had been planted there. They were starting to leaf out. It wasn’t difficult to imagine a beaver setting up shop here, and not just for the scenery.
“Beavers like to surround themselves with water; it helps keep them from being eaten,” Charlie told us. Without that buffer, beavers are an easy (and meaty) target for a host of predators, including cougars, bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and of course, humans.
A Rebranding Campaign
Beavers, once pilloried as pests, have undergone an image makeover in the Beaver State, thanks in part to legislative champions. Last year Oregon’s governor signed the “Beaver Believer” bill, which recognizes the rodent’s potential role in mitigating climate change. Beavers, whom the state had perplexingly classified as predators (they’re vegetarians), have now been rebranded as furbearers. As of this July, private landowners must obtain a permit before they can trap or kill so-called “nuisance” beavers. For the first time, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife will also begin collecting data on all beavers killed in Oregon.
Some conservationists have been lobbying the Biden administration to ban hunting and trapping of beavers on federal lands. More locally, advocates have pushed for a trapping ban within the monument’s borders. They hoped it would be included in a new draft “Resource Management Plan” released by the BLM this year, but it was nixed.
Shockey has mixed feelings about such a proposal.
“Traditionally, trapping bans have been used as a wedge issue between those who hunt and those who don’t,” says Shockey. Increasingly, anglers and hunters are coming to appreciate beavers’ good work in streams and meadows — the places they fish and hunt.
And, as Shockey points out, a trapping ban won’t matter if beavers are shot out of spite. Having more beaver advocates actively monitoring in the monument might be the most effective way to protect the animals. Events like the scavenger hunt help by elevating their profile, making more people aware of their presence and importance.
“Beavers are so interesting in the way that people relate them,” says Shockey. “They’re kind of a charismatic animal and they’re easy to find compared to a lot of wildlife that people care about, yet they’re still pretty invisible.”
Setting the Stage
Late in the afternoon, after the scavenger hunt had run its course, 50 or so tired but happy citizen scientists reconvened at the local elementary school to share their findings. A few teams had discovered fresh sign, including along one stretch of creek where Shockey had never detected beavers before. Teams that found no fresh beaver signs shared other sightings — a snake skin, a junco nest, blooming lilies, chewed willow stumps from years past.
Shockey was pleased. “The data are going to directly inform where we’re going to do restoration,” he said, after he’d thanked the volunteers.
“I’m incredibly proud about what we accomplished,” says Streight. From the fundraising campaign to last-minute scrambling when two team leaders cancelled, the scavenger hunt had required a huge amount of effort. Best of all, no one had twisted an ankle or succumbed to heatstroke.
She hopes to capitalize on the scavenger hunt’s momentum. “We feel we could have volunteers at the ready” to help Shockey’s crew monitor sites or plant willow stakes, she says. “They are really jazzed.”
Project Beaver and the BLM have secured $227,000 for beaver restoration, which is enough to support an eight-person crew for three years. Each spring and fall, they will spend two weeks building and repairing structures in creeks, with the ultimate goal of enticing beavers back. They hope to allow beavers to find the habitat on their own and start breeding.
“Can we increase the amount of beaver activity through our restoration work? That’s how we’re going to measure success,” says Shockey.
A new law will allow the state’s wildlife agency to reintroduce the endangered species.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has signed a law to allow wildlife authorities to reintroduce the North American wolverine to the state. Under the law Colorado Parks and Wildlife is expected to create new rules for a wolverine reintroduction program, as well as set guidelines for compensating ranchers and farmers for potential financial losses from any damage to livestock. (Wolverines typically prey on rabbits and other small mammals but have been known to take down animals are large as elk or moose; experts say they rarely prey on livestock.)
Colorado has been attempting to reintroduce wolverines for nearly 15 years. The state first floated a potential program in 2010, but officials opted to reintroduce lynx first. The state wildlife agency estimates Colorado is now home to as many as 250 lynx.
The Northern American wolverine’s natural habitat includes snowy, cold climates. They’ve traditionally been found in the northern Rockies and North Cascade mountain ranges and parts of Alaska and Canada. However, due to aggressive hunting, climate change, and habitat fragmentation, they have been virtually eliminated across the United States. In November 2023 the North American wolverine received federal protection as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Meanwhile, the species has recently started to expand its range — one wandering wolverine was even spotted last year near Portland, Oregon, and may still be patrolling the region.
Most people will never have an opportunity to see reclusive wolverines in the wild, but they’ve appeared several times in the pages of The Revelator. Here’s some of our previous coverage of this fascinating species:
What’s Needed to Save Wolverines? A New Study Has Answers
Wolverines are notoriously elusive, which has made them hard to study. And harder to protect.
Often dwelling in high mountain reaches and denning in deep snow, wolverines (Gulo gulo) prefer to stay away from people. Although evidence has long suggested their populations have declined, some scientists and policymakers have, for years, fallen back on a common trope that not enough is known about them to warrant protective action.
But a new study published in Global Ecology and Conservation flips this narrative — and renews the call for conservation.
Carnivore Conservation Is Tougher in the Mountains
When the Yakama Nation detected a wolverine on Washington’s Mt. Adams in 2005, outside the animal’s known distribution, Jocelyn Akins wanted to learn more. Was it part of a population that hadn’t been previously known or a lone animal seeking new territory?
To answer those questions, Akins, who had previously studied wolverines and grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains, launched the Cascades Carnivore Project in 2008. Studying these elusive and rare mountain carnivores is no easy feat. After setting up remote camera traps with the help of friends and other volunteers, it was 15 months before they got their first photograph of a wolverine. And it wasn’t until 2018 when field researchers working with Akins documented the first female wolverine in 75 years in Washington’s South Cascade Mountains.
Wolverine is Gulo gulo; the glutton so nice they named it twice. Across their range, they are known to eat goats, grouse, goose eggs and everything between. People have been picking apart their scat for half a century. I had never heard of anyone finding fish scales.
In the coming days, to my amazement, Nimbus marched back to the channel and sat at its center for hours, accumulating GPS locations at a baffling rate. From camp, I inspected our photos of the barren ice, imagining him there. What on earth was he doing?
Road to Nowhere: Highways Pose Existential Threat to Wolverines
This is not a good time to be a wolverine.
The infamously scrappy, snow-adapted mustelid — a relation of badgers, martens and otters — is barely hanging on in the contiguous United States, where its population has dipped to mere hundreds. Decades of habitat loss and trapping reduced the wolverine’s numbers, and now diminishing snowpack from climate change is adding insult to injury.
And we can add one more surprising threat to the list: roads.
Yes, even though wolverines thrive in remote, snowy wildernesses, roads can still pose a problem — but perhaps not in the way you might think.
For cartoonist Tom Toro, humor about climate change attacks hypocrisy, supports truth, and fuels resistance.
Think climate change isn’t funny? Try telling that to cartoonist Tom Toro. The frequent New Yorker contributor, who also writes and draws a comic strip called “Home Free,” often points his pen at the pain and hypocrisy behind the climate crisis and other environmental issues, with blistering results.
It’s not just about mocking the systems and people behind the problems. As Toro tells The Revelator, humor provides worried readers with a laughter-induced catharsis.
At the same time, he points out, humor serves a vital form of resistance.
Platt: This is a tough time for the planet — but also for political cartooning. Most newspapers don’t have staff cartoonists anymore.
Toro: Still, this is a boom time for journalism. There’s plenty of material out there. People are really seeing, more than ever now, the value of the fourth estate and holding power accountable.
Yeah, journalism as the co-equal fourth branch of government. But it’s almost like cartooning should be the fifth branch.
Cartooning is definitely a good part of it. I think people are just really hungry for satire.
It’s tricky, though. You don’t want to minimize things and you don’t want to trivialize. But there’s a way of clarifying an idea in a single panel with a caption. The power, the clarity of that, I think is what’s really appealing.
Cartooning is so well suited to the sort of media diet that people have nowadays. The short captions appeal to kind of the Twitter mentality. It’s just ideally suited to the way that people receive media.
You are always looking for the pithiest caption. Wordiness is kind of the death of a quip. You’ve got to cut like a knife.
But marrying those words with art — how does that shape the satire in comics form?
For the cartoonist — editorial cartoonist, New Yorker cartoonist, whatever — you’re really looking for the stuff that you can attack with the strengths of your own art form. What can I do in a cartoon that they can’t do on Saturday Night Live? That’s the kind of stuff that you really try to hone in on.
Every day I catch up on what Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert did, and SNL — it’s something funny that we all watch, and everyone kind of attacks the same material. There’s a little bit of repetition that goes into it.
With the cartoonists, it’s like, well, what can I do? Because in cartoons you don’t have to obey physics. You don’t have the sort of constraints of a production of Saturday Night Live. They might shy away from an idea just because it’s not necessarily worth it to create an entire set.
And sometimes those “sets” for you are just a moment in cartoon time.
Yeah. Probably my most popular one was the one that was the sort of postapocalyptic landscape and the guy who’s kind an investment banker talking to some children around a fire saying, “yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.” That’s probably been my most popular one. And I was surprised when the New Yorker took it.
That brings up something I hear from freelance or staff journalists, who still have challenges getting editors to accept environmental topics.
I’ve submitted a lot of carbon footprint stuff. I have this one they just refuse to buy where there’s two women sitting on the table and she’s saying, “my heart says Jack because he has a private jet, but my head says, date Don, because he has a small carbon footprint.”
There’s that sort of stuff where it’s, like, lifestyle choices that yuppies can make based on trying to have a low impact on the Earth kind of thing. So you’re trying to find humor in environmental stuff. It’s a little bit hard to sell as a gag.
It’s not that the New Yorker is not environmentally conscious, but they sometimes don’t want their jokes to address the same stuff that the journalism is addressing. The jokes have to kind of live in their own world and not necessarily be comments on what they’re approaching in their articles. So whenever you manage to slip one in there, the planet got destroyed, it’s gratifying.
Are there other reasons why more cartoonists don’t address environmental issues?
Maybe because it’s just uniquely hard to find levity in that. Or there’s something about climate change that’s hard to particularize because it’s such a sweeping thing and the actual impact on our first-world lives is not entirely evident.
Whereas with politics, it’s right in our face all the time. Maybe if global warming was on the front page every single day. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be something that was more addressed in the culture of humor. But I think we’re still in denial.
And it’s tough. I mean, climate change is the death of a thousand paper cuts, and it’s hard to be that scalpel blade cutting through the humor of a particular thing when it’s all this slow incremental change that adds up over time.
Right? Yeah. There’s no smoking gun and there’s only so many polar bears you can draw on shrinking ice floes. That’s the stereotypical image. Not a lot of political cartoonists are addressing it.
There would probably be more of a variety of topics you could address if we were living in more of a sane political environment. But yeah, it’s like you were saying, it’s the death of a thousand cuts and how you particularize that?
I mean, I have kind of a silly one where there’s an Eskimo, and the ice is receding. And so they’re saying, “well, one good thing about climate change is I can find all my lost pens” — and all the pens are on the ground that’s cleared by the melting ice. There’s stuff like that that I try to do.
You’ve got to give people that catharsis.
Yeah, bringing up catharsis is interesting. Do you think cartoons can be useful in today’s mental environment in terms of changing people’s minds about anything? I mean, you can also go back to the original editorial cartoons taking down all the New York City bosses and things like that. Obviously, they had a political edge, and they did have an effect. Do you think cartooning still has any of that power on individuals or society?
I think it is powerful in terms of just giving fuel to what’s become known as the resistance. I think people are hungry for it, and it has a way of lending force to the ideas that are going into the resistance. I don’t know if humor can necessarily change the world, but it can definitely buoy up the movements that will change the world.
The power of jokes is that they’re truth-telling, but they do it in a way that’s surprising and funny. At the core of it, they’re demystifying something. They’re telling some truth. They’re pointing out a hypocrisy in people who are in power. And so I think the more that you can lend humor to the cause of the resistance, the more that you stack facts on that side of the argument — because there’s such a countervailing force against the resistance to call it fake news, to keep the shroud of doubt around things that are self-evidently true, that you have to keep pushing that boulder uphill.
And I think that cartoons, in the way that they can really clarify an idea in a simple form and be memorable in that way, sort of put the shoulder to the wheel in terms of keeping the energy on the side of truthfulness and factuality. Because jokes don’t work unless they’re true.
That’s something that I’ve found really to be useful in terms of clarifying what I’m trying to do. And I’ve also found it to be, in itself, a true statement.
The reason we find jokes funny, and particularly the Daily Show kind of jokes or political cartoons, is because it’s almost that sort of burst — just opening the window and getting that breath of fresh air. It’s like, “oh, that is true.” It’s sort of an epiphany moment when a joke works.
Increasing demand for this seemingly abundant and common material harms human and natural communities — and fuels a lucrative and dangerous illegal industry.
Coastal ecosystems — including oyster reefs, sandy beaches, mangrove forests and seagrass beds — provide important habitat for marine life and food and recreation for people. They also protect shorelines from waves and storms. But these precious systems face serious threats. This series looks at what put them at risk, along with examples of efforts to restore and protect important coastal ecosystems around the world.
We need to talk about sand.
Most people don’t realize that these humble grains — that ubiquitous stuff of vacations, ant farms and hourglasses — are the second-most used natural resource in the world after water. According to a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Programme, we use more than 55 billion tons of it per year — nearly 40 pounds per person per day.
And a lot of that sand comes from illegal activity, involving criminal gangs who mine, smuggle, and kill for the precious material.
The Building Blocks of Modern Society
Sand — legal or otherwise — gets used to enhance beaches, extract petroleum through hydraulic fracking, fill land under buildings, and make computer chips.
But the biggest amount by far — an estimated 85% of the sand mined globally — goes into making concrete. Concrete combines two key ingredients: cement, a binding agent made from calcium or other substances, and aggregate, which is either sand or a combination of sand and gravel. Quality concrete requires jagged and angular aggregate grains — a quality found in only a tiny fraction of the worlds’ sand, most of it on beaches and in rivers. This sand also is easy and cheap to mine, and it’s located close to much of the construction taking place around the world.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, world consumption of aggregate for all uses exceeds 40 billion metric tons (44 billion U.S. tons) a year — an estimate that’s likely on the conservative side and represents about twice the amount of sediment carried annually by all the world’s rivers. (Sediment from land rocks is the source of most coastal sand, which also comes from shells and marine organisms pulverized by waves, the digestive tracts of coral-eating fish, and the remains of tiny creatures called foraminifera.)
The organization also warns about sand mining’s serious consequences for humans and the natural environment.
Removing beach sand leaves coastal structures more vulnerable to erosion even as climate change raises sea levels and makes storms more intense. Transporting sand generates carbon dioxide emissions. Sand mining has political and cultural consequences, including effects on the tourism industry, and creates noise and air pollution.
Coastal sand mining also destroys complex ecosystems. The microorganisms, crabs, and clams that live in beach sand are important food sources for birds. Sea turtles and several bird species nest on sandy beaches. Seagrass, an important food source and habitat for marine residents, needs sandy ocean floor to grow. Stretches of underwater sand provide habitat for sea stars, sea cucumbers, conchs, and other critters, and are feeding grounds for flounder, rays, fish, and sharks.
Yet this harm is not the only issue. Increasing demand for sand has created a vast illegal industry resembling the organized criminal drug trade, including the same violence, black markets, and piles of money — an estimated $200 to $350 billion a year. Of all the sand extracted globally every year, only about 15 billion metric tons are legally traded, according to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Pascal Pedruzzi, director of UNEP’s Global Resource Information Database-Geneva, became aware of illegal sand mining when the Jamaican government asked UNEP in 2014 to find out why the island had a serious beach erosion problem.
“There was a lot we didn’t know about sand extraction, including how much was being taken,” he says.
Or from how many places: Sand is mined from coastal environments in at least 80 countries on six continents, according to the 2022 book Vanishing Sands, written by several geologists and other experts on coastal management and land rights.
The book outlines a litany of sand crimes, from seemingly small to massive. In Sardinia, Italy, airport officials have seized about 10 tons of sand over 10 years, much of it carried in thousands of individual half-quart bottles. In Morocco criminals removed as many as 200 dump trucks of sand a day from massive dunes lining the Atlantic coast.
According to Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, illegal sand mining in Morocco is run by a syndicate second in size only to the country’s drug mafia. It involves corrupt government and law enforcement officials and foreign companies. Much of the Moroccan sand, for example, ends up in buildings in Spain.
In India demand for sand tripled from 2000 to 2017, creating a market worth 150 billion rupees, just over $2 billion. Multiple diverse and competing “sand mafias” run mining sites surrounded by armed private security guards. Their weapons likely are obtained illegally, given the difficult process of acquiring guns legally in India.
The NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People reports hundreds of deaths and injuries related to illegal sand mining in India each year, including citizens (adults and children), journalists, activists, government officials, and law enforcement.
There are similar stories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, elsewhere in Africa, and in the Caribbean — almost everywhere sandy coastal areas can be found.
How to Solve the Problem
UNEP has begun tackling the problem of sand mining, putting forth ten recommendations that include creating international standards for extracting sand from the marine environment, reducing the use of sand by using substitutes, and recycling products made with sand.
While these recommendations target legal sand mining, more responsible management and reduced overall demand also should make illegal mining less lucrative and, therefore, less common.
“The good news is there’s a long list of solutions,” says Peduzzi. “We start by stopping waste of sand. We can make the life of buildings longer, retrofitting them instead of knocking them down. Maybe change the use of a building over time, as a school first and then 50 years later, a place for elderly people. When a building needs to be destroyed, crush and reuse the concrete. Build with wood, bricks, adobe, and straw.”
Building with straw also could reduce burning of crop waste. Every year, India produces 500 million tons of straw but burns 140 million tons as “excess.” One company there, Strawcture Eco, is using straw to create wall and ceiling panels that are fire resistant, insulating, and sustainable.
Alternatives to sand in concrete include ash from waste incineration and aluminum smelting waste. Peduzzi notes that ash creates concrete that is about 10% less solid, but points out, “that is still pretty good. You can use it to make buildings, but maybe not a bridge.”
The UNEP report notes that involvement from industry, the private sector, and civil society is vital in solving the problem. For example, shifting away from building with concrete will require changing the way architects and engineers are trained, acceptance by building owners, and new laws and regulations.
“We rely on sand, as a commodity,” Peduzzi says. “But we also need to realize its ecosystem services. We must be wiser about how we use it.”
UNEP hopes to collect solutions into a single, accessible online location (although it currently lacks funding for the effort). The idea is to create a hub for policies and technological solutions, Peduzzi says, and to develop best practices for them. The Global Initiative report on India also calls for a website for tracking illegal sand mining hosted by a think-tank or journalism agency — a sort of crime-spotters portal where people could anonymously upload evidence.
Shifting Sands, Shifting Thinking
William Neal, an emeritus professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and one of the authors of Vanishing Sands, suggests in an email that finding sand substitutes is not enough. Coastal communities, he says, need to retreat from rising seas rather than build more hard structures such as seawalls. This “shoreline engineering” often destroys the very beaches it is intended to save, he explains, and the long-term cost of saving property through engineering often ends up exceeding the value of the property. Seawalls also tend to simply shift water elsewhere, potentially causing flooding and significant damage along other parts of the shoreline.
Peduzzi also espouses shifts in thinking, including how we get around in cities.
“Instead of building roads for cars, build subways,” he says. “That moves people faster and gets away from fossil fuels. The icing on the cake is that when digging subway tunnels, you are getting rocks, generating this material instead of using it. Cars are not sustainable — not the material to make a car itself or the roads and parking lots.”
Without systemic changes, the problem of sand removal is only going to grow bigger as the population increases and people continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, increasing the demand for infrastructure like roads and buildings.
“The problem has been overlooked,” Peduzzi warns. “People need to realize that sand is just another story of how dependent we are on natural resources for development.”
The unanticipated environmental effects of inhalers underscore the contradictions of piecemeal climate solutions.
In Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” where the air is thick with pollutants and asthma rates are alarmingly high, a troublesome irony is unfolding.
This region is home to sprawling petrochemical plants and toxic fossil fuels that disproportionately affect the respiratory health of the area’s majority-Black residents.
Here, inhalers — one of the key tools for managing diseases like asthma — play a dual role: alleviating symptoms of pollution while also contributing to environmental degradation. This paradox has underscored the urgent need for sustainable solutions that holistically address environmental justice, health, and race equity issues in frontline communities like Cancer Alley.
Inhalers, often viewed as life-saving devices, have a profoundly negative impact on the environment. The most popular of the two main varieties of inhaler, metered-dose inhalers, release a gas that warms the earth hundreds of times faster than carbon dioxide.
A recent investigation by NPR revealed that the cumulative amount of climate-damaging gasses released from traditional inhalers is the equivalent of driving half a million gas-powered cars for a year. This means that each puff contributes significantly to climate disintegration. And as pollution damages more people’s lungs, the need for inhalers increases.
This 85-mile stretch of land wasn’t always referred to as Cancer Alley. Older residents recall a thriving community where many people lived off the nutrient-rich land. However, corporate greed and negligent politicians have irreparably damaged the soil, the land, and the air, leading to some of the highest cancer rates per year for residents.
Dozens of new cases each year are believed to be linked to severe air pollution. That pollution has also led to high rates of asthma in the area. Even more concerning is data showing the link between pollution, asthma, and cancer is visible in neighborhoods with high poverty rates — but not in more affluent communities, proving again that poverty kills.
The implications of the inhaler paradox are staggering. Not only do frontline communities bear the brunt of pollution-related health burdens, but they also face the ironic reality of using medical interventions that perpetuate the cycle of environmental degradation. Addressing this issue requires collective advocacy and action between healthcare professionals, environmental advocates, policymakers, and community leaders.
We have long approached environmental and public health solutions with a bandaid instead of a cure. The unique problem posed by inhalers releasing toxic gasses that increase climate change is one example why short-term solutions are no longer an acceptable way to manage our climate’s deteriorating health. Frankly speaking, it’s too costly to keep operating under this model when it is costing lives, the health of our planet, and our collective future.
Beyond encouraging the use of other inhalers and safe recycling, it is critical that government agencies do more to address greenhouse gas emissions so that we can proactively focus on prevention efforts instead of doing damage control.
While recent EPA rules on clean vehicles and emission reduction efforts are encouraging, it is not enough to combat the damage we have already done to the planet.
That is why my organization, the Hip Hop Caucus, is working with communities on the frontlines of these issues, uplifting their stories through The Coolest Show. Together we’re pushing back against attempts to roll back the minimal regulations protecting these communities and advocating to shut down operations that disproportionately put Black and brown lives at risk.
We’ve witnessed the effects of corporate greed and climate denial on our planet. It’s untenable to keep proposing short-term public health solutions without addressing the underlying causes of disease. Reports have shown how creating climate friendly policies can save taxpayer dollars in the long run — and more importantly, save lives.
It’s not too late to do right by the 20,000 residents of Cancer Alley. But we must act before it’s too late.
This op-ed was produced by Inequality.org and distributed for syndication by OtherWords.org.
A recent success got a lot of publicity, offering us insight into not only the species but the narratives that resonate with people.
Last November conservationists carefully carried 70 young, critically endangered Mojave Desert tortoises to the reptiles’ natural habitat on Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. The tortoises had been hatched and reared in captivity, and the team — a collaboration between U.S. Air Force officials at the base, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Springs — were hopeful that the animals would survive the rigors of life in the wild, where ravens would try to peck through their shells and coyotes could attack them.
It would take a while to learn how they fared: Soon after their release, the reptiles would hide in underground burrows and go into brumation, a state of inactivity, for the winter.
But six months later, this past April, news of their fate came out: The tortoises had emerged from their burrows healthier and stronger than ever, a notable milestone in the ongoing tortoise conservation story.
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
The news quickly made headlines around the country. Local outlets covered the outcome, as did the Associated Press, which transmitted it internationally. Even celebrity-focusedPeople magazine profiled the project. The media blitz demonstrated that even though conservation projects can be expensive and time- and energy-intensive, concerted efforts to help species come back from near extinction, and even thrive, can work.
Dozens of conservation success stories come out every year, from bald eagle population surges to black-footed ferret births, zebra shark releases to red wolf habitat protections. Yet few get as much publicity as the tortoises did in the spring.
So why did the story of the tortoises resonate so widely when so many other conservation stories fail to reach the public? The answer may reflect not only the state of human views on our effect on the environment, and our opinions of animals, but also the state of the news industry and what we cover.
“A Huge Downer”
Research published in 2022 by Carlos Corvalan, an advisor on risk assessment and global environmental change at the World Health Organization, suggested that people often feel overwhelmed by today’s biodiversity and climate change crises, which can lead to feelings of helplessness and result in people taking less action, not more.
Bad news about habitat destruction, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere, and struggling species abound. The public, it seems, is hungry for positive stories.
“In this time, in all times, conservation can be a huge downer,” says James Danoff-Burg, director of conservation at The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens. The tortoise story, however, was about how the reptiles did well in their new environment after months in brumation. “This,” he says, “is a success.”
Another reason that the tortoise story got so much traction may be because they’re cute and unthreatening. Unlike endangered predators, tortoises won’t hurt anyone or take down prey with their fangs. Studies on stories about hyenas and sharks, for example, show that conservation focused on those species is less popular among certain age groups who think of them as scary.
Although tortoises may not qualify as charismatic megafauna — typically thought of as popular, attractive, and well-known animals — they have endearing features and are charmingly awkward.
“We relate to those big eyes,” says Danoff-Burg. “Tortoises, they’re just so funny and odd and alien, but adorable. I think that sold the story as much as anything.”
Photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
The groups involved also have communications departments that helped narrate the story of the species the organizations care for. Typically it’s up to the researchers themselves to relate successes in the field, but media departments can help tell those stories to a wider audience, says Melissa Merrick, associate director of recovery ecology at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
“They really did a great job in elevating the work that we’ve been doing,” she says. “Not every organization is fortunate to have such a great communications team, and that’s really something that’s overlooked in a lot of conservation work, the importance of getting the story out there and letting people know some of the wins.”
Can the Tortoises’ Media Success Be Duplicated?
If conservationists or public relations professionals want to replicate the Mojave Desert tortoise story success, the task may be difficult, says Betsy Hildebrandt, senior vice president of external affairs for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. “A great, compelling story often doesn’t land, while one that seems insignificant can have legs,” she says.
In her more than three decades in communications, she’s seen how uncontrollable factors often influence the amount of publicity a study or a success will have in the media. Those can include a heavy news cycle, whether a reporter or editor has interest in a particular species, or whether viewers think the species is cute and cuddly.
“The best a PR department can do is put together a compelling pitch, be smart and target reporters who may have covered something similar in the past, [and] try an ‘exclusive,’ which you can then promote on social media to get further pickup,” she says.
Success Stories Have Power
In the void of good news, the doom and gloom stories often earn more attention, so the conservation community should promote even small victories.
“There are so many successes out there,” Danoff-Burg says. “We just don’t tell those stories very well.” We often fail to advertise minor wins in a conservation success story, such as efforts to mitigate threats like roads or poaching.
Some in the media understand that dynamic, which has led organizations like the Solutions Journalism Network to advocate for stories with a positive message that can show readers why, and how, people responded to a particular problem.
Sure, sometimes even good-news stories fail to make a splash. But even if a conservation story doesn’t grab the public’s attention the first time there’s a breakthrough, a species’ comeback could become an even more compelling narrative over time.
Take the black-footed ferret, for example. The species was thought to be extinct by the early 1980s, until a rancher’s dog found one in the wild a few years later. Biologists named the ferret Willa and collected her genetic material. Decades later they created her genetic clone in 2021 to help the species recover. The news of the genetic advance made national headlines in places like Science, National Geographic, and Smithsonian Magazine. Biologists just recently used that same genetic material to create two more younger sisters, also clones, generating yet more headlines.
The organizations that contributed to the Mojave Desert tortoise success could have more news to promote in the future, too, as they continue their research, like what makes a tortoise clutch successful, whether specific females are likely to produce young that succeed in cold weather, and whether individual differences in behavior change how they respond to predators. That could all make conservation efforts more effective on a faster timeframe, Danoff-Burg says.
As researchers and biologists increase their knowledge of how to best protect and support lots of other threatened and endangered species — and the habitats they rely on — conservationists will have more tales to tell of their successes. That could benefit both humans and animals alike.
For Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh, the night skies hold a sense of natural wonder and offer opportunities for citizen science.
When I was a child, my mother instructed me to stop playing outside and come home at the sight of the first twilight firefly. For many years I believed what most children believe: that when darkness falls, the day’s fun is over. It wasn’t until my stint as a Student Conservation Association intern at Arches National Park, many moons ago, that I began to explore the night sky and all the secrets it holds.
Dr. Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh had a similar experience. As the Malaysian conservation scientist recounted in a talk at TED Women in Atlanta, Georgia, last fall, she and her siblings grew up in a “superstitious, conservative community” and were always told to return home at sunset. “This particular rule made the night seem mysterious to me,” she recounted at the conference, where we first met. “I spent my school years admiring the dark, but never got around to really exploring it.”
When she was a young scientist, that began to change. On a late-night boat ride through a mangrove estuary one evening, she found herself surrounded by thousands of fireflies, all blinking in unison. As she said in her TED talk, “That is the moment I will never forget — the moment I officially fell in love with kelip-kelip,” the local name for fireflies.
Now a senior lecturer in biodiversity and conservation at Monash University in Malaysia, Jusoh has dedicated her career to firefly research and conservation. Among her accomplishments, she recently coauthored a paper outlining firefly threats and conservation strategies around the world.
Another area of Jusoh’s research focuses on the genus Pteroptyx, also known as congregating fireflies. Like the insects she saw that fateful night, Pteroptyx gather in large swarms in trees and shrubs along tidal rivers in mangrove swamps and flash their lights in nearly perfect synchronicity. Because of these displays, the IUCN refers to them as “icon species.”
But even these icons are in trouble. Last month, just a few days before World Firefly Day on July 6, the IUCN Firefly Specialist Group announced that four congregating species — the Comtesse’s firefly (Pteroptyx bearni), synchronous bent-wing firefly (P. malaccae), perfect synchronous flashing firefly (P. tener), and nonsynchronous bent-winged firefly (P. valida) — have been assessed as vulnerable to extinction, one step above endangered. (The extinction risk of the majority of firefly species has yet to be assessed, something the Specialist Group is working to address.)
On the day of the IUCN Red List announcement, Jusoh and I reconnected over video to discuss her work.
Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh speaks at TEDWomen 2023. Photo: Erin Lubin / TED
There are more than 2,200 known species of firefly. They’re found on every continent except for Antarctica. And each type serves as an indicator of its habitat. Why is this important?
Fireflies are so important. I think the first thing that we talk about is balancing the ecosystem. There are also other insects that play a role like that, but if you look at fireflies, their life stage has [a] different role.
When we talk about firefly larvae, we are also talking about maintaining good habitat for their prey. So, for example, we’re talking about firefly larvae eating snails. The snails require good water quality. When you don’t have good water quality, the snail population will decrease and the fireflies’ population will also decrease.
But I also like to talk about specific fireflies — for example, the aquatic firefly. We don’t have many, at least not all over the world, but there are aquatic fireflies [who] can swim. They require high quality water to actually live in the water.
It’s not just about fireflies alone. When you remove the firefly from the ecosystem, you are disturbing the other parts of the food chain.
For those of us who are not scientists and have not devoted our lives to fireflies, what can we do to help foster healthy habitats so that the widest range of species of fireflies can thrive?
This might be funny, but as a collective group of firefly researchers we all say that the first, very simple thing that you can do is turn off the lights when you don’t use them.
That’s the easiest thing that we can do as citizens because fireflies are talking to each other using signals. And when you have the light too bright, you will see decreased number of fireflies because you disrupt their communication.
And number two, if we cannot contribute scientifically, we can always go for a citizen science program. There are national recording systems, or something like iNaturalist. People [like me] actually get the data. Sometimes [users] will ask, “hey, what is this species?” Then experts try to identify it. And that’s very, very helpful. We can see that [and say] “oh, I have never seen this firefly, maybe next time I should visit this place.”
I think awareness, education, is very important. And in terms of contribution, nowadays almost every country has a citizen science program.
Maybe we think that it’s quite slow. Maybe we don’t see the return on investment in this kind of work. But in the long term it creates guardians, the people who one day, when they know there are fireflies here, will become the eyes and ears for scientists to help protect them.
A mangrove forest in Thailand at twilight. Photo credit: Banthoon Pankaew.
You’ve spoken of the moment that you first saw the kelip-kelip dancing, and how it was a moment of wonder and excitement.And that moment has led to your entire life’s work.What would you say to people who have maybe not experienced that wonder? Where would they start to find wonder in nature?
I think it’s really hard to answer this. I think it really depends on how much you’re willing to be open to curiosity, open to new experiences. If you’re into nature, or if you have a high curiosity, you’re probably easily attracted to that kind of mystery. The message can be really powerful. But I think fireflies have a strength here that even by looking at them, you always have that magical moment.
In your talk you spoke of how coming home at twilight meant the night was mysterious to you. And that’s something shared by children around the world. How would you recommend we foster wonder of the dark in children?
People talk about the safety issue, of children being out at night, and that makes sense. But then when you grow up — and it was always instilled since you were young that you cannot go out — it feels dangerous. For you to get out and explore, there’s always many layers of doubt. But there are always ways to do it.
Nowadays we have a lot of opportunities to go explore an area that has already been established — for example, an ecotourism area. If we are not sure yet — and especially if we have that fear about about night — you can go with your family, ask your friends to come. The more the merrier.
Helping Indigenous peoples to protect forests and other shared resources will keep us all safer from climate change and other threats.
Saudamini Mohakud, the 65-year-old elder of her village, proudly calls herself the daughter and bride of the Eastern Ghats, the range of mountains that borders the eastern Indian state of Odisha. The mountains’ undulating wooded hills cradle her native village, Punasia, where she was born and wed. Saudamini says she could not have been happier growing up in its lap of lush greenery, which included about 50 acres of the community forests near her village.
“The forests were then a treasure trove of nature’s bounties, providing us with fruits, vegetables, tubers, medicines, and numerous other resources that sustained our households,” says Saudamini, now a grandmother to four children. “Our sacred grove, dedicated to our village deities, also flourished within these community forests.” The village cattle, too, grazed at the edge of the forest and community pastures.
But in the 1980s the forests began to disappear. The hills turned bare. According to villagers, loggers rampantly smuggled timber. Summers became hotter; dusty winds from the nearby hills hit the village. Rainfall became scarce and erratic. Agriculture, their primary means of livelihood, became uncertain. Depleted forest resources also hit their secondary source of income: collecting seeds, mushrooms, flowers, and other wild plants.
By the 1990s Punasia’s economy was as bare as the nearby hills. “This resulted in migration of men and youths from our village to find work outside,” rues Saudamini.
But over the past two decades, Punasia village has turned that around. A dedicated band of women led by Saudamini have nurtured nearly 50 acres of degraded forest patches and restored them to their former glory.
The formerly depleted forests have regrown with native trees such as sal, siali, mahua, tamarind, mango, and bamboo. Natural water bodies have also been revived with regular rainfall and rising water tables.
“It was hard work” that relied upon their traditional knowledge, recalls Mami Mohakud, now 35 and a member of Saudamini’s team. “We reared the reappearing saplings in the forests, created fences around them, and saved them from grazing cattle.”
Saudamini’s 20-year-old granddaughter, Nirupama, says these protected and restored community commons are an intrinsic part of Punasia’s existence, spiritual, cultural, and ecological heritage, as they are for other Indigenous communities. “They are not just forests or grazing land for us, but deeply connected with our feelings, sustenance, and day-to-day life,” she says.
Community commons also provide many ecosystem services that regulate the local climate, a process seen around the world, according to Sharat Kumar Palita, a professor in the department of biodiversity and conservation of natural resources at Central University of Odisha, Koraput.
“Different kinds of commons — including forest patches, water bodies, and grazing lands — play their respective roles in maintaining favorable microclimatic conditions,” says Palita.
Patches of community forests, he says, reduce heat and local temperature, bring rainfall, and help recharge the water table.
Pastures and grazing lands are also ecosystems on their own, explains Palita. The vegetation provides habitats for diverse pollinating insects such as grasshoppers, butterflies, and bees, and birds such as sparrows. The grass cover, meanwhile, checks rainwater runoff, binds the soil, and, most importantly, provides fodder to the cattle. “All these [benefits] enable the communities to develop a sustainable bond with natural resources,” he says.
Community commons also play an important planetary role by sequestering carbon, a necessary process in a world threatened by climate change. According to FAO’s Global Forest Assessment Report (2020), an average hectare of living forest biomass sequesters 72.6 metric tons of carbon.
But protecting the commons well enough to provide these benefits remains a challenge.
India’s Endangered Commons
Research shows that community commons, which constitute nearly a quarter of the Earth’s land, sustain the livelihood and fulfill the cultural and spiritual needs of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In India common lands constitute nearly 38% of the country’s landmass, spanning 308 million acres that provide critical subsistence and livelihoods for more than 350 million rural people.
Despite their significance, India’s commons have seen a 31-55% decline during the past few decades, in part due to a failure to acknowledge Indigenous practices and skills.
“Though the Indigenous communities have been historically managing and governing the commons for centuries, their time-tested systems are yet to be acknowledged or officially recognized in India,” says Swapnasri Sarangi, the head of gender, diversity, and inclusion at the Foundation for Ecological Security, a pan-Indian nonprofit that has been working with Indigenous communities on conservation and protection of commons and other issues since 2001.
Without any well-defined policy, Sarangi says community common lands are vulnerable to human encroachments and diversion for economic development, such as power projects, roads, industries, constructions, and other threats. The Indigenous communities, who suddenly feel thrown out of their age-old native resources, become impoverished and seldom enjoy the benefits of the “new age” developments. “The conservation and management of community commons is thus a global challenge today,” she says.
But a solution has emerged, and it’s helping villages like Punasia.
Community Mapping
In 2019 the Foundation for Ecological Security developed a mobile application it calls the Common Land Mapping tool, which can identify and demarcate community commons land and shared resources using GPS data. The application allows users to create images and maps of the common land and shared resources, check for encroachment on their territories, and develop collective economic opportunities.
The foundation has trained more than 8,000 community members across Odisha, 30% of whom are women. To date users have mapped an area of 450 square miles (11,7285 hectares). The organization says this work could potentially benefit up to 20,000 villages and millions of people in the state.
In Punasia village, for instance, the mapping tool has helped users to scientifically establish the village’s boundaries so they can protect the forests against unauthorized access. “Today, with sticks in hand, every household in the village regularly patrols and protects our community forest in turns,” says Mami Mohakud. Loggers pose less of a threat now, but the sticks serve as a symbolic gesture that they women are actively monitoring the forests.
Women use the mobile-based Community Land Mapping tool to demarcate the boundaries of their community forest patches and guard them against unauthorized forest resource collections and tree felling from nearby villages. Photo by Biju Tudu
The protection has boosted Punasia’s ongoing efforts to restore its forests. Today the villagers are particularly excited to watch herds of migrating elephants pass through the forest patch from the nearby Dalma sanctuary. “Sometimes, they even stay in the forest for a day or two, until the forest department drives them to the nearby Simlipal forests,” says 15-year-old Namita from the village.
The revival of the community worship site within the forest makes her particularly happy. “The forest deity is our mother and ultimate savior of the jungles,” she says. “We do not allow anyone to pluck a single leaf from her sacred site.”
Protecting the Commons, Restoring Culture
“Integrating commons with local culture and traditions is the best way to conserve them,” says Sanjukta Basa, chairperson of Sangram, a state-based nonprofit that has worked with Indigenous communities to conserve forests and wildlife since 1995.
According to Basa, the organization has so far worked in 450 villages in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, reviving at least 350 acres of degraded worship sites. Today the dense growth of these sacred patches of forest (an average of 0.5-1 acre each) welcomes animals such as barking deer, sloth bears, jackals, and wild boars. These commons are also places for celebration, where the local communities dance and sing to the rhythm of their traditional drums.
A common place of worship in a tribal village surrounded by trees and forests. Photo: Moushumi Basu
Other communities have taken on their own restoration efforts. In the Koraput district, 30-35 families in the village of Nuaguda have revived about 10 acres of forest cover with various commercial varieties of native plants. They have also collectively restored natural water bodies in their village. The largest of them, with an area of 5 acres, is used by the community to cultivate native fish species such as catla, rohu, prawn, and puntius, among others.
Four other water bodies, each 1.5-2 acres, are used for rainwater harvesting. “During the dry season, we drain out the water from these smaller ponds to cultivate vegetables,” says Kamala Mathapadia, who heads a women-led self-help group in the village that determines the community marketing of fish and vegetables. “We ensure the earnings are distributed equitably among the community members,” she adds.
The weaving community from Kotpad village takes pride in rejuvenating their traditional art of preparing vegetable dyes from plants in their community forests. According to conventional weaver Kunti Mohont, their 20 acres of community forests have plants such as tesu, catechu, annatto, Indian mulberry, shikakai, and harada (chebulic myrobalan). “We use vegetable colors derived from the flowers, roots, barks, or fruits of these plants for long-lasting effects on the fabrics we weave,” she says.
These efforts protect the local ecology while providing value to local communities. According to field research conducted by the Centre for Youth and Social Development, the restoration of commons by the local communities has augmented the livelihood of the village households by at least 20-25% during the past 8-10 years. The organization has worked with Indigenous communities in the state since 1982, empowering them through sustainable livelihoods and conservation of community forests and other commons. According to their records, the effort has so far covered about 21,300 acres (8,617 hectares) in 1,183 villages.
“The correlation between the livelihood of the local communities and the commons is best understood through the positive impacts the latter has on the region’s microclimate,” explains Ashish Jalli, senior project manager at the Centre, who was part of the field research team.
He adds that it has resulted in adequate and timely rains, restored soil fertility, erosion checks, and other accompanying factors that have secured agriculture as the primary source of livelihood for the local communities. In addition, the sale of natural resources such as vegetable dyes, leaves for making containers or plates, wild grass, honey, incense materials, and medicines in local markets are substantially contributing to their secondary sources of income.
The efforts may help sustain the villages in another critical manner, by removing the incentive to leave home and work elsewhere.
“It is rewarding for me to see how the youths are choosing to stay back and work in their native village, thus strengthening the social fabric of their community,” says Jalli.
With these successes already boosting many local commons, efforts to protect the similar territories will continue to expand. Within the next three years, the Foundation for Ecological Security says it plans to extend its outreach to other states in India, including Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra. It also expects to expand partnerships with nonprofits and government agencies to enhance the capacities of local communities to identify and strengthen the governance of commons in the country.
The ongoing work will depend on combining traditional knowledge with new technology and high-quality, open source, accessible information. “Strengthening the community knowledge on commons — and adding scientific data — empowers and instills confidence within Indigenous communities,” says Sarangi. “When their skills and knowledge are acknowledged, their capabilities and confidence are also enhanced.”
Local communities strive to protect local forests and headwaters that include some of the Amazon River’s most important water sources.
The Place:
The communal reserves of the Pampa del Burro and Copallin Private Conservation Areas, and the Jardines Ángel del Sol Conservation Concession, are nestled in the forested Andean foothills of northeastern Peru. Their geographic splendor encompasses waterfalls, orchids, hummingbirds, amphibians, and other rare and endemic wildlife. Local communities are striving to conserve these areas to protect local forests and headwaters that include water sources of the world’s largest river, the Amazon.
Why it matters:
The formerly vast Andean forests of northern Peru have drastically declined in area due to rapidly increasing agriculture and livestock grazing that have reached unsustainable levels. These montane forests are known for their high diversity of wildlife and plant species, many of which are only found there. We still have a lot to learn about the amazing wildlife in this region. In just the past five years, many species have been newly described by science: at least 26 amphibians and reptiles, six orchids, and even a small wildcat (the clouded tiger cat, Leopardus pardinoides).
Local communities support the legal designation of their lands to prioritize conservation of Andean forests. When requesting official designation of their lands as a conservation area, a community must follow legal guidelines in a participatory process to develop a master plan for management of the community conservation area. Designation of the conservation area, with a developed master plan, makes them havens for the protection of headwaters and biodiversity, safeguarding the communities’ future well-being.
Each of these conservation areas is managed by a committee of community members. These residents focus on balancing sustainable agriculture, such as of coffee and cacao, with these forests’ water storage, potential for ecotourism, and intrinsic beauty and worth.
Since 2001 communities across Peru have been formalizing private and communal protected areas to prevent forest and habitat loss. The communities of Copallín, La Perla del Imaza, and Libano each have their own conservation area. Although they’re not close together, their protected areas face the same regional threats.
A conservation area of the Andean forest. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero
The threat:
These montane hills have experienced an expansion of logging, legal mining, cattle grazing, and roads that facilitate further cattle grazing. In addition, lands in remote areas with little governmental presence here, and elsewhere in Peru, are sometimes illegally acquired by land speculators.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, people migrated to rural areas, expanding anthropogenic pressure and bringing beliefs — such as that burning fields will increase soil productivity or that smoke during the dry season seeds rain clouds — that increase the risk of forest fires.
To prevent those threats, local communities conduct patrols around their protected areas through the “minka” or “faena,” an Indigenous cultural practice of collaborative work among families for a common benefit. These activities are often organized through local civil structures called the Rondas Campesinas.
Local families want to do more for conservation, but their resources are limited. Without technical support, it is difficult for them to implement the master plans for their conservation areas, which include their vision, goals, and action items for the area. One goal of those master plans is to produce information about local biodiversity, and to promote biodiversity conservation in these important but vulnerable ecosystems.
My place in this place:
I realized during my first visit that this journey was akin to sailing toward new horizons. My team and I travelled 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the south of Peru, where we were based, to the north of the country. This involved long hours on the road while adapting to more tropical weather. Along the way new views of vast transformed landscapes, primarily dominated by rice fields, and extensive livestock pastures were common. It was shocking to observe the disappearance of the forest. However, as we moved deeper into the countryside, we enjoyed long hours of green mountain views.
In the communities families were eager to share stories of their lives and their motivations to create protected lands. In the community of Libano, the Fernandez family with Srs Eugenio, Armandina, and Arcadio created the Jardines Angel del Sol Conservation Concession because the protection of headwaters as a water resource is important for their future. In the community of La Perla del Imaza, the President Edilberto and Sr Benjamin shared with us the latest news of a newly discovered endemic orchid species, Epidendrum edquenii sp, and the newly named endemic monkey frog (Callimedusa duellmani). In the Pampa del Burro Private Conservation Area, Sr Llantoma from Copallin has been passionate since his youth about exploring the wild forest, watching primates like critically endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkeys (Lagothrix flavicauda) and other wildlife. All of them recognize the value of nature and their ecosystems and want to protect these lands. Highly motivated from our conversations, we explored the forest, following incredible animal trails, with a lot of evidence of Andean bears — clear evidence of the remarkable good health of these ecosystems.
In subsequent presentations at community meetings and school groups, we witnessed the emotional response to camera trap photographs of mammals that many local adults and children had never seen before.
As a biologist and conservationist, I’ve felt deeply rewarded by people who embrace a commitment to conservation.
A conservation area of the Andean forest. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero.
Who’s protecting it now:
The admirable work protecting these lands is managed by the committee of residents from each community, with the collaborative support of the NGO Neotropical Primate Conservation (NPC):
What this place needs:
To demonstrate the conservation importance of these communities’ lands, and illustrate the effectiveness of management of the reserves, we need to produce scientific information on local wildlife diversity to validate the master plan for each area.
Communities that believe in conservation need conservation biologists’ support. The Andean forest program of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and SDZWA-Peru has carried out conservation research in collaboration with national and local protected areas, NGOs, and private landowners, in other Peruvian landscapes since 2010, most recently in the Manu Biosphere Reserve of SE Peru. We’ve recently started collaborative research with NPC and the communities it supports in NE Peru. This expanded collaboration allows us to enhance our understanding of Andean bears and other wildlife in this region, in comparison to the results we’re obtaining elsewhere.
Because of its cultural and biological significance, and its conservation needs, research on the Andean bear can motivate broader interest in conservation and support conservation of less well-known species.
An Andean community working to protect the area. Photo by Denisse Mateo-Chero.
Lessons from the fight:
The most important lesson for me has been that cooperative work between residents, students, and scientists can have a healing impact on the resilience of these lands.
Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
At first glance the hills and valleys covered in coastal sage scrub oak are little more than a featureless green swath. On closer inspection, however, you can recognize it for what it truly is: the beating heart of one of the most genetically rich ecosystems on the planet. Birds, insects, mammals, fungi, and even some other plants find refuge under the boughs of coastal sage scrub oak, while water drawn up from its deep roots spreads out to sustain ground-dwelling organisms.
