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

You may not have heard much about the long fight to remove the Nooksack Dam near Bellingham, Washington, but its detonation this week will prove ecologically and culturally important.

The conclusion to decades of work to remove a dam on the Middle Fork Nooksack River east of Bellingham, Washington began with a bang yesterday as crews breached the dam with a carefully planned detonation. This explosive denouement is also a beginning.

Over the next couple of weeks, crews will fully remove the 125-foot-wide, 25-foot-tall dam, allowing the Middle Fork Nooksack to run free for the first time in 60 years. With the dam’s removal, 16 miles of river and tributary habitat will open up to help boost populations of three threatened Puget Sound fish species: Chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout.

“This project has always ranked at the top of the list for fish recovery projects in this area because of the sheer number of miles of river habitat that are available upstream in a fairly remote and pristine area,” says Renee LaCroix, assistant public works director for the city of Bellingham, which owns the dam. “There’s no other single project in this area that can match this.”

Two local tribes, the Nooksack and Lummi Nation, have been behind the effort to help restore fish passage and the river’s ecological integrity.

“Our natural resources are our cultural resources,” says Trevor Delgado, the Nooksack tribal historic preservation officer. “With this removal we get a little piece of our home back — a place where our people have visited for hundreds of generations.”

LaCroix says the project has no downsides for the city, and it’s expected to increase the resilience of the municipal water supply, remove a safety hazard for kayakers, help fish recovery and restore culturally significant resources for the tribes.

Proponents also hope to see indirect benefits for endangered Southern Resident killer whales. This population of orcas ranges across Pacific Northwest coastal waters and relies on dwindling numbers of Chinook as a main food source. Fewer than 80 of the whales remain, and Chinook populations have fallen so low that the orcas have started altering their traditional migration patterns as they search for fish to eat.

But even with the dam removal’s many benefits and municipal and tribal support, the path to this moment hasn’t been easy.

The History

The Middle Fork Nooksack drains glacier-fed headwater streams that run off the icy summit of 10,778-foot Mt. Baker. The Middle Fork joins the North Fork and then the mainstem of the Nooksack River, which travels to Bellingham Bay and Puget Sound. The entire Nooksack watershed stretches 830 square miles across Washington and into British Columbia.

map of diversion dam and region — Image: American Rivers

For generations the river and its surrounding habitat have physically and spiritually nourished Indigenous peoples — including the Nooksack Indian Tribe and the Lummi Nation.

But all that changed when the dam was built in in 1961 to divert water to the city of Bellingham to supplement its main water supply in Lake Whatcom — the drinking water for the now-85,000 residents in the city and county. As soon as it went up, the dam obstructed fish passage, altered the river’s flow, and disrupted the ability of tribal members to use a culturally significant area.

For the past four decades, Delgado says, the Nooksack have pushed for dam removal. They got close in the early 2000s, when the Nooksack and Lummi Nation entered into an official agreement with the city and state to work on a solution that would allow fish passage, including the possible installation of fish ladders. But despite years of work, a suitable fix wasn’t found, and the effort had completely stalled by 2016.

The following year the nonprofit American Rivers, which works on watershed restoration and has extensive experience in dam-removal efforts, stepped in with financial backing from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. American Rivers’ April McEwan assumed a project management role and brought parties back to the table and soon into agreement on a plan to remove the dam and reengineer the city’s water intake from the river.

“What we know about dam removal is that if you can remove the infrastructure and restore the channel to natural conditions, that’s always the best way to get fish passage,” says McEwan.

The final cost of the project came in at around $20 million — way more than the city could afford on its own. About half of the cost eventually came from the state and the city is collaborating with federal agencies on the distribution of another $2 million in Pacific Salmon Treaty funds. But before applying for that money, the city had to complete costly initial design and permitting work. Private foundations — largely the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, along with Resources Legacy Fund — picked up 70% of those initial costs.

LaCroix says help from American Rivers and the foundations was hugely important in getting the project “shovel ready” so it could apply for the construction funds it needed.

Removing the dam infrastructure was just part of the cost, though. Reworking the city’s water intake also required some tricky engineering.

A Plan Comes Together

The Middle Fork dam is not a pool dam built for water storage. Much of the time, water flows over the top until dam operators drop a floodgate to divert water to new locations. That water travels about 14 miles through tunnel and pipeline to Mirror Lake, then Anderson Creek, and to Lake Whatcom before finally being delivered to residents’ taps.

Before removing the dam, engineers had to move the water intake 700 feet upstream and situate it at an elevation that still enabled city water withdrawals throughout the year, regardless of flow conditions.

They also needed to make sure that the rushing water didn’t sweep up fish and accidentally send them through the water-supply system.

“The solution required a fairly complex design in the intake structure, including a fish exit pipe out of that structure to put fish back into the river in a way that meets current environmental permit standards,” explains LaCroix.

project schematic — Project layout for the removal of the Middle Fork Nooksack diversion dam and rebuilding of water intake. Credit: City of Bellingham

Despite the cost and the work, she says, being able to continue to meet their municipal water obligations while opening up habitat for threatened species has been a win-win.

“I think there’s a lot of benefits to having a dam removal versus fish passage — the main one being that you get a free-flowing river that can be a dynamic ecosystem and change over time,” she says. “A static fish ladder just can’t provide that same level of ecosystem benefit.”

Restoration Success

Despite local authorities’ championing dam removal on the Middle Fork, the project has largely flown under the radar, overshadowed in the Pacific Northwest by heated discussions about a much larger potential project — removing four federal hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake River, a major tributary of the Columbia River.

Proponents of dam removal there see it as the best chance for recovering threatened salmon populations, including Chinook, which could help starving Southern Resident killer whales. Those dams also provide irrigation water, barge navigation and hydropower, so there’s been more pushback against removal efforts.

Previous dam removals around the country, however, have proved successful at aiding fish recovery and river restoration.

Most notably the 1999 demolition of Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River restored the annual run of alewives, a type of herring essential to the food web. The fish run has gone from zero to 5 million in the two decades since dam removal. Blueback herring, striped bass, sturgeon and shad have also extended their reach. And the resurgence has brought back osprey, bald eagles and other wildlife, too.

The overwhelming success of river restoration on the Kennebec helped to spur a nationwide dam removal movement that’s now seen 1,200 dams come down since 1999. Last year a record 90 dams were removed in 26 states, including 20 dams in California’s Cleveland National Forest.

spider excavators removing dam — Spider excavators remove a dam on San Juan Creek in California’s Cleveland National Forest. Photo: Julie Donnell, USFS

The results have been seen in the Pacific Northwest, as well, which boasts the largest dam removal thus far in the country. In 2011 and 2014, the demolition of two dams on Elwha River, which runs through Washington’s Olympic National Park, opened up 70 miles of habitat that had been blocked for a century. Scientists have started seeing all five species of salmon native to the river coming back, particularly Chinook and coho. Bull trout, they’ve observed, have increased in size since the dams were removal.

Benefits on the Middle Fork Nooksack

McEwan hopes to see a similar outcome on the Middle Fork.

Like the Elwha the Middle Fork Nooksack is a relatively pristine river with little development, and dam removal is expected to provide a big boost to fish. The additional miles of spawning habitat are important, but so is the temperature of that water.

The dam removal will open access to cold upstream waters, which are ideal for salmon and getting harder to come by as climate change warms waters and reduces mountain runoff.

Aerial view of river and trees — Middle Fork Nooksack canyon just below the diversion dam. Photo: Wendy McDermott

“This is really great for the climate change resiliency for these species,” says McEwan.

Steelhead will get back 45% of their historic habitat in the river, and scientists expect Chinook populations to increase in abundance by 31%.

That could help Southern Resident killer whales.

“When you get to the ocean, it’s a little bit of a black box in terms of what you can model and say definitively is going to help, but more fish is better for orcas,” McEwan says.

Upstream habitat will see benefits, too.

Oceangoing fish like salmon enrich their bodies with carbon and nitrogen while at sea. When they return to their natal rivers to spawn and die, the marine-derived nutrients they carry back upriver become important food and fertilizer for both riverine and terrestrial ecosystems — aiding everything from trees to birds to bears.

“Once the fish start making their way back, it will start changing the whole ecological system,” says Delgado.

But any ecological benefit from salmon restoration, either in the ocean or the upper watershed, won’t be immediate.

“The population of salmon on the Middle Fork is so low that we expect it’s going to take quite a while to rebound,” she says. “But the big picture is that what’s good for salmon is good for the region — our history and our destiny are intricately intertwined.”

After decades of work, that process of restoration has finally begun.

Study: Only 5% of Conservation Journals Comply With Principles for Fair and Open Access

Our research finds ethical problems that lock certain researchers out of the conservation and biodiversity publishing system — and offers resources to help decide where to submit new research.

Biodiversity conservation needs to be informed by science. The body of scientific knowledge, meanwhile, ought to be accessible to those whose work would benefit from using it (e.g., conservation practitioners) and reflect the perspectives of a diverse global network of researchers.

But that’s not always the case. In one recent study, nearly half of surveyed conservationists said it was “not easy” or “not at all easy” to access scientific literature in their work. Too often, the survey found, the publishing practices of academic journals — the primary outlet researchers use to disseminate their work — can provide a major barrier to achieving these aims.

Having experienced this ourselves, we recently published a study that asks: Do conservation and ecology journals use ethical publication models, what does this mean for conservation, and what can researchers do about it?

To answer those questions, we assessed the websites of 426 conservation and ecology journals against the Fair Open Access principles, developed by scholars and librarians to help transition toward more ethical publishing practices.

The five FOA principles are:

The journal has a transparent ownership structure and is controlled by and responsive to the scholarly community;
Authors of articles in the journal retain copyright;
All articles are published open access and an explicit open access license is used;
Submission and publication are not conditional in any way on the payment of a fee from the author(s) or their employing institution, or on membership of an institution or society;
Any fees paid on behalf of the journal to publishers are low, transparent and in proportion to the work carried out.

Most conservation research, we found, is published in journals that do not follow these principles.

According to our analysis two-thirds of journals, publishing almost half of all articles, complied with only one or two FOA principles. Only 20 journals (5%), publishing less than 1% of all articles, complied with all five principles. The majority of assessed journals charge high publishing fees to authors, restrict access to the published research to those that can pay, and take sole copyright ownership of the research produced by the conservation community.

ethical publishing — Source: “Ethical Publishing in Biodiversity Conservation Science,” Conservation & Society

Moreover, four publishers owned 80% of the 25 journals with the highest impact factor — a metric often used as a proxy of journal prestige when researchers decide where to publish. These publishers tended to have lower FOA scores, meaning researchers publishing in many prestigious journals must comply with more restrictive publishing practices — which potentially exclude researchers in lower-income countries from submitting their work to these highly read outlets.

This reveals major ethical problems within the conservation and ecology publishing landscape. Academics from lower-income countries, as well as researchers that are part of NGOs, are often excluded from publishing and reading many conservation journals. This exclusion is likely a barrier to evidence-based conservation in the most biodiverse and threatened parts of the world.

This barrier may partly be a consequence of the limited control by the conservation science community: A third of journals appear to be run entirely for profit, rather than being controlled by scholarly bodies.

What can researchers do about this?

While recognizing that there can be tradeoffs when selecting journals, authors can help address these practices by “voting” with their research papers — in other words, submitting research to publishers with the more ethical publishing models.

To help enable that decision process, our research provides scores for each of the conservation and ecology journals we assessed. Those results can be found here. We encourage researchers to consult this database when deciding where to submit their research.

Together we can start a shift toward a more equitable landscape of research publication and use in conservation — and that can only further enable our goals of protecting species in need around the planet.

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.

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

Fish in the northern reaches of the planet are adapted to thrive in some of the most dynamic conditions, but new research finds that some species are showing decline.

Summer has finally arrived in the northern reaches of Canada and Alaska, liberating hundreds of thousands of northern stream fish from their wintering habitats.

Through the long winter, many have endured cramped, icy quarters with perilously low oxygen levels. Others have recently journeyed incredible distances from large rivers and lakes to small summer habitats upstream.

Northern stream fish come from a long line of hardy adapters. Their ancestors were well equipped to survive multiple ice ages and then go on to colonize some of the coldest newly accessible northern habitats. They thrive in some of the most dynamic conditions on the planet, from short intense summers, with up to 24 hours of sunlight, to long cold winters with limited light and food.

But the survival tools these fish have used for millennia — exceptional tolerance to cold, slow growth rates and long lifespans — could be a disadvantage as environmental conditions in the north warm and more fast-paced species move in.

Our research team set out to see how stream fishes were responding to unprecedented environmental changes across their northern ranges. Ultimately, we wanted to know how these changes might affect the hundreds of thousands of people in Alaska and northern Canada that rely on local fisheries for food, culture and economic security.

A Good News Story?

On the surface, the results from our study appear to provide a “good news” story. Warming temperatures were linked to higher numbers of fish, more species overall and, therefore, potentially more fishing opportunities for northerners.

Initially, we were surprised to learn that warming was increasing the distribution of cold-adapted fish. We reasoned that modest amounts of warming could lead to benefits such as increased food and winter habitat availability without reaching stressful levels for many species.

salmon under water — Salmon migration in Togiak National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: USFWS

Yet, not all fish species fared equally well. Ecologically unique northern species — those that have evolved in colder, more nutrient-poor environments, such as Arctic grayling and Dolly Varden trout — were showing declines with warming.

Fish Strandings and Buried Eggs

Recent news headlines run the gamut for Pacific salmon — from their increased escapades into the Arctic to massive pre-spawning die-offs in central Alaska. Similarly, results from our study revealed different outcomes for fish depending on local climatic conditions, including Pacific salmon.

We found that warmer spring and fall temperatures may be helping juvenile salmon by providing a longer and more plentiful growing season, and by supporting early egg development in northern regions that were previously too cold for survival.

In contrast, salmon declined in regions that were experiencing wetter fall conditions, pointing to an increased risk of flooding and sedimentation that could bury or dislodge incubating eggs.

Interestingly, we found that certain climatic combinations, such as warmer summer water temperatures with decreased summer rainfall, were important in determining where Pacific salmon could survive. Summer warming in drier watersheds led to declines, suggesting that lowered streamflows may have increased the risk of fish becoming stranded in subpar habitats that were too warm and crowded.

The Fate of Northern Fisheries

The promise of a warmer and more accessible Arctic has attracted mounting interest in new economic opportunities, including fisheries. As warming rates at higher latitudes are already two to three times global levels, it seems probable that northern biodiversity will experience dramatic shifts in the coming decades.

Fish under water — Arctic graylings. Photo: USFWS Mountain-Prairie/ Mark Conlin

Despite the many unknowns surrounding the future of Pacific salmon, many fisheries are currently thriving following warmer and more productive northern oceans, and some Arctic Indigenous communities are developing new salmon fisheries.

As warming continues, the commercial salmon fishing industry is poised to expand northwards, but its success will largely depend on extenuating factors such as changes to marine habitat and food sources and how many fish are caught during the freshwater stages of their journey.

Even with the potential for increased northern biodiversity, it is important to recognize that some northern communities may be unable to adapt or may lose individual species that are associated with important cultural values.

For example, many Yukon First Nations, including Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, have voluntarily refrained from fishing their main traditional food of chinook salmon to help stocks recover. Other communities that rely on increasingly vulnerable northern-adapted species such as Arctic grayling and Dolly Varden trout may also be at risk to future changes.

Although climate change action is urgently required at the global level, there are still tools that environmental managers can employ locally to reduce some of the effects. For example, watersheds with an elevated risk of flooding during the salmon incubation period could have more stringent streamside habitat protections, such as preserving larger areas of streamside vegetation from development, actively revegetating disturbed areas and conducting site-specific erosion and sediment control studies. In dangerously warm and dry years, fishing quotas could be reduced to limit salmon die-offs.

Ultimately, we advise that getting ahead of these impending changes by preserving the integrity of large intact watersheds will be key for protecting these evolutionary superstars from new human-driven pressures.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate Refugia: Protecting Biodiversity in the Face of Climate Change

Areas with natural buffers from the effects of climate change could play a vital role in conservation efforts. New research helps to better understand them.

For more than a century, the famous formation of long, symmetric columns of basalt have drawn tourists to marvel at the geology of Devils Postpile National Monument near Mammoth Lakes, California.

But recently scientists have found another interesting natural feature in the park. A valley with high walls and a north-south alignment blocks sunlight and traps cold air, creating cool temperatures that, they believe, may become a kind of refuge for plants and animals facing a warming world.

All across the world rising temperatures are changing ecosystems and threatening some of the species evolved to live in those places, forcing them to try to adapt or move. That’s why scientists are focusing attention on a field of study — climate-change refugia — that could help improve conservation and minimize biodiversity loss in the face of climate change.

The journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment dedicated its newest issue to the topic, with studies about how to identify, protect and manage these important areas. Authors in the issue say these climate-change refugia — areas largely buffered from current climate change effects because of unique local conditions, like the valley at Devils Postpile — could serve as ecological safe havens.

“As the effects of climate change accelerate, climate‐change refugia provide a slow lane to enable persistence of focal resources in the short term, and transitional havens in the long term,” wrote scientists in the issue’s first study, which was led by Toni Lyn Morelli, a research ecologist at the USGS Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center. “Planned wisely, they can serve as stepping‐stones for multiple species as climates continue to change.”

Necessary Steps

The first challenge is identifying and mapping potential refugia — some of which could be small “microrefugia.” Then, according to the study, land and water managers need to shift natural resource priorities to protect and monitor these areas, which may face additional threats besides climate change.

Some groundwater-fed springs, for example, could be important refugia for conserving both freshwater and terrestrial species. But these freshwater sources also can be polluted, drained by groundwater pumping, trampled by livestock, or altered by invasive species or other human activities.

Four species using freshwater resources — Springs are hotspots of biodiversity, supporting (a) Salt Creek pupfish; (b) spring‐loving centaury; (c) New Mexico hotspring snail; (d) American black bear. Photos: D. Sada, Desert Research Institute; C. Souza, USFWS; G. Alpert, Museum of Northern Arizona; J, Moeny, New Mexico Environment.

Comprehensive efforts to address these threats have historically been rare, the researchers say, because springs aren’t often included in federal regulations that protect other water bodies, like lakes, streams and wetlands.

That’s why it’s critical to identify refugia and raise awareness about their important ecological value.

“Subsets of springs are likely to become ‘oases of the future,’ providing the kinds of hydrologic refugia needed to maintain groundwater‐dependent biodiversity in the coming decades,” wrote scientists in another study in the journal, led by USGS biologist Jennifer M. Cartwright.

Refugia in Practice

There’s still a lot to be learned about climate-change refugia, but state and federal agencies have started putting some of what they know into practice.

Research in California, for example, found that nearly 15% of the state’s lands could be a refuge for the region’s plants as the climate changes — particularly areas of the northwest Klamath Mountains, the northern Sierra Nevada and California’s Central Coast Ranges. But some iconic species — like coast redwoods and coast live oak — are likely to face climate stress in much of their range in future decades.

Map of distribution of plants — Vegetation refugia by 2070–2099 under wetter (CNRM ‐CM 5) and drier (MIROC ‐ESM ) global climate models. Areas in green represent consensus refugia (areas for which the two models agree that suitable climate conditions will be retained for the current vegetation); areas in blue and red represent additional lands considered as vegetation refugia by the two models. Image: Thorne et al, (CC BY 4.0)

The state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife is also looking at what these vegetation changes could mean for California’s 522 vertebrate species and how their ranges may shift over time.

Research to understand which plants species will fare best in certain locations in the future is also helping guide some of the reforestation and restoration work in California’s El Dorado National Forest following the 2014 King Fire, so species are not replanted in areas where they’re not likely to thrive with future warming. The practice could be adopted in other areas following large-scale disturbances.

“A more thorough evaluation of climate exposure and predicted locations of refugia could better inform species‐specific planting decisions with respect to site selection, planting densities and seed sources,” wrote researchers in a study led by James H. Thorne, a research scientist at U.C. Davis, published in the journal.

In fact, scientists have honed in on “disturbance refugia” — areas that experience less severe or less frequent disturbance by forces like fire, drought and insects than their surroundings and could provide another kind of refuge.

For example, islands of forest canopy that haven’t burned in wildfires provide reservoirs of genetic plant diversity that may be critical for land restoration and regeneration after a fire, found researchers in a study led by Oregon State ecology professor Meg A. Krawchuk.

While scientists agree that identifying and protecting these refugia are important tools in working to safeguard biodiversity, they also acknowledge that it’s not a static process. Many climate-change refugia are likely to be temporary “stepping-stone refugia” themselves as climate changes intensify beyond 2100.

Some, however, could endure longer.

“If the existing species assemblages persist over even longer times, then these locations might be considered climate refugia in the long‐term sense of the word,” wrote Thorne. “It is our task to identify such potential areas and consider what interventions, if any, would best promote such a future.”

Racial and Environmental Justice: Our Coverage

We’ve collected our best articles and essays about the links between racism, pollution, climate change and more.

Standing Rock. Black Lives Matter. The U.S.-Mexico border wall. The oversized effect of COVID-19 on communities of color. These are some of the most visible manifestations of the way racism and environmental issues intersect — often with deadly results. Here you’ll find The Revelator’s ongoing coverage of these issues, including a mix of important journalism, expert commentary, and profiles of the leaders working for a brighter and safer future for everyone.

Black Leaders:

Dr. Robert Bullard: Lessons From 40 Years of Documenting Environmental Racism

Intelligence Thieves: How Toxic Pollutants Are Robbing Communities of Color

What Are the Biggest Challenges for Saving the Oceans?

Farming While Black: Growing Food and Community While Saving the Earth

How Colleges Can Attract More Minority Students to Environmental Studies and Careers

Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples:

The Shocking Number of Environmentalists Murdered Each Year

Ruby Mountains: A Push to Drill, a Failure to Consult Native Peoples

Can Native American Tribes Protect Their Land If They’re Not Recognized by the Federal Government?

The Koreguaje Tribe: Threatened Guardians of the Northwest Amazon

California Tribe Hopes to Conquer Climate Woes — With Fire

Forests and Biodiversity Need Indigenous Stewardship

Oak Flat: Government Complicity in Indigenous Sacred Site Desecration

Trump vs. Bears Ears: Outraged Native Groups Respond

Beyond Division: American Indians Unite to Create Bears Ears

How the World’s Oldest Wisdom Is Informing Modern Responses to Climate Change

Native Renewables: Powering Up Tribal Communities

Endangered Languages, Endangered Ecologies

Dam Lies: Despite Promises, An Indigenous Community’s Land Is Flooded

Tribal Cultures Underwater — and Falling Through Thin Ice

Environmental Justice:

Nothing to Wheeze At: Air Pollution’s Disproportionate Effect on Poor and Minority Communities

Environmental Justice Means Desegregating the Environmental Movement

Trump Administration Seeks to Muzzle Activist Shareholders

GreenLatinos: Working Locally, Connecting Nationally

Broader Discussions:

COVID-19 Reveals a Crisis of Public Spaces

‘We Know the End Is Coming’: The Plight and Rise of Climate Refugees

Fighting Water Privatization with ‘Blue Communities’

The Surprising Link Between Climate Change and Human Trafficking

Pandemic Shines a Light on Critical Water Issues — Will Congress Fund Solutions?

Should Environmentalists Embrace Universal Basic Income?

Build a Border Wall? Here’s an Idea That’s Better for Communities and the Climate

Editorials:

Don’t Look Away

Inhumanity at the Border — and Beyond

Additional Reading:

16 Essential Books About Environmental Justice, Racism and Activism

From Kochland to Standing Rock: Here Are the 16-plus Best Environmental Books of August

Could the COVID Crisis Provide an Opportunity for Thailand’s Captive Elephants?

The pandemic has revealed the truth about Thailand’s unsustainable and exploitative elephant tourism sector — and a chance to rethink the relationship between humans and elephants.

In Buddhism the Asian elephant has been a symbol of wisdom and strength since ancient times. Even today, many countries regard this magnificent animal as part of their cultural heritage — like Thailand, where elephants are the national animal.

It’s easy to see why these animals remain so revered. Elephants are gardeners and landscape architects of their natural environment. They spread plant seeds and fertilizer, open underground water sources, and change the forest canopy by pushing over trees and digging up roots, thereby creating vital food sources and micro-habitats for other species.

Yet despite their cultural and ecological values, fewer than 50,000 elephants live wild throughout Asia today. The rest — up to 15,000 — spend their lives confined in captivity.

That dichotomy is at its strongest in Thailand, where less than half of elephants live free. About 3,500 elephants roam the countryside, while nearly 3,800 elephants go to “work” every day, according to a 2019 report from the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation.

The captive elephants, which can most be found in tourist destinations called elephant camps, carry visitors on their backs, play soccer for spectators, and serve as cash cows for camp owners who depend heavily on tourist dollars to take care of their families and the elephants.

Elephant soccer — An elephant playing soccer for tourists in 2019. Photo: Miguel Discart (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Much of that is currently on hold. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, the world as we knew it shut down, including Thailand’s tourism sector. Today most of the captive elephants are out of work. Suddenly these revenue sources have become great financial burdens, with each one requiring up to 330 pounds of food daily. That can cost up to $40 a day per animal — three times the country’s minimum income.

Many in the community have expressed fears these difficult times will result in some elephants being sent to beg for food on city streets or put to labor hauling timber — a practice that was banned in 1989 but continues, illegally, on the border with Myanmar.

That’s why now, more than ever, change is necessary. We need to find the means to reconcile human and elephant interests in a way that benefits both.

We believe rewilding captive elephants provides a solution.

The Expertise Exists

Even before this crisis, many experts have expressed the need to rescue, rehabilitate and rewild Thailand’s elephants.

Our own research, published recently in the journal Animal Sentience, argues that the pandemic provides an opportunity to plan for a transformational strategy in elephant tourism. We also suggest that this can be accomplished in a way that would benefit both elephants and human communities. This is a long-term solution, and additional short-term resources are needed to help elephants and owners who are suffering today. But with so much stalled, now is the time to start thinking about and planning for the future.

Our research team combines more than 85 years of experience in elephant conservation. We take a scientific approach toward establishing a just and sustainable world where humans and elephants live together in harmony, in a mutually beneficial way, and without chains, enclosures or exploitation. In other words, we seek a world in which elephants live as they are meant to in the wild; people benefit financially, socially and spiritually from their presence; and nature benefits from elephants fulfilling their role as environmental engineers and keystone species.

Performing elephant — An elephant performs tricks for tourists. Photo: Michael Ellen Smith (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In order to ensure that elephants, people and nature benefit equally from this transformative strategy, we’ve explored innovative methods and opportunities — in part theoretical, in part already tested.

We believe the most promising approach involves creating so-called “corridors” by connecting existing fragmented natural areas through reforestation and trophic rewilding (rewilding as a strategy to restore ecological resilience), combined with a form of environmentally sustainable nature-based, cruelty-free tourism run by local communities. This will allow elephants space to live while bringing benefits through tourism, and associated micro-enterprises, to people in low-income areas.

There’s space to accomplish this. Thailand has 272 largely unfenced protected areas that cover approximately 20% of the country’s landmass. Currently elephants inhabit only 69 of these protected areas, often in populations much smaller than the viable minimum of breeding individuals. Moreover only 45% of the total available wildland, consisting of large undeveloped areas, has been formally declared protected, leaving a large amount of land in Thailand that could become elephant habitat.

This would have many benefits for the country. Elephants are trailblazers. Rewilding them so they can roam across potential corridor areas, and tracking their movements through the landscape, can show us which habitats currently function best and which patches of land offer the most natural migration paths between them. This will, in turn, allow us to identify where to reconnect fragmented patches of forest to create a viable, extended habitat — for the benefit of all of Thailand’s wildlife.

Challenges and Solutions

Of course, this novel enterprise will encounter novel challenges.

First, how do we convince elephant owners to release elephants?

It actually makes sense economically. The local mahouts and surrounding communities stand to benefit greatly from increased local and international tourism — post-pandemic, of course — if elephants live in additional locations beyond the restricted camps. Tourists who visit reserves with rewilded elephants would not only enjoy spending meaningful time observing elephants in their natural habitats, they could also immerse themselves in Thai culture, enjoy local cuisine, and participate in home-stay visits and craft-making workshops.

In addition, many spin-off businesses could provide financial benefit in new, empowering ways, such as producing elephant dung paper, elephant ambassador programs, beekeeping and deriving unique products from the alternative crops not favored by elephants. Meanwhile, every enterprise associated with the tourism value chain itself would benefit, including hotels, taxis, restaurants and more.

This long-term, meaningful engagement offers benefits to local communities as well as mahouts that would be in keeping with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, thereby also obtaining international recognition for Thailand’s efforts.

The second question: Is it possible to just go ahead and release captive elephants?

Science has already demonstrated that rewilding captive elephants is possible and that it has positive outcomes. Studies in Africa showed that rewilding entire social groups, including calves, into suitable habitat helped to create and maintain stable social networks and reduce stress. Although Asian elephants differ from their African counterparts in physical appearance as well as behavior, rewilding studies in Thailand have shown similar results. A study in 2015 followed the reintroduction of elephants into forested areas and showed that the presence of calves, or adults with calves, helped unrelated elephants to bond and form new herds. Preliminary findings of a study in 2020 revealed that rewilded elephants quickly learned how to navigate forested areas, forage on wild plant species and form natural social groups. The lessons learned from these previously successful initiatives show us that captive elephants can be released and no longer live under direct human control if we do it in a carefully planned manner.

The research also reminds us that elephants are social creatures and lone individuals should not just be randomly let loose to fend for themselves. An inventory of currently captive elephants could aid in identifying herds of healthy individuals that can be released together and in exploring the willingness of elephant owners to participate in rewilding projects.

Finally, is there a risk of increasing human-elephant conflicts?

Conflict is always possible when people live near large animals, but there are proven ways to minimize risk. In alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals, local people living near rewilded elephants should be engaged in conservation projects like forest restoration. Workshops can be facilitated to assist in the transition of alternative crops or to set up beehive fences to reduce the chances of damage by elephants. Although there will be some adaptation required from the various stakeholders, we believe that the benefits far surpass the negative impact these elephants may initially have on, for example, certain agricultural activities.

By using these techniques, individual rewilded elephants will be healthier, the survival rate of the Asian elephant as a species will be higher, and nature in these areas will be restored, enhancing resilience and channeling financial benefits to local people and the wider population.

Planning During the Pandemic

Although many challenges remain, rewilding captive elephants provides opportunities to restore ecological systems, gain knowledge, attract global investments for a holistic conservation approach, and improve livelihoods and wellbeing. We hope Thailand — and the international community — will stand up to the challenge and prepare for better, fairer, pro-environmental tourism after the pandemic has lifted, recognizing the interconnectedness of human well-being, nature and the economy.

Planning and implementation of this strategy must include all stakeholders and should start with the mapping of potential habitats for rewilding elephants, including areas of human disturbance. Social surveys and community workshops help to gain insight in how people feel about sharing their land with elephants, create ownership, offer an opportunity to educate people about the benefits of living with elephants and explore the potential for community development through convivial conservation. Importantly, new investment strategies (such as a carbon tax or community levy) are required to support a transformed world of ecotourism that enhances long-term sustainability and strengthens social cohesion.

This planning can also help Thailand’s already wild elephants, like those that live in Khao Yai National Park. With the park currently closed to visitors due to the coronavirus, its 300 resident elephants have started to expand their range, reaching areas they’d previously avoided due to humans.

The problems facing Thailand’s elephants are bleak, but promising solutions do exist. We need extensive exploration of all challenges to build knowledge and attract investments.

In an ideal scenario, elephants will be able to live natural lives, nature in general will thrive, and people will benefit in a material sense, as well as regain their age-old respect and veneration for the gentle giants.

Admittedly, the pandemic makes it difficult to envision those ideal scenarios, but it also tells us that now is the time to plan changes for a better future and an exciting new normal.

Michelle Henley of Elephants Alive, Lucy Bates of the University of Sussex and Rob Slotow of University of Kwazulu-Natal contributed to this essay.

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.

Want to Design a Livable Future? Try ‘Multisolving’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

En-ROADS Overview from Climate Interactive on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Sawin, Climate Interactive cofounder. Photo: Courtesy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this look like in action?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shocking Number of Snakes Traded Internationally Each Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snakes on a Plane, Train, Boat, Etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding the Picture

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

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

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

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

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

Complex Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Bites in a Pandemic World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Environmentalists Embrace Universal Basic Income?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Philosophy

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

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

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

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

Potential Benefits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Flip Side

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

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

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

A Lack of Data

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

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

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

Influencing Green Policy

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

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

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

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

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

Pugh says that’s likely because of political factors.

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

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

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

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

Hawaii’s Invasive Predator Catastrophe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first step in controlling predators is quantifying the threat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fence Me In

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

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

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

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

But the hard work pays off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in The Revelator:

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