Don’t Look Away

The ongoing crisis of racially motivated police violence — and the government’s violent response to demonstrations against those actions — reminds us that change requires justice.

It’s hard to comprehend how broken our country feels right now. The recent killings of African Americans at the hands of police — and in Atlanta, armed vigilantes — are horrific. So, too, are the nationwide acts of violence perpetrated against the people protesting these deaths.

It’s harder, still, to wrap our minds around how President Trump continues to incite hatred, violence and oppression in his speeches, tweets and strong-arm deeds — cheered on and echoed by many of his colleagues and supporters. Their white supremacy extends well beyond the White House to the very underpinnings of our society — including the systems that should be protecting all of us.

And of course, the racist violence and suppression of dissent come at a time when we’re also fighting a global pandemic — one that has sharply revealed the long-entrenched racial inequities in American society, as communities of color suffer more than white communities from the disease.

That’s why all communities, including environmentalists, must not look away during this difficult time.

One of the fundamental values behind environmental protection has always been justice — justice for those who breathe air and drink water, justice for those who have lived on the land for thousands of years, justice for wildlife beleaguered by poaching and habitat loss, justice for ecosystems being torn apart, justice for future generations who will need a livable climate.

Now environmental protection must also be understood as a fight for human justice — justice for people who’ve been harassed, murdered, marginalized and abused for far too long.

The systemic violence against African Americans, Native Americans and other peoples of color in this country is unacceptable. And although it isn’t exactly an environmental issue, it’s one more symptom of the same far-reaching oppression and subjugation that drive most of our environmental ills, ranging from climate change to pollution to the toxic chemicals and zoonotic diseases that enter our bodies. The same system of exploitation and abuse that has meant, for decades, that people of color have faced greater burdens from toxic air and water, climate change and the cascading health and economic problems that result.

Issues of conservation have always intersected with justice: justice across time and justice across space. That makes the environmental community a necessary, vital ally in the struggle against racial violence.

Because of the interconnected nature of these linked struggles, if we work to resolve one thing, the rest of these problems we face might start to follow.

If we demilitarize the police, if we stop beating people down, if we stop committing the types of violence that cascade from one generation to the next — well, that’s a step ahead on the long road before us. One that will give us all a bit more strength for the next fight to ensure that future generations will have a better, healthier planet on which to live.

If y’all could fix racism so I can focus on saving the planet, that would be great. Thanks. xo https://t.co/oZw1PNpQ1I

— Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (@ayanaeliza) June 3, 2020

Here’s our additional perspective as journalists: Our society can only resolve these issues if we listen to the people who’ve been affected most. We need to attune ourselves to listen, learn, reflect and commit to change. This will help identify the scars that need to heal and the systems that need to be replaced, along with the new systems that should take their place.

At The Revelator we’ve always asked people not to look away from the disasters unfolding around us. That’s true whether we’re talking about climate change, the extinction crisis or racial injustice.

Because while these ongoing crises of racism, police violence and oppression aren’t directly environmental issues, they’re issues of people and culture and society and justice. And all of those are worth fighting for.

Australian Plant Species Face ‘Imminent Extinction’ From Invasive Pathogen

The once-common native guava species has nearly vanished — killed off by an invasive fungus that arrived just 10 years ago. Other plant species may soon follow.

For Australia’s native guava, death came in the form of a fungus.

Just 10 years ago, a virulent strain of the fungus Austropuccinia psidii arrived in New South Wales. First observed in Hawaii in 2005, the fungus causes a devastating plant disease called myrtle rust, which has quickly and mysteriously spread around the world — most likely through industrial shipping and other elements of our global economy. Each species that encounters the fungus displays different levels of resistance, but many plants experience deformed leaves, defoliation, stunted growth and even death. The fungus reproduces prodigiously, spewing out trillions of microscopic spores that can easily be carried to new areas by the wind.

Once the fungus hit Australia it quickly spread from coast to coast, infecting hundreds of species from the Myrtaceae family, which includes native guava, eucalyptus, tea trees and bottle brushes.

Native guava (Rhodomyrtus psidioides) was hit the hardest. Just a decade after myrtle rust first turned up in Australia, the once-common plant is now almost completely incapable of producing seeds, fruits or new growths throughout its range. According to a new study, 23% of native guava populations have disappeared. Another 61% have been reduced to “root suckers,” little growths that the fungus attacks and kills as soon as they emerge from the ground. Out of 66 regularly monitored guava sites in Queensland and New South Wales, 65 sites have lost every plant.

dead native guava — Native guava trees killed by myrtle rust near Byron Bay, NSW. Photo: Kris Kupsch, courtesy Threatened Species Recovery Hub

“The guava itself is just screwed,” says Rod Fensham, an ecologist with the University of Queensland and the Queensland Herbarium who’s the study’s lead author. “It’s so susceptible to the disease, it just kills every living tip. They’re unable to set viable seed, so they’re functionally extinct.”

And it’s not alone. The study predicts that myrtle rust will cause the “imminent extinction” of many other Myrtaceae species. “I reckon there’s at least 15 species that are soon going to be functionally extinct,” Fensham says. “They’re not seeding.”

He sees the effects of the fungus every day while he’s self-isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I could take you down to my back garden where I’ve planted some of these Myrtaceae in the last month or two,” he tells me while video chatting from his back porch in Brisbane. “They’re showing signs of the rust already. I’m probably just going to watch them die.”

All this from a relatively invisible threat.

“It’s just these little dust particles floating in the air,” Fensham says. “It’s not a giant bulldozer or fires roaring through the landscape. It’s these particles that innocently arrived as a result of some unknown artifact of globalization.”

The loss of the guava and other Myrtaceae species, Fensham warns, could drive other ecological threats.

An Ecological Loss

As a widespread, fruiting tree, native guava traditionally supports a wide range of other species, including more than 100 pollinating insects. So myrtle rust’s invasion could result in “the local extinction of both the floral resource and disruption of associated plant–insect relationships” throughout the plant’s range, according to the paper.

Native guava myrtle rust — Native guava shoots infected with myrtle rust. Photo: Rod Fensham, courtesy Threatened Species Recovery Hub

And it’s not just insects. “Unlike eucalyptus that have got a hard, woody nut, these Myrtaceae have got a fleshy fruit which must be an important resource for frugivores,” Fensham says. “I know people who have had native guavas around their houses, and they say bats just loved them. They were gorging themselves on these guavas. That was only ten years ago and now the thing’s gone.”

Meanwhile the loss of native guava and other Myrtaceae could cause another problem: fire.

Lighting the Wick

Some Myrtaceae species affected by myrtle rust typically grow at the edge of Australia’s rainforests. There they can serve as a kind of barrier, slowing or preventing any fires along the edge from entering the heart of the rainforest. “Their trick is to retard the fire at the edge of the forest, and they do it in a spectacular fashion,” Fensham says. This isn’t the case for species such as eucalyptus, which encourage fire in the bush, but certain rainforest species have a dense, tightly packed canopy that appears to minimize ground layer growth of more flammable plants and block the wind that drives fires.

But as Myrtaceae plants disappear, what replaces them serves the opposite function. The same rainforest edges are also home to another invasive species, a beautiful flowing plant from the American tropics called lantana (Lantana camara). One of the world’s most invasive species, lantana is considered by the Australian government to be a “weed of national significance,” as its quick growth rate — it seeds six times a year — allows it to take over native brushland habitats, converting them to dense, impassable thickets.

It’s also toxic to livestock, and its woody structure serves as ready fuel for forest fires.

Fensham says as Myrtaceae disappears, lantana has the potential to become “sort of a wick into the rainforest.” If the fungus kills off the native plants and the invasive plants replace them, the lantana could carry fire into the normally protected rainforests and the wide range of unique species that live within them.

“It’s a really important source of biodiversity that’s going to be wiped out,” he says. Australia’s recent slate of brushfires has mostly left the county’s rainforests unscathed, but that could change as the loss of Myrtaceae allows lantana to continue its spread.

Resistance and Reservoirs

At the moment the greatest hope for native guava is the potential that some individuals may show resistance to myrtle rust.

That hasn’t happened yet. “It just doesn’t seem…we can’t find them, for the guava,” Fensham says. There are plants holding on, but barely. The most notable example is at Byron Bay, a popular tourist destination, where just 10 trees remain. “We’re monitoring them, but we expect they’ll just succumb,” he says. “And even if they don’t succumb, they can’t fruit and seed, so they’ll just die of old age and there won’t be another generation.”

Other Myrtaceae species might have more resistance than the guava, although that’s still an area of active research. “It’s a bit early to say. But in some populations of some species, some individuals seem less affected than others.” If researchers do find resistant individuals or populations, there’s a possibility for keeping the various species going.

“The biggest hope for survival,” Fensham says, “is just that we can find some signs of resistance in the wild populations, and then reintroduce those resistant strains back into places where they used to be, but…” His voice trails off.

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Look at these lovelies! Look 😍 Fruit from the critically endangered Rhodomyrtus psidioides (native guava), from plants cared for by my awesome colleagues. Now I just have to work out how to store their seed in liquid nitrogen, because they don’t survive our normal seed-banking procedures. #rhodomyrtus #myrtaceae #myrtlerust #nativeguava #nativeplants #australiannatives #australiannativeplants #rainforestconservation #rainforest #conservation #rainforestfruit #research #phdlife

A post shared by Lyndle (@what.i.spot) on Mar 23, 2020 at 3:24am PDT

Meanwhile, the best chance for native guava’s continued existence lies in captivity. Two special “rescue gardens” outside the plant’s native range have been set up to keep the species from totally disappearing. “They’re just beyond the reach of the myrtle rust,” Fensham says. They’re drier than the guava’s normal habitats, so “we might have to water them in droughts, for example, and they become more like a garden than a translocated, self-sustaining population. So that’s wait and see.”

But so far they’ve helped to save the species from extinction, and the 80 plants growing there are doing well.

“What I can tell you is that in these gardens, the guavas look fantastic. So just beyond the reach of the disease in these dryer environments, in a town just an hour and a half to the west of here, the guavas are doing fine, they’re leaping out of the ground. I guess that’s a good news story, and we’ll be adding to these gardens other species that we’re worried about.”

A Rapid Change

What Fensham finds most unprecedented about myrtle rust is the speed of its spread and impact.

“You know, I can’t find any documentation of anything else this fast,” he says. “You’ve got the American chestnut blight and the Dutch elm disease, but this seems extraordinarily rapid and severe.”

It’s unprecedented even in Australia, which has one of the highest concentrations of endangered species in the world but relatively few plant extinctions to date.

“Europeans have done some pretty nasty things to this continent,” he says. “It’s remarkable with what we’ve thrown at this continent how few things have gone extinct. And here’s myrtle rust — 10, 20 years, we could lose 15 species. Who knows, we could lose more.”

This gnarly old tree deep in Limpinwood NR is NSW’s newest #threatenedspecies – critically #endangered Lenwebbia sp Main Range. With very few in the wild, Myrtle Rust is rapidly killing them off. Today I got cuttings for #PlantBank so there’s hope! #SavingOurSpecies #conservation pic.twitter.com/045xF5UDzt

— Gavin Phillips (@SeedyGav) November 23, 2018

Which brings us back to COVID-19.

“We’ve tried to change the climate of the planet,” Fensham says. “We’ve poisoned our oceans with all these things. And maybe the most critical threat to humanity is just this tiny little organism.”

Hunting for Game Wardens: A Shortage of Conservation Officers Threatens Wildlife

States are facing significant shortages of conservation officers, who help protect natural resources and wildlife. COVID-19 could make it worse.

In Georgia there are just 213 game wardens to enforce state fish and wildlife laws, investigate violations, assist with conservation efforts and collect data on wildlife and ecological changes across 16,000 miles of rivers and 37 million acres of public and private lands. Statewide 46 counties have no designated game warden at all. The shortage could lead to wildlife crimes going undetected.

“The more officers we have in the field, the more contact those officers have with the public, the more violations we’ll find,” says Major Mike England, a game warden with the Law Enforcement Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. “The locals in the counties without game wardens are very vocal about it; it’s like living in a town with no police department.”

Georgia is not an anomaly. Nationwide states struggle to recruit, hire and train game wardens. These law-enforcement officers — also known as conservation officers, forest rangers, gamekeepers or wildlife troopers — are on the frontlines of conservation, but significant staffing shortages, especially in rural communities, put wildlife and the environment at risk.

It’s not just an issue in the United States. A 2018 United Nations report noted a worldwide increase in environmental crimes and cited a “lack of capacity in the enforcement chain” as one of the major gaps in ability to respond.

And the current COVID-19 pandemic could exacerbate the problem.

The Environment Pays the Price

Environmental crimes like poaching, overfishing and illegal dumping threaten healthy ecosystems, and without adequate patrols can lead to declining wildlife populations, disease spread, increases in invasive species, erosion and contaminated waterways.

“People who want to cheat resources know which [ranger] stations are vacant and know that the odds of seeing a warden in the field are rare because regular patrols aren’t happening,” explains Larry Bonde, chairman of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress, a group of elected delegates who advise the state department of natural resources. “It’s not just fish and game violations; if no one is visiting sensitive sites…there are a lot of things that get overlooked that could be spotted by [a game warden] patrolling the area.”

In California, for example, game wardens with the Department of Fish and Wildlife are often the first to spot illegal cannabis cultivation sites — called trespass grows — where growers raze paths through national forests to access secluded sites, divert significant amounts of water to irrigate cannabis plants, and apply massive amounts of pesticides to keep wildlife from gnawing on the crops. Too few game wardens in the field could lead to massive environmental degradation before trespass grows are spotted.

garbage in forest — A small portion of the garbage and debris left at a “trespass” marijuana grow site on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California. Photo: US Forest Service

Even when issues are spotted, Rick Langley, wildlife program manager for the Arizona Game and Fish Department and president of the North American Wildlife Enforcement Officers Association, believes that having too few game wardens in the field could have a negative impact on investigations and enforcement.

“[Game wardens] work really hard to fill in the gaps to protect natural resources,” he says. “In areas with less officer presence or where officers are spread thin to cover vacant districts, it has the potential to leave investigations incomplete or not responded to or followed up on as thoroughly as they would have been if you had one officer assigned to the area.”

Bonde agrees, adding, “If the station is vacant and there’s a complaint, it won’t be ignored, but it certainly isn’t going to get the amount of attention it would if it had been a full-time posted station.”

But filling vacant stations isn’t always easy.

Several factors, including shrinking conservation budgets, declining numbers of qualified applicants, long hours, low wages and rural locations have all contributed to the dearth of game wardens working in the field.

Those who want to pursue careers in the field often fail to make it past initial screenings. In 2019 the Georgia Department of Natural Resources hired just 10 game wardens from a pool of 350 applicants. England notes that most of the applicants failed their physical fitness exam or polygraph test, removing them from consideration. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources graduated a class of 12 game wardens from a pool of more than 400 applicants.

“There has been a longstanding concern about the number of vacancies,” notes Bonde. “[With too few officers in the field] it’s not even possible for proper enforcement to occur.”

COVID Challenges

These existing challenges are poised to get worse. The COVID-19 global health pandemic has triggered major budget cuts, further threatening funding for environmental conservation and could result in additional cuts to conservation districts that are already cash-strapped and understaffed.
“For agencies that receive funding [through state taxes and revenues], the repercussions from reduced tourism and businesses closing could have a very serious effect,” says Langley. “We’re hearing rumors about budget cuts and, in many areas, budget is one of the main reasons these positions go unfilled.”

In 2019 the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources had 21 open positions across its 155 patrol areas; the number decreased (from 27 vacancies in 2019) but the state is facing a projected $2.42 billion budget deficit as a result of the pandemic, which could threaten funding for the department.

In Montana the wardens working for Fish, Wildlife & Parks wrote 2,194 citations in 2018 compared to 4,027 a decade earlier. Game wardens suspect that there are not fewer wildlife crimes, just fewer officers to catch perpetrators. That number could drop again. The state, anticipating “significant revenue shortfalls” due to the pandemic, led legislators to request reducing state spending; the department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks could feel the sting.

To complicate matters, stay-at-home orders have led people to spend more time outdoors, hiking in national forests and boating and fishing on lakes. States like Vermont, North Dakota, Minnesota and New York have reported significant increases in the number of fishing licenses being issued, which means more anglers to monitor and too few game wardens to ensure no one is violating catch limits.

abalone in pickup truck — California Department of Fish and Wildlife Lieutenant Specialist Jess Mitchell with an overlimit of abalone taken off the California shore. Photo: CDFW

Targeting Solutions

The seriousness of the issue has led some states to implement strategies to increase the number of game wardens in the field and provide additional support to keep them in their roles.

In fiscal year 2018-2019, the Minnesota legislature allocated an additional $2.8 million to help the Department of Natural Resources recruit, hire and train additional game wardens to help fill 28 vacant positions. The Arizona Fish and Game Department, which has 16 vacancies across its 80 conservation districts, ramped up recruitment efforts too, adding three classes to the law enforcement academy in 2020 (up from just one in previous years). It also hired an advisor to educate students graduating from Arizona State University and the University of Arizona about conservation careers.

Most departments also have ranger “tip lines” where the public can report violations. In addition to the hotlines, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources also installed 400 cameras across the state to help catch wildlife violations.

“Instead of a game warden sitting out at night for eight hours to watch for hunters spotlighting deer [an illegal practice that involves using a flashlight or headlights to locate wildlife while hunting after hours], we use cameras,” England explains. “If we have problems with people dumping trash, sneaking in certain areas and fishing after hours or illegal hunting, we can hide one of these cameras and it sends the game warden a picture or a video of what’s going on.”

While Bonde supports the use of high-tech tools and hotlines to report potential conservation violations to help protect wildlife and the environment, he believes addition funding to get more game wardens in the field is essential, adding, “Without proper enforcement, there will always be people who cheat our natural resources.”

A Lost Leech and a Call to Protect the Bloodsuckers

The New England medicinal leech could be a poster child for invertebrate and parasite conservation, according to researchers. We just need to find it first.

Could a five-inch-long, bloodsucking leech inspire efforts to protect other leech species?

Yes, according to researchers — but only if it’s not already extinct.

That’s a possibility, as the New England medicinal leech (Macrobdella sestertia) — a name that dates to the practice of using leeches to “treat” fevers and other health conditions — hasn’t been observed in the wild since 2008.

But it’s gone long unseen several times before. The species, a relative of the much more common American medicinal leech (M. decora), was first described back in 1886, after which no reports of its existence emerged again until 1977. It had been presumed extinct before that rediscovery.

Since then it’s remained a bit of an enigma. Just a handful of reports of its existence have emerged from the leech’s wetland habitats in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire.

We don’t know exactly why it’s been so hard to find — it may always have been rare — but the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife describes it as “likely sensitive to shoreline changes and declines in water quality” and identifies sewage seeps and habitat loss as potential threats.

And maybe we weren’t looking in the right places. Recent research revealed that several New England medicinal leeches were observed in 2002 and 2008 in South Carolina — far outside their previously recognized range. The discovery wasn’t published until 2018.

Another recent finding provides even more hope. Last year scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of National History announced that they’d identified a new Macrobdella species, the first such discovery in 40 years.

For #NationalRelaxationDay we share this hypnotic video…of a LEECH. Its name is Macrobdella mimicus. And it was just described today in the Journal of Parasitology, by our curator of parasitic worms, Anna Phillips @Annalida500, and a team of scientists. pic.twitter.com/3iCQO9h2Uk

— Smithsonian’s NMNH (@NMNH) August 15, 2019

They found it just 50 miles from the museum, as well as in museum collections around the country, where it had been misidentified as other species.

“A discovery like this makes clear just how much diversity is out there remaining to be discovered and documented, even right under scientists’ noses,” said lead researcher Anna Phillips, the museum’s curator of parasitic worms, at the time.

That theme echoes in the new paper about the New England medicinal leech by Phillips and Georgetown University biologist Colin Carson. They’re calling for additional surveys to find any remaining populations of the lost species, as well as assessing it to be listed under the Endangered Species Act and the IUCN Red List. They also recommend protecting critical freshwater habitats and creating Red List entries for it and at least a dozen other rare or vulnerable leeches.

If protected or rediscovered, Phillips and Carson suggest that the New England medicinal leech could serve as “the first flagship species for parasite conservation.” As they write in their paper:

“…parasitic leeches are a comparatively easy ‘sell’ for parasite conservation: they are diverse, useful in medicine and as a model organism in developmental biology, striking and often colorful in appearance, have an infamous reputation, and are unlikely to pose a major threat to endangered hosts.”

Of course, the question remains: Does the New England medicinal leech still exist or is it extinct? Phillips and Carson devote the core of their paper to that problem. They used a series of six “extinction date estimator” mathematical models to calculate the probability of the species continued existence based on how often and when it was last observed. Their conclusion: There’s just not enough evidence to support the hypothesis that it’s no longer with us.

That’s potentially good news for now, but it doesn’t mean this species is exactly safe. Two of the six models suggest it might already be extinct, while a third calculates the year it could go extinct as…2020. The other three models give it a little bit more time — anywhere from 2027 to 2046.

As Phillips and Carson note in their paper, only a handful of leech species have ever received conservation protections. Could the New England medicinal leech help turn that trend around? It’s certainly time to try — while there’s still time to try.

Previously in The Revelator:

Why We Should Care About Parasites — and Their Extinction

‘Not Another Decade to Waste’ — How to Speed up the Clean Energy Transition

Energy policy expert Leah Stokes explains who’s pushing climate delay and denial — it’s not just fossil fuel companies — and what we need to do now.

The first official tallies are in: Coronavirus-related shutdowns helped slash daily global emissions of carbon dioxide by 14% in April. But the drop won’t last, and experts estimate that annual emissions of the greenhouse gas are likely to fall only about 7% this year.

After that, unless we make substantial changes to global economies, it will be back to business as usual — and a path that leads directly to runaway climate change. If we want to reverse course, say the world’s leading scientists, we have about a decade to right the ship.

That’s because we’ve squandered a lot of time. “The 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s were lost decades for preventing global climate disaster,” political scientist Leah Stokes writes in her new book Short Circuiting Policy, which looks at the history of clean energy policy in the United States.

But we don’t all bear equal responsibility for the tragic delay.

“Some actors in society have more power than others to shape how our economy is fueled,” writes Stokes, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We are not all equally to blame.”

Short Circuiting Policy focuses on the role of one particularly bad actor: electric utilities. Their history of obstructing a clean-energy transition in the United States has been largely overlooked, with most of the finger-pointing aimed at fossil fuel companies (and for good reason).

We spoke with Stokes about this history of delay and denial from the utility industry, how to accelerate the speed and scale of clean-energy growth, and whether we can get past the polarizing rhetoric and politics around clean energy.

What lessons can we learn from your research to guide us right now, in what seems like a really critical time in the fight to halt climate change?

What a lot of people don’t understand is that to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we actually have to reduce emissions by around 7-8% every single year from now until 2030, which is what the emissions drop is likely to be this year because of the COVID-19 crisis.

So think about what it took to reduce emissions by that much and think about how we have to do that every single year.

It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be some big sacrifice, but it does mean that we need government policy, particularly at the federal level, because state policy can only go so far. We’ve been living off state policy for more than three decades now and we need our federal government to act.

Where are we now, in terms of our progress on renewable energy and how far we need to go?

A lot of people think renewable energy is growing “so fast” and it’s “so amazing.” But first of all, during the coronavirus pandemic, the renewable energy industry is actually doing very poorly. It’s losing a lot of jobs. And secondly, we were not moving fast enough even before the coronavirus crisis, because renewable energy in the best year grew by only 1.3%.

Right now we’re at around 36-37% clean energy. That includes nuclear, hydropower and new renewables like wind, solar and geothermal. But hydropower and nuclear aren’t growing. Nuclear supplies about 20% of the grid and hydro about 5% depending on the year. And then the rest is renewable. So we’re at about 10% renewables, and in the best year, we’re only adding 1% to that.

Generally, we need to be moving about eight times faster than we’ve been moving in our best years. (To visualize this idea, I came up with the narwhal curve.)

How do we overcome these fundamental issues of speed and scale?

We need actual government policy that supports it. We have never had a clean electricity standard or renewable portfolio standard at the federal level. That’s the main law that I write all about at the state level. Where those policies are in place, a lot of progress has been made — places like California and even, to a limited extent, Texas.

We need our federal government to be focusing on this crisis. Even the really small, piecemeal clean-energy policies we have at the federal level are going away. In December Congress didn’t extend the investment tax credit and the production tax credit, just like they didn’t extend or improve the electric vehicle tax credit.

And now during the COVID-19 crisis, a lot of the money going toward the energy sector in the CARES Act is going toward propping up dying fossil fuel companies and not toward supporting the renewable energy industry.

So we are moving in the wrong direction.

Clean energy hasn’t always been such a partisan issue. Why did it become so polarizing?

What I argue in my book, with evidence, is that electric utilities and fossil fuel companies have been intentionally driving polarization. And they’ve done this in part by running challengers in primary elections against Republicans who don’t agree with them.

Basically, fossil fuel companies and electric utilities are telling Republicans that you can’t hold office and support climate action. That has really shifted the incentives within the party in a very short time period.

It’s not like the Democrats have moved so far left on climate. The Democrats have stayed in pretty much the same place and the Republicans have moved to the right. And I argue that that’s because of electric utilities and fossil fuel companies trying to delay action.

And their reason for doing that is simply about their bottom line and keeping their share of the market?

Exactly. You have to remember that delay and denial on climate change is a profitable enterprise for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. The longer we wait to act on the crisis, the more money they can make because they can extract more fossil fuels from their reserves and they can pay more of their debt at their coal plants and natural gas plants. So delay and denial is a money-making business for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities.

There’s been a lot of research, reporting and even legal action in recent years about the role of fossil fuel companies in discrediting climate science. From reading your book, it seems that electric utilities are just as guilty. Is that right?

Yes, far less attention has been paid to electric utilities, which play a really critical role. They preside over legacy investments into coal and natural gas, and some of them continue to propose building new natural gas.

They were just as involved in promoting climate denial in the 1980s and 90s as fossil fuel companies, as I document in my book. And some of them, like Southern Company, have continued to promote climate denial to basically the present day.

But that’s not the only dark part of their history.

Electric utilities promoted energy systems that are pretty wasteful. They built these centralized fossil fuel power plants rather than having co-generation plants that were onsite at industrial locations where manufacturing is happening, and where you need both steam heat — which is a waste product from electricity — and the electricity itself. That actually created a lot of waste in the system and we burned a lot more fossil fuels than if we had a decentralized system.

The other thing they’ve done in the more modern period is really resisted the energy transition. They’ve resisted renewable portfolio standards and net metering laws that allow for more clean energy to come onto the grid. They’ve tried to roll them back. They’ve been successful in some cases, and they’ve blocked new laws from passing when targets were met.

You wrote that, “Partisan polarization on climate is not inevitable — support could shift back to the bipartisanship we saw before 2008.” What would it take to actually make that happen?

Well, on the one hand, you need to get the Democratic Party to care more about climate change and to really understand the stakes. And if you want to do that, I think the work of the Justice Democrats is important. They have primary-challenged incumbent Democrats who don’t care enough about climate change. That is how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected. She was a primary challenger and she has really championed climate action in the Green New Deal.

The other thing is that the public supports climate action. Democrats do in huge numbers. Independents do. And to some extent Republicans do, particularly young Republicans.

So communicating the extent of public concern on these issues is really important because, as I’ve shown in other research, politicians don’t know how much public concern there is on climate change. They dramatically underestimate support for climate action.

I think the media has a really important role to play because it’s very rare that a climate event, like a disaster that is caused by climate change, is actually linked to climate change in media reporting.

But people might live through a wildfire or a hurricane or a heat wave, but nobody’s going to tell them through the media that this is climate change. So we really need our reporters to be doing a better job linking people’s lived experiences to climate change.

With economic stimulus efforts ramping up because of the COVD-19 pandemic, are we in danger of missing a chance to help boost a clean energy economy?

I think so many people understand that stimulus spending is an opportunity to rebuild our economy in a way that creates good-paying jobs in the clean-energy sector that protects Americans’ health.

We know that breathing dirty air makes people more likely to die from COVID-19. So this is a big opportunity to create an economy that’s more just for all Americans.

But unfortunately, we really are not pivoting toward creating a clean economy, which is what we need to be doing. This is an opportunity to really focus on the climate crisis because we have delayed for more than 30 years. There is not another decade to waste.

Bear-ly on the Radar: Indonesia’s Illegal Trade in Sun Bears Could Worsen in the Pandemic

The world’s smallest bears face oversized pressure from poaching, traditional medicine and the illegal pet trade. The COVID-19 pandemic could make things even worse.

Last month, as the world dealt with the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, China’s National Health Commission proposed an unexpected and potentially devastating treatment for the virus: the injection of “traditional medicine” containing bear bile.

China’s inhumane treatment of captive sun bears — which are kept in tiny, cramped cages and continuously “milked” for their gall-bladder bile for use in traditional Asian medicine — has long earned condemnation from conservationists and animal-rights activists.

But the proposal of using bear bile as a treatment for COVID-19, which is unlikely to have any real medicinal value for coronavirus patients, has implications beyond those affecting the captive-bear population. By creating additional demand for bile and other bear products, it could make things worse for wild bears in Indonesia, a hotspot of poaching and wildlife trafficking.

Indonesia’s Amazing, Threatened Bears

The sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) is a wide-ranging Asiatic species and the world’s smallest bear. Two unique sun bear subspecies live in Indonesia: H.m. malayanus, on the island of Sumatra, and H.m. euryspilus, endemic to the island of Borneo. The entire species faces declining populations and localized extirpations and is considered “vulnerable to extinction” by the IUCN Red List, although these two Indonesia subspecies may be at much higher risk.

sun bear hole — A hole carved in a tree by a sun bear. Photo © Andy J. Boyce (CC BY-NC 4.0) via iNaturalist

Sun bears are amazing forest dwellers that, as omnivores, have immense ecological value. They drive forest nutrient cycling, seed dispersal and forest regrowth. They’re a form of pest control, since they feed on termites and other insects, and serve as engineers of the forests. Their hunt for ants and bees creates tree cavities that provide homes for various other forest inhabitants, including endangered hornbills.

But their ecological significance is trumped by the contraband worth of their parts, which are highly valued by humans as trophies and charms and for use in traditional medicine.

Historically indigenous communities in Indonesia have always hunted bears for ceremonial clothing, food, jewellery, medicine, protective charms and hunting trophies. This had little impact on wild populations due to the traditional hunting methods used. But hunting methods have evolved and now include the use of firearms, snares and electrocution, all of which make it much easier to kill large animals. Meanwhile ongoing clearing and logging of forests have made wildlife ever-more accessible to poachers, with significant impacts on populations of sun bears and other species.

While detailed population estimates for sun bears don’t exist, Indonesia has been described as an important stronghold for the species, which are found in higher densities here than in any other range state. But the bears face a multitude of threats in Indonesia, not the least of which is illegal wildlife trade.

An Ongoing Threat Moves Online

Our studies, including an analysis of Indonesian seizure data related to bears from 2011 to 2018 and a three-month survey of the online availability of bear-related products on Facebook, reveal an ongoing threat from the illegal wildlife trade in Indonesia. Along with a local demand for sun bear parts such as claws, teeth, skins, skulls or stuffed whole specimens, there’s also the sale of claws and teeth on social media, both in their natural forms and carved into intricate designs or crafted into pendants.

Sun bear Borneo — A sun bear in a tree in Malaysian Borneo, its strong claws visible. Photo: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay (CC)

We also found evidence of the trade in live cubs as pets. For example, a live bear cub was recently seized, along with live orangutans and clouded leopards, in the Indonesian state capital of Jakarta. The animals were en route to Kuwait and were rescued during an investigation into international wildlife trafficking, including shipments to Middle Eastern countries. The Middle East is under increasing scrutiny for its flourishing exotic-pet industry.

And of course, even before the pandemic, there was evidence of more targeted hunting of bears for their gallbladder and bile, used in traditional medicine, and their paws for exotic meat. In January 2018 Indonesian authorities arrested a wildlife trader and confiscated 64 bear paws and 22 frozen Sunda pangolins (Manis javanica) stored in a refrigerator, along with one live pangolin. The items were reportedly purchased from an indigenous tribe in Jambi, West Sumatra, and destined to be sold to Chinese restaurants in big cities in Java.

Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam have also been implicated as destination countries in the shipment of bear parts from Indonesia’s East Kalimantan. The largest sun bear seizure in our study period took place in 2017, involving two bear skulls, 266 bones, 24 gall bladders, 1087 claws and 67 canines — all destined for Vietnam. According to the arrested suspect, this was not the first time such a shipment had been sent there.

Lack of Law Enforcement

Wildlife traders in Indonesia clearly have little fear of law-enforcement action. Sun bears have been protected in the country since 1973, yet the illegal trade in live bears, their parts and derivatives all persist.

International regulations are also ignored. Sun bears are listed in Appendix I of the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which prohibits international trade, but evidence continues to point to Indonesia as a source of trafficked bears to other parts of the world.

As with almost all wildlife crime, this trade — when it’s encountered by law-enforcement officials — rarely results in heavy punishments for the perpetrators. Our analysis of bear seizure data showed that only 32% of incidents resulted in successful prosecution and just one of those cases came close to the maximum penalty afforded by the law. In that case — the January 2018 seizure involving 64 bear paws —the trader received a jail sentence of 4 years and 6 months as well as a IDR100mil fine (approximately $6,900).

Arrests and prosecutions are so low, in part, because traders exploit legislative loopholes in Indonesia’s wildlife laws. While the sale of sun bears, their parts and derivatives remains illegal, the authorities can only take enforcement action against anyone they know to be in possession of protected species, or when suspects are physically involved in an illegal transaction.

Traders are aware of these flaws and manipulate them to their advantage by moving many of their transactions online to Facebook and other social media platforms, which are more difficult for law enforcement to monitor and regulate. Traders can easily set up multiple anonymous social-media accounts and secret trade groups. Face-to-face meetings between seller and buyer are no longer required, as payment can be transferred online and goods can be shipped directly to the buyer. The convenience of these transactions makes it more difficult to for authorities to connect buyers and sellers, which could later be used as evidence in court.

This is not exclusive to sun bears, and all of it ties into the broader network of wildlife trade and smuggling syndicates. In at least 48% of seizure cases involving sun bears, other high-profile animals were seized at the same time, including tigers, orangutans, pangolins, clouded leopards, hornbills and other birds.

Through all of this, we see alarming evidence that bears appear to be of low conservation or legal concern in Indonesia. Instead of facing severe consequences, Indonesians found in possession of a live sun bear — to sell or keep as pets — are merely given an opportunity to surrender the animal.

Necessary Actions to Protect Sun Bears

The threat of illegal trade — combined with loss and degradation of suitable habitat and food resources, as well as conflict with humans — puts sun bears at considerable risk. Now, with COVID-19 potentially complicating things even further by increasing the incentive to poach wild bears, it’s time to implement targeted conservation efforts for the species to ensure viable populations remain in the wild. The IUCN Sun Bear Conservation Action Plan, 2019-2028 already includes useful and practical initiatives to support government agencies in range states. Its recommendations should be immediately put into action throughout the sun bear’s range.

The #SunBearActionPlan is the first range-wide strategy for any terrestrial bear species, integrating conservation of #InSitu sun bear populations throughout their range and #ExSitu bears in good zoos and sanctuaries throughout the world. Download free: https://t.co/jZM2KOOYvi pic.twitter.com/gmtYIbLgDg

— BrianCrudge (@BrianCrudge) June 5, 2019

Beyond that action plan, it’s also essential that Indonesia prioritize enforcing its existing legislation to protect bears from poaching and illegal trade. And it’s crucial that the country close its legislative loopholes, which would support and empower enforcement authorities in the investigation and prosecution of illegal wildlife traders operating online. Greater effort also needs to be made to raise awareness of the nation’s wildlife laws protecting species — as well as of the conservation needs of the sun bear. Such outreach should target the public, enforcement agencies, the judiciary, traditional medicine practitioners, hunters and poachers, consumers and villagers living in or near sun bear habitat.

If Indonesia is to remain one of the strongholds for sun bears in the age of COVID-19 and beyond, these protection measures urgently need to be established — before more populations of these incredible, important animals disappear.

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.

Forests vs. Climate Change: Researchers Race to Understand What Drought Means for the World’s Trees

We’re already seeing signs of accelerated forest mortality around the world. And it’s not just arid regions that may see forest die-offs, new research finds.

Much of the world watched in horror as Australian wildfires that burned late last year and into the beginning of 2020 incinerated an area the size of Wisconsin, killing 33 people and, by some estimates, more than a billion birds, mammals and reptiles.

But the area of forest that burned pales in comparison to the total area affected by drought worldwide, says Tim Brodribb, a professor of plant physiology at the University of Tasmania. That could lead to a larger, though less headline-grabbing, crisis — and one that’s not confined to just Australia.

Brodribb is the lead author of a new study in the journal Science that analyzed 10 years of research on how forests react to droughts, which are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, even though the damage may be less evident to the eye than the Australian bushfires.

wildfire — Australian bushfires in 2020. Photo: BLM Idaho, (CC BY 2.0)

“There’s no smoke,” he says, “but there’s a big problem.” In fact, another paper in the same issue of Science found that climate change is driving a decades-long “megadrought” in the U.S. Southwest.

Across the world, forests cover almost a third of all land — and in some places, the ratio is even higher. But if climate change continues unabated, many forests will suffer.

Researchers have used models to understand potential changes to the forest canopy, and “you can easily see 40 to 50% of forests being destroyed in 40 years,” says Brodribb.

The effects could be far-reaching.

Tree species “from rainforests to arid woodlands face similar exposure to stress or damage during periods of drought,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

That would be an astounding change for countless species, as well as humans. Trees provide oxygen and medicine, and they help comprise some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. Their ability to absorb CO₂ is also important, many experts feel, in mitigating the effects of climate change.

“There are already clear signs of accelerated forest mortality, globally,” says Brodribb. “It looks pretty bad.”

Changing Forests

Understanding how forests may respond to climate change is critical, but also complicated.

In laboratory scenarios trees grew faster and larger when there was more CO₂ in the atmosphere. That’s led some researchers to wonder if climate change could be good for forests. Faster growth might mean that species can more easily adapt and more quickly spread their young into new areas. More robust trees might help forests survive the other challenges that climate change will bring: more drought, fires, pests and pathogens.

Outside the lab, though, it’s more complicated. For trees, carbon emissions have one big upside, but a lot of downsides.

Dead trees surround lake — Due to California’s drought conditions, trees are dying at the Castaic Lake State Recreation Area, April 13, 2016. Photo: Florence Low / California Department of Water Resources

Brodribb and study coauthor Jennifer Powers, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota, say it’s clear now that the calamity that climate change will bring to forests will offset any positive impact that more carbon dioxide might have.

For one thing, high levels of CO₂ might spur more leaf growth, but “if you make 20% more leaves, each plant will actually need more water in a high CO₂ world,” Danielle Way, an associate professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario who was not associated with the study, wrote in an email.

In a world with more droughts, that’s a problem for trees.

Water molecules are sticky. They cling to one another and pull each other up the inside of a tree’s trunk through the xylem. As the water evaporates out of the leaves, it draws on the water behind it. Most of the time this process, known as transpiration, provides leaves with the constant supply of water they need for photosynthesis, but it also puts water and xylem under extreme tension.

When there is not enough water, the tension can collapse the xylem, a process known as hydraulic failure. Higher temperatures make this failure even more likely because trees “kind of sweat,” says Brodribb. When there is little water, cells called stomata usually close up to keep a tree’s water from evaporating, but under higher temperatures trees keep the stomata open. Water escapes and the tree draws even more moisture out of the soil.

This is what the authors of the Science study call a “universal vulnerability.” Some species may be better adapted to drought and less susceptible to hydraulic failure, but with a perfect storm of warming temperatures and drier conditions, every tree in every forest in the world could be vulnerable.

California has already seen what this will look like. Warming temperatures, combined with the state’s recent five-year drought, killed nearly 150 million trees in the Sierra Nevada.

“I think that the emerging consensus now is that elevated carbon dioxide levels aren’t going to rescue trees from the negative effects of drought,” says Powers.

But some researchers think it’s too early to draw this conclusion.

“Fundamentally there is this tug-of-war between the benefits of CO₂ and the stresses of temperature and drought, and we don’t really know when and where which of those two forces might dominate,” says William Anderegg, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah who was not involved in the study. “It could vary by region and by forest and of course by climate future.”

It’s also not simply a matter of whether trees may benefit or be harmed — there are degrees of change in forests that could result.

Lucas Cernusak, a biologist at James Cook University who was not part of the study, wrote in an email that if new trees grow quickly where the older trees die, “the 40% mortality over 40 years could take place without a net change in stem density or canopy cover.”

That means the forests of the future could look a lot different from the forests we know today. They’d be more likely to be dominated by faster-growing, weedier trees that die and more rapidly replace themselves. Even then, droughts, pests and temperatures may push trees to their limits. And any major change in the type of forest would have big implications for the species adapted to live in those habitats. When the trees change, whole forest communities could too.

Planning for the Future

Trees that can’t adapt to these new conditions will need to find some better approximation of the world they evolved to live in, rather than the one people are creating. For trees, that’s a slow process and many species may not be able to migrate fast enough to keep up with climate change. For those that do, more research could identify which species handle drought best and how susceptible they are to hydraulic failure, a useful tool for conservationists helping to rejuvenate a forest.

“We can say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to invest a lot of money in restoring a forest, don’t choose these species. They seem very vulnerable to drought,’” says Powers. “With this knowledge, we can help practitioners choose species that will cope better with future climate change.”

smoke on the forest floor — A prescribed burn is used in a western Oregon forest for management. Photo: Bureau of Land Management, (CC BY 2.0)

Still, Powers and Brodribb are skeptical of efforts by organizations like Plant for the Planet to plant more trees in order to soak up carbon and curb emissions. It is much better, says Powers, to help support the forests we do have using tools like assisted natural regeneration, in which people can help speed up the natural way a forest grows.

But in order to conserve the forests of the future — whatever they may look like — more research is needed, and fast. There’s still much we don’t know about how individual species will be affected, and what implications that will have for the myriad organisms that depend on the forests. And of course, much of it hinges on how much carbon dioxide we will emit into the atmosphere.

That uncertainty is what concerns Brodribb. Without accurate information to create robust predictions of what forests look like in a changed world, we risk learning the answers firsthand.

“If we’re not predicting this right, if we don’t get it right,” he says, “then the impacts are so unimaginably bad that … it does keep you up at night.”

How COVID-19 Is Eroding Scientific Field Work

The pandemic has changed how conservation research is conducted today, and the effects could be felt long into the future.

Editor’s note: Summer is prime time across much of North America for scientists to do field research outdoors. But this year the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing many researchers to cancel or scale back their plans. Two scholars explain the long-term effects of a missed or downscaled field research season.

By Richard B. Primack, professor of biology, Boston University

Holes in the Data

For the first time in 50 years, ornithologists at the Manomet nature observatory in Plymouth, Massachusetts are not opening their mist nets every weekday at dawn to catch, measure and band migrating songbirds. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the center has essentially canceled its spring field season and will be doing only very limited sampling. Going forward, its long-term banding data will contain only a fraction of the usual information on songbird migrations during the spring of 2020.

Across the world, field stations, nature centers and universities have shut down long-term research to protect scientists, staff, students and volunteers from COVID-19. There’s good reason for this step, but it comes at a cost.

Collecting data over many years allows scientists to detect gradual trends and short-term anomalies in the health of forests, bays and other ecosystems and biological communities. Long-term research has been crucial in detecting how climate change is affecting the abundance and distribution of species and the timing of spring events, such as bird migrations and plant flowering.

Multi-year data has been vital to understanding how ecosystems bounce back after major disturbances like hurricanes and wildfires. Long-term research has informed policies addressing air and water pollution and wildlife conservation in ways that would have been impossible through short-term studies alone.

Since 1980, the U.S. National Science Foundation has supported a network of Long Term Ecological Research sites that now spans 28 locations, from northern Alaska to Antarctica and across North America. These sites are leaders in detecting effects of air pollution, land use and urbanization on ecosystems. The data they produce is available to the public and the scientific community.

Working Solo

Many long-term studies also take place in national parks, where researchers track subjects like water quality, wetland health and endangered species. In a normal year, armies of researchers and students would be at work in national parks and Long-Term Ecological Research sites. Now, however, just small groups are collecting data, aided by automated equipment.

Richard Primack wears a face mask while repeating Henry David Thoreau’s spring flowering and leafing observations in Concord, Massachusetts. Photo: Richard Primack, (CC BY-ND)

Some small-scale projects are managing to continue. Over the past 18 years, my students and I have recorded wildflower flowering and the first appearance of spring leaves in Concord, Massachusetts, repeating observations made by Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s.

We’re doing this to study the ecological effects of climate change. Our studies have shown that plants are flowering about 10 days earlier in the spring than they did in Thoreau’s time. We have also found that cold-loving northern wildflower species are becoming less abundant, and nonnative species are increasing.

Now I wear a mask, go out early in the mornings when few people are on the trails and work without students. None of this is how we typically work, but it allows me to continue this research and capture anomalies that might occur this year.

But maintaining a few long-term studies won’t make up for irreplaceable losses to science that will occur this year, especially for two-year experimental studies that were supposed to start or end this year. My colleagues and I hope that this pandemic ends soon, so that scientists can get back to analyzing the long-term workings of ecosystems — and the ecological impacts of coronavirus.

By Casey Setash, PhD student in fish, wildlife and conservation biology, Colorado State University

Abundant Uncertainty

Ecologists like me often measure a field season by the numbers: 40 birds captured, 85 nest plots searched, three times when the truck got stuck. This year we’re thinking about Colorado’s coronavirus case count.

My field site sits at an elevation of about 8,500 feet in northern Colorado’s Jackson County. The landscape and lifestyles here have remained largely unchanged over the last century. Jackson is also one of the few counties in Colorado without a positive case of COVID-19.

I’m conducting field work that will inform my dissertation on waterfowl breeding in flood-irrigated agricultural systems, as well as a long-term waterfowl monitoring project run by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Answering my proposed questions requires capturing 40 female mallards and gadwall, two common duck species. We mark them with GPS transmitters, conduct biweekly samples in the flooded fields for invertebrates — small crustaceans that ducks eat — and carry out daily nest searches within a 250-square-mile area.

sun on water — Dawn at Casey Setash’s research site in northern Colorado. Photo: Casey Setash, (CC BY-ND)

The Top 10 Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots to Protect

A new study took a deep dive into critical aspects of ocean life to identify the areas of the high seas most worthy of conservation effort.

The Sargasso Sea, an area of the Atlantic Ocean between the Caribbean and Bermuda, has bedeviled sailors for centuries. Its namesake — sargassum, a type of free-floating seaweed — and notoriously calm winds have “trapped” countless mariners, including the crew of Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria.

For the past 500 years, most of the stories that have come from the Sargasso have been about stranded ships and sunken vessels. But in recent years scientists have rewritten the sea’s narrative. It’s not a life-stealing sea, but a life-giving one. The seaweed alone helps support 100 species of invertebrates, 280 species of fish and 23 species of birds.

That’s one of the reasons why a team of scientists from 13 universities and institutions included the Sargasso Sea as one of 10 biodiversity hotspots in the high seas — areas of the ocean outside of national boundaries — that their research indicates should be considered for designation as marine protected areas.

Their recommendations, published earlier this year in the journal Marine Policy, took more than a little bit of work to develop.

Map of conservation areas from study — Results from the global data-driven conservation planning analysis showing priority areas to be considered for protection (green) in marine areas beyond national jurisdiction. Image: Visalli et al

Quantifying the Great Unknown

The high seas make up two-thirds of the ocean, much of which is remote. Scientists are still learning about the diversity and complexity of life there.

“We’re discovering new species in the high seas all the time,” says Morgan Visalli, lead author of Marine Policy study and a project scientist with U.C. Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative.

But at the same time, her colleague and study coauthor Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative, says there’s also a lot we do know that can help guide conservation.

They began their study by reaching out to networks of colleagues across the world to help gather data.

“I was really impressed by how much we actually know — how much data we have for what is out there, biologically speaking,” he says. “And also what people are doing in that space. We can’t fall back on the excuse of not knowing enough.”

The researchers ended up analyzing 22 billion data points — a huge data-processing challenge — to identify areas of the high seas that could warrant protection.

That included looking at indicators such as seafloor habitat, ocean productivity, diversity and richness of species, and extinction risks. They also identified certain physical features — like seamounts and hydrothermal vents — where changes in elevation and temperature help foster biodiversity.

Their results identified priority regions in nearly all the major ocean basins, with the largest areas in the South Pacific Ocean. Key areas also included the Sargasso Sea, as well as the Costa Rica thermal dome in the Pacific Ocean; the South Tasman Sea; the Emperor Seamount Chain northwest of the Hawaiian Islands; the Mascarene Plateau in the Indian Ocean; and the Walvis Ridge, an undersea mountain range off southwestern Africa.

map — Sources: UCSB analysis; Marineregions.org; Natural Earth. © 2020 The Pew Charitable Trusts

Their model avoided areas of high fishing activity in order to avoid what the study calls “real or perceived negative socioeconomic impacts” of setting aside conservation areas. It also took into consideration how climate change could alter biodiversity by selecting areas critical today and ones likely to be important in the future as well.

The Need for Protection

The research comes at a critical time for the future of the ocean — and the high seas, specifically.

A new United Nations treaty to protect and conserve biodiversity in the high seas is currently being negotiated, and a focus of those talks is how to create a framework for establishing marine protected areas outside of national waters. This could help ensure that unique ecosystems like the Sargasso Sea and others identified in the Marine Policy study aren’t overexploited.

The current law that governs the high seas, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, was finalized in 1982. But since then, our collective impact is starting to reveal gaps in governance.

Marine shipping traffic is up 1,600% and plastic pollution has increased 100-fold. At least one-third of fish stocks are being overharvested, and many migratory fish species, such as tuna, have declined more than 60%. Technological advances have led to more prospecting in the ocean’s depths for minerals and other genetic resources, as well as more destructive practices, like trawling along the ocean floor. Climate change, which is warming waters and increasing acidification, poses even more risks to ocean life.

bleached coral — Coral bleaching in the Gulf of Thailand. Photo: Petchrung Sukpong, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This has all taken a toll.

A landmark report last year from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found massive declines in biodiversity globally — including in the ocean, with one-third of all reef-forming corals and marine mammals threatened with extinction.

A recent study in the journal Nature, published just a few days after the Marine Policy study, suggests that we’ve come to a critical crossroads.

“We are at a point at which we can choose between a legacy of a resilient and vibrant ocean or an irreversibly disrupted ocean, for the generations to follow,” wrote the researchers, led by Carlos Duarte, a professor of marine science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

They posited that with enough resources and global will, we can see a “substantial recovery of the abundance, structure and function of marine life” by 2050. But to do that, we need to scale up efforts to protect vulnerable species and habitats, reduce pollution and — most critically — curb climate change.

That’s why Visalli and McCauley believe efforts like the emerging high seas treaty are important.

So far fully implemented marine protected areas span just 5% of the ocean. And the vast majority of these reserves are in national waters, which are only one-third of the ocean. But a high seas treaty would help create a framework to more easily set aside conservation-rich areas in a much greater expanse.

“Even though there is industry out there and it has been increasing over the past several decades,” says Visalli, “there is still a lot of wilderness in the high seas, and we are at this moment where we have an opportunity to protect these wild places before industry continues to expand even further.”

To truly protect and restore ocean health, scientists have been calling for a bare minimum of 30% of the ocean to be protected. More protected areas in the high seas are important for meeting that goal. But just as crucial as how much space, is also where that space is.

The Need for Protected Spaces

The major driver for changing and threatening biodiversity in the long term is climate change, says McCauley, which makes protecting these spaces vital in the short term.

“We are already seeing the first manifestation of these threats and we need to think about climate change and always manage the oceans — from fishing regulations to ocean parks — with that in mind,” he says. “Climate change is changing where biodiversity will be in the high seas, and we can use data to plan for that.”

Duarte and authors of the Nature study wrote that “Climate change is the critical backdrop against which all future rebuilding efforts will play out.” But well-managed marine protected areas, they said, can help ecosystems be better equipped to handle threats from climate change, like warming temperatures and changing ocean chemistry.

Getting there won’t be cheap. A global network of marine protected areas that conserves 20–30% of the ocean could cost $5–19 billion a year, the researchers write in Nature.

But supporting local economies, feeding communities, and fostering biodiversity don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The money spent on conservation will be more than returned in economic gains from the new jobs, revenue from ecotourism, restored fisheries, and protections for coastal areas, their research found.

But establishing the policy and international agreements, like the high seas treaty, to set plans in motion will require a lot of compromise, says McCauley.

“We need that space to have an ocean economy and we need that space to have biodiversity,” he says. “Can we find a sweet spot?”

18 New Environmental Books to Help You Through COVID-19 Isolation

May’s publications cover the amazing lives of elephants, butterflies, eels and fungi, and offer solutions for eco-anxiety and other environmental ills.

When I can’t get outdoors, I like to curl up at home with a good book.

As you might guess, I’m reading a lot of books these days.

And as I read, I’m finding powerful sources of inspiration for the days that will come after our current times of COVID-19 isolation.

Here’s the scoop on 18 fantastic new books — all published this month — offering insight into our natural world, the environmental problems we all face, and strategies for saving the planet and ourselves. You’ll find books about wildlife, climate change, pollution, and environmental justice, with selections for adults and kids. We’ve even got a few novels on the list this month, providing some thought-provoking entertainment.

Obviously most local bookstores are still closed to in-person shopping, but many shops offer curbside pickup or shipping, while publishers and libraries may provide e-books for immediate download. Many of this month’s titles are also available as audio books.

No matter how the books end up coming your way, may they offer the inspiration and tools you need to keep going and protecting the planet.

How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change: Turning Angst into Action by Harriet Shugarman

How do we embrace the urgent need for change without getting bogged down by overwhelming fear and anxiety about the future? The founder of the ClimateMama website offers a concise resource guide that, despite its kids-oriented title, is geared toward motivating entire families — and through them, their larger social circles — into creating positive change for the planet.

Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano

The full story of the notorious and horrific Camp Fire that ravaged Paradise, California, in 2018. The authors covered the fires for daily newspapers as flames raged through the town, and now they expand upon their reporting to present the full history and the stories behind the tragedy. Along the way, they provide a potent example and warning of things to come in an increasingly warm, dry, overly developed world.

The Language of Butterflies by Wendy Williams

A book as colorful and varied as its titular subjects, from the bestselling author of The Horse. It’s a thoroughly engaging mix of science, history, culture and personal narrative, as well as a testament to the need to conserve our fluttering friends. It also comes with the best subtitle of the month: “How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect.”

Fire on the Water by Scott MacGregor and Gary Dumm

This stunning graphic novel tells a slightly fictionalized version of one of the first major environmental disasters in the United States, the Lake Erie tunnel fire, and the entrenched racism that nearly made its death toll much, much worse. This book serves as a painful reminder that people died — horribly — so cities like Cleveland could have fresh, disease-free drinking water, and that corrupt politicians and corporations were just fine with the human cost of their actions. (Sound familiar?) MacGregor and Dumm also bring to light the story of Garrett Morgan Sr., the pioneering African-American inventor whose contributions and heroic sacrifices during the tragedy have been mostly erased from the history books — until now.

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

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

The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can by Stan Cox

The operative word in the title is “beyond.” Cox, lead scientist at The Land Institute, walks us through what the current iteration of the Green New Deal misses and what it would take to get to a zero-emissions future. Noam Chomsky provides the foreword.

Elephants: Birth, Life, and Death in the World of the Giants by Hannah Mumby

Part autobiography, part science, all elephant. And it’s a dynamic call for conservation action, to boot.

Industrial-Strength Denial: Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, from the Slave Trade to Climate Change by Barbara Freese

The author of Coal: A Human History continues her digs into the past, this time to examine how and why corporations so consistently employ delusion and deception to get their way, why so many of us keep falling for it, and how we can shift the narrative.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Fungi are having their moment in the sun, with a magical new documentary and now this entertaining book that dives into the world of mushrooms, molds, yeasts and so much more. Utterly fascinating and eye-opening. The mouther-watering chapter on truffles is worth the price of admission.

Unnatural Companions: Rethinking Our Love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife Extinction by Peter Christie

As much as we love our pets, our desire for animal companionship comes with a laundry list of environmental ills. Free-roaming housecats and invasive pythons kill native birds (and just about anything else they can find). Dogs carry diseases and harass wild animals. Parrots, songbirds, lizards and other exotic pets are often poached from habitats around the world. Even the toys and food we buy for our pets have an environmental impact. This informative book isn’t about shaming pet owners, though; it serves as a call to action to change the ways we acquire, interact with and support our pets, while also providing us with a sustainable path forward.

Shuri: A Black Panther Novel by Nic Stone

An environmentally themed young-adult novel based on Marvel Comics characters, in which T’Challa’s younger sister must save an endangered plant from extinction — and simultaneously preserve a critical element of Wakandan culture.

The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson

If you only read one translated-from-the-Swedish treatise on the philosophy, history and science surrounding weird, slippery animals, make it this one. Seriously, it’s bizarre and engaging.

A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

Full disclosure: This powerful, funny and emotional novel about climate change and extinction comes to you from The Revelator’s copyeditor, but really, isn’t that even more of a reason to give it a try?

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

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

Hidden Prairie: Photographing Life in One Square Meter by Chris Helzer

Most photo books take on an epic scope and try to capture massive concepts or landscapes. This one goes the opposite direction. Helzer spent a year pointing his camera lens at the same tiny plot of prairie land until he captured photos of 113 diverse plant and animal species and the drama that surrounded them. The book also includes a dozen short essays about his experience and the natural history of that one square meter. The whole thing adds up to a magical reading and viewing experience that will inspire you to get down on all fours and stare at the microcosms around us the next time you’re outdoors.

International Conservation Law: The Protection of Plants in Theory and Practice by Rob Amos

We try not to include too many expensive textbooks on this list each month, but we couldn’t resist this book dedicated to the thorny issues of the laws behind protecting endangered plants. Amos starts by the book by addressing why readers should care about the world’s vegetation and ends it with a chapter critically addressing “humanity’s failure to protect plants.” In between, he discusses threats ranging from climate change to international trade and invasive diseases and devotes two major sections to ways to move forward. This book isn’t for your average home gardener, but it could set the stage for important action toward plant conservation around the world.

Valuing Nature: A Handbook for Impact Investing by William J. Ginn

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our current capitalistic systems need an upgrade. This book, by the former chief conservation officer of The Nature Conservancy, aims to help nonprofits and others invest in the land, water and green infrastructure. As such, it unfortunately still embraces the ideal of placing and extracting a financial value from natural systems — heck, the final chapter is even entitled “Finding Wealth in Nature.” That might seem like an immediate contradiction, and yes, there are plenty of questions about how much impact “impact investing” truly has, but at least there’s a values system behind the concept. As such, this might serve, at the minimum, as an important piece of the conversation about our future as we move forward.

Gender and Environment, 2nd Edition by Susan Buckingham

This fully revised edition of a classic textbook looks at solving our environmental woes through the lens of social inequality, making it the perfect learning tool for the Greta Thunberg/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez era of activism and progress.

That’s it for this month. Stay safe and stay tuned for another batch of books on June’s list in a few short weeks. Until then you can find dozens of additional eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.