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

Clean water is essential during the COVID-19 health crisis, but so far Congress hasn’t directed funds to help water utilities or stop water shutoffs in low-income households.

Our days now are clouded with uncertainty. How long will the COVID-19 crisis last? What immediate health effects and long-term economic damage will we experience? What’s the best protocol for staying safe and healthy?

On that last front, we know one thing for sure: We need to wash our hands well and often. And for that we need clean, running water.

But so far the federal legislative responses to the novel coronavirus crisis have not included financial support for water utilities, most of which are public agencies. And there’s been no federal mandate to prevent water shutoffs for households unable to pay their bills.

“We’ve known that water is a priority, but it’s just not the top priority,” says David Zielonka, communications manager for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, which represents public wastewater and stormwater agencies. “There’s been incentive and motivation on both sides to include it [in upcoming legislation], but getting it into the final package hasn’t happened yet.”

Economic Pressures

Water utilities have had to quickly adapt to make sure their vital services keep running, even if staff are sick or otherwise sidelined by the virus. In California the Mercury News reported that a desalination plant in Carlsbad, which supplies drinking water to San Diego, is now housing its 10 most critical employees on site so they remain healthy.

Other agencies have made arrangements to provide beds and food for workers if they need to live at treatment plants. Some are even calling back retired employees to bolster reserves. A survey of industry leaders by American Water Works Association found that nearly three-quarters of utilities expect to face challenges from absentee workers due to illness. Smaller water utilities, with just a few workers, are even more at risk if critical staff become unavailable.

But that’s not the only challenge.

With many industries, shops, restaurants and other businesses ground to a halt, water utilities now anticipate a precipitous decline in revenue, which will also reduce funds available for their already tight operating budgets. Zielonka says the National Association of Clean Water Agencies’ members are projecting losses ranging from 20% to 40%.

“These utilities are all publicly owned and they don’t have vast private resources in terms of stock buybacks or other things they can do to recoup this lost revenue,” says Nathan Gardner-Andrews, the general counsel and chief advocacy officer for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. “They’re basically stuck.”

Drinking-water and wastewater services are usually billed based on the volume of water delivered — it’s revenue based on usage. But the costs for the industry — to maintain the infrastructure and keep treatment plants running — are fixed. When usage falls, costs remain the same, and the utility gets pinched.

The utilities are, of course, not the only ones being hit with economic losses. Some 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past four weeks. For some families, that may mean an inability to pay their water bills. That’s more lost revenue for water agencies and a potential life-and-death health risk for residents if utilities enforce water shutoffs for delinquent payments.

Some utilities, like the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, have chosen not to shut off water connections in light of the pandemic. At least 12 states have mandated that shutoffs cease during the health emergency, and the governors of California, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin have ordered that water service be restored to those without it. But there’s no federal order, and it’s likely that millions of Americans are still at risk of losing service because of dire financial straits.

Longstanding Problems

This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

An “affordability gap” has been growing in America’s water system over the past two decades, says Gardner-Andrews.

Keeping up with replacing and repairing aging infrastructure, which is 100 years old in some parts of the country, has significantly added to the costs of water services that have been passed on to ratepayers. Between 2000 and 2015, the cost of water and wastewater services rose more than 40% in some major U.S. cities. Rural communities, which lack economies of scale, often pay twice as much for water as urban residents.

As a result an estimated 12% of U.S. households find their water bills unaffordable, according to a 2017 study by researchers from Michigan State University — and that was before millions lost their jobs in the last few weeks. Meanwhile, federal assistance for water infrastructure has fallen 77% since its peak in 1977, but the need is greater than ever.

protest
Actor Mark Ruffalo at a protest against water shutoffs in Detroit, MI in 2014. Photo: UUCS, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The American Water Works Association estimated that we’ll need $1 trillion over the next 25 years to upgrade our aging water infrastructure.

The current crisis may help shine a light on this affordability gap, but it also reveals another longstanding problem that we can’t delay addressing: Around 2 million people in the United States don’t have running water and adequate plumbing. For example, about 40% of the Navajo Nation lacks running water, which could put many residents at risk during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political Pressure

In the months ahead, mounting financial losses for water utilities will likely mean rate increases that will become unsustainable for more and more poorer households, says Gardner-Andrews.

“How bad it is, and the level of pain they pass onto their ratepayers, will in a large part depend on what financial assistance, if any, comes from federal and state governments,” he says.

His organization is asking Congress to direct $12.5 billion in aid for water utilities in the next stimulus bill to offset the loss of revenue, provide assistance for those who can’t pay, and keep water rates from rising. Other nonprofits are calling for a national moratorium on water shutoffs and more support for low-income affordability programs.

Their concerns are supported by at least 80 members of Congress who sent a letter to House and Senate leaderships asking for legislation to “prioritize water infrastructure funding to local water providers and provide assistance to ensure that no American goes without water service due to an inability to pay during this pandemic.”

Other industry leaders are lending their voices in support of addressing shortfalls in access and affordability.

“We have an opportunity now to deliver on the human right to water by including urgent infrastructure upgrades and ratepayer protections in the coronavirus relief packages currently being negotiated,” wrote Peter Gleick, Heather Cooley and Laura Feinstein, researchers with the global water think-tank the Pacific Institute, in an op-ed in the Hill. “After decades of deferred maintenance and disinvestment, it is time to shore up the systems that keep our communities healthy and ensure even the most vulnerable among us have access to safe water and sanitation.”

Many groups, including House Democrats, have pushed for a big infrastructure package that would address decades of funding shortfalls, including $25 billion for drinking water, and $50 billion for wastewater and other clean-water projects.

“The next COVID-19 stimulus package provides an opportunity to invest in ways that create lots of jobs and finally begin to provide the level of resources that are needed to make sure no one is drinking polluted water,” says Scott Faber, senior vice-president of government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

But it’s increasingly looking like the next stimulus package may bypass water issues yet again. When asked about an infrastructure package, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told E&E News that it’s not off the table, “But what is on the table is more funding for the immediate needs that people have.” It’s not clear yet if that includes help for those who can’t afford their water bills.

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Food Waste in the Time of COVID-19: The Real Reason to Cry Over Spilt Milk

Let’s focus on the economic systems that allowed such waste to be created in the first place, while causing needless pollution, animal suffering and threats to human health.

Earlier this month Wisconsin journalist Shaun Gallagher shared a shocking video of dairy farmers dumping tens of thousands of gallons of milk down the drain as the industry faced reported strains from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What a waste!” Gallagher wrote in a widely shared tweet. “#COVID19Pandemic is forcing dairy farmers to dump their milk down the drain so the milk market doesn’t implode. Why not give it away to those who need it?”

The question seems a natural one to ask, but the very fact that Gallagher’s asking it reveals how little is publicly understood about the dairy industry, where dumping milk has been a regular feature for decades.

To understand the nature and scale of waste behind milk being dumped, even under business-as-usual scenarios, consider for a minute everything that led up to this dumping incident. Look behind the curtain of industrial dairy production, ostensibly dedicated to feeding us and meeting our nutritional needs.

Vast swaths of land are cleared for crops and tended by agricultural workers to grow the more than 100 pounds of food required every day by each of the country’s 9 million dairy cows. Most dairy operations belong to large, commercial farms, which at all stages consume and release vast quantities of water, chemicals and pesticides.

All this habitat destruction and resource use goes toward producing milk (and related products), which has become an irrevocable brick in the food pyramid not based on its nutritional value but based on decades of work by industry lobbyists.

Dairy cows
USDA Photo by Preston Keres

The U.S. Department of Agriculture already bails out the dairy industry by buying unwanted cheese to the tune of more than $20 million in a year — adding up to a current federal stockpile of 1.4 billion pounds of cheese — produced with heavy taxpayer-funded subsidies in the first place. Note that this is the same federal department that’s meant to “provide leadership on nutrition” of a population where 4 in 10 adults suffer from obesity while 37 million struggle with hunger (with overlap between groups).

Consider that our economic system produced these circumstances before COVID-19 even existed. In 2016 farmers dumped $43 million worth of unwanted, unprofitable gallons of milk in fields, manure lagoons and anywhere else they could find to perpetuate an industry that’s supported more by government bailouts than consumer demand. All this waste is enabled by lobbyists influencing the people’s representatives in government.

On top of that, milk production remains an animal-welfare issue: Nine million cows were forcibly impregnated and had their calves taken away to produce milk in the United States in 2019 alone. It’s also a human-health issue, considering the antibiotics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, hormones, pesticides and other chemicals present in waste from dairy farms — much of it leaching into America’s waterways — with a typical megafarm estimated to produce 187 million gallons of waste a year.

Coming back full circle to COVID-19, milk is a disease issue, as cramped factory farms have been known vectors for MRSA infections, E. coli, cryptosporidiosis, ringworm, salmonella and tuberculosis.

Of course, other types of food are also going to waste as well because of a shift in consumer practices during the pandemic. The market forces and policy interventions governing the dairy industry are hardly unique — all commodities experience gluts and creative pricing to some extent — but only some of those commodities have an existential dependence on subsidies. A mere five of the crop types grown in the United States depend on government subsidies — just as vast energy subsidies continue to be funneled to the oil and gas industry during a time when 70% of Americans support a complete transition to renewable energy.

Most people don’t see that, since our economic system runs on turning a blind eye to spilt milk.

Milk pouring down the drain tugs at the heart — for journalists and all of us — because it’s easier, and more emotional, to connect wasted food with hungry people than it is to connect, say, natural-gas flaring as a wasted resource.

Regardless of whether you believe the outcome is important enough to justify the waste, let’s not keep nurturing the myth that our economic system represents the most efficient use of resources — or that it’s the best way to assign value to the resources we have. Industries routinely use their power and deep pockets to stop the playing field from being level — to stop policies being enacted that might be worse for them but would be better for the rest of us.

The myth is hurting us, and we need to call it out. COVID-19 is straining the farcically unjust systems we already lived in — and that could help us to see those systems’ flaws with greater clarity. If the questions seem insane — why are we pouring milk down drains? — it’s reflecting the conditions that created the drains. Giving “extra” milk to hungry people is not even close to a Band-Aid for all the problems that led to the situation in the first place.

Previously in The Revelator:

Can the U.S. Slash Food Waste in Half in the Next Ten Years?

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Elephant Hunts for Sale During a Pandemic

Botswana hides behind national “sovereignty” while selling off its natural heritage to foreign hunters and treating elephants as mere commodities.

In February 2020 the government of Botswana auctioned off the right to hunt and kill 60 elephants — the first salvo toward a quota that aimed to allow the trophy hunting of 272 elephants this year.

Plans for those hunts, which would have been the first since the country’s 2013 hunting moratorium, were put on hold in late March by the worldwide pandemic when Botswana banned travelers from the United States and other “high-risk” countries. But the Botswana Wildlife Producers Association, which represents the hunting industry, quickly asked for an extension of this year’s hunting season.

If the COVID-19 lockdowns end sometime soon, the bullets could quickly begin flying.

Botswana is a cash-strapped nation, so one can perhaps understand the short-term attraction of trophy hunting. The government made $2.3 million in a few hours on that February afternoon from selling 60 elephants at an average of $39,000 per head.

The pandemic has not slowed this thirst for short-term profits. On 27 March, just a few days after Botswana closed its borders, it reportedly auctioned off additional hunting rights for 15 elephants, two leopards and dozens of other animals for a total of $540,000. The auction results have not been publicly reported, but were conveyed to me by a present, concerned party.

An Elephant’s Value

To ecological economists like me, the push for trophy hunts seems to severely undervalue these magnificent creatures.

Notwithstanding their obvious intrinsic value, elephants most likely have even greater ecological-economic value than these hunting permits reflect.

For one thing, each elephant contributes to the dynamics of the ecosystem and improves the functionality of forests and savannahs as effective carbon sinks. A whole host of other species depend on elephants’ movements, which create forest corridors and shape the habitat. Elephant droppings fertilize forests and savannas and carry seeds to new locations. Even tiny tadpoles have been known to live in elephant footsteps.

Botswana elephant
Elephant in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Photo © Ross Harvey, used with permission.

And then there’s the value to people. A 2014 report estimated that elephants are each worth more than $1.6 million in ecotourism alone. Purchasing an elephant at an auction for $39,000 and selling it on to a trophy hunter for $85,000, therefore, seems not only ethically callous but economically senseless.

Elephants are not alone in this. Recent work by International Monetary Fund economists estimated the value of a single whale at $2 million over its lifetime due to its roles in carbon sequestration, the growth of carbon-absorbing and oxygen-generating phytoplankton, and whale-watching tourism. They estimate that the world’s population of whales alone are worth a staggering $1 trillion. Obviously, there are no whales in Botswana, but the research illustrates the growing trend of valuing large megafauna well beyond their charismatic appearances.

An Important History

The Botswana government, under former president Ian Khama, originally placed a moratorium on trophy hunting back in 2013. In May 2019 the current government justified hunting’s reintroduction as an element of the country’s “sovereign right” — while at the same time abrogating this right to a foreign hunting organization, Safari Club International, which now openly boasts of how it influenced the decision.

During the moratorium wildlife and tourism groups lauded Botswana as a haven for elephants, a conservation and marketing success that saw rapid growth in the country’s ecotourism industry.

When President Mokgweetsi Masisi came to power, however, the political narrative changed from recognizing elephants as critical to the country’s success to labelling them as a problem to be “managed.” The president and other cabinet members have repeatedly peddled the view that there are “too many” elephants and that they are responsible for environmental damage and increased human-elephant conflict.

Of course, this myth has been repeatedly exposed and debunked.

That debunking hasn’t changed Botswana’s messaging. Trophy hunting, the world is told, will result in benefits such as meat, revenue and jobs for local communities in rural areas close to wildlife. These benefits will purportedly increase “frustration tolerance” (acceptance of the risk of living near elephants) among local community members, thus indirectly serving conservation ends.

Excluded from this new narrative is an acknowledgment that the moratorium was originally imposed because of the widespread failures of governance in community trusts. Abuses in the hunting industry were rife. There was also no evidence that trophy hunting revenues were equitably distributed or that hunting was contributing to wildlife conservation. In fact, wildlife numbers for many species were in decline by 2012, and excessive trophy hunting was considered among the potential causes of the decline. There’s good evidence to substantiate this, so the government cannot now argue that the ban was “not scientifically based.”

Moreover, the growth in Botswana’s tourism industry in the wake of the moratorium was remarkable, with increases in both the number of tourists and profits — not to mention growing elephant populations. This alone supports the idea of keeping photographic tourism as the primary revenue opportunity for elephants and other wildlife.

It’s not without criticism, however. We must also recognize that the Botswana Tourism Organisation — set up by the government to take a 65% share of photographic-community joint-venture revenue (leaving only 35% for communities that live with or near wildlife) — has been a governance disaster. In addition, the barriers for citizens to enter the tourism industry are impossibly high. They face formidable red tape in the licensing process and must conduct their own environmental impact assessments, which cost time and a lot of money.

These are long-term problems to solve, regardless of what type of tourism we’re talking about.

Trophy Hunting Is Not Conservation

But the growth of photographic tourism and wildlife populations are not discussed by the current government. Instead the narrative persists that trophy hunting will indirectly serve conservation by giving communities the tools and resources to withstand any human-elephant conflict they encounter. No clear evidence exists, however, that this type of conflict has increased since the moratorium, and it was prevalent long before then.

In fact research shows that hunting makes human-elephant conflict worse. The violent deaths of elder elephants creates intergenerational trauma, leading to increased aggression and delinquent behavior among young bulls. Growing human populations and resultant competition over access to water, which will become increasingly scarce under climate change, will make things even worse.

Botswana elephants
Elephants in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Photo © Ross Harvey, used with permission.

Trophy hunting is therefore a short-term non-solution to human-elephant conflict.

Yes, some communities lost short-term hunting revenue after the moratorium was put in place, but that should not serve as cause to invite hunting’s return — not even for communities now facing the spectre of lost tourism income during the pandemic.

A Tragedy in the Making

Lifting the hunting moratorium under the guise of a country’s “sovereign right” is Orwellian doublespeak. Botswana does not own Africa’s shared elephants, which migrate between countries, yet the government has sold them out to foreign hunters and to satisfy foreign interests like Safari Club International. The long-term opportunity costs of hunting have not been considered, yet the government blindly insists that it will produce “significant conservation benefits.” Two plus two equals five here. There is no evidence that the Ministry’s decision has been guided by “the highest ethical standards and principles of science-based sustainability.” No publicly available science warrants the quota of 272 elephants for 2020, let alone the arbitrary allocation across sensitive areas and other areas which likely cannot sustain hunting at all.

Botswana’s decision to lift the trophy-hunting moratorium was ill advised at best and an indication of short-term rent-seeking at worst. It’s ecologically unsustainable, undermining the very foundations of the country’s recent ecotourism successes. Attempting to justify it under the banner of “sovereignty” raises questions, as the right to kill public heritage is being granted to wealthy foreign hunters. The ultimate tragedy is that the rural poor living with or near wildlife will be no better off.

And Botswana’s selling additional hunting rights during a worldwide pandemic, when the world’s attention is elsewhere, shows that the government does not care about its people or its elephants — only short-term profits.

COVID-19 has exposed humanity’s propensity to treat wild animals as mere commodities to be consumed. Animals slaughtered at wet meat markets in Wuhan were the most likely intermediary source of zoonotic spillover — possibly involving transmission of a bat virus from animals to humans. Trophy hunting reflects the very same mentality, that wild animals exist only for our entertainment and consumption.

It would be a real tragedy if these planned hunts simply resumed when the current lockdowns are lifted.

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.

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How COVID-19 Took Hold and Why We Must End the Wildlife Trade

Here’s what we can do to make sure the critical mistakes made after the SARS outbreak won’t be made again.

There will be no silver lining to the suffering caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is a rare opportunity to learn a crucial lesson: The trade in wildlife must end.

In the past this cruel and destructive trade has been dismissed as a “conservation issue” by those who deem protection of the natural world a distraction from the grown-up matter of economic growth. They couldn’t be more wrong. As the novel coronavirus acts as a wrecking ball, devastating the global economy while killing tens of thousands of people, there’s a growing understanding that this “conservation” issue is inextricably bound up in global public health and economic security.

I was in Beijing when SARS hit China in early 2003 and saw the panic it caused. As a founder and director of the international conservation organization WildAid, I worked with students and tutors at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine to build awareness of the cruelty, damage and other threats that accompanied the multibillion-dollar wildlife trade. The consumption of civet cats was believed to be the probable source of the SARS transmission to humans, and there was a growing realization of the health threats posed by the transmission of disease from wild animals to humans more broadly.

But even in the wake of SARS, China ignored the calls from conservationists to restrict or end the wildlife trade that devastates global animal populations… and the world was set on course for new disease outbreaks and to 2020’s tragic pandemic.

Fatal Errors

The critical mistakes made after the SARS outbreak were threefold.

First, the action taken was short term. Yes, China instigated a ban on the hunting, transport and sale of all wild animals in southern China, and civet cats in the so-called “farms” where they were bred for human consumption were either killed or quarantined, but these measures were temporary and limited to southern China, where the outbreak started.

Second, there was a critical misunderstanding of how the SARS virus was developing and being transmitted. While it seemed highly likely that it had come to humans via civet cats, there was a failure to address the deeper issue of where the virus originated. This is key, as it’s the intermixing of multiple species that occurs in the wildlife trade — species that don’t normally mix closely in the wild — that likely forms the pool for virus transmission, possibly with mutations from one species to another.

Last, but most certainly not least, was the global failure to come to grips with our unsustainable exploitation of wildlife. This meant that as one wildlife population was depleted, others were targeted and brought to market, creating the potential for novel viruses.

Put simply, the response was too narrow and short-lived to work in the long term to prevent another similar outbreak. And here we are today, with many tens of thousands dead, our global economy savaged and worse still to come.

Learning From Our Mistakes

This cannot be allowed to happen again.

China’s legislative committee has issued a welcome ban on wildlife trade from markets, restaurants and e-commerce. But it’s temporary. Unless this is permanent and enforced, it will become a mere PR exercise.

We’re not expecting another coronavirus to develop in the next few months or even year. But we should expect it in decades to come, unless bans are put in place in China and other consuming countries. And it’s crucial that those bans be enforced.

China has huge wildlife markets, with the legal side of the trade, the wildlife-farming industry, worth around $57 billion annually. This “legal” trade, which is already the source of barbaric cruelty, often provides a front for its shadowy, even nastier twin, the illegal trade. Traders in “wet markets” — like the one in Wuhan where this coronavirus is believed to have originated ­— sell live animals in deplorable conditions and are able to launder their products so that any illegality is extremely difficult to detect and prosecute, even when the authorities try.

This is why China’s oxymoronic “ban on illegal wildlife trading” ­(issued before the recent temporary ban on both legal and illegal wildlife consumption and trade) makes even less sense than it first appears to. Cracking down effectively on illegal wildlife trading is almost impossible unless the legal markets are dealt with.

It is also crucial that along with consumption of animals — which is what the temporary ban covers — any legislation must include animal parts procured for traditional Chinese medicine.

Not Just China

China has much urgent work to do, but this is categorically not a “Chinese problem.”

Collectors from across Asia, the United States, Europe and the Middle East, and many other regions drive the destructive trade in wild animals. In Vietnam, for example, the wildlife trade is worth over a billion dollars each year.

There we see hopeful signs of action too, with the prime minister asking the country’s agriculture ministry to draft a directive to stop illegal trading and consumption of wildlife.

But again, it must be all-encompassing, and it must be enforced.

The Real Solution

Underlying all this is our rampant, unsustainable, self-defeating exploitation of the natural world. We are at last beginning to understand that it is not just a danger to the overall ecological security of the planet but to human health — to ourselves. Ebola, bird flu, swine flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Rift Valley fever, SARS, West Nile virus and Zika virus: All these made the jump from animals to humans, and experts say it was almost always human behavior that caused the leap.

The new coronavirus is causing suffering and death, but it could be even worse. What if the contagious nature of corona had been combined with the 50% death rate of Ebola? The tragedy would have been unthinkable.

Preventing further, potentially more vicious outbreaks is not just a matter of shutting down wildlife markets like Wuhan’s. It requires us to reassess our connection to nature. To halt the destruction of ecosystems and climate crisis that drive wildlife into contact with people.

This would not only safeguard against lethal outbreaks, it would make us happier, healthier and put us on track for a prosperous, sustainable green economy.

China has acknowledged the need to bring the wildlife trade under control if it is to prevent another outbreak — and that’s an important and welcome step. But, along with the rest of the world, it must follow through, even after this coronavirus has subsided and the world’s attention has turned elsewhere.

We have the opportunity here to safeguard species threatened with extinction, reduce cruelty to animals, and protect our economy and health at the same time.

This planet is our home. It keeps us well and safe, but only if we do the same for it.

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Blood Is Life — The Amazing Dragon’s Blood Tree

New research proposes classifying the threatened tree as an “umbrella species” because of its oversized ecological role.

Dragon’s blood trees (Dracaena cinnabari) are evolutionary marvels of the plant kingdom, but they may not be around forever.

Native to a single island in the Socotra archipelago, off the coast of Yemen in the Arabian Sea, the extraordinary-looking dragon’s blood tree, which is classified as “vulnerable to extinction,” can grow to more than 30 feet in height and live for 600 years. Looming over the island’s rocky, mountainous terrain, it produces rich berries and a vermilion sap — the source of its name — that has been used for centuries as everything from medicine to lipstick, and even as a varnish for violins.

Visually, the trees are stunning. Their branches grow in an outward-forking pattern that gives them the look of a giant mushroom or an umbrella sucked inside-out by the wind.

extinction countdownAnd that appearance isn’t the only umbrella-like aspect of the dragon’s blood. New research, published in the journal Forests, suggest the tree could also be considered an umbrella species — the protection of which would benefit a wide range of other species.

The umbrella species concept has traditionally been applied to large, wide-ranging, charismatic mammals and birds such as giant pandas, mountain gorillas and northern spotted owls. The theory is that by protecting these animals and their habitats you also, directly or indirectly, conserve everything else that lives near them.

A team of researchers from Socotra, Spain and Portugal wanted to find out if the dragon’s blood tree could do the same thing — even though, unlike other umbrella species, it stays in one place. It’s not that big a leap: The tree has long been considered an indicator species, meaning it quickly shows signs of changes to its environment and plays host to a wide range of the island’s other unique wildlife. But would protecting the dragon’s blood also help other species?

The researchers studied 280 trees for two months and found that they provided food and shelter to at least 12 of Socotra’s endemic reptile species, including 10 geckos, one chameleon and a snake. Some of these species were only observed a few times, so they probably don’t fully depend on the dragon’s blood, but others, like the critically endangered gecko known only as Hemidactylus dracaenacolus, appear to only live amidst the trees.

Dragon's blood trees
Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The trees themselves weren’t the only part of the equation. Bushes from the Cissus genus grow near and around the trees, providing a shared habitat for many of the observed lizards.

Although the researchers caution that their research period was relatively short, they say this supports their hypothesis that the dragon’s blood tree should be considered an umbrella species on the Socotra archipelago and protected for the good of the whole.

And that protection is sorely needed. Dragon’s blood trees face a wide range of threats, including logging, habitat fragmentation, and overgrazing of seeds and young shoots by livestock. Few new trees survive to maturity. The trees currently occupy just 10% of their potential habitat.

Climate change will make things even worse. The island is already getting drier, and research cited in the Forests paper calculates the dragon’s blood will lose up to 45% of its remaining range by the year 2080.

As the researchers write, this means dragon’s blood forests are in urgent need of protection now.

But Yemen remains in the grips of a five-year war that includes a power struggle for control of Socotra. This conflict, which has killed more than 100,000 people, has curtailed conservation efforts on the island. The researchers, who conducted their study before the conflicts began, note that international funding to help nurseries grow dragon’s blood seedlings has been placed “on hold due to the country’s political situation.” (Saudi Arabia just announced two-week cease-fire, which was expected to begin on April 9 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.)

For now the dragon’s blood tree persists, and its umbrella-like branches continue to serve as vital shelter and resource for the both the human and ecological communities around them.

Watch this 2014 video about the dragon’s blood tree and the threats it faces from climate change:

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Now’s a Great Time to Become a Backyard Naturalist — Here’s How

Connecting with nearby nature can give people a much-needed boost — and help save wildlife, too.

Millions of people who aren’t frontline workers in the COVID-19 pandemic are adjusting to a new routine that means staying home — or close to it. Many are seeking solace outside.

Nature is good for our health. And during stressful times, it can be a lifeline.

“I’ve become convinced that even in the background — green space, biodiversity, birdsong — access to nature is crucial for good population health,” Lucy Jones, author of the new book Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild, told Huck Magazine. “And it’s not a luxury, an add-on or a frill: It’s central to our humanity and our sanity.”

You don’t need to flock to dangerously overcrowded national parks to do this. Experts say you can find nature where you are already — whether that’s your backyard, a window box, or whatever sliver of wild is within reach. For many people, including kids, that may begin with learning what kind of nonhuman neighbors they have.

If you’re not sure where to start, try birds.

“Since we share our community with birds wherever we are, I think it’s a great way to think about being grounded and connected right now,” says John Rowden, director of Audubon’s Plants for Birds program, which supports planting native flora. “If you’re out for a walk, it’s an opportunity to begin to listen to what life is in your neighborhood.”

And fortunately, you may not even need to leave your house.


“Backyard birding by putting out feeders is a lot of people’s entrée into the birding world,” says Andrea Jones, director of bird conservation for Audubon California. Birds are easier to spot when they sit still to eat. (Just make sure you know what to safely feed them and how to keep the feeder clean.)

You can simply delight in their presence or go further and learn which species they are. There are lots of apps that can help you identify birds and birdsong, including one from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology that can match your photos with species and another from Audubon that lets you track what you’ve seen and share it with friends.

Birding in the days of quarantine doesn’t have to be an entirely solitary pursuit.

And now’s an especially good time to get into birds, since the spring migration in North America is underway — or, in the northern areas, will be starting soon.

Swifts entering chimney
Vaux swifts swoop into an abandoned chimney in downtown Los Angeles. Photo: waltarrr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Migration is a bonus for those who lives in cities, where biodiversity is usually lower than in rural areas.

“Many cities can have huge waves of migrants and really high diversity,” says Jones. “Parks with flowering trees and ornamentals attract a lot of insects and get huge pulses of migrants, particularly warblers.”

Watch for Yourself — and for Science

As important as it is to connect with nature on a personal level, you can also be a part of something bigger by recording what you’re seeing and sharing that information with scientists who track bird migration over time. Your data could help them to better understand how factors like climate change, habitat loss and pesticides may be affecting bird populations and movements.

“Cornell University [uses that information] to build maps that show how birds are moving across our landscape in real time,” says Jones. “You can see a wave of tanagers coming through.”

Audubon has used volunteer data to build climate maps showing what kind of habitat birds prefer, how that may have shifted, and whether birds will have the habitat they need in the future as the climate changes, she says.

Birding may help give people a reprieve from the day’s stress, but birds can also tell us a lot about the places around us.

Diseases passed between migratory waterfowl can provide a warning about contaminants in water. Or a lack of insect-eating birds could indicate a loss of insects from things like pesticides and insecticides, Jones says.

“We see that with flycatchers not showing up in some areas, and we think it may be attributed to loss of a food source they need,” she says. “They tell us a lot about the health of the environment because of what they eat.”

Changes are afoot. A 2019 study found that the population of North America’s birds has dropped 30% since 1970 — a loss of nearly 3 billion birds.

Learning about birds can translate into learning to protect birds, says Rowden. And it can provide an opportunity to learn more about other parts of our natural world, too — like native plants.

“As people are mandated or encouraged to stay home, there are lots of plants that can support birds that can be grown from seeds — even in window boxes if you don’t have a yard,” says Rowden.

Finding more than just birds? Another app called iNaturalist, a joint project of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, can help you identify and track just about any plant or animal you see around you — and share that information with scientists and other users.

Ready? Some Tips to Get Started

If you want to see more birds and other wildlife, try going outside around dawn or dusk. Or change your perspective — get down low to see what’s crawling, hopping, or slithering on the ground. There’s a lot more to see than birds, after all.

And record what you see over time. That’s particularly important right now: As our routines change, how’s wildlife in our communities responding?

Stay quiet, walk slowly, or better yet, try sitting still for a bit. That may take some practice.

Connecting with nature can make these difficult days more bearable — even, at times, beautiful.

This is an opportunity to appreciate what you’ve got in your backyard, says Jones.

“I discovered there’s an oak titmouse nesting on my back patio,” she says. “If I wasn’t working from home every day, I wouldn’t know that and I’d be going to some far-off location to look for birds and not know I had something cool five feet from my back door.”

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Will Climate Change Push These Amphibians to the Brink?

California newts faced the worst drought conditions in 1,200 years, but new research finds that the lack of precipitation may not have been their biggest threat.

Aerial photos of the Sierra Nevada — the long mountain range stretching down the spine of California — showed rust-colored swathes following the state’s record-breaking five-year drought that ended in 2016. The 100 million dead trees were one of the most visible examples of the ecological toll the drought had wrought.

Now, a few years later, we’re starting to learn about how smaller, less noticeable species were affected.

One of those is the California newt (Taricha torosa). These large, colorful amphibians live across the state, from Mendocino County to San Diego County, but newts living in Southern California fared worse during the drought, according to a new study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. And worse, anticipated future changes to the climate are likely to put northern newts in the same boat in coming decades.

Researchers have been surveying populations of these amphibians for decades. By tagging them with transponders and following their movements, they’ve learned that the newts can live for more than 30 years and return to the same spots year after year as they migrate between freshwater and land.

But as the drought began in 2012, the researchers noticed a change in the Southern Californian populations. There were fewer newts from the tagged population coming back to dozens of breeding sites monitored across the region each year. The researchers also observed fewer egg masses, tadpoles and larvae.

“Here’s a long-lived species that we’re not seeing individuals that we’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years coming back to the sites where they usually breed,” says Gary Bucciarelli, the lead author of the report and an assistant adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.

And there was one more piece of bad news: Most of the adult newts that did return in Southern California were in poorer body condition than before the drought began. This negative trend, the researchers concluded, was linked to drier and warmer conditions that were far outside the 100-year average.

At the time the state was experiencing drought conditions not seen there for 1,200 years. You’d expect drought to hurt amphibians, which rely on access to water, but Bucciarelli says the research shows that similarly record-high air temperatures may have played an even greater role than precipitation.

Warmer temperatures remove necessary moisture from the terrestrial environment. But they could also affect food — a shifting climate may mean less prey, says Bucciarelli. Or it could mean that newts spend more time wandering around, burning calories, and less time hunkered down as they normally would.

Whatever exactly happened in this case, “It all was strongly correlated with the extreme deviation in climate,” he adds.

Newt gets microchip
A syringe is used to place a microchip inside the abdomen of a California newt so they amphibian can be tracked. Photo: Jerry Kirkhart (CC BY 2.0)

Amphibians spend part of the year on land, and we know far less about how they spend their terrestrial days. “When they’re on land we don’t know if they’re underground, moving around, in a deep sleep, or what they’re feeding on,” he says. “This research suggests there are things happening on land that are impacted by temperature that we don’t really understand.”

One thing is certain, though: Climate change will bring more severe droughts and higher temperatures to California, and that could push newts in Southern California, which are already a species of conservation concern, closer to extinction.

And in the next 50 years, the northern populations are likely to experience the same change in body condition. That means that the northern range “likely will not provide climate refuge for numerous amphibian communities,” the researchers conclude.

That’s particularly bad news considering that globally, an estimated 40% of amphibians face extinction. A disease caused by chytrid fungus has devastated many amphibian populations, especially in Australia, Central and South America, and wiped out 90 species already.

But amphibians face other threats, too. And the California newt is no exception.

The species is adapted to drought, but “they haven’t dealt with drought coupled with temperature changes that are this rapid and this severe, in conjunction with habitat fragmentation, land use changes and fire frequency changes,” Bucciarelli says. “Now we’re beginning to see how these combined stressors are acting out ecologically.”

So what do we do?

Collecting more data is a good start. Land managers need to begin long-term monitoring surveys of populations of amphibians now, even if the species aren’t currently a major concern. “You never know what’s going to happen and having baseline data is super important,” he says.

Proactively improving habitat is also critical. We can start by ensuring that habitats are free of non-native species, says Bucciarelli, who has also tracked the negative effects of introduced fish and invasive crayfish on amphibians.

Suitable habitat is key, but so is connection. Many newt populations in Southern California have become islands, separated by development that limits their genetic diversity — and in the long run, their capacity to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Ensuring habitat connectivity could help strengthen their resilience.

Even if all of that happens, climate change will continue to be a threat, and Bucciarelli says we may need to develop contingency plans for worsening conditions if we hope to save these newts.

“We’ll have to think of different and more creative management strategies to help in years when temperature and precipitation are not in line with the norm.”

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Coronaviruses and the Human Meat Market

We’ve created a world where parasites and pathogens can run amok. Here are three steps we need to take, as a society, to protect both native species and human health.

Over the course of my career, I’ve come down with an endless variety of tropical diseases: leishmaniasis, amoebic dysentery, dengue, schistosomiasis, leptospirosis, countless bouts of diarrhea of unknown origin, dozens of cases of food poisoning, numerous secondary infections, pinworm, wandering hookworm, and dozens of botflies in various parts of my body.

This, plus my interest in new and reemerging diseases (like Monkey-B virus, Ebola, HIV/AIDs, Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika, as well as SARS and MERS — both of which are coronaviruses), led to an idea I’ve been mulling over for more than 30 years, which seems to be playing out now with the novel coronavirus COVID-19.

I call it the “human meat-market hypothesis.”

Superabundance Makes Us Easy Prey for Parasites

If you look at the course of evolution, you see that certain species become abundant, or even superabundant, for whatever reason. Along with this success, you see the accompanying evolution of predators to take advantage of this food resource, this mass of protoplasm, this “meat market” of living creatures. These include the emergence of a wide variety of parasites — viruses, bacteria, protozoans or rickettsia — that make use of these superabundant species. Predators and parasites evolve to depend on these superabundant species for their survival.

One of the world’s more successful, abundant species? Humans. That makes us a huge source of food for potential predators and parasites — a human monoculture, or a “human meat market.”

covid-19
Source: Centers for Disease Control

Saber-toothed tigers and cave bears were a problem for us in the past, and some animals still eat us from time to time. But it’s unlikely that new megafauna predators are going to emerge at this point, leaving certain microfaunal parasites as our major adversaries in the future — and right now.

The more simplified and less diverse ecological systems become, due to our exploitation of those ecosystems, the more we’ll become targets of these emerging pests, unbuffered by the vast array of other species a healthier ecosystem provides.

The consumption of wild animals (aka “bushmeat”) in China, Southeast Asia, West and Central Africa and elsewhere provides a direct human connection to pathogens that would otherwise be restricted to different species living in their natural habitats. Anyone who has ever visited the dreadful markets where bushmeat is sold knows how unsanitary they are and how easily they can cause direct infections to human consumers — which is how the most recent coronavirus jumped to us. The only surprise is that these kinds of outbreaks have not happened more frequently.

bushmeat
Staff from the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspect bushmeat being imported into the U.S. (Photo: Derek Sakris/CDC)

Our domestic animals are an even bigger “meat market” for parasites. Domestic mammals account for 60% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, compared to 34% for humans and only 4% for all wild mammals. No wonder we feel we have to pump domestic animals full of antibiotics to avoid the occasional outbreaks of domestic disease epidemics such as mad cow, swine flu, foot-and-mouth disease and avian influenza, which then often spill over into humans.

The combination of the two, the human meat market and our own domestic-animal meat market, is proving deadly.

What does this mean for conservation? Three major steps need to be taken.

Protect Biodiversity

First, we need to protect the full range of biodiversity on our planet, since diverse, healthy and functioning ecosystems protect us. We don’t want our Earth to become less diverse, with people (and our domestic animals) becoming increasingly easy targets for the harmful viruses, bacteria, protozoans and other parasites that will certainly discover that we’re the best, most readily available source of meat.

Stop the Wildlife Trade

Second, we must stop removing wild animals from their natural habitats for human use and consumption, practices that put us into direct contact with their parasites. We strongly encourage countries that are actively engaged in the commercial trade of terrestrial wild animals for food, medicines and pets to ban these practices permanently.

China has already done so in response to COVID-19, but how long will such a ban last? The country also banned bushmeat after the SARS outbreak in 2003, but the markets opened again shortly after the threat passed — and now we have COVID-19. Vietnam’s government is also preparing a directive to stop its $18 billion wildlife-trade market. African countries should also ban commercial bushmeat consumption. Some have made feeble attempts to do so, but most haven’t stuck. These bans need to be strictly enforced, including by focusing on the vast illegal underground markets.

Eat Less Meat

Third, as a society we need to move away from large-scale meat consumption in general and transition to plant-based diets.

Coronavirus has given us yet another wake-up call. We can’t yet determine how severe this outbreak will be, but it should help us prepare for the future, not just in Band-Aid approaches like more masks, hand-sanitizers and test kits, but in attacking the underlying causes of these outbreaks to prevent them in the future. We simply must put an end to the commercial trade in wild animals for food, medicine and pets — for the health of our planet and for us humans who live on it but continue to destroy it with such callousness and ignorance.

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.

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Can You Draw An Extinct Species From Memory?

An art project brings to light how quickly the species we’ve lost can fade from our consciousness.

Pop quiz: What did the quagga look like?

If you’re scratching your head, you’re probably not alone. It’s been 137 years since this South African zebra subspecies went extinct, and it was only photographed once, so its image doesn’t exactly leap to mind.

The quagga isn’t the only lost species that’s fading from our memory. A recent art project asked 20 illustrators around the world to draw extinct species like the quagga, great auk and sea mink without looking them up first.

The results were … not very accurate.

Take the Pyrenean ibex, for example, which went extinct just 20 years ago:

Ibex
Courtesy: Tanzania Expeditions

As you can see, a lot of the illustrators had the antelope family in mind, but some of their images differed dramatically from the ibex’s actual appearance. A few artists apparently thought the ibex was a bird.

The project was the brainchild of a safari tourism company called Tanzania Expeditions, which created it as a tool for conservation outreach.

“We know how much people love lions, tigers, zebras and elephants,” says Justin Mtui, the company’s CEO. “But can they imagine a world where people didn’t know these animals? We wanted to highlight the importance of keeping these species a part of our world by showcasing how some of those historic animals — many of which lost to human intervention — have been erased from knowledge.”

A few of the artists report that they had an idea about what some of these extinct species looked like before sitting down to draw. Others had more difficulty — and they found that troubling.

“It made me realize that I actually don’t know many of the extinct animals, apart from the dodo,” says Connor Handley, a designer based in the United Kingdom.

The artists tell us that the experience offered them a valuable lesson.

“I think this project really highlighted how little awareness there are of some now-extinct animals, and it does make you worry about which of our current wildlife could be completely extinct and unknown in future,” says French illustrator Candice Massaria. She adds that she wasn’t too pleased to see how her drawing of the extinct moa differed from reality. We won’t tell you which of these was hers:

moa art
Courtesy: Tanzania Expeditions

Let’s be honest: This isn’t just about extinct species. How many of us in this era of disconnection from nature can accurately draw or describe any species, whether rare or common? Even a certain environmental editor admits to having this occasional problem:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

This week’s sketchy cartoon. #comics #webcomics #pig?

A post shared by John Platt (@johnrplatt) on

How would you or your kids cope with this challenge? Let’s put that to the test during this time of self-isolation. Here’s a list of 10 extinct species, some of which were just declared lost this past year. Try drawing them — no Internet searching! — and send us the results or post them on social media using the hashtag #drawingextinction. We’ll add the best entries to this article.

Tasmanian tiger

Bramble Cay melomys

Chinese paddlefish

Desert rat-kangaroo

Baiji

Pinta giant tortoise

Cumberland leafshell

Yunnan lake newt

Miss Waldron’s red colobus

Po‘ouli

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In This Time of Crisis, We Need to Keep Our Eyes Open

Even as thousands of people get sick and die, the Trump administration continues to strip away our environmental protections. And that’s just the start.

Both eyes open. Look for potential threats coming from all sides. Be prepared to change course at a moment’s notice.

That’s quickly become a life strategy at the dawn of this pandemic — which still seems like an alternate reality — as we carefully, nervously navigate our neighborhood sidewalks, lonely roads and outdoor trails.

It needs to be our larger strategy, too.

As we self-isolate, seeing our passing neighbors and even ourselves as potential disease vectors in the community, new threats have continued to emerge around us.

While many of us have been panic-watching the news for updates on the worldwide COVID-19 crisis, the Environmental Protection Agency — already defanged by the Trump administration — quietly stopped enforcing antipollution laws, a dereliction of duty that came at the behest of the American Petroleum Institute and other industry leaders.

This development occurred in the background, unnoticed by most of us, just as we learned that air pollution appears to increase COVID-19 death rates.

Meanwhile, also mostly hidden from public view, the Trump administration has moved forward on several oil, gas and mining lease auctions, approved construction of the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas export terminal, hired a trophy-hunting advocate to run the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s international program, proposed allowing GMO crops in wildlife refuges, continued its move to reduce automotive fuel-efficiency standards, and weakened a host of other environmental regulations, including one on toxic coal ash.

Looking beyond the federal level, Kentucky, West Virginia and South Dakota all passed laws intended to criminalize protests against pipelines and other fossil-fuel infrastructure.

And then there are the disaster capitalists, who seek to take advantage of the chaos to make greater profits. The most obvious examples affecting consumers so far include price-gouging on N95 masks and toilet paper, but the bigger picture continues to emerge every day. To name but a few: the coal industry asking to be relieved of its responsibility to support miners with black-lung disease; the plastics industry looking to suspend bans on single-use bags; and corporations galore lining up for handouts through the federal coronavirus stimulus package.

There will be more. Probably, a lot more.

To protect ourselves — both from the virus and the corporate forces that want to use this pandemic as an opportunity to take control — we need take our modern survival strategy to the next level.

Both eyes open. Look for potential threats coming from all sides. Be prepared to change course at a moment’s notice.

And when you see these novel injustices and threats emerge, shine a light on them and raise hell.

That means paying attention, safely engaging in every opportunity for participatory government, supporting nonprofit watchdogs and vital local and national journalism (which needs our help more than ever), and using social media and online tools to call out injustice and mobilize activism.

And keep an eye out for your neighbors, friends, family and colleagues. We need to step up to safely help people and systems in need every chance we get — and we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help if we need it.

It’s easy to let fear overwhelm us and rule our lives. It’s far, far harder to pay attention to the big picture while many of us are struggling, getting sick and even dying. But this pandemic isn’t the only fight going on right now, and if we’re not careful, we’ll lose a lot more before it’s over. Experts warn that fascists and other political strongmen have used pandemics to seize or consolidate power — something that’s already happening in Hungary and several other nations. Many countries have already launched efforts to hobble freedom of the press — as has, apparently, the governor of the state of Florida.

Corporations and anti-government extremists are sure to take or advocate for similar actions.

If we’re not careful through all of this, we’ll undoubtedly lose many more lives, careers, protections, habitats and species.

But that can only happen if we fail to keep both eyes open, even in these troubling times.

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