Nine New Environmental Books You Need to Read This Month

March’s best books examine how cities (and families) can fight climate change; look at the history of Earth Day; and reveal growing threats to the world’s wild spaces.

Existential threats to the planet call for practical solutions — along with heartfelt examinations of how we got here and where we’re going next.

Those themes run strong through this month’s new environmental books, including an emotional memoir from climate activist Greta Thunberg and her family that’s sure to inspire discussions among other families around the world.

Also hitting bookstores this month: Hope Jahren and other writers tackle the realities of climate change, two authors offer municipalities proven tools to reduce their greenhouse emissions, and several books look back at key moments in environmental history to provide important insight for today.

You’ll find our list of March’s nine best new environmental books below (plus a few honorable mentions for good measure). Check ‘em out, share them with friends, and then put their lessons to good use.

Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis by Greta & Svante Thunberg and Malena & Beata Ernman

The influential teenage climate activist teams up with her father, mother and younger sister to tell their family story. Our House shows how they fought through Greta’s immobilizing fear of an unlivable planet, exacerbated by her autism, to help her become a force for the future. Most of the book is told through mother Malena Ernman’s point of view, and she provides a heart-wrenching and honest examination of the pain Greta experienced — not just from the facts of climate change, but from the attacks by the denial industry — and the healing power of her activism.

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here by Hope Jahren

The author of Lab Girl, 2016’s best science memoir, returns with a pocket-sized primer about the state of the planet. Researching the book took Jahren on a journey of discovery, and the result was illuminating. If you want to understand how we got here — and how we’re going to move forward — this book offers a concise, thoughtful and surprisingly hopeful message.

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier

An anthropological examination of the Anthropocene. Farrier’s deeply moving book examines what we’re leaving behind on the planet today — everything from plastic pollution to the extra gases in the atmosphere and the bones of our great skyscrapers — and speculates about what these fossils might reveal to future archaeologists studying the lives and deaths of the peoples of the 21st Century.

Earth Day and the Environmental Movement by Christy Peterson

This fun, colorful and informative book for high-school age readers looks at the foundations of Earth Day and its continued relevance as we approach its 50th anniversary in a world full of disinformation and newly emerging threats to the environment. (Parents, you’ll get a lot from this book, too.)

The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court by Richard J. Lazarus

The complex story behind Massachusetts v. EPA, perhaps the most important environmental case to ever come before the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s not just a tale of unlikely triumph — it’s also an important look at the power of the courts that’s especially resonant as the Trump administration shapes (or perhaps misshapes) the future of the judicial system.

Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places by Julian Hoffman

The best way to renew your drive to protect imperiled ecosystems is to visit wild spaces. The second-best way is to read impassioned reporting like this book, which takes readers on a journey to some of the world’s most imperiled places and the species that live in them.

American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West by Betsy Gaines Quammen

As the cultural influence of the Bundy family continues to grow among America’s right-wing militias and other extremist groups, it’s important to look back to see how their rebellion against the federal government got its start — and where it could go next.

Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change by Joan Fitzgerald

Remarkable Cities and the Fight Against Climate Change by Jonathan D Rosenbloom

How can cities reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions? That’s a big question, and an important one, since urban centers play an oversized role in the climate crisis — and since national governments around the world seem to be increasingly dropping the ball on solving the problems we’ve created. Fitzgerald’s book uses interviews and examples from 20 North American and European cities to identify the policies and strategies that work, especially as they relate to emissions-heavy buildings, transportation and energy systems. She also digs into how state and national governments sometimes hold cities back on their climate efforts and devotes an entire chapter to issues related to just transitions for low-income communities.

Rosenbloom’s book, meanwhile, builds off of his work as founding director of the Sustainability Development Code project, which envisions the creation of sustainable and equitable communities. The book offers 43 proven regulatory examples that can help cities reduce their emissions by incentivizing progress or removing barriers to change. Taken together these two books present a powerful opportunity to build (or rebuild) the cities of the future.

But wait, there’s more!

Other notable books out this month include Cranky Uncle Vs. Climate Change by SkepticalScience.com founder John Cook; marine conservation pioneer Callum Roberts’ Reef Life: An Underwater Memoir; the apocalyptic science fiction novel Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine; and Adrienne Martini’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It, a book that aims to inspire readers to run for local office and create positive political and environmental change in their communities.

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

The Road to Zero-carbon Transportation Runs Through the Northeast

Three strategies can help transform transportation in America — and regional cooperation by states would take things further, faster.

Transportation is climate enemy number one in the United States, producing more carbon pollution than any other part of the American economy.

In fact the U.S. transportation system is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire economies of France and the United Kingdom combined. The average American drives roughly 10,000 miles a year, and too many of our vehicles are inefficient, burning gas like there’s no tomorrow. And because of the way we’ve built our communities and our lack of investment in public transit, most of us have few alternatives but to drive.

Despite the urgent need to act on global warming — and the fact that transportation is a leading source of air pollution that makes us sick — the federal government continues on its plan to roll back clean-car pollution standards.

To effectively address global warming, we need to change how we get around. We need big, ambitious goals to transform transportation and the means to achieve them.

A good place for policymakers to start is by following a three-point plan my organization, Environment America Research & Policy Center, outlined in a newly released report, Destination: Zero Carbon. The report provides three major strategies we need to follow to transform transportation in America:

1. Switch to all-electric vehicles

Given the number of miles Americans drive, shifting from gasoline-powered to electric vehicles is essential. To get this right, we need both incentives and infrastructure.

An EV charging station in Virginia. Photo: Ken Hammond/USDA

Ambitious states have already started the transition. In Connecticut, for example, the EVConnecticut Electric Vehicle Charging Station Incentive Program has helped to fund 336 charging outlets at 214 locations, for both the public and private sector. A similar program in New Jersey awards charging-station grants through the state’s “It Pay$ to Plug In” program. And on the West Coast, California, Oregon and Washington, along with British Columbia, have collaborated on the “West Coast Electric Highway,” an extensive network of fast charging stations every 25 to 50 miles along major roadways. That will make it easier for folks to get around in electric cars. Other states need to follow or expand upon these models.

2. Electrify public transportation

We can’t be content just with electric automobiles. All modes of transit must be powered with clean, renewable energy: In Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced an initiative last year to use $20 million from the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust to reimburse school districts for investments in electric school buses and charging infrastructure.

That’s just a drop in the bucket, but it’s a start, and it’s been echoed by communities across the country.

3. Drive less, live more

The least-polluting car is the one we don’t drive in the first place. We need to give more people the option to travel by foot, bike and public transit — more programs like those adopted by almost 1,500 communities across the country that have “complete streets” policies aimed at making streets safer and more accessible to people using a variety of travel modes. These features include raised medians, protected bike lanes and bus rapid-transit systems.

How we take these goals to the next level may depend on the actions of some of the country’s top state leaders.

This spring policymakers in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic will have the opportunity to take a big step toward meeting visionary goals and helping to solve the climate crisis. Governors from Maine to Virginia are part of a regional collaborative called the Transportation and Climate Initiative, which is considering a multistate policy to clean up transportation.

When it comes to the climate crisis, no state will solve the problem alone. That makes it important for states to collaborate and join forces to cut as much pollution as possible from the source. The strategies that this regional consortium puts forth can serve as examples for places across the country that need to prioritize cutting transportation pollution immediately.

The Transportation and Climate Initiative would create direct investments in clean solutions and help to forge a modern, healthy transportation system. It would get electric vehicles and chargers on the road, speed the electrification of the bus fleet, and expand non-driving options to get around.

Now is the time to act. Earth just had the hottest January ever recorded, and our climate will keep warming unless we accelerate our progress now. If supporters of the Transportation and Climate Initiative embrace and implement these strategies, it would offer important insights to the rest of the country on how to address the transportation crisis.

But full implementation of the initiative is far from a sure thing. The final memorandum of understanding is expected later this spring. At that point each governor in the region will have to decide whether to lead the way to zero-carbon transportation or get left in the dust.

We’re calling on governors to act through the Transportation and Climate Initiative. States and communities can, and should, take additional steps on their own, but the collective power of this larger, regional effort has the potential to produce real, deep change.

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.

‘The Story of Our Lifetime and Our Planet’ — Environmental Journalism in Troubled Times

Covering environmental issues these days can be tough. But it’s needed more than ever, says Society of Environmental Journalists president Meera Subramanian.

Journalist Meera Subramanian wants to tell you a story about the environment….

That’s getting harder and harder, though. The media landscape has become a version of “The Walking Dead,” with newspapers around the country closing, being acquired by hedge funds, or cutting their editorial staffs to the bone.

And then there’s the constant barrage of claims of “fake news” from the Oval Office, corporate spokespeople and pundits. There’s a reason why “post-truth” became Oxford Dictionaries’ International Word of the Year in 2016.

What’s a journalist to do in a world where people are polarized and persuaded more by beliefs and opinions than objective facts?

For many, the answer is to dig deeper into storytelling.

That’s what Subramanian did in her award-winning InsideClimate News series, “Middle Ground: Conversations Across America.” Published in 2017 and 2018, the series told deeply personal and character-driven stories as it tracked climate effects in conservative communities.

In the process, the series revealed a far richer and more complex story than we often hear in narratives diluted to simply climate deniers versus believers.

Subramanian has made a career of unearthing stories that give people a better understanding of the natural world and each other. Her work has been widely published and anthologized in collections such as Best American Science and Nature Writing. She’s the author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka. And she’s currently the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron visiting professor in the environment and the humanities at Princeton University.

In December she carried her experience to a new arena as president of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), which works to support professional journalists and increase the public’s understanding of environmental issues. It’s a job that seems to get harder each day, with newsroom budget cuts and threats to journalists’ safety.

The Revelator talked with Subramanian about the challenges and opportunities environmental journalists face today, and how to deal with an inbox full of bad news every morning.

As president of an organization that helps support environmental journalists, what’s most concerning for you right now?

A number of things. We’re seeing more restrictions domestically in terms of press freedoms and access to information. SEJ has been really active working to defend the Freedom of Information Act.

Journalist and SEJ president Meera Subramanian. Photo by Ashley Garmon

And then there are safety issues for journalists. On the international level, it’s a frightening time. People who are covering the environment are increasingly being targeted by governments. This is happening online in terms of social media harassment, doxing and that kind of activity. (Editor’s note: Shortly after this interview, the Department of Justice announced arrests of violent extremists in four states who had made threats against American journalists.)

But it’s more than that. Just last month SEJ was writing letters to help free a Mongabay editor who was detained in Indonesia. And you’re hearing about journalists, some of them not just being detained, but being murdered, for their activity exposing environmental stories. So there’s personal-safety issues for journalists.

I think the other huge challenge is that just being a journalist has always been demanding and financially challenging. Now more than ever. We also have a 24-7 news cycle you’re constantly responding to. It’s harder to do the slow-burn stories — the stories that are not as immediate as the entire continent of Australia being on fire but are just as critical to put those stories into context.

What do you see as some opportunities?

I feel like we’re at a very interesting point because the climate change issue is affecting so many realms. People are thinking about covering energy and the environment in a very different way than they did even five years ago.

There’s a lot of opportunity there in terms of other beats that are not traditionally thinking about the environment. There’s climate fiction happening in the arts section. The business pages are writing about BlackRock divesting. There are journalists who didn’t do environmental stories before and now they do. I think that’s really positive.

It seems like every week we read stories about newspapers shutting down, layoffs and consolidation in the media industry. What are the risks to our understanding of environmental issues?

Shrinking newsrooms and these expansive news deserts are getting even worse. The mission of SEJ is to inform the public on environmental issues and to keep them engaged. And that can be challenging when there are newsrooms in particular states that don’t have a single environmental reporter.

But when there are these news deserts, hopefully journalists who wouldn’t normally be thinking about environmental issues can come to SEJ and can find the resources to figure out how to cover those stories better.

I’ve also seen a lot of responses to the news deserts. The Knight Foundation is putting money into getting people in newsrooms. SEJ has the Fund for Environmental Journalism to support journalists who would otherwise not have the funding or the institutional publishing support to do these stories.

Each time there seems to be a crisis within journalism, there are creative responses that rise up to try to deal with it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re fundamentally gaining ground in terms of getting good, robust journalism out there in the world. But people are still trying to figure out new models to make this work.

I think that there has to be a recognition that there will need to be a continual process of being creative, of figuring out what works and what doesn’t. And then don’t get too used to it, because it will change.

As environmental journalists we constantly face bad news, and this can be emotionally tough, as The Revelator has covered recently. Do you feel the weight of that?

Yeah, I feel it. I’ve been amazed at how much I’m hearing it from other people as well.

I’m teaching now, so I’m also hearing it from my students who are 20 years old and they’ve got a lot more life ahead of them than I do. And it’s looking really precarious in many respects. If you have watched the lack of action happening for decades, it’s totally understandable that they don’t have much faith that something is going to shift.

But on the other hand, there’s also been incredible activism coming from the younger generation in terms of just getting engaged with these issues. And I’m completely impressed with how many of my students are interested in journalism and are eager to do it, despite the challenges.

I feel like there’s a whole new generation of journalists who are coming up who are thinking about these issues in a different way than prior generations. They are thinking about how it’s not just a science issue or a policy issue. But it’s about human rights and equity. They’re thinking about all these much more integrated ways of looking at a problem. That gives me great hope.

What drives you to keep doing this work?

It can be hard staying up to date on all the information. And it’s mostly bad news, pretty much every morning, in your inbox. So that’s not easy.

But I feel like this story is really the story of our lifetime and our planet. It’s the story that crosses every boundary that we humans have artificially put upon the world. Anybody who can be engaged in dealing with it, on any level, should do that. And so, being a journalist, I feel it’s my responsibility to tell these stories.

Last Chance to Voice Support for Key Environmental Law

The Trump administration wants to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, a move that would silence community criticism of destructive projects and give more power to industry.

One of America’s primary environmental and community health laws is under attack.

For half a century, the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, has effectively protected air, water, forests, and the health and vitality of countless communities. But sweeping changes proposed by the Trump administration would eviscerate the law’s implementation by undermining environmental protections, public health, and citizen input on local projects.

A public comment period about the proposed changes is open through March 10, 2020.

NEPA was signed by Republican President Richard Nixon 50 years ago, at a time of startling environmental degradation. New York City suffered fatal smog episodes, California’s scenic beaches were fouled by oil, and Midwest rivers burst into flames from chemical pollution. “Freeway revolts” erupted as interstate highway construction sliced through communities and landscapes.

When Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson described these conditions in February 1969, while introducing NEPA to Congress, he said lax federal policy allowed “haphazard urban growth, the loss of open spaces…deforestation, faltering transportation systems, a proliferation of pesticides and chemicals” and other problems harmful to the public interest.

Urged by a concerned public, Jackson and other legislators negotiated the nation’s first comprehensive environmental policy. NEPA passed the Senate unanimously and faced only 15 opposing votes in the House. At its 1970 signing, President Nixon called it an opportunity to reclaim the nation’s environmental health. Since then more than 100 nations have emulated the law.

NEPA greatly improved government transparency and accountability. It required federal agencies to first review environmental and human impacts before beginning projects needing government funds, permits or other support. The process, in the form of an environmental impact statement for the largest projects, applied to highways, airports, pipelines and many actions affecting public lands. For the first time officials had to analyze a range of project alternatives and ensure community input through public hearings and comment periods.

NEPA’s results are written across today’s landscape. Highway upgrades, wildfire mitigations, power plant expansions, and proposals for mining and grazing on public lands — among thousands of other projects — have moved forward, but often with public health and environmental mitigations gained through NEPA reviews.

And the law has never been more relevant. In my home state of Alaska, NEPA is enmeshed in several high-profile public lands debates, including Trump administration efforts to increase old-growth logging on the Tongass National Forest, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and pave the way for the massive Pebble Mine in the salmon-rich Bristol Bay region.

No doubt NEPA presents a bureaucratic hurdle for industry, as environmental reviews cost time and money. And few deny there’s room for improvement in implementing NEPA. But Trump’s proposal overwhelmingly tilts the NEPA process in favor of industry, while curtailing public participation. An extreme example in the new rules allows companies to conduct environmental reviews for their own projects, weakening the role of federal biologists and others trained to fairly consider the public’s interest.

Public participation would also be undermined by allowing officials to dismiss citizen comments lacking scientific references and other technical requirements. This puts lay people at a disadvantage. Here in Alaska, as in other parts of the country, it would leave no room for input from indigenous people and others raising cultural values or traditional ecological knowledge. This disservice to communities is also a lost opportunity, as citizen input can improve project design.

The new rules would also arbitrarily limit the timelines and number of pages for environmental reviews, forcing agencies to rush projects affecting drinking water, endangered species and other complex matters. And by shrinking the scope of reviews, the administration would allow industry and government to ignore issues tied to biodiversity and climate change, essential considerations for the welfare of today’s young people.

Trump claims the proposal benefits “new roads, bridges, tunnels, [and] highways,” aligning with an industry narrative that NEPA is somehow responsible for the nation’s aging infrastructure. But the comments ignore the proposal’s broader impact of gutting oversight on fossil fuel pipelines, fracking, offshore drilling and other projects deserving careful analysis. After losing dozens of court cases due to shoddy environmental reviews of such projects, the administration now seeks to hobble the law.

Today’s environmental concerns dwarf the conditions that in 1970 inspired NEPA. Plastics pollution, declining forest health, failing biodiversity and of course climate change are dire problems affecting all Americans, but young people, minorities and low-income communities are especially vulnerable. We need environmental and public health safeguards more than ever, not a return to the bad old days of a half-century ago.

The public can learn more about the NEPA changes and submit comments here. And we should continue to speak out about the changes after the public comment period ends. The Trump administration’s proposal is an attempt to silence our voice; we should make sure to tell them how we feel about that.

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.

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

Noise pollution has harmed species across the planet. Could social recordings help bring them back to their habitats?

It’s a quiet May morning on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. We’re high on a cliff inside the fences of the Nihoku Ecosystem Restoration Project, with only the sound of the wind rushing past our ears and the crash of waves breaking on the shoreline far beneath. Only the slightest hints of animal cries reach our ears — until ecologist Lindsay Young turns on a loudspeaker. Then the air fills with the breathy squawks and raucous chirps of seabirds.

It’s hardly Barry White, but for Pacific seabirds, it’s music to their ears.

“These guys are so cued into the sound, at our other sites we have birds mounting the speakers, doing bad things to them,” Young says as she tromps back up the hill from the loudspeaker.

As the executive director of Pacific Rim Conservation, Young has made it her mission to protect endangered seabirds. On this site that means Newell’s shearwaters and Hawaiian petrels, known as ʻaʻo and ʻuaʻu on the islands. Both nocturnal species have declined due to predation by invasive species and the lure of artificial lighting, which often causes fatal collisions with power lines and other urban obstacles.

Young’s organization and a handful of others began working on the Nihoku nesting site in 2014, after all the resident birds had been wiped out. They started by constructing a predator-proof fence to prevent everything from mice to feral cats from getting inside. The team also planted native shrubs and installed 50 artificial burrows to enhance the habitat. Then, beginning in 2015, they used helicopters to translocate chicks from mountain colonies down to Nihoku, where they raised them on a slurry of squid and fish, hoping the chicks would imprint on the night sky from this new location and return to it in three to five years when they reached breeding age.

But in the meantime, the conservation team saw the need to lure additional adult birds to this newly predator-free habitat.

There was just one problem: silence.

Hawaiian seabirds are social animals — they need to know the party has started before they’re willing to settle down in a new colony. With no adult birds at Nihoku, passing birds had no one to listen to and invite them in.

Enter the seabird stereo. It plays every night, sundown to sunup, from March to November, and is audible up to about a half-mile away.

And it works, to a degree. When I followed up with Young nine months after our trek to the site, she told me that some other bird species have been attracted to the site, but not the target birds — at least, not yet.

“Most seabird species nest in multi-species colonies,” she explains, “so I think regardless of what species calls you’re playing, it is going to be attractive on some level to closely related species.” One of the species that did come to Nihoku, wedge-tailed shearwaters, is more abundant than Newell’s shearwaters, so Young says it’s not surprising that they might arrive sooner.

She’s still hopeful the target species will arrive, lured in by the daily broadcasts. In the meantime it’s a waiting game: When will any of the several dozen chicks that have fledged here return to look for mates? Young’s listening for their calls.

Echoes and Questions

Nikoku and other degraded habitats are the flip side of the story of noise pollution. While human-generated sounds have harmed wildlife and ecosystems around the planet, the absence of natural sounds also causes cascading ecological problems.

Scientists around the world have started to investigate the soundscapes — or lack of them — for a range of species, and they’re realizing just how crucial critter calls are for healthy ecosystems. Planting native vegetation and removing sources of pollution aren’t necessarily enough to get an ecosystem functioning again. For that wildlife needs to fulfill key ecological roles such as pollination and seed dispersal — and eating, or being eaten by, other animals.

Darren Proppe has been investigating the role of sound in habitat restoration for years. He’s currently the research director at the Wild Basin Creative Research Center of St. Edward’s University in Texas, but he previously studied songbirds in Michigan and the effect that birdcall recordings might have on conservation efforts.

“One of the challenges that drove this whole thing initially is that there were areas where people had restored habitat and it looked great, but it was left vacant,” Proppe says.

Previous research had already established that broadcasting sounds of bird calls could attract individual songbirds to a specific area. Proppe wanted to test whether that technique could be expanded for a larger number of species. In a key 2015 study, his research group used recordings of six different songbirds in northern Michigan to see whether playing those calls together would attract more birds to a given tract of forest. The speakers, camouflaged as rocks and powered by solar-charged batteries, broadcast the calls on daily playback loops between May and July.

An ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapillus), one of Proppe’s target species. Photo: Grayson Smith/USFWS

The study was a resounding success. Multiple species nested in higher densities near the playback speakers than in other parts of the forest. The only problem was that birds of related species whose calls weren’t broadcast seemed to be avoiding the areas with the speakers, perhaps because they feared the area was already overpopulated by competitors.

In addition to understanding the reasons for that avoidance, Proppe says there are plenty of other questions that need to be answered. Researchers don’t know what happens when the recordings are no longer played, or whether there might be ecosystem-wide impacts they haven’t yet noticed. They also want to make sure that birds moving into the sound-scaped environments are also doing well over the long term, that the habitat provides them with the right living conditions.

And they want to find out what these sounds mean for the next generation of birds.

“What we’re working on now is, what does this do for reproduction? This is breeding season. If we bring them into certain areas, do they reproduce poorly? If that’s the case, this isn’t a conservation methodology we want to use.”

The Sounds Heard ‘Round the World

Birds aren’t the only species that could benefit from this emerging research. The possibility of using sound as a conservation tool is being explored across species and habitats. In Kenya researchers have used broadcasts of hyena and lion vocalizations to draw the carnivores to certain locations in order to more easily conduct population surveys. A similar technique was used in Zimbabwe to count African wild dogs.

And more recently, biologists in Australia have turned to a different medium to fill with sound: the ocean.

“We’ve recently discovered that as coral reefs degrade, their biological soundscape gets quieter,” writes marine scientist Timothy Gordon, with the University of Exeter, by email.

Because some fish species spend parts of their life in the open ocean, they need a way to eventually navigate back to the reef. That’s where sound comes in, and why it’s such a problem when cyclones or mass bleaching cause reefs to empty out.

“The animals that usually make a symphony of crackles, snaps, pops, grunts and whoops are dead, and in their absence the reef turns ghostly quiet,” Gordon says. “This is tragic to hear, and also concerning — without these sounds, there’s a real danger that fishes can no longer hear their way home.”

Gordon and his colleagues wanted to see if they could develop a solution for this problem. Working on the northern Great Barrier Reef, they used underwater loudspeakers to broadcast the sounds of healthy reefs onto coral-rubble patch reefs. Unlike the environment hosting birds, coral reefs are filled with a jumble of sounds. Gordon says it would be almost impossible to disentangle the sounds to target one individual species, since healthy reefs feature a cacophony of sounds (he compared the noise of moving sea urchins to “sizzling bacon”).

🐠🎧😢The sound of the dying #GreatBarrierReef is the saddest thing you’ll hear today. 🎧🐠😢

Our new #openaccess @PNASNews study shows that Nemo isn’t hearing home anymore, as #coralreefs turn eerily quiet. https://t.co/Q2Agm96zJf @ExeterMarine @UofE_Research @OurBluePlanet pic.twitter.com/pOzPlQa09q

— Tim Gordon (@TimACGordon) April 30, 2018

And it worked: Compared to the parts of the reef without any fishy noises being projected onto them, the artificially loud reefs doubled in overall abundance and had a 50% greater species richness.

“That’s good news for reef restoration,” Gordon says, since previous research has shown that healthy fish populations can help facilitate recovery of damaged reefs. “At the stage in life that fish are being attracted back to reef habitat from the open ocean, many species are very site-attached and territorial. That means if we can persuade them to settle somewhere, and they’re able to survive, they are likely to stay put.”

Ghost Sounds

The biggest challenge with all these cases is the lack of high-quality habitat in the first place. Neither Gordon nor Young were particularly optimistic about using animal soundscapes as a panacea for an enormous, multifaceted problem.

“No reef restoration can work without simultaneous dramatic action on carbon emissions to reduce global warming and prevent further damage,” Gordon says. “But if we can limit our emissions to stop ocean warming, new understanding like this gives us a real chance of helping our heavily damaged reefs to recover.”

For Hawaii’s seabirds, Young says, the solution must go beyond the sounds of a restored habitat. Although they’re making progress with expanding the number of safe spaces for the birds, and have even created a website to catalogue seabird restoration and social attraction recordings from around the world, they still have to deal with the predators and artificial lights that decimated bird populations in the first place.

“The restoration only creates another safe site, it doesn’t address why they’re going extinct on their colonies,” Young says. “We’re creating a new safe space for them, but it doesn’t mean the threat doesn’t exist at all the other colonies. And until we really get that addressed, it’s not going to be optimistic.”

Water Conflicts Will Intensify. Can We Predict the Worst Problems Before Conditions Boil Over?

A new online resource combines economic and environmental data to help prevent deadly conflict. It could be a vital tool in the age of climate change.

In 2015 an estimated 1.8 million migrants crossed into the European Union, fleeing countries gripped by violence, political upheaval and resource scarcity like Syria, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Eritrea and Nigeria. Many made their trips in flimsy, overcrowded boats. Thousands drowned along the way. E.U. governments struggled to deal with the influx of new arrivals, and the confluence of humanitarian and political crises that resulted — including a surge in right-wing anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Advance warning, experts say, could have helped world governments and aid workers anticipate and adapt for these problems, and probably save lives in the process. But how do we predict future conflicts on a rapidly warming planet?

The Netherlands, which has experienced sharp rises in both immigration and far-right populism, decided to try to answer that question by funding a project to model which areas of the world were likely to face upcoming conflicts.

The result — the Water, Peace and Security Global Early Warning Tool — was released in December. It’s an online interface that analyzes data on violent conflicts, as well as dozens of economic, environmental and social indicators, to help pinpoint hotspots where worsening conditions — like food shortages or drought — are likely to shift to violent conflict within the year.

“We used a number of traditional indicators of predicting conflicts, such as economic strength, political, stability, demographic trends and past conflict, which is actually a predictor of future conflict,” says Charles Iceland, director of global and national water initiatives at the World Resources Institute. The organization partnered with IHE Delft, Deltares, The Hague Center for Strategic Studies, International Alert and Wetlands International to develop the tool.

refugee camp — A camp hosting Syrian refugees in Turkey. Photo © European Union 2016 – European Parliament, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

When it comes to determining where problems could erupt, water is a key part of the equation.

“We put in a number of water-risk variables on the assumption that no conflict is caused by water alone,” Iceland says, “but water may be present as an exacerbating or contributing factor along with a lot of other features of society.”

Most recently, drought was one of the driving factors in the unrest that led to Syria’s civil war and increasing destabilization in Mali. It was also an underlying contributor to the deadly conflict in Darfur in 2003 and has bolstered the efforts of terrorist organizations like Boko Haram.

The link between water stress and other resource pressures, Iceland warms, is becoming more acute as global environmental crises worsen.

“When you look at the big picture, we’re consuming a lot more resources now then are replenished by our natural systems,” he says. “Just that alone is enough to cause a lot of problems. And then on top of that you’ve got a changing climate that’s further exacerbating the situation.”

The links between climate change and global security are fast becoming a top concern.

A new report released this week by U.S. national security, military and intelligence professionals at the Center for Climate and Security mapped future climate change scenarios and their effects on security. Not surprisingly, the findings are troubling. Competition for dwindling resources, they predict, will increase social tensions and could topple already-fragile states. Natural disasters, social unrest and shrinking economic opportunities will push people from their homes and heighten migration pressures.

The report found that “even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades… Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century.”

Iceland hopes that the early warning tool could help play a role in averting some crises that could come from these and other scenarios that lead to violent conflict.

filling water jugs — Habiba Hossen collects water from a rehabilitated distribution point in Ethiopia during a drought in 2012. Photo by Pablo Tosco / Oxfam, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But it’s a complicated picture.

“It would be wonderful to have a perfect tool to predict something as inherently complex as violent conflict,” says Peter Gleick, president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, which along with Oregon State University and New America are also affiliated partners of the project. “We’ll never have such a tool. But the more information we have about the many factors that contribute to violence the better, especially given the new, real and growing threat of climate disruption.”

How successful the resource ultimately is also depends on how, and by whom, it’s used. Simply knowing where trouble is brewing is only the first step. Iceland says the resource is geared for decision-makers like foreign-affairs ministries and intelligence departments, as well as development and disaster-relief experts at non-governmental organizations.

“A lot of these governments and non-government entities could use this information to try to figure out where the next problems can occur and get ready for it,” he says. “Or the global community could approach those national leaders in developing countries [where problems are predicted] and say, ‘We see that you’re likely to have a water-related problem in the near future, what are some strategies that we could develop with you to try to address this problem?’”

The system isn’t just available to diplomats and international NGOs, though — anyone can use it and download relevant data.

“You can look at a lot of other datasets on the website that might be used as contextual information,” says Iceland. “Things like where are the roads and reservoirs with respect to predicted conflict. Or where the population is very dense in relation to these predicted conflict areas.”

One area currently on the map as an emerging area of concern, he says, is Iran. The country has a dry environment with a rapidly growing population and is working toward being food self-sufficient.

“But they really don’t have enough water to do that and so a lot of these lakes and rivers are drying up,” says Iceland. That’s forcing people to abandon farms to move to cities, and those who’ve remained in agricultural communities are beginning to protest the government’s water allocations.

Other areas of concern include the eastern coast of South Africa and southern Iraq, he says, but it’s too soon yet to show any on-the-ground results from the early warning tool there or elsewhere.

Even so, the resource has started to reveal things that could soon help mitigate future conflicts or allow communities to adapt to upcoming problems.

“This new effort has already given us insight into areas where more efforts at smart water policies, improved management and environmental diplomacy are needed,” says Gleick.

And the more data we collect, the more we’ll be able to learn.

“I hope and expect the tool to improve over time,” he adds.

‘Devourer’ Fungus Could Wipe Out Salamanders in the Southeast

Scientists are hoping to head off an extinction crisis in Appalachia, a hotspot of amphibian biodiversity.

When Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, emerged in the mid-twentieth century, scientists and conservationists watched helplessly as the fungus swept like a biblical flood through amphibian populations across the planet. Commonly known as chytrid, the disease spread rapidly and crippled nearly every new amphibian species it encountered, exhibiting a particular violence towards frogs and toads. It soon claimed 90 species and affected nearly 500 others.

Chytrid hit so hard and spread so quickly that by the time the public knew what it was around the late 1980s, there was little chance to save many of these affected species. For that reason, some have called Bd an ecological supervillain. Others refer to it as the doomsday fungus. Both monikers, regrettably, tend more toward fact than hyperbole.

Today, we’re on the brink of another outbreak.

As Bd continues its rampage among toads and frogs, a new insidious threat has begun to emerge, this time targeting a different class of amphibians: salamanders. In 2013, scientists described a second species of chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or Bsal, when it arrived in Europe from Southeast Asia and spread to the vulnerable fire salamanders of the Netherlands. Living at the edge of its geographic range and confined to small populations with low genetic diversity, this species stood as a perfect target for the fungus. In three years, fire salamander numbers declined by 96 percent. The scientific name of the fungus, which means “salamander devourer” in Latin, rang true: It was indeed the devourer of salamanders.

In the southeastern United States, a hotspot of salamander biodiversity, the amphibians are safe from this new chytrid fungus, for now. But as scientists watch the demise of the fire salamanders from across the sea, many of them agree: Bsal is on its way.

“We have to think of it as more of a matter of when it gets here than if,” says Debra Miller, a professor at the University of Tennessee and a co-leader of the disease task team with Southeast Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation. “With all the salamander species we have throughout Appalachia, we could lose a huge portion of them.”

salamander pond — An ephemeral pond in Pigeon Mountain, Georgia with high numbers of larval salamanders. Photo by Seánín Óg, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Roughly 20 percent of the world’s salamander species live in the American Southeast. Many of them make their home nowhere else on the planet. The region contains numerous examples of isolated species living in small populations, vulnerable to a quick extinction with any sort of disruption to their health or environment much like the fire salamander. There’s the Pigeon Mountain salamander, for example, endemic to a single mountaintop in the state of Georgia, and the Black Warrior waterdog, found only within the Black Warrior River Basin in Alabama. There’s also the South Mountain gray-cheeked salamander, the Peaks of Otter salamander, the Caddo Mountain salamander — and the list goes on.

It’s the same environmental anomalies that make the Appalachian region such a perfect home for salamander biodiversity that have also led to this sort of speciation and separation. Over the millions of years salamanders have evolved in the Southeast, the various mountain ranges and elevation gradients have acted as natural barriers to connectivity. Certain species prefer lower elevations while others prefer higher, and this separation has led to the emergence of unique populations in isolated regions.

But that speciation makes some of these species particularly vulnerable. Any small disturbance here — habitat destruction, climate change, or, perhaps most menacingly, an invasive fungal infection like Bsal — could spell immediate doom.

As the advent of Bsal approaches, many scientists are preparing for its onslaught. Having learned harsh lessons from Bd, they carry a haunting sense of déjà vu. But they also see this next wave of chytrid as a second chance at saving amphibians and preempting another extinction crisis. “When Bd first hit, we didn’t know anything,” Miller says. “We’re still learning, and now investigating Bsal as well.”

Mystery still shrouds much of the biology and virulence of these diseases, and therefore inhibits attempts to create effective treatment protocols. This lack of understanding is one of the primary reasons that Bd has been so destructive to amphibians, and why Bsal would be too.

Ordinarily, the response to this sort of marauding infection would be to secure a captive population of the imperiled species in order to shield at least some portion from the disease, and to enable the possibility of reintroduction once the environment can again support them. But Miller is quick to point out that captive propagation programs — often referred to as ex situ conservation — are notoriously difficult to carry out for even a single species, not to mention the dozens that would be impacted simultaneously if Bsal were to reach the Southeast.

They have certainty proved challenging in the case of toads and frogs at risk from Bd. “We lost a lot of species because we didn’t know how to successfully care for and breed these animals in captivity,” Miller says. In the case of vulnerable salamanders, she suggests that we learn from the past and use the time we have to prepare ahead of Bsal’s arrival.

“I don’t think it would be a far-fetched idea at all to have something in place to do [ex situ],” says Miller. “And we don’t need to wait until it gets so close that it’s a last resort.”

There exists a tendency in conservation to rarely initiate ex situ programs until the threat has already begun taking its toll. For a menace like Bsal — one that we know is coming — a last resort measure could perhaps be better seen as a preemptive defense against an imminent onslaught.

“When we think of conservation, we think of intact systems and wild animals in those systems thriving,” says Kat Diersen, Southeast representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “Ex situ conservation is not that. Ex situ is Noah’s Ark.”

The Yonahlossee salamander is found in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Photo by Marshal Hedin, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Diersen acknowledges the difficulty in breaking from these traditional views, but also recognizes the unique danger Bsal poses to the vulnerable biodiversity of southeastern salamanders. “These are animals that are challenged on multiple fronts,” she says. “Their adaptive capacity, their representation, their redundancy and their resiliency are all hugely negatively impacted. For those species, the introduction of a disease? It could be an overnight wipe-out,” she adds, snapping her fingers, her eyes cold, her face set grimly. “For most species, ex situ conservation would normally be considered extreme measures, but for southeastern salamanders it’s going to need to be a foundational element of our strategy for saving them.”

Ex situ conservation requires huge amounts of money, capacity, collaboration and commitment — and belief, at the end of the day, that these expenditures are worthwhile and that the salamanders of the Southeast are worth investing in. This shift toward preemptive conservation requires a fundamental change in practices, fueled by an influx of public support.

Even if this support materializes, realistically, these efforts will be confined to the most vulnerable species. And while screening efforts are in place to prevent Bsal’s arrival through the pet trade, they are admittedly inadequate to reliably stop the pathogen in its tracks.

That’s why other conservation avenues must also be pursued if we are to become truly ready for Bsal’s eventual landfall. It is this understanding that drives the work of Diersen and her partners.

“These diseases are going to come,” says Diersen. “The best thing we can do for species in the wild that are facing these threats from all directions is to give them the resiliency they need to bounce back from a systemic event like the introduction of disease. If we can connect, protect and restore their habitat, their overall adaptive capacity will be greater. We know what these creatures need: protection, restoration, connectivity. Those are the key.”

This story was reprinted from Earth Island Journal. You can find the original here.

Could a California Law Help Save America’s Public Lands Throughout the West?

The state used an innovative new law to fight back against the Trump administration’s expansion of oil and gas drilling — and that could provide a model for the rest of the country.

Could a little-known bill that recently passed in California serve as a model to save public lands throughout the American West from destructive oil and gas drilling?

The innovative bill, an amendment to California’s Public Resources Code, goes by the inauspicious name of AB 342. That may not sound like much, but it accomplishes a lot.

The bill came as a response to an April 2019 announcement that the Trump administration planned to open more than 1 million acres of federal public lands in California to fracking and oil drilling. AB 342 became law this past October, a month after California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a limited moratorium on new fracking operations in the state, an action that lacked authority over public lands.

AB 342 closed that gap by making it illegal to build new pipelines and other infrastructure on state lands. Since any extractive industries operating on federal land would require infrastructure to move drilled oil and gas from public lands, this effectively blocks the new drilling permitted by the Trump administration.

“We need to fight the Trump administration’s plan to frack and drill for oil in some of our most beautiful national and state parks,” says state assembly member Al Muratsuchi, who sponsored the bill.

Sequoia National Park, an area now at risk from fracking and oil drilling. Photo: Matt Machin (CC BY 2.0)

Fracking is a notoriously involved process, requiring miles of pipelines, specialized equipment and pollution-heavy processing facilities. The environmental nonprofit Earthworks describes fracking as a “vicious cycle” because after the infrastructure is in place oil and gas companies can ramp up production even more to offset the costs of building it.

Muratsuchi says he was alarmed by the rapid expansion of fracking in his other jurisdictions and wanted to design a bill that would curb the Trump administration’s power.

“They have already approved new drilling and pipelines in the wildflower rich Carrizo Plain National Monument near San Luis Obispo,” he says. “By prohibiting the issuance of new oil infrastructure leases on state lands, AB 342 is sending a clear message to Trump that we will fight to protect these beautiful lands for current and future generations.”

Beyond California

Experts say California’s bill works creatively to stop the exploitation of public lands and could offer an important model for other Western states, like Colorado and Utah, where exploitation of public, federal lands has caused tension.

“By prohibiting new infrastructure on state and public lands near these protected federal lands, other states could also safeguard federally protected land and national monuments within their borders,” Muratsuchi explains.

The progressive advocacy group Voices for Progress helped to pass a precursor bill to AB 342, AB 1775, which applied to offshore drilling in federal waters, and supported the new bill as well.

“Because of the cost-prohibitive and impractical nature of alternatives, these policies strongly disincentivize and effectively prevent drilling, with all of its inherent risks, in these delicate and important natural areas,” says Sandra Fluke, the group’s president. “We’ve already seen this policy approach spread to other states as a way of preventing offshore drilling … so I certainly hope other states will also utilize the model regarding federal public lands.”

Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director at WildEarth Guardians, says his group is pushing the governor of Colorado to take a similar approach.

“We want to see him put his foot down on some of these plans being developed for public lands in Colorado,” Nichols says.

WildEarth Guardians’ current strategy involves advocating for the governor to use the state’s existing climate plan to leverage the federal government (like California, Colorado has far more stringent regulations on fossil fuels than the federal government). The Bureau of Land Management is considering opening vast swathes of western Colorado to oil and gas extraction, to the dismay of conservation groups in the area.

“Federal law states that these plans have to be consistent with state level laws and regulations that deal with environment, health and safety,” Nichols explains. “These plans that the BLM are considering would cause a massive increase in fracking on our public lands, which is totally inconsistent with our state climate initiative.”

Colorado protest — A Colorado fracking protest. Photo: John Duffy (CC BY 2.0)

Although the approach might vary slightly, Nichols says the core idea is the same: States can and should use their authority to protect public lands, even federal ones.

“It’s absolutely along the same line of thinking as Gov. Newsom,” he says. “How can the state use its land, its regulatory authority, its power in some way to try and slow, and maybe derail, the Trump administration?”

Fights over oil and gas extraction on public lands have exploded across the West since President Trump’s election. Sometimes anti-fracking advocates have been able to get federal judges on their side, as in Wyoming, where a U.S. judge blocked expansion of fracking on public lands after he ruled that the administration had not adequately assessed environmental impact.

But where that hasn’t been successful, bills modelled after AB 342 could be another avenue for change, as Fluke and Nichols explain. Over 90% of federal public lands are in the West, but there are still significant state controlled holdings in those areas. If state agencies are not collaborating with the administration, ramping up fracking further would be difficult.

Nichols thinks that AB 342’s impact would go much further if western states come together to advocate against the Trump administration.

That’s especially important, Nichols says, because California’s oil and gas industry, while extensive, is smaller than the ones in other western states like Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico.

“When you think about air and water,” he says, “it doesn’t mind political boundaries, one region, one area. So, we need to get western states coming together to hold the line there.”

EPA Enforcement in Distress — and More Trouble Is Brewing

The White House has now quietly and ominously asked polluters to help identify new opportunities for deregulation.

In recent months the Trump administration has intensified its assault on federal environmental safeguards on several fronts. It has proposed drastic reductions in the scope of protections against water and air pollution, lagged in the cleanup of hazardous waste contamination, allowed the continued marketing of toxic herbicides, narrowed the scope of needed environmental impact reviews, ignored and undermined legitimate scientific studies and findings, and dismantled government attempts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.

Every bit as disturbing, but much less discussed, is a discouraging deterioration in the rigor of EPA’s once-effective enforcement program, which identifies and punishes polluters that skirt federal regulations.

The agency’s latest enforcement statistics reflect a dramatic decline in injunctive relief — the amount of money EPA-enforcement activities compelled polluters to commit to spending to correct their environmental violations and maintain compliance with the law. That crucial metric fell to its lowest level in 15 years, from $20.6 billion in 2017 to just $3.95 billion in 2018.

Similarly, statistics released recently by the U.S. Department of Justice indicate that the number of environmental criminal cases referred by EPA in 2018 declined to a shocking 20-year low. Though the agency’s enforcement efforts did have some legitimate successes in 2018 — particularly with respect to the control of lead contamination in public housing — the overall decline in enforcement still stands out.

EPA rally — American Federation of Government Employees rally outside of EPA headquarters. Photo: Chelsea Bland (CC BY 2.0)

EPA’s current enforcement strategy has emphasized the agency’s role in providing technical assistance to state environmental-enforcement programs, purportedly as an effective substitute for assertive federal enforcement efforts. However, most states can’t fill that federal role: Over the past decade numerous state environmental agencies have experienced major budget cuts. These cuts forced the elimination of 4,400 state-agency staff positions, and many of those layoffs have had a markedly detrimental effect on state-level environmental enforcement.

On top of this, a good number of states simply lack the political will to pursue meaningful enforcement actions against polluters. Making things even worse, the EPA has completely dropped its traditional oversight of state enforcement programs — a policy change that appears to have bolstered the resolve of anti-safeguard states to eliminate every vestige of environmental enforcement.

Is the worst yet to come? Near the end of last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced an additional gift to polluters and pro-industry ideologues when it issued a notice inviting the public “to identify additional reforms that will ensure adequate due process in regulatory enforcement.” The plain premise of this request — which, like the enforcement decline, fell under the radar — is that administrative enforcement poses a threat to the constitutional rights of regulated parties and is thus in need of major reform.

Discarded pesticide cans in 1972. Photo: Gene Daniels/EPA

In the case of the EPA, certainly, this premise is entirely false. There is simply no legitimate reason to suspect that EPA enforcement practices and procedures deny due process to any party.

OMB’s solicitation of comments is clearly designed to collect exaggerated regulatory “horror stories” from well-paid lawyers representing polluters and other scofflaws. Their claims may overstate the harm to their clients while omitting mention of relevant ameliorating factors.

Unfortunately it seems likely that President Trump’s administration will use the one-sided “data” OMB collects from industry lawyers to further decimate enforcement at the EPA and other agencies and make it practically impossible to successfully pursue more than a tiny number of administrative enforcement actions.

To the extent that comes to pass, the EPA and its sister agencies will be deprived of a much-needed and valuable enforcement tool to redress environmental pollution and other wrongdoing — and in the process, American citizens’ health, safety and well-being will suffer needless but very real damage.

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.

10 Species Climate Change Could Push to Extinction

From the mountains of Ethiopia to the ice floes of the Arctic, numerous species could be pushed to the brink. Here’s how.

Polar bears are often seen as the poster child for climate change — and for good reason. The charismatic Arctic dwellers depend on dwindling sea ice to survive, and their plight has caught the world’s attention.

Sadly they’re far from the only species at risk from a warming planet.

“There is growing evidence that climate change will become one of the major drivers of species extinctions in the 21st century,” reported the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which manages the global Red List of threatened species.

Scientists have found that half of all mammals and a quarter of birds listed as threatened have already been harmed by climate change.

For at least one, the changes have been too much.

In 2019 the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent that lived only on an island in the Great Barrier Reef that was swamped by rising seas, earned the unfortunate distinction of being the first mammal declared extinct due to climate change.

It won’t be the last.

Climate change is shrinking the range of species like the American pika, which may soon run out of suitable habitat. For green sea turtles, hotter sand in which eggs incubate has already started to skew the sex of hatchlings. Females outnumber males by 99% in some places.

Other species are finding less food, more competition for limited resources, or inhospitable conditions to which they can’t adapt fast enough.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, many more species will join the Bramble Cay melomys.

Watch the video below to learn about 10 species we could lose.