Picking Up the Pieces: My Search and Rescue Mission for Fallen Songbirds

Identifying the shocking number of birds killed when they collide into local buildings was just the first step toward saving them.

The early-morning air felt cool and refreshing on my skin. I glanced above my head at a towering maple tree and saw an enthusiastic American robin, his red chest puffed out proudly as he broadcasted his joyful song over the sprawling York University campus in Toronto.

But the cheerful spring atmosphere did nothing to ease the sense of dread creeping up into my throat. My palms were already damp, and my heart raced, as I walked briskly up the pathway toward the inevitable. I strode past the back entrance of the 14-story student residence and the transparent floor-to-ceiling glass panels of the Bethune walkway came into view.

Just short of the entrance to the walkway — a walled-in pathway connecting two buildings — I stopped and carefully scanned the ground in front of me. I almost didn’t see it, but I had done this dozens of times and had developed a sharp eye. Partially obscured by the greenery carpeting the unkempt garden, a rusty-colored bird struggled helplessly beneath the glass, unable to put any weight on its legs and too dizzy to fly. The morning’s victim was a wood thrush, a threatened species in Canada.

The thrush, like so many before it, had obviously collided with the windows, causing injuries that had, at the very least, incapacitated it.

Window collisions like this are one of the top ways that humans are directly, although unintentionally, killing and injuring huge numbers of birds. And this danger is not isolated to large metropolises like Toronto. Collisions can and do happen anywhere there’s glass, and glass is everywhere. In Canada alone, an estimated 25 million birds die from window collisions each year.

Every one of these birds has a story of risky travel and perseverance that has been cut short in an instant.

As a researcher studying the migratory ecology of songbirds like the wood thrush, I knew what this bird had gone through in its annual cycle before reaching this tragic point. And I would soon learn that a solution was within reach.

The Wood Thrush’s (Final) Journey

Kneeling beside the injured thrush, I couldn’t help but imagine what that bird had endured just to make it to York University.

Only weeks earlier it would have been skulking in the undergrowth of the steamy tropical forests of eastern Nicaragua, feasting and fattening up on insects and ripe fruit. It needed this fuel for what came next: a grueling 24-hour, nonstop flight over 600 miles of unforgiving open water, the Gulf of Mexico. I imagined the faint glow of city lights 3,000 feet below during the wood thrush’s nightly marathon flights; the only sounds in the chilly air were the faint chips of thousands of other little travelers taking advantage of the cover of darkness and a good tailwind. During the 2,500-mile race to its breeding grounds, it might have faced unexpected spring storms and escaped the deadly grasp of hawks and outdoor cats. The sheer strength and determination of this small bird, battling the exhaustion of flying over 150 miles a night, left me awestruck.

wood thrush — Wood thrush by Michael Schraam/USFWS (public domain)

All the risk was for one more chance to raise a family on the summer bounty of food in Ontario’s deciduous forests. Instead the bird lay quivering in a dense tangle of Virginia creeper, barely able to move, its amazing journey cut short by a panel of glass.

I reached into my backpack for a “rescue pack,” a temporary transport carrier consisting of an unwaxed paper bag with a rolled-up tissue inside, sealed with a paper clip. As I gently placed my hands around the helpless bird to transfer it to the paper bag, I noticed a thick bead of blood rapidly collecting on its beak. The clock was ticking.

Ten minutes later I was in the passenger seat en route to Toronto Wildlife Centre, the wood thrush in its paper bag on my lap. My partner, a fellow bird rescuer, was at the wheel and shot me a worried glance. We had made this same harrowing trip too many times to count.

Suddenly I felt a labored shifting of weight inside the bag, and the wood thrush emitted a startlingly loud, gurgling noise. Then the movement stopped.

We rushed through the entrance of Toronto Wildlife Centre just moments later, where the veterinary technician confirmed what we already knew.

The wood thrush was dead.

A Deadly Count, a Painful Mission

This wood thrush’s tragic fate was not unique.

Every spring and fall millions of birds migrate hundreds or even thousands of miles between their southern wintering areas and northern breeding grounds. As their migration routes slowly become clogged with urban development, the small pockets of greenspace, like the woodlots at York University, can be a welcome oasis to birds in desperate search of a place to rest and refuel. Little do these travelers know that they will have to navigate a labyrinth of invisible barriers and deadly reflections, where a single mistake can be fatal.

Since coming to York University in the fall of 2018 to study migratory songbirds, I had been horrified at the sheer number of dead and injured birds I encountered on campus. Seeing the carnage firsthand drove my partner and me to head out early every morning during spring and fall migration to document the lives lost and rescue those we could.

It felt as if we’d been left to pick up the pieces in the lethal aftermath of a destructive fire, but new blazes kept flaring up. Just as I was kneeling over a dead songbird to record my notes, a sharp thud beside me made me turn, where I saw yet another victim, its eyes glazing over as it took its last breath.

From the data we collected, we estimated that around 1,500 birds were killed or injured by buildings on campus every single year. As hard as we tried to rescue the survivors, many times we arrived too late.

What we needed was to prevent these “fires” from starting in the first place.

Our early morning patrols of the campus made it very clear that certain buildings and structures were deadlier than others. For example, the shrubs and fruiting plants in the secluded garden around the Bethune walkway drew birds in with the promise of a quiet, safe place to rest and refuel. Once inside the courtyard, the birds spotted new places to forage, or an escape route from predators, but they couldn’t see the large, transparent panes of glass between them and their refuge.

The layout of the walkway, combined with the large amount of glass and nearby vegetation, made it a death trap.

In contrast to many other conservation issues of our day, the solution to birds colliding with glass is quite simple. If we provide birds with visual cues that a barrier is present, they can avoid a collision. There are a variety of effective, aesthetically pleasing and economical methods already on the market to prevent birds from flying into windows.

But how could I, or anyone else, convince one of the largest universities in Canada, with countless competing priorities for funding, that this was an issue worth addressing? Does the life of a single bird matter enough to act? Do the lives of 1,500 matter? And with dozens of buildings on campus, where could York University even start in helping birds stay safe?

A Proposal — and Progress

Together with my research supervisor, renowned ornithologist Bridget Stutchbury, we offered York University a simple solution.

With the detailed records we had kept during our daily monitoring, we were able to identify which buildings, and specifically which facades of those buildings, caused the most bird deaths. If York University focused on treating these high-priority sites, we said, they could significantly reduce the number of casualties with only a modest investment. We reached out to other environmentally minded faculty and the voice to protect birds on campus quickly turned into a chorus.

The York University administration was sympathetic to our cause, yet no action was taken for months to treat the problem windows. I was heartbroken to be picking up more dead birds that could have been saved.

Then, out of the blue, the university called us in for another meeting. We went in prepared with more evidence to defend the cause. Instead we were met with the announcement that they would implement our plan.

On October 7, 2019, the Bethune walkway became a hive of activity as a group of contractors worked to cover the glass panels with a bird-friendly window treatment. Earlier that morning I’d found a tiny common yellowthroat that had been injured from a collision with these same glass panels. Unlike the wood thrush, this bird survived the trip to Toronto Wildlife Centre and was released days later to continue its journey. Now the closely spaced white dots alert birds to the presence of glass and prevent other birds from meeting the same cruel fate.

treated windows — Bird-friendly window treatment at York University. Photo © Lisa Horn, used with permission

I found no more dead or injured birds at the Bethune walkway that fall.

A year has now passed since York University applied the first of several bird-friendly window treatments. Since then it has retrofitted five more high-priority locations on campus. The thousands of migratory songbirds passing through York University’s gardens and woodlots this October will have a higher chance of safely reaching their winter homes.

And other people can help them stay safe during the rest of their journey.

Make the Case for Change

Addressing the bird-collision problem in new construction — as Toronto and an increasing number of cities now require — is undoubtedly important, but we can’t forget the enormous toll of the millions of buildings already covering the landscape. Buildings like your home, your office, or the ones on your university or corporate campus.

birds buildings — Birds that collided with buildings in Washington, DC. Photo: USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab (public domain)

For anyone hoping to spark change in their community, collecting defensible data on bird collisions in an area is a good first step. Go out early in the day, when collisions are more frequent and before predators can snatch up injured or dead birds. Document the victims. Track where you found them so people can understand which buildings, or sides of buildings, pose the greatest risk. Work with a licensed wildlife-rehabilitation facility to give the survivors a second chance at continuing their journey. Concentrate your efforts during spring and fall, when migratory birds are passing en masse through our cities — and of course, do all of this while ensuring your personal safety.

Then put that information to use. A solid dataset, as we saw, provides fuel for effective advocacy and can help gather a coalition to support positive change. It also allows policymakers to identify the biggest bird-killers, and then to prioritize the right buildings for treatment.

My hope is that more people and institutions will follow this promising model and step up to address the deadly situations we unintentionally created decades ago, before we understood the immense effect buildings are having on bird populations. We all have a part to play in helping these amazing creatures arrive safely to their destinations.

In the meantime I’ll continue to carry around my rescue packs with me wherever I go. Because if my experience has taught me anything, it’s that you can never know when you’ll have the opportunity to save a life.

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.

Previously in The Revelator:

Rehabilitating Injured Wildlife Taught Me to Look at Both Life and Death

From Abundant to Critically Endangered: Shark Species Nearly Vanishes in Just 40 Years

Smalltail shark populations have declined by 90% in Brazil, and new research finds that overfishing has pushed the species perilously close to extinction.

Oh what a difference a few decades make.

Back in in the 1980s and 1990s, a species known as the smalltail shark (Carcharhinus porosus) was one of the most common fish caught off the coast of northern Brazil.

That’s not the case anymore. A new paper by researchers from a trio of Brazilian science institutions calculates that smalltail shark populations in the country have declined by a shocking 90%. They say the species has now become critically endangered and is in need of “urgent conservation methods…to prevent its extinction in the near future.”

The problem, as with so many other declining oceanic species, stems from rampant overfishing.

In this case smalltail sharks face similar threats from two very different types of fisheries. Small-scale, artisanal fishers use gillnets to catch species like mackerel and weakfish, while industrial-fishing operations use trawl nets to catch shrimp and massive gillnets to scoop up catfish and other bottom-dwelling species. These industrial gillnets regularly reach up to 5.5 miles in length.

Each of these methods indiscriminately catches a wide range of species, including smalltail sharks, which swim in muddy coastal waters and estuaries. The sharks only reach 3-4 feet in length, so they’re easily swept up by these fishing operations.

Amplifying the fishing threat, the paper reports, a majority of smalltail sharks caught by the fisheries have always been juveniles. In the 1980s sharks younger than six years accounted for 90.6% of catches.

The elimination of so many immature sharks from the population removed any chance they’d get to breeding age and perpetuate the species.

Brazil recognized the threats to these sharks a few years ago and declared them critically endangered in their waters. But the IUCN Red List still identifies the species as “data deficient,” meaning its extinction risk hasn’t been fully assessed on a global level.

To solve that, the paper also takes a deep dive into the shark’s biology and comes up with some startling revelations. Among them, the authors upend previous research suggesting the species had a fast growth rate and reveal that it actually “has one of the longest juvenile phases when compared to several species of small coastal sharks, thus taking longer to reach sexual maturity.” This makes the smalltail shark an “intrinsically low-resilient species” that is “highly vulnerable to fishing exploitation.”

Meanwhile a second study by some of the same authors looked at the sharks from a different angle: microchemistry. The researchers examined vertebrae from 17 sharks caught in the 1980s and in the past couple of years to determine their elemental compositions. Based on the levels of barium, calcium, magnesium, manganese and strontium in the bones and at various sites around the country, the researchers hypothesize that northern Brazil holds at least three major birthing sites for the species and that the country’s waters serve as important habitat for smalltail sharks throughout their lifecycles.

The fisheries study focuses on the threats in Brazil, but the authors point out that these same fishing threats occur throughout the smalltail shark’s range. They’re calling for the animal to be considered critically endangered not just in Brazil but on a global level.

The paper points out what could happen if conservation action isn’t prioritized. Another species from the same genus, Carcharhinus obsolerus, was declared extinct in 2019. Dubbed the “lost shark” by the researchers who discovered the species from decades-old museum samples, the shark was probably also wiped out by overfishing — before it was ever scientifically recognized.

Without protection the smalltail shark could soon join its fellow among the ranks of the lost.

Cargo Vessels Are Killing More Whales — and a New Effort Aims to Save Them

Collisions between whales and ships have increased, but an effort to hear, see and predict whale behavior could help reduce fatalities.

A blue whale can weigh as much as 200 tons and consume 12,000 pounds of krill in a single day. But even the largest animal on Earth doesn’t stand a chance against a fast-moving cargo ship.

Collisions between whales and shipping vessels are especially prevalent in areas where whale habitat overlaps with busy port traffic, such as the Santa Barbara Channel. This 70-mile stretch of water between mainland California and the Northern Channel Islands is a thoroughfare for thousands of cargo ships going to and from the busy ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. It’s also a hotspot for endangered and threatened whales.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has instituted voluntary slow-speed zones, but whale-ship strikes have still been on the rise for the past few years.

To reverse that trend, a group of scientists from all over the country have collaborated on a new project spearheaded by U.C. Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative. Whale Safe, a technology-based mapping and analysis tool, provides near real-time data on whale activity in the Santa Barbara Channel in the hope of reducing fatal whale-ship collisions.

We spoke to Morgan Visalli, the science lead at the Benioff Ocean Initiative, about how the technology works and what the public can do to help hold shipping companies accountable.

Why is something like Whale Safe needed?

Many whale species thankfully are recovering from the days of intensive whaling, when they were hunted to the brink of extinction. But now they’re facing other threats from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements.

The Santa Barbara Channel, where we’ve launched Whale Safe, is a really important feeding ground for blue, humpback and fin whales — all species that are either endangered or threatened. Those three species are the ones that we’re focusing on with this first launch of the project.

The past two years were some of the worst on record for ship strikes off the West Coast of the United States. Even worse, the number that we actually see recorded in the data is likely a small percentage of the actual number of ship strikes that occurred.

Scientists estimate that only about 5% to 17% of whale carcasses are actually observed and recorded. So if we see 13 whale carcasses that wash up on the beach, as was the case last year on the West Coast of the United States, it’s likely that that could actually be closer to 130 ship strikes that occurred.

loaded container ship on water — Container ship. Photo: Pixabay.

What’s the best way to reduce or eliminate whale-ship collisions?

One way to address this issue is to separate ships and whales. In some places it’s possible to actually move shipping lanes away from areas of known whale concentrations, which can help reduce the risk of these strikes happening.

In the Santa Barbara Channel in 2013 they did move the shipping lanes one mile away from an area that is a known blue whale feeding hotspot. But unfortunately, the Santa Barbara Channel is a constrained waterway, and so there’s really not too much more that can be moved. The next best option is slowing down.

Studies have shown that when ships slow down it reduces the probability of a strike happening by potentially giving the whale a bit more time to respond. And we’ve also found that slower speeds can reduce the lethality of the strikes.

How does Whale Safe work to try and alert ship captains to whales in the area?

whale safe infographic — Credit: Nicolle R. Fuller, Sayo Studio
1. Acoustic monitoring instruments identify whale vocalizations. 2. Observers record whale sightings with a mobile app. 3. Oceanographic data is used to predict where blue whales are likely to be. 4. The data streams are compiled and validated. 5. Whale information is disseminated to industry, managers and the public.

There are three main components.

One is an acoustic listening station. Out in the Santa Barbara channel, our collaborators at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Texas A&M University at Galveston deployed an acoustic buoy that has an underwater microphone near the seafloor. There’s a small computer that processes any audio that the microphone picks up.

It is able to automatically detect the calls of blue, humpback and fin whales. Then there’s a surface buoy with a satellite transmitter that sends that information back to shore. It’s then validated by a scientist on shore before it’s added to the database.

Then the second piece is a blue whale habitat model. We use oceanographic data like sea-surface temperature and current to predict where blue whales are likely to be on any given day. That was developed by our collaborators at U.C. Santa Cruz, the University of Washington and NOAA Southwest Fishery Science Center.

It’s a dynamic model that’s running every day in an automated fashion and producing maps that show us blue whale hotspots.

The third piece is data gathered by community scientists who are out on whale-watching and tourism boats nearly every day. They use mobile apps such as WhaleAlert and Spotter Pro to record whale sightings that are also added to the database.

I know you’ve just launched this database, but what are you hearing from people in the shipping industry that may be using it or want to use it?

We did some interviews as we were building the system to get information from industry in terms of what information would be most helpful, how frequently they would like to receive data and what pathway they would like to receive data through.

Now we’re working on building those relationships, making sure everybody knows that this information is available and also getting more feedback so we can continue to improve the system and tailor the data feeds to fit the needs of different folks within the industry.

One kind of communication pathway that could be really exciting to implement is getting the whale information piped into the charting system on the ship through the automatic identification system (AIS). It’s the navigation and collision avoidance system that all of these large ships have on board.

deploying buoy — Deploying the acoustic detection system in the Santa Barbara Channel near the shipping lanes in 2019. Photo: Benioff Ocean Initiative

There are quite a few challenges, both on the technological side and just the bureaucratic side, of actually getting the data delivered that way. It’s their main safety and navigation tool, so you don’t want it to be crowded with too much data and information. That would need to be done really thoughtfully. But that’s a communication pathway that could really help get this data more easily adopted.

Right now there are voluntary slow-speed zones, but some ships aren’t abiding by those recommendations. How likely do you think they’d be to adopt technology like Whale Safe?

A few years ago there was actually a NOAA-led working group that brought together many stakeholders to try to develop solutions. One of the recommendations that came out of that process was actually a call for new technology and more real-time data on whale activity. And that was supported by many members of the shipping industry that were part of that working group.

That helped to inform the approach that we decided to take. Some of these companies expressed that time is money, and if they’re going to slow down, they want to make sure that they’re slowing down because there are actually whales in the area.

Our hope is that this data can really help to reinforce those slow-speed zones, especially when there’s high whale activity in the channel.

Whale Safe also provides data on how well companies are abiding by the slow-speed zones. But many of these shipping companies aren’t consumer-facing, so how can this information be used by the public to pressure companies to make changes?

Big companies like Walmart, Target and Home Depot import a lot of stuff and use these shipping companies quite often. We’re starting to have conversations with some of those retailers that are more public facing to see if there’s information about whale safety that could be helpful for them as they’re doing their planning around their sustainability portfolios.

And from the public standpoint, the more general awareness there is about the problem of whale-ship collisions, the more it helps public-facing companies know that this is something that they should prioritize in their sustainability planning.

We want people to know that whales are really important for global biodiversity and also as ecosystem engineers that help stabilize the food web. Whales are also important for coastal economies through whale watching and other tourism businesses. And they can help mitigate climate change. Studies have shown that they can actually help to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

Besides whales being incredible creatures deserving of protection in their own right, there are multiple benefits that we see from keeping these populations strong and healthy in our global ocean.

Avian Botulism Kills 40,000 Birds at National Wildlife Refuge

Heat, drought and water policy have created a slow-motion catastrophe at a refuge on the California-Oregon border.

Highway 161 carries me along the Oregon and California border as I head toward Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. I wish I were visiting it under better conditions. In better time this is a place where birds gather in abundance, feasting and fattening up as they continue their migration along the Pacific Flyway. Sadly, I’m here to witness a massive outbreak of disease — one that’s wiping out tens of thousands of birds.

The Lower Klamath refuge is a “must see,” especially at the start of fall migration. Designated as an “Important Bird Area” by the National Audubon Society, it’s one of a mosaic of refuges in the Klamath Basin that form an essential pinch point along the Pacific Flyway, causing waterbirds to congregate in huge numbers during migration. Birds coming south from Alaska stop to rest and refuel before continuing their journey south to estuaries along the coast, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California, and beyond that as far as the tip of South America. The birds can’t complete their journey without places like the Lower Klamath along their route.

This year, though, instead of broad sheets of water, green wetland stands, clouds of mosquitos and throngs of noisy waterbirds, what greets me is a dry, barren landscape baking in the hot summer sun. Throngs of birds cram together in the few pools of hot, stagnant water that remain. Different species and guilds gather in a motley collection of unlikely neighbors; American white pelicans waddle near elegant black-necked stilts and American avocets, rather than spreading out across the open water and mudflats. These are exactly the kinds of conditions where disease can spread rapidly.

small strip of water in field — Shrinking patch of water at Lower Klamath NWR Photo: Meghan Hertel, Audubon California

It’s not surprising, then, that an avian botulism outbreak is ravaging the birds of the Lower Klamath and some of the surrounding refuges. At last estimate 40,000 birds have died in the last month due to botulism, and thousands more are at an emergency “duck hospital” operated by staff from Bird Ally X, California Waterfowl Association and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Avian botulism is a waterborne bacterium, Clostridium botulinum, that occurs naturally in many wetlands but becomes activated when the water temperature rises. Overcrowding caused by insufficient water supplies have created ideal conditions for bacteria to spread rapidly through the birds in the refuge. Birds eat infected food sources, become paralyzed and die, and in turn transmit it to other birds in a vicious cycle that spreads quickly across the wetlands.

Overcrowding, combined with a lack of water supplies to maintain these wetlands and push clean water through their habitats, exacerbates the outbreak as water sits and concentrates.

Making matters worse, some species of waterbirds are molting and will be unable to fly to better habitat for approximately a month. A 2016 study by Point Blue Conservation Science (Barbaree et al.) showed that dowitchers rely on Klamath Basin as a staging ground during molting, staying there for roughly 32 days between July and October while replacing flight feathers. The length and timing of their stay and the lack of flight feathers makes dowitchers and other waterbirds particularly vulnerable to disease outbreaks in this region.

This combination of deadly circumstances for the birds in Klamath has left biologists and refuge managers scrambling for solutions.

To minimize the spread of the infection, biologists and volunteers are capturing thousands of sick birds every day and removing dead birds before they can infect others. They will have to keep this up until temperatures drop considerably, since it will take several nights of freezing temperatures to kill the bacteria.

Refuge managers are also looking for new sources of fresh water to flood more habitat and spread the birds out, a difficult challenge in a dry year like this one. Recent news of additional water being delivered by the Bureau of Reclamation offers some hope, but it may be too little, and it is definitely too late to help those birds that have already perished.

Egg shell on the ground — Broken eggshell at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Meghan Hertel, Audubon California

The only true, long-term solution is to ensure that wildlife refuge has secure, reliable water supplies to maintain sufficient wetland habitat for the hundreds of thousands of birds that rely on it. This is not an easy fix, since there’s rarely enough water in the Klamath to meet the needs of tribes, farmers, ranchers, endangered salmon and birds.

Stakeholders have been working for years to reach an accord to accommodate all these important needs, but a satisfactory solution remains elusive, and wildlife refuges have not been highly prioritized. The tens of thousands of dead birds at Klamath are a sign of the stakes and the need for a balanced solution now.

As I leave the refuge, I come across two birders standing in the heat, staring at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge sign. I want to stop and warn them to not travel any farther into the parched land — that there isn’t anything to see, at least anything pleasant. But I hold back. Perhaps it’s important for all of us to see and understand the tragedy occurring in this remote corner of California and Oregon.

It reminds us of how the refuges that make up the Pacific Flyway are the last, critical links in the long but fragile chain of the Pacific Flyway. We’re linked together through these birds and habitats, across borders, culture and time, and what we do at each of these places — such as our decisions about who does and doesn’t get water — has lasting consequences for our birds, our people and future generations of both.

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

This story was first published by Audubon California.

A Crop Pandemic Would Be as Devastating for Biodiversity and Food Security as COVID-19

Biodiversity loss threatens national security. We need to invest in technologies to preserve our vital food varieties.

As the impacts of climate change intensify — from water scarcity to raging fires and disease outbreaks — the ability to keep pace with demand for food will increasingly rely on crops adapted to new conditions. To achieve this crop breeders will need the full range of tools at their disposal.

So while conserving flora and fauna in their natural habitat remains an immediate priority, global food security in the long term must be futureproofed through continued investment in the preservation of plant genetic material.

Late blight — Tomatoes affected by late blight in a garden near Hilo, Hawaii. Photo: Scott Nelson/Flickr (public domain)

A model for this futureproofing exists at my organization, the International Potato Center (Centro Internacional de la Papa, or CIP) in Lima, Peru. Here we host the world’s most extensive collection of potato and sweetpotato material, which conserves more than 15,000 samples of root and tuber crops. This genetic material can be drawn upon to minimize disruption to food supplies if one variety is lost to natural causes like disease or human-caused processes like climate change.

The threat is far from theoretical. Already more than a dozen varieties of native and wild potatoes are in danger of disappearing due to temperature changes or loss of habitat, while diseases are emerging in new places to endanger other popular crops, including varieties of wheat and bananas, and their wild relatives. In total two-fifths of the world’s plants are at risk of extinction, according to new research.

Resilient Genes

Wild potatoes and sweet potatoes are the cousins of the third- and sixth-most important food crops on the globe. These wild species, although inedible themselves, are rich with hardy genetic traits that can be used to breed more nutritious, disease-resistant varieties of crops that underpin diets and incomes around the world.

For example, researchers have found that wild species of potatoes contain genes that provide resistance to late blight, the most destructive potato disease, which causes an estimated $6.7 billion in yield losses worldwide every year. The loss of just one wild potato species could both set back progress toward reducing losses to late blight and hinder recovery from large-scale outbreaks in the future.

potato genebank — Varieties at the CIP genebank. Photo: Sara A. Fajardo/CIP (provided)

To provide defenses against such a future food apocalypse, collections of genetic material — not just of potatoes, but all crop species and their wild relatives — must be continually conserved, tested and renovated, requiring ongoing funding, research and innovation. With plant genetic material being a common good shared by and essential to all, it is in the interests of governments, development organizations and the private sector to make crop conservation a funding and policy priority.

Just as digital backups moved the world from storing information on floppy disks to the cloud, recent advances in genetic conservation techniques, such as DNA sequencing for digital catalogs and cryopreservation, offer new opportunities to preserve these staple crops for future generations facing new scenarios.

Frozen Value

The CIP genebank — one of 11 CGIAR genebanks protecting the planet’s crop diversity — began to cryopreserve crops in 1996 and now has the most advanced cryopreservation practices for potatoes.

Cryopreservation allows for the long-term storage of plant material in liquid nitrogen at temperatures of -320F (-196C). Among the advantages, for crop material, of cryopreservation over in vitro conservation are the time and resources saved — both in day-to-day maintenance of storage facilities and in the need to regenerate in vitro accessions, or plant material, every 1 to 2 years.

Scientists are currently in the process of cryopreserving all potato genetic material while developing ways to cryopreserve the more delicate sweet potato to help secure the availability of safe, nutritious crops into the future.

Maintaining diverse reserves of the widest possible variety of genetic material offers the greatest chance of protecting the public from potential food shortages. Indeed, breeders must screen thousands of potatoes over many years to identify only one or two that address the needs of farmers in terms of productivity and climate resilience.

Without a reserve of potential material to screen, important advances in new crop varieties would be stymied.

Meanwhile the cost-effectiveness of cryopreservation means more funds have been invested in other areas of research. In vitro conservation is incredibly labor intensive, requiring ongoing maintenance by specialized staff. But cryopreserved samples can remain in deep freeze for decades with little oversight necessary, freeing up more resources to dedicate to the conservation of greater crop biodiversity in natural habitats, the development of a generation of virus-free germplasm, and the repatriation and rediscovery of native varieties.

Now Is the Time

Despite their values, digital catalogs and the cryopreservation of crops and wild food plants remain under-appreciated, underfunded and underutilized by governments and international governing bodies.

Food security is national security, meaning genebanks could hold the vaccines needed for humanity’s survival of a food disaster. Put simply, bioversity loss weakens our defenses.

native potatoes — Native potatoes. Photo: David Duddenhoefer/CIP (CC BY-NC 2.0)

This makes conserving the rich and varied genetic material that underpins diets and human health one of our most important guarantees against devastating global shocks. Conservation efforts like ours should be treated as a matter of national and international security and investing in accordingly by the public and private sectors alike. Unless funding is secured, we at CIP may no longer be able to preserve the potato’s genetic diversity for future generations.

The value of these technologies is clearer now than ever. An outbreak of potato disease on the scale of Covid-19 could be as lethal for humanity as the pandemic itself has been.

Investing in the conservation of staple foods is a crucial investment in our collective resilience.

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.

Bees Face ‘A Perfect Storm’ — Parasites, Air Pollution and Other Emerging Threats

A growing body of research finds the dangers to pollinator populations are greater than ever. But studies also point to some potential solutions.

Bees are facing a pandemic of their own.

A collection of threats — habitat loss, pathogens, pesticides, pollution and poor nutrition — have led to widespread decline in bee health and pollinator populations.

The threats add up: The number of commercial honeybee colonies declined by more than quarter million between April and June 2020, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Native bees are at risk, too, with 1 in 4 native species in North America at risk of extinction.

“Things are not going so well for bees,” says Arthur Grupe, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado. “There’s been a lot of research looking into the causes, and usually, humans try and look for the magic bullet — what is the one thing causing this problem that we can stop? And the research has shown that it’s actually a collection of things.”

A single-cell fungal pathogen called Nosema is one of the latest threats.

Nosema reproduces in the gut, where it ruptures, spreads out and then infects the cells of the digestive tracts. It leads to lethargy, reduced foraging ability, poor sense of direction and, often, death.

Although Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae — two strains of the fungi — have been regularly recorded in Europe, North America and Southeast Asia, the pathogen is now more widespread than ever, according to recent research published in the journal PLOS Pathogens. Grupe was the lead author.

Grupe notes that N. apis, once the dominant strain affecting commercial bee colonies, was observed to be seasonal, which helped protect against total colony collapse. The increasing export of commercial beehives from Europe, however, has expanded the distribution of the problematic pathogen.

bee colony — USDA photo by David Kosling

At the same time, reports of N. ceranae have increased dramatically — and it infects hives all year long.

“Historically, it was thought that Nosema ceranae wasn’t so much of a problem because its spores can’t survive freezing or near-freezing temperatures,” he explains. “But as winters have become milder these spores are able to persist and then cause infection, and Nosema ceranae has overtaken Nosema apis as the predominant infect of European honeybees.”

Once a bee is infected with Nosema, it can contaminate entire colonies — where social distancing is not an option — and spread that infection to the wild. Infected honeybees can leave spores on flowers, transmitting the pathogen to other susceptible pollinators, including native bees. This “community spread” has led Grupe and his co-author C. Alisha Quandt to declare it a “pandemic” in their paper.

Research published this July in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution illustrates the threat. Field studies in update New York found that one in 11 flowers carried disease-causing parasites, including Nosema ceranae, N. bombi, Crithidia bombi, C. expoeki and neogregarines that were linked to declines in bee populations. Social bees, including honeybees and bumblebees, were more likely to be infected with parasites than solitary bee species.

“Bees visit hundreds of flowers a day and act as a ‘shared food source’ between the other foraging bees in the area which will feed from the same flowers,” explains study co-author Peter Graystock, now a research fellow at Imperial College in London. “If a bee has been in contact with parasites or is suffering from an infection, they may shed some contagious parasite cells on the flower when they visit it, and then when a subsequent bee visits the same flower, the bee may become infected by with those parasite cells or spores.”

Bombus affinis — An endangered rusty patched bumble. USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab

Air pollution might also contribute to bee declines.

To understand more about that air-quality risk, Barbara Smith, associate professor at the University of Coventry, is working with beekeepers in the United Kingdom to set up sensors in their hives to record the level of air pollution and incidents of disease to determine whether there is a correlation.

“We know that air pollution is bad for humans and mammals, and we’re interested to see if the same is true for invertebrates,” Smith explains. “We have reason to believe that it could have an impact, because we know that we can record air pollution particulates in honey.”

Indeed, previous research found that pollutants lingered on the bodies of honeybees in areas with high levels of air pollution; exposure to diesel exhaust interfered with their foraging ability; and that air pollution may affect the heart and immune systems of wild honeybees.

Smith hopes her research, funded through the British Beekeepers Association, will provide more data about the impact of air pollution on bee health and population decline. Even if the results are conclusive, she knows it’s just one of the issues that needs to be addressed to restore pollinator populations.

“I don’t think that these declines in pollinators are down to one thing,” she says. “It’s about a suite of things that are happening. It’s like a perfect storm.”

Addressing the Threats

The fact that bees are facing multiple threats to their health and survival means that coming up with a single solution is impossible, especially when researchers are still trying to collect data.

Grupe notes that most of the research on Nosema infections has focused on European honeybees. The pathogen also affects native bees, but few researchers have done environmental surveys to capture wild bees from native ecosystems and screen them for Nosema.

“There’s only a handful of studies that have documented Nosema infections in native bees and the problem that needs to be addressed in the future,” he says. “More work needs to be done to understand Nosema infections in native bee species and the potential consequences to native ecosystems, and if native bees suffer a similar fate as honeybees when infected.”

To complicate matters, the manufacturer that made a chemical control for Nosema, which the company called its “bread and butter,” went out of business in 2018, leaving beekeepers without access to a treatment. Grupe cites a mix of high prices and a complex supply chain that led to the discontinuation of the product.

But the cost for bees could be higher.

“All of a sudden we have these pathogens that are globally distributed, that are negatively impacting agricultural crops and negatively impacting native plant communities, and we don’t really have any way to treat it.” This could further imperil native bees if the pathogens continue to spread from commercial hives.

In the absence of treatment, Graystock promotes prevention. Increasing floral abundance and diversity, he says, could offer some protection against parasite transmission. His research showed that the incidence of parasites was higher when floral numbers were low and decreased as the number of floral resources increased.

Diverse plant communities may be especially important in urban areas where higher human populations are linked with fewer species of wild bees, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

Planting strips of native pollinator plants on farmland could even improve crop yields. Another study published this summer found that five out of seven crops in major crop-producing areas had lower yields and production due to pollinator limitations. Attracting wild bees and honeybees, especially in intensive production areas, could help bolster food security, the research showed.

All of this backs up Graystock’s points.

“It’s important to appreciate the vast diversity of our pollinator communities, not just in terms of bee diversity but also floral diversity,” he says. “Frequently in ecology we find the solutions for maintaining the health of our wildlife are simply to support and promote our native wild communities above others.”

As Glaciers Melt, Will Deadly Landslides Increase?

A recent string of massive landslides in Alaska and around the world bears the fingerprint of climate change.

Six years ago Blacksand Beach stood out as one of the prettiest beaches in Prince William Sound, Alaska. You could picnic or pitch a tent on its flat mix of gravel and moss, near an alder thicket busy with warblers. The birds’ singing joined a chorus of falling water, including a small stream along the beach and cascades thundering down nearby glacier-capped mountains. Harbor seals drifted past on icebergs and mountain goats scampered on cliffs above. A short stroll led to the edge of the Coxe Glacier, a four-mile river of ice that flows from the mountains down to the ocean. You could walk up and kiss it.

But today much is changed. The Coxe Glacier has shrunk away from one mountainside, leaving a massive wall of loose rock perched above the beach. Almost every year sections of the wall collapse into the glacier’s river, temporarily damming it. When the river inevitably breaches the dam, a sudden flood rages down the beach, burying it in furniture-sized boulders and loose rubble. The few trees that remain have been slashed open by speeding rocks.

Many people now avoid the beach, including most of the eco-tour kayak and hiking companies that used to bring visitors here every year.

The events at the remote and relatively small Coxe Glacier require further scientific study, but experts say they reflect a rise in landslides near retreating glaciers in Alaska and other mountainous areas of the world.

As glaciers retreat with ever-increasing speed, ice that for millennia has held up potentially unstable mountainsides disappears, a process called debuttressing. Geologists debate specifics of the process, but they acknowledge it contributes to slides, some of which are big enough to block rivers or trigger deadly tsunamis in lakes or oceans.

Alaska’s Tyndall Glacier eight months after a landslide. Photo: Ground Truth Alaska (CC BY-NC 3.0)

It’s a potentially dangerous side effect of climate change that requires more research to fully understand, says Bretwood Higman, executive director of the nonprofit science advisory group Ground Truth Alaska. “It’s certainly an evolving field,” he says.

But Higman has studied Alaskan tsunamis and landslides for two decades and believes the evidence is strong that receding glaciers can destabilize mountain slopes.

And that can produce serious hazards. In May Higman and more than a dozen other geologists warned residents of the Prince William Sound community of Whittier that an even larger mountainside near Coxe Glacier appears vulnerable to collapse. This one, near the retreating Barry Glacier, could slide directly into the ocean, producing an initial wave up to 600 feet high and sending a potentially destructive tsunami toward the city, 50 miles away.

A Wide-ranging Threat

Higman says the potential Barry Glacier landslide carries markers similar to a massive 2015 event in the remote Taan Fiord in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, 150 miles southeast of Prince William Sound. It occurred near a similarly retreating glacier and was also associated with debuttressing. The slide sent a 633-foot wave up a nearby mountainside and triggered a tsunami that leveled eight square miles of forest.

taan boulder — A giant boulder moved by the tsunami that ran down Taan Fiord in 2015. Photo: Ground Truth Alaska (CC BY-NC 3.0)

Responding to this May’s warning, Chugach National Forest officials advised the public to avoid the famously scenic Harriman Fiord, a staple for recreation and tourism activity that provides revenue across south-central Alaska. State and federal geologists have spent the summer rushing to learn more, protect Whittier residents and maybe restore a sense of stability for local tour operators.

“I’m impressed by the response,” says Higman, who works with the Forest Service and other agencies to assess the danger.

He says the unpredictable nature of landslides presents a challenge, as some debuttressed mountainsides let loose catastrophically, while others remain precariously in place for decades or longer. This complicates public messaging and makes life hard for residents and tour operators, who want to know they’re taking people to safe locations.

Ninety miles from Whittier, on the eastern side of Prince William Sound, city officials in Valdez now warn that recent events at the Valdez Glacier may pose a similar debuttressing threat, albeit on a smaller scale. This summer two large “separation events” detached a half-mile section of the glacier, which may have undermined the stability of adjacent slopes and increased the risk of future landslides.

“It was wall to wall,” says the city of Valdez’s emergency manager Aaron Baczuk, describing how the ice broke away across the entire width of the fiord. “It completely severed and then floated out into the lake.”

Baczuk has teamed with local outfitters to release videos warning boaters about travel in the area, including the possibility of landslides traveling into the lake and triggering dangerous waves. They take the potential threat seriously: Three kayakers died in 2019 after ice fell into the lake.

The Permafrost Factor

Farther south safety concerns at Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park led to a 2017 report in which geologists described 24 landslides they believe were at least in part climate-related.

In a normal year, cruise ships carrying up to 4,000 passengers transit Glacier Bay’s steep-walled fjords hundreds of times. Park officials have acknowledged that landslides could strike the water and jeopardize these ships and tourists.

“Glacier Bay is characterized by a lot of steep slopes,” says Erin Bessette-Kirton, a geological engineering graduate student who has researched local slides. “The mountains go from sea level to high elevations very quickly, making them susceptible to landslides.”

A 2019 assessment mapping landslide hazards in Glacier Bay identifies retreating glaciers as a factor, but also points to thawing of high-elevation permafrost.

In this process frozen rock and water that have bonded mountain peaks together soften as temperatures rise, leaving slopes more susceptible to rainfall, snowmelt, earthquakes and other forces.

“The thawing causes changes in rock strength,” says Bessette-Kirton. “It allows water and heat to travel deeper into the rock. And it transfers freeze-thaw processes into deeper material, causing unstable conditions.”

Thawing alpine permafrost is suspected in a monster 2016 landslide high in Glacier Bay’s backcountry, which dumped over six miles of debris onto Lamplugh Glacier. Geologists estimate the pile is the size of 60 million mid-size SUVs. It flowed within a few miles of Johns Hopkins Inlet, a common destination for cruise ships. Researchers say that the slide would have been catastrophic for cruise ships and other visitors — including subsistence users, recreationists and park staff — if it had dropped directly into the water.

Back in the Prince William Sound region, five large landslides potentially linked to thawing permafrost have torn away from high peaks in the Chugach Mountains during the last two years. One on Yudi Peak, near the town of Girdwood, left a mile-long trail across an area frequented by a local helicopter ski company.

Higman agrees that the “big black splotches” that landslides increasingly deposit on high mountain glaciers — which are visible in satellite imagery — are consistent with thawing alpine permafrost, but he cautions that the story is not always that simple.

“There’s a lot going on in these mountains,” he says. Rainfall, snowmelt, rising temperatures, tectonics and earthquakes all exert their own pressures, along with debuttressing from glaciers and thawing of permafrost. “Climate change underlies several of those forces, but any one of them may act like the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to landslides.”

In this sense, just as it’s hard to blame any specific hurricane or wildfire solely on climate change, it can be hard to pin specific landslides to climate.

Yet thawing permafrost has been tied to a growing list of examples across the globe. Researchers speculate it factored in a massive 2017 landslide at Pizzo Cengalo in the Swiss Alps that killed eight hikers and destroyed parts of the village of Bondo. It has also been implicated in events in the Himalayas, Andes, Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, where thousands of landslides were recently linked to thawing permafrost. Recent work by Bessette-Kirton also links it to landslides in Alaska’s Saint Elias Mountains, north of Glacier Bay.

2019 photo of landslide activity in the Andes mountains at Metro Santiago, Chile. Oton Barros (DSR/OBT/INPE) (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Unfortunately, just as in instances of debuttressing near receding glaciers, the remoteness and wide distribution of alpine permafrost means landslides often occur in areas where no prior monitoring has been conducted.

“It’s often in really difficult terrain that is hard to access,” says Bissette-Kirton. “And it’s not visible at the surface, so you need temperatures gauges in place and a long-term record to detect changes.”

To address the dearth of hard data, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Jeffrey Coe recently proposed monitoring five “bellwether” sites in the Himalayas, Alps and other areas where the intersection of landslides and thawing permafrost seems most likely.

Compounding Factors

The swift changes being brought about by warming temperatures will always put multiple disruptive forces at play at the same time.

Take, for instance, the deadly 2013 ”Himalayan tsunami” in India. On the surface it appears to have occurred when record-setting rainfall, which has been tied to climate change, swelled the banks of the glacier-fed Chorabari Lake. When the water breached a moraine that formed the lake’s barrier, it washed away scores of villages and killed more than 6,000 people. But research shows retreat of the Chorabari Glacier may have also played a role in the disaster. When it melted it no longer buttressed the moraine, making its collapse more likely.

Chorabari Lake highlights yet another piece of the puzzle. Recent NASA research shows glacial lakes have expanded 50% worldwide due to the accelerating loss of glaciers. Changes to the lakes can cause dangerous instability.

As glaciers retreat, they can trap pools of water behind ice or piles of debris. These pools are called glacial lakes. As the planet warms, glacial lakes are growing — since 1990, the volume of these lakes has increased by about 50% globally. https://t.co/5ptHD06dUw pic.twitter.com/8i1TWb3tHR

— NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) August 31, 2020

Higman points out that these lakes form higher in mountain terrain, where they’re susceptible to landslides caused by shrinking glaciers or thawing permafrost.

There’s no clearer example than Lake Palcacocha, high in the Peruvian Andes, where in 1941 falling ice sent a tsunami across the lake, breaching its barrier and sending a wall of water into the city of Huaraz, killing 1,800 people. That was before the modern recognition of climate change, but today melting glaciers have expanded the lake to many times its 1941 volume, and tens of thousands more people now live below it. Today safety officials liken the specter of landslides or falling ice entering the lake to a devastating “timebomb.”

Such dangers drive Higman and others to continue probing for answers in places like Barry Glacier. He says that, in the past, studying glaciers and mountains required thinking on a time scale of thousands of years, but climate change has reduced the scale of events to decades or even years.

“It would be nice to get ahead of that curve and understand these processes better,” he says. “And maybe by putting in place mitigations we’ll be able to tell a positive story in the future.”

13 New Environmental Books to Motivate Action

Erin Brockovich, E.O. Wilson, Jane Fonda and others deliver important new books addressing the fights against climate change, the extinction crisis and toxic pollution.

One of the best ways to feel better about the world is to do something to help the world.

That’s a lesson I learned a long time ago, and it’s one echoed in an impressive slate of new books addressing climate change, the extinction crisis and other environmental problems.

Most of the 13 books on this month’s list offer powerful advice and lessons from experience. Several authors tell us horror stories of things we should never let happen again, while a few offer stories of wonder that remind us of the natural world we need to save. All of them should help motivate readers and help keep them moving forward toward a better planet — even in these tumultuous times.

So take a break from the fires, pandemic and election rhetoric, curl up with a good book (or books), and then put what you’ve learned into action.

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Keeble Wilkinson

Quite simply, this is the climate book of the year. It includes contributions from dozens of scientists, journalists, activists and other experts, including Katherine Hayhoe, Mary Annaïse Heglar, Emily Atkin, Kate Marvel, Kendra Pierre-Louis and Naomi Klein — as well as a wide selection of poets — who collectively aim to build a community of women climate leaders.

Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It by Erin Brockovich

The famous environmental activist returns with a new book to motivate action for clean water, using examples from around the country, including her long fight against PG&E in California.

What Can I Do? My Path From Climate Despair to Action by Jane Fonda

You don’t need to wait for the next Fire Drill Friday to start reading this one and putting the longstanding activist’s lessons into practice.

As the World Burns: How a New Generation of Activists Is Leading the Landmark Case Against Climate Change by Lee van der Voo

Talk about standing up to giants. The kids at the heart of the Youth v. Gov climate lawsuit — officially called Juliana v. United States — took their right to a livable planet to some of the highest courts in the land over the past few years. Although the 9th Circuit dismissed the case earlier this year, the plaintiffs have appealed and continue undaunted. This excellent book tells the history of the case and the people behind it, while broadening the discussion to look at the political forces at play throughout the country. I had a chance to read an advance copy a few months ago, and it suddenly feels a lot more relevant now that the Supreme Court is up for grabs.

Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency edited by Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar and Matt Nelson

Even before the pandemic, this election season had a lot of issues on the table, including climate change, income inequality and systemic racism. This book offers critical guidance for motivating political action in a season where in-person contact feels extra-frightening. Contributors include Maria Teresa Kuma, Bill McKibben, Winona LaDuke and dozens of other experts from a variety of perspectives. The book’s website also provides a series of voter-registration tools.

Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity From Darwin to the Anthropocene by David Sepkoski

How do humans perceive the nature of extinction, and how has that shaped how humans perceive each other and aspects of society? This thought-provoking book examines those questions and reveals how knowing that we can lose something forever — and the realization that extinction comes with cultural and ecological costs — motivates us to protect everything else.

Earth A.D. The Poisoning of The American Landscape and the Communities that Fought Back by Michael Lee Nirenberg

You know all those pesky environmental regulations that have been repealed over the past few years? This deeply researched book examines the histories of two polluted U.S. communities to remind us why those laws and protections existed in the first place.

Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M.M. Blume

A true story from the 1940s that echoes today and should especially motivate environmental journalists and people who appreciate — and depend upon — their efforts.

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght

Sit back for a trek to the Russian Far East as the author recounts his team’s perilous efforts to study, understand and conserve the Blakiston’s fish owl — an utterly massive bird he describes as looking like “a small bear with decorative feathers.” This is the type of book that reminds us how amazing the natural world can be and how much it deserves protection.

Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More edited by Michael Mascarenhas

Essays from 18 experts discuss how our environmental risks often fall upon the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized peoples and address the issues through the lenses of science, law, culture, activism and a whole lot more.

Tales From the Ant World by Edward O. Wilson

The groundbreaking biologist best known for “Half Earth” call to protect 50% of the planet looks to the smaller details in his latest book. Wilson reflects on his decades-long career studying thousands of ant species around the world, and in the process shines a light on the magic and mystery of the natural world.

Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains by Kerri Arsenault

For more than a century, life in Arsenault’s hometown of Mexico, Maine revolved around the local paper mill, which dominated the economy but also poisoned the community so badly it became known as “Cancer Valley.” This book serves as both a personal reflection and vital history on that slow-moving tragedy. In the process. It also reminds us of the human and environmental costs of the toxins that flow through our society and so many American towns.

Kent State by John Backderf

The demonization and criminalization of protestors, National Guard troops descending on American cities, armed citizens setting up roadblocks and rooftop sniper stations while looking for imagined outside agitators and anarchists. Does any of this sound familiar? It all happened in 1970, and it’s happening again in 2020. The massacre of students at Kent State was obviously not an environmental story, but this powerful work of journalism (in graphic novel form) is very much relevant to today, and it serves to remind us of the ever-present threat and human costs of authoritarianism.

Four Environmental Fights on the 2020 Ballot

Across the country voters will weigh in on ballot measures to decide issues like wolf reintroduction, taxes on oil companies and renewable energy standards.

Maybe we can blame COVID-19 for making it hard to hit the streets and gather signatures to get initiatives on state ballots. But this year there are markedly fewer environmental issues up for vote than in 2018.

While the number of initiatives may be down, there’s no less at stake. Voters will still have to make decisions about wildlife, renewable energy, oil companies and future elections.

Here’s the rundown of what’s happening where.

Return of an Apex Predator

Wolves are on the ballot in Colorado. Proposition 114 would require the state’s Parks and Wildlife Commission to create a plan by 2023 for the reintroduction and management of gray wolves (Canis lupus) in areas west of the continental divide.

Gray wolves once roamed across the western United States but were mostly eradicated by the 1930s. Slowly efforts are being made to bring them back. The reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1996 has been hailed as a rewilding success.

“The argument is that by putting back in wolves — an apex predator that has evolved alongside their prey species — we’re putting things back into ecological balance,” University of Colorado Boulder ecology professor Joanna Lambert told The Revelator in a February interview about the science behind wolf reintroductions.

Wolf laying down. — Gray wolf. Photo: ohn & Karen Hollingsworth/USFWS

The Colorado initiative is backed by the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Colorado Farm Bureau are two of the top donors to the opposition groups.

The measure does include compensation for losses of livestock caused by gray wolves.

“What we’re all hoping for is a landscape where we can coexist with the species that were originally here, but also acknowledging that humans need to make a living and that the costs of this initiative will be felt by some folks more than others,” Lambert said.

Confusion Over Clean Energy

In Nevada voters will take a second swing at a constitutional amendment to require that electric utilities source 50% of their electricity from renewables by 2030. Voters passed the same measure, Question 6, in 2018, but state law requires that constitutional amendments be passed in two consecutive even-numbered election years.

More clean energy for the state may seem good. But there’s concern that enshrining 50% renewables by 2030 in the state’s constitution isn’t that ambitious and it will make it harder to continue the push for 100% renewables in the future. To do that would be another constitutional amendment that would again take four years and two consecutive ballot wins to move the needle.

Also, the state is already on its way to the same renewable goal.

A legislative effort to achieve 50% renewables by 2030 — but with a slightly different timeline for the increments to get there — was signed into law in April 2019 by Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak. Renewable advocates hope the state will do even better than that benchmark, but passing Question 6 would make it harder.

Paying a Fair Share

If California’s Proposition 15 passes, commercial and industrial properties will need to start paying taxes based on their current market value, instead of paying based on the purchase price from decades prior (which stems from Proposition 13 passed back in 1978). The initiative would exempt agricultural land, small businesses, renters and homeowners.

Reassessing the worth of large commercial properties could bring in between $7.5 billion and $12 billion a year that would go toward supporting local governments, school districts and community colleges.

Most of the opposition has come from big business and anti-taxation groups.

The California Teachers Association Issues PAC is the biggest supporter of the effort, but a number of environmental groups have also endorsed the measure, which would likely see oil companies and other big industrial polluters having to kick in more money.

“The oil industry has used Prop. 13 loopholes to evade tens of millions of dollars in property taxes,” wrote Victoria Lome, California legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Companies like Chevron, Exxon, Phillips 66, Shell and Tosco are paying taxes based on assessments taken prior to 2000. Prop. 15 would end this hidden subsidy to dirty energy.”

Oil companies could stand to lose in Alaska, too. Voters there will weigh in on Ballot Measure 1, which would increase taxes on big oil producers (those that have produced more than 400 million barrels overall or 40,000 barrels a day in the past year) operating in three established oil fields in the North Slope.

Taking the Wind Out of the Sails of the Electoral College

Colorado’s Proposition 113 isn’t about environmental issues directly but could cause big shifts in how presidential elections are run and what states and issues are considered important.

The initiative would add Colorado to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. That effort is aimed at ensuring the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote wins the election. It doesn’t eliminate the Electoral College, but it saps its power.

The compact needs states representing at least 270 Electoral College votes to go into effect. It’s currently at 196.

If Colorado’s proposition is passed, and if the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact eventually gets enough votes to go into effect, then Colorado’s nine electoral votes would go to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote, not to the one who gets the most votes in Colorado.

Naturalist Obi Kaufmann on the Power of Forests: ‘Be Ready to Change the Story’

With his new “field atlas,” Kaufmann challenges readers to better understand the places where we live — and to protect them.

As 25 wildfires burn through California in another record-breaking fire season, it’s a good time to talk about the state’s forests and their future. That’s the focus of a new book — The Forests of California — from Oakland, California-based artist and naturalist Obi Kaufmann.

Wildfire is an intrinsic part of most landscapes in California, so much so that Kaufmann says, “trees themselves in California are fire waiting to burn.”

Kaufmann’s new book isn’t focused on wildfire specifically (that will come in a later volume), but he does lay important groundwork to help people better understand the complex ecology of the state’s varied forests and why they are so important.

“Although California accounts for only 3% of the land area in the United States, more than 30% of all plant and vertebrate species in the nation find habitat here,” he writes.

But this amazing biodiversity and the systems that link it together are under threat from human development, climate change, misguided management and invasive species.

Forests of California, the third book from Kaufmann, is no ordinary reading. It’s a “field atlas,” a construct of his own making and not to be confused with a field guide. This 600-page volume describes ecological forces at work in California’s forests with artistically rendered data, watercolor drawings and maps, detailed research, and knowledge accumulated from decades exploring the backcountry.

Kaufmann calls the book “an activist’s guide” and a “work of hope,” meant to inspire people to help protect California and other places they love.

We talked to Kaufmann about geographic literacy, overcoming “plant blindness” and his favorite forests.

Unless folks have picked up your first book, The California Field Atlas, they’re likely unfamiliar with this genre. Can you explain what it is?

The “field atlas” is a genre that I invented in order to tell the story that I wanted to tell.

I think most people confuse it with a field guide, which would be a reference book aimed towards biological identification — or looking at the what of things. But a field atlas is a story of the character of California that has always been, continues to be, and will always be despite our very successfully imposed urban veneer over the past 170 years.

I am not concerned so much with the what of things, or even the where of things, which is funny for something calling itself an atlas.

But I am obsessed with learning about the how of things. How the whole cycle works from growth through conservation to release, and then regrowth. Most often, and dramatically, this is expressed across California’s extremely varied topography through fire.

And I’m interested in how the resiliency mechanisms within those ecosystems are triggered and how succession works within the forests in California.

The book is a unique combination of research, art and science. How did you decide to organize it?

I’m fascinated by systems thinking. And I think ecology is an academic discipline that really lends itself to those kinds of models. The organization is basically structured around three concentric circles. The first inner circle, circle A, is tree associations. How tree species in California tend to grow in each other’s proximity. The very skeleton of what might eventually become habitat, which would be circle B.

How then, once these trees are grouped together in particular locales, do they attract other species? Maybe it’s an understory or what is happening along the forest floor. Maybe we can then include wildlife that finds its niche opportunities within this arboreal architecture.

And then finally the largest circle, circle C, would be the forests themselves. And that is where I use the contrivance of contemporary political boundaries across the 23 national forests as they are currently described in California, which covers roughly half the state’s total land area.

I go through and give six examples in each one of the national forests of what habitats and forest types exist within them.

That gets to my larger mission, which is to alleviate what has been called “plant blindness,” which is [when people fail to see the variety around them and just think] ‘a tree, is a tree, is a tree.’ In fact, here in California we enjoy an elite class of biodiversity that rivals all other portfolios of such measurement around the world.

We’ve got it all here in a unique, complex and very precious structure. And telling that story on a popular level where I am not only describing the trees themselves, but where the trees are, then that biogeography leads to a kind of geographic literacy.

painting of forest cycles — Stages of the adaptive cycle. Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

I believe that our greatest tool as an informed citizenry is knowing what actually there is to protect. People protect what they love. And people love what they understand and know.

So we have to begin with an inventory of what there is to protect.

Do you have a favorite forest type or place in California?

I am really drawn to the area near Duck Lake in the Russian Wilderness, where 19 species of conifers live within one square mile. All of these conifer species together like that exist nowhere else in the world.

I’m also always looking for a way to get back to the High Sierra. The Crystal Range within Desolation Wilderness is not called that for nothing. When the sunset hits it on a clear July night, the whole place radiates a prismatic quality that will rival anything in the Italian Alps or anywhere else in the world for its alpine beauty.

And the third one I’m going to give you is my home mountain, Mount Diablo [near Oakland], which is such an excellent little topographic anomaly. It jets out like a thumb into the Central Valley and catches all the seeds from the Northwest temperate rainforest and all the seeds from the Southwest deserts to create this really unique little wildflower bloom every year.

It’s a jewel of biodiversity and wilderness just set like a diamond inside this hub of urban activity that is the East Bay.

For folks who don’t live in California and don’t have a rad field atlas for their home, how can they begin to better understand the place where they live?

I use California as my focus, but it really is a metaphor about looking at nature. You can swap out any of these maps with any other geographic region at scale — wherever you are in the world. This is the beauty of ecological science.

Artist painting — Obi Kaufmann painting. Photo: Paul Collins

For me, it’s wrapped up in art and my own personal expression. But I think there’s a subtler truth here that these books are not necessarily about nature, but about me looking at nature. So on one level, these books are about me, which I think is a place to start for anybody.

I’d love to give license to whoever wants to make the field atlas of Minnesota. I’d love to see that. It can be done and it’s going to be your field atlas.

What do you hope for California’s forests and also for our environment more generally?

As we move through this century and begin our discussions about what 22nd century conservation policy might look like, we need to look at the shortcomings of 20th century policy and realize how much we’ve learned and how much indeed there is to learn.

What we’re actually learning now with the advent of such disciplines as corridor ecology and a better understanding of how wildlife actually move throughout a mosaiced habitat, is how to get more specific about the quality and diversity of habitat types that we should be conserving.

And we shouldn’t just talk about endangered species, but also habitat and perhaps even endangered phenomenon, like coastal fog. It’s a phenomenon upon which coastal redwoods, for example, depend. But it’s threatened by climate breakdown.

We have the opportunity to leave the 21st century with the natural world of California in better shape than we left it at the end of the 20th century, which is very a hopeful thing to say.

I’m often asked what people can do right now to help in response to all of the alarms going off — to help save this idea of nature in California or wherever else. And I always answer that question with a question: “When was the last time you went camping?”

And it’s hard to say under these apocalyptic [smoke-filled] skies right now, but I want to encourage anyone who’s feeling that to get out and take some time to literally take your shoes and socks off and put your toes into the cold, clear, clean water and feel nature around you.

Because it’s all still here. And breathe that deeply. Whatever happens next, we’re going to need you grounded, unpanicked and ready to change the story.