Save Salmon, Save Ourselves

A new book from veteran author Mark Kurlansky explains why helping to save salmon is one of the best things we can do for ourselves and the planet.

If you want to know how well the environment is faring these days, look to the fish. Especially salmon.

“Our greatest assaults on the environment are visible in salmon,” writes author Mark Kurlansky in his new book, Salmon: A Fish, the Earth and the History of Their Common Fate.

Following decades of environment abuses, salmon populations in many places, especially the Atlantic, are in dire shape. Some Pacific runs have disappeared, too, and most populations are greatly reduced. Farmed salmon now outnumber wild ones.

How did we get here?

Kurlansky takes readers on a long historical trip to communities throughout the northern half of the world — anywhere you can or could find salmon — to understand how the fish went from ubiquitous to imperiled. Along the way he reveals the role of salmon in historical and contemporary indigenous communities, the destructive march of industrialization, the complicated role of hatcheries, and the growing threat of climate change.

“Human inventiveness keeps proving inadequate for replacing the natural order,” he sums up.

Salmon, Kurlansky’s 33rd book, is part natural history and part cultural history — there are even a few recipes. And it’s reminiscent of some of his previous hits including, Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas and Salt: A World History.

The Revelator recently spoke to Kurlansky about the threats to salmon, why we don’t seem to learn from our mistakes, and the life history of what he calls these “extraordinarily poetic” fish.

Why did you want to tell this story about salmon?

In 1997 I wrote a book about cod and it happened to be about the time that the northern cod stocks collapsed and people started really thinking about fishery management and overfishing. I worked on commercial fishing boats in the 1960s and that’s all anybody was talking about then, but by the 1990s the general public was [finally] thinking about it, too.

I have continued to watch what’s going on with fisheries and I’ve realized that [focusing on] overfishing doesn’t come close to covering the problems that we’re actually facing. I thought that salmon was an ideal fish to make that point, because as an anadromous fish that lives in freshwater and at sea it’s destroyed by everything we do to the oceans and everything we do to the land.

What are the biggest threats facing salmon today?

There’s a dazzling variety of things that are causing the problem, including bad farming practices, pesticides, deforestation, damming of rivers and climate change — and climate change and climate change.

There’s a lot of places — most of the North Atlantic — where there’s no more commercial fishing of Atlantic salmon. And yet the stocks still keep declining. One of the reasons for this is that salmon are born in the rivers and they reach a certain size and they go out to sea. They gain 95% of their size when they’re at sea by eating voraciously.

And what people have been telling me all over the North Atlantic — in New England and Scotland and Norway — is that the salmon that go to sea just aren’t coming back at the same rate they used to. When scientists look into this, they discover that the ocean is losing its carrying capacity — its ability to feed the animals that live in the ocean.

In more than 40 years of writing about this sort of thing, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever learned.

If the oceans can’t feed the fish, we’re really sunk. And this is due to climate change.

Before climate change was a threat to salmon, you document, there was a long history of salmon getting in the way of “progress.”

The British destroyed their rivers by damming them to get power for mills. And then the mills dumped pollution until the rivers were completely dead. And then people of British origin did the exact same thing in New England. And then it was New Englanders who went to the Pacific Northwest and built all these dams to make it an energy-based economy.

And while I was researching this, I was thinking, “Why don’t people ever learn?” And then I realized it’s because they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. The British were out to create the greatest power of the industrial revolution. And they succeeded. And in New England, they succeeded in creating the greatest industrial center of North America. And in the Pacific Northwest, they took a place with very little economic activity and turned it into this powerhouse.

And so, what you really learn from all of this is that the whole problem is our concept of economic development.

You write a lot about the life history of salmon, and how adaptable they are. Does that give them a better chance of survival?

They are really one of the most astounding, beautiful animals in the kingdom. They can jump 10, 11 feet in the air, which in comparison to their size would be like a human being jumping 50 feet. They can swim faster than an automobile. They will journey thousands of miles back to find not only the river of their birth, but the exact spot in the river where they were born.

They are voracious eaters in the ocean, but when they enter the river, they stop eating. If they didn’t, they’d just clean out the river. So nature dealt with that by having them just stop eating and they live off the fat and the energy that they got out at sea. They give everything they have to get up this river, no matter the current or waterfalls. Then they get there, and they reproduce, and they have nothing left and they die.

Their life history is extraordinarily poetic.

The challenges you document in the book are substantial. Are there reasons to be optimistic about the future of salmon?

Yes. Farmers have become more aware of harmful practices. People have become more cautious about the use of pesticides. And I don’t think the argument flies anymore that we should build more dams because it’s better than fossil fuels. Dams can be torn down and replaced with alternative energy.

People are becoming aware of these things. There have been polls in the Pacific Northwest that show that the population thought it was more important to preserve salmon in the Columbia River than to have industrial development. And people in Northern California want their salmon back and are doing things about it, including taking down dams.

But of course, you can’t just tear down the dams and let the salmon in and expect everything will be fine. You also have to clean up the river and then you’d have to rebuild the river because the dams have completely misconfigured it. You have to bring back an environment that a wild salmon will live in.

That reminds me of a line in your book where you write, “If salmon doesn’t survive, there’s little hope for the survival of the planet.”

Yeah, or the other way you can look at it is: If you want to save salmon, all you have to do is save the planet.

Freshwater Species Are Disappearing Fast — This Year Is Critical for Saving Them

Scientists and policymakers have developed a time-sensitive plan to help save ailing freshwater ecosystems and imperiled species.

We’ve all seen photos of clear-cut forests with swathes of razed trees or deep scars in the ground from an open-pit mine. The damage to the species that live in these habitats isn’t hard to imagine.

But the damage we’ve done to freshwater ecosystems isn’t so visible. In rivers or lakes, trouble often lurks out of view beneath the surface of the water — as with dams that block migratory fish or choke off needed nutrients and sediment.

Some experts believe we’re losing freshwater species faster than any others for one main reason: out of sight, out of mind.

A new study by more than two dozen expert scientists and policymakers aims to change that.

Their paper, “Bending the Curve of Global Freshwater Biodiversity Loss: An Emergency Recovery Plan,” published last month in BioScience, explains the growing threats to freshwater biodiversity and proposes a plan to tackle it by adjusting targets and indicators in two existing global frameworks — the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Time is of the essence, they write. Both frameworks are up for discussion and review by the world’s governments later this year, offering a unique but brief opportunity to make a difference for freshwater species.

Many of those species don’t have much time to wait. Freshwater species face grave threats, with 62% of turtles, a third of amphibians and more than a quarter of fishes currently threatened with extinction. Populations of freshwater vertebrates are falling twice as fast as vertebrates on land or in the ocean, and the population decline for freshwater megafauna — those animals that can reach 66 pounds or more — fell an astonishing 88% from 1970 to 2012. The Chinese paddlefish, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish, is now believed to be extinct.

“This decline and the possible solutions have not been that well publicized and aren’t strongly understood by decision makers,” says Jeff Opperman, the lead scientist for global freshwater issues at WWF and a co-author of the report.

dolphin swimming — Fewer than 100 Irrawaddy dolphins are believed to be left in the Mekong River. Photo: Jim Davidson, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Scientists do know what’s driving this decline: changes to river flow, pollution, habitat loss, overexploitation of species and invasive species. Yet no comprehensive global framework exists to tackle the problem with the urgency and at the scale we need, the report says.

That’s where the new study comes in. Opperman says it provides clear examples of how to add or amend language and goals to help protect and restore freshwater ecosystems into both existing international frameworks.

“At least we can get these global frameworks and targets to specifically recognize the challenge and highlight opportunities that we have in terms of fresh water,” he says. “That can help raise expectations for how the world is going to handle this.”

The plan lays out six priority actions for global action:

Accelerate the implementation of water protections against agricultural, industrial and domestic use to ensure that rivers have enough water to protect freshwater habitat.
Improve water quality. Pollutants vary by region, but across Latin America, Africa and Asia, 80% of sewage discharged into waters hasn’t been treated adequately.
Protect and restore critical habitat, like inland wetlands, which have decreased by 87% since 1700.
Prevent the exploitation of freshwater species and river structures. Better policy frameworks could prevent overharvesting of fish, crabs, frogs and other species, as well as mining sand and gravel that can destroy freshwater habitat.
Prevent and control the invasion of non-native species.
Protect and restore the connectivity of freshwater systems. Dams, for example, bisect riverine habitat and alter flows. And flood management structures like levees separate rivers from floodplains.

The paper translates these priority actions into specific recommendations. For instance, the researchers recommend that the Convention on Biological Diversity amend its ecosystem services goals to emphasize the many values of healthy freshwater ecosystems, not just the need to protect water supplies.

The authors also propose adding language to include inland freshwater fisheries in fisheries management targets, instead of just marine fisheries. An estimated 158 million people are fed by freshwater fisheries, but they’re often overlooked by governments because they’re outside traditional markets.

In the Sustainable Development Goals, the researchers advocate including an emphasis on nature-based solutions in the sustainable infrastructure goal. And they recommend a new indicator to track the number of water bodies that have implemented environmental flows.

For each recommendation in the study, the researchers also provide real-world cases that show the solutions in action and best practices that could help other countries implement similar strategies.

River with fall foliage — Dam removal and improved fish passage have opened up more than 1,000 miles of connected riverine habitat on Maine’s Penobscot River. Photo: Jim Dollar, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

“These aren’t academic recommendations,” says Opperman. “We’re showing which countries have done this and the benefits.”

The report was just released in February, but Opperman says it’s already generated some good high-level discussions. “The key agencies that are involved in the dialogue have been receptive to this emergency recovery plan as useful guidance,” he says.

But the truly hard work will be if, or when, governments put these guidelines into practice. Researchers will need to play a key role, too, in maintaining and increasing the amount and the types of things they track related to freshwater populations and ecosystem services.

“If we’re not able to monitor and document trends, it will be hard to know how we’re performing against targets or just performing in general,” Opperman says.

We’re a long way from what’s needed at the global level to stem the loss of freshwater biodiversity, but the study’s authors contend that right now we have “a once in a generation opportunity to promote such improvements at scale and to avoid the irreversible losses of species and habitats.”

Will global leaders rise to the challenge?

Spending Time in Nature During the Pandemic? You’re Not Alone — and That’s a Problem.

Encouraged by the federal government, lots of people are trying to get outside. But it’s a risky decision for rural communities.

When the San Francisco Bay area, where I live, started seeing its first confirmed cases of COVID-19 a few weeks ago, my initial reaction was to pack up my camper van and head for the hills. Knowing tough times were ahead, I just wanted to be in nature.

There’s a scientific reason behind that desire — studies have shown that time in green spaces is good for our health and can even reduce the risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease and premature death. It’s not just a boon for our physical health, either: Being in nature can improve our mental and emotional wellbeing, too.

Taking deep breaths in the shadow of an ancient redwood tree feels good on any day, but during a global pandemic, when we’re battling a rotation of fear, anxiety and uncertainty, it seems almost essential.

Since we’ve been ordered to “shelter in place” where I live, my van’s still parked in front of my house. But I’m far from alone in my desire to get outside and hit the trails. And that’s becoming a big problem for rural communities.

Earlier this month, as health officials were warning that our best bet for slowing the spread of the virus was to stay home, the federal government was waiving entrance fees and encouraging people to visit national parks, wildlife refuges and other federal public lands.

A few places like the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the Bay Area and the Statue of Liberty National Monument closed. But most didn’t, and visitors flooded in.

Even as outrage grew over coronavirus-mocking spring break revelers packing beaches in Florida, folks of all ages were visiting national parks across the country. A March 17 story in The Guardian described shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at popular parks like Big Bend and Zion, which later suspended its shuttle bus service.

In theory, getting out into nature and exploring our expansive public lands may seem like a good idea right now. But finding the right balance between enjoying the outside and keeping park employees and local residents safe during this health crisis has proved tough.

Tourists flock to Joshua Tree National Park amid coronavirus https://t.co/lTGmMLkz6I pic.twitter.com/xSfxpaDtC8

— Emmanuel Gabriel (@emmagab2014) March 24, 2020

Most people don’t head for remote wilderness; instead they congregate in the popular and accessible locations. They also need services like restrooms, garbage cans, restaurants and shuttles, which — if they’re carrying the virus — can put not just other visitors but park staff at risk.

“We should not be encouraging more visitation to our national parks,” Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect National Parks, said in a statement. “It is irresponsible to urge people to visit national park sites when gathering at other public spaces is no longer considered safe.”

National parks are already dealing with budget shortfalls in the billions — reduced staff with bigger crowds right now further threatens park resources.

We’ve seen that before. During the government shutdown last year, leaving parks open but largely unattended by rangers resulted in heaps of garbage, destroyed trails and damaged plants.

One National Park Service employee, in Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, took a very public stand against this last week. In his resignation letter, which he distributed to the media, he said park employees who still had to come to work in the small Alaskan town of Skagway were being put at risk.

“We are geographically isolated. We have one respirator in town and no doctors,” wrote Dustin Stone, who also serves as a local assemblymember. “The municipality has declared a state of emergency and requested that people close non-essential offices, yet my federal employer actively chooses to disregard those guidelines, as well as CDC and White House recommendations.”

This isn’t just a problem in remote Alaska. Rural areas across the country already face limited medical resources exacerbated by years of hospital closures that put residents at an increased risk, especially when visitors cause a quick uptick in population.

Arches and Canyonlands national parks in Utah are still open, but the surrounding communities, like Moab, have tried to deter visitors by closing campgrounds and hotels to out-of-towners. Local hospital officials even sent a letter to the governor asking for nonessential businesses to be ordered closed, as well as parks, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

“Although the desert around Moab is vast, our town is small,” the letter said. “We are already concerned about how we will meet the needs of our community in an epidemic. As a 17-bed critical access hospital, we have no ICU and minimal capability to care for critical respiratory patients.”

It’s a similar story in Colorado. Rocky Mountain National Park closed on Friday after urgings from the mayor and health department in the adjacent town of Estes Park, which had its first confirmed COVID-19 case. In a letter to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, Mayor Todd Jirsa said that a flood of visitors posed a “grave public health concern” for the small communities around the park, which have limited resources and a large population of higher-risk retirees.

“With immense compassion for everyone’s wish to be in the fresh mountain air, now is NOT the time to visit Truckee,” reads a Tuesday Facebook post from Visit Truckee.https://t.co/Vaz8PLsI29

— Tripp Mickle (@trippmickle) March 19, 2020

In Lake Tahoe the agency responsible for luring tourists and drumming up business reversed course. “This is something I thought I’d never have to say throughout my tourism career, but please stay home at this time,” Carol Chaplin, the president of Lake Tahoe Visitor Authority, said in a statement. “Once it is deemed safe by the health experts, we can welcome you with open arms and will be joining you.”

Coastal areas of Oregon and California saw bumper-to-bumper traffic this weekend as people headed to beaches and parks. Keeping a safe distance became untenable. As a result, Marin and Sonoma counties just north San Francisco closed all parks. Oregon’s governor ordered residents to stay home. And Great Smoky Mountain National Park abruptly closed on Tuesday.

This is no longer business-as-usual and we’re going to have to adjust. If wild places can’t be accessed without endangering those who work or visit there, common decency suggests they shouldn’t — even if the federal government doesn’t amend its messaging.

Losing access to some of our most beautiful places right now is a tough one, but the alternative is far worse.

Where Pandemics Come From — and How to Stop Them

As biodiversity disappears, the risk to human health increases. Experts say we need to protect wild spaces and species to help prevent future outbreaks.

“This continues to be a strange time, but that’s the new normal,” says ecologist Felicia Keesing.

She’s speaking by phone from her backyard on a Monday morning, after spending three days helping to evacuate students from Bard College, in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she teaches. “It feels like the beginning of a new phase for us,” she says.

It feels that way for a lot of us right now. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has upended lives and economies around the world, and experts warn it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

“This outbreak is pretty much what all of us would have considered the worst-case scenario,” admits Keesing, who has spent the past two decades studying infectious diseases and how loss of species diversity affects human health.

Her research, along with that of a growing number of scientists around the world, shows a clear pattern: As biodiversity decreases and wild spaces vanish, pathogens can run amok, putting humans, wild and domestic animals, and even plants at risk.

No one can say for sure yet if COVID-19 came from any specific species or circumstance, but many experts have theorized that it jumped to humans in China’s so-called “wet markets,” where exotic animal meat has long been readily available for sale.

Previously unknown viruses have emerged under similar circumstances, when humans took disparate animals out of their various native environments and penned them together.

Why this pandemic is only the latest in a string and we need to eliminate the sources: markets selling wildlife. https://t.co/P2UnqbnYeM

— Carl Safina (@carlsafina) March 18, 2020

“It’s a mix of biodiversity, but one that was created by people, not nature,” Keesing says. “We create a mix of species that don’t naturally occur together, and then it’s kind of like running an uncontrolled experiment. This virus jumps to that species.” Maybe that’s when a pathogen that we didn’t know about, that hadn’t previously made anyone sick (to our knowledge), suddenly becomes virulent and infects humans. “It was only when we did that to biodiversity that that virus became dangerous.”

These types of markets pose one of the clearest threats to animal and human health, but they’re not the only threat.

A greater risk is posed by the complex mix of habitat loss, population declines in wild species, and population increases among livestock and domesticated animals, invasive species and other more adaptable forms of wildlife.

“All over the world there are fewer and fewer of most kinds of wild creatures and more and more domesticated creatures and humans,” Keesing says. “We’re losing wild species, but we’re doing it at the expense of increases in a very small number of species. Those domesticated species tend to be less diverse. We’re growing a lot of the same crops worldwide and raising a lot of the same animals, which makes for easier targets for pathogens. It’s much easier for them to move around.”

cattle — Cattle in corals. Photo: USDA NRCS Montana (public domain, uncredited)

That’s why the current outbreak has spread so quickly. “The fact that there are 7 billion people on the planet who are genetically very similar has been a boon for the COVID-19 virus, because there are so many of us at such high density that it’s able to spread through the population. We’ll see that play out for other kinds of pathogens, hopefully less virulent ones, maybe affecting wheat, corn, rice or chickens.”

Another factor helping pathogens spread through the modern world is the preponderance of what Keesing calls “weedy species” — this includes domesticated animals, as well as invasives like rats and mice, and even common species such as pigeons.

These “weedy” species have several characteristics in common. “They’re adaptable, they’re abundant, they tend to be small-bodied, and they reproduce quickly at a young age,” she explains. “They have shorter life spans, so they have a lot of turnover in their populations. And they have attributes that we’re still trying to understand that seem to make them better reservoirs for many different diseases.”

That’s why species going extinct and replaced in ecosystems poses a direct threat to humans. “The next emerging infection is more likely to come from a rat than from a rhino, right? We’re creating a planet in which the rats are thriving and the rhinos are disappearing, and when we create environments where those species thrive we’re absolutely affecting our health.”

Even the decline of still-common species can have dangerous side effects. We’ve seen that over the past few decades with opossums in the United States. As their forest habitats have become fragmented, opossum populations have declined — and Lyme disease has increased. Opossums normally eat ticks, and these unique marsupials can resist the pathogen that causes Lyme, but they don’t do very well in altered habitats where “weedy,” invasive mice thrive. These invaders then carry an increased abundance of ticks, and the disease, to humans. (If you’ve ever seen a meme about the value of opossums for tick control, it’s based on work by Keesing and her colleagues.)

Why did the opposum cross the road? To eat one heck of a lot of ticks! A new study shows that opossums attract and then kill thousands of ticks per acre, per week, making them one of our best allies in stopping the spread of Lyme disease. More: https://t.co/jrolo2StmD pic.twitter.com/8LSwhIkv3S

— Rachel Brittin (@GreenBrittin) October 2, 2019

The long-term solutions to these problems are simple to state but infinitely harder to accomplish.

For one thing, we need to preserve more wild spaces and the species that live in them. “The bottom line is that humans are taking up more and more space on the planet,” Keesing says. “And whatever it is that we’re using that wild space for, whether it’s a suburban development or an Amazon warehouse, it’s prioritizing human needs over wild creatures. And that is having consequences for us.”

For another, we need to find ways to boost populations of native species. “There’s no magic formula for that,” Keesing says. “You do it by making space for these creatures, and that requires people to make difficult choices. We’re all faced with difficult choices right now.”

In addition to space, keeping those native species in their habitats, and protecting them from wildlife trafficking, remains essential. Many experts say that includes shutting down the exotic wildlife markets in China and around the world.

And we need to keep supporting the science that’s improving our understanding of these issues. Keesing says that’s been a growing, vibrant field of study.

“It’s been a tremendous turn in the last five years especially — but really the last 10 or even 15 years — toward recognizing that the state of the environment affects the transmission of infectious diseases, and it’s led to the burgeoning of a bunch of disciplines or sub-disciplines that connect the health of humans, wildlife and other animals, plants and the environment together. A lot of scientists, and particularly graduate students and postdocs, are really, really inspired by the fact that those linkages exist, and that’s something we could continue to work on.”

These steps may not offer much solace in the face of the current pandemic. But, as many experts are saying, now’s the time to start looking to the next problem down the road — be it another disease, climate change or something else entirely.

“We do have other global challenges, and we’re all going to need to work together, and we’re all going to need to change our behavior,” Keesing says. “That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been painful already, and there’s a lot more to come, but we’ve already seen that we can change our behavior quickly. We can learn from this experience.”

Further Reading

We’ve gathered 14 essential scientific papers discussing how biodiversity loss affects human health.

Keesing, F., Belden, L., Daszak, P. et al. Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases. Nature 468, 647–652 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09575

Scott R. Granter, Richard S. Ostfeld, Danny A. Milner, Jr, Where the Wild Things Aren’t: Loss of Biodiversity, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Implications for Diagnosticians, American Journal of Clinical Pathology, Volume 146, Issue 6, December 2016, Pages 644–646, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcp/aqw197

Mills, J.G., Weinstein, P., Gellie, N.J.C., Weyrich, L.S., Lowe, A.J. and Breed, M.F. (2017), Urban habitat restoration provides a human health benefit through microbiome rewilding: the Microbiome Rewilding Hypothesis. Restor Ecol, 25: 866-872. https://doi:10.1111/rec.12610

Rohr, J.R., Barrett, C.B., Civitello, D.J. et al. Emerging human infectious diseases and the links to global food production. Nat Sustain 2, 445–456 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0293-3

Marilyn J Roossinck, Fernando García-Arenal, Ecosystem simplification, biodiversity loss and plant virus emergence, Current Opinion in Virology, Volume 10, 2015, Pages 56-62, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coviro.2015.01.005

Cardinale, B., Duffy, J., Gonzalez, A. et al. Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity. Nature 486, 59–67 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11148

Ostfeld, R.S. (2009), Biodiversity loss and the rise of zoonotic pathogens. Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 15: 40-43. http://doi:10.1111/j.1469-0691.2008.02691.x

Montira J. Pongsiri, Joe Roman, Vanessa O. Ezenwa, Tony L. Goldberg, Hillel S. Koren, Stephen C. Newbold, Richard S. Ostfeld, Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, Daniel J. Salkeld, Biodiversity Loss Affects Global Disease Ecology, BioScience, Volume 59, Issue 11, December 2009, Pages 945–954, https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.6

Rulli, M., Santini, M., Hayman, D. et al. The nexus between forest fragmentation in Africa and Ebola virus disease outbreaks. Sci Rep 7, 41613 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep41613

Johnson CN, Balmford A, Brook BW, Buettel JC, Galetti M, Guangchun L, Wilmshurst JM. 2017. Biodiversity losses and conservation responses in the Anthropocene. Science 356:270–275. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam9317

Kilpatrick AM, Salkeld DJ, Titcomb G, Hahn MB. 2017 Conservation of biodiversity as a strategy for improving human health and well-being. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 372: 20160131. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0131

Patil RR, Kumar C, Bagvandas M., Biodiversity loss: Public health risk of disease spread and epidemics. Ann Trop Med Public Health 2017 http://www.atmph.org/text.asp?2017/10/6/1432/222642

A Alonso Aguirre, Changing Patterns of Emerging Zoonotic Diseases in Wildlife, Domestic Animals, and Humans Linked to Biodiversity Loss and Globalization, ILAR Journal, Volume 58, Issue 3, 2017, Pages 315–318, https://doi.org/10.1093/ilar/ilx035

Wilkinson DA, Marshall JC, French NP, Hayman DTS. 2018 Habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss and the risk of novel infectious disease emergence. J. R. Soc. Interface 15: 20180403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2018.0403

Boom: Removing 81 Dams Is Transforming This California Watershed

The innovative project could aid endangered native species — and provide a useful roadmap for other dam-removal efforts.

Removing one gigantic dam can have a massive effect on restoring a river ecosystem.

But bringing down more than 80 smaller dams? That can also cause a transformation.

This spring the Forest Service, aided by U.S. Marine Corps members, will blast apart 13 more dams in the Trabuco ranger district in Southern California’s Cleveland National Forest.

It’s the last phase of a groundbreaking project that began more than five years ago to remove a total of 81 dams from four streams in the mountains of Orange County.

“Nobody’s really taken on a project this large and with this many partners and methods,” says Forest Service fish biologist Julie Donnell, who’s been working on the project.

The mammoth undertaking is designed to help boost populations of native aquatic species — most importantly Southern California steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss), which are federally listed as endangered.

It may also be a crucial learning tool due its sheer scope. Last year an estimated 90 dams were removed across the country, and nearly a quarter of those were in the Cleveland National Forest. That makes what’s happening in California the place to watch as organizations plan for other multi-dam removal efforts around the country.

“Looking at what the Forest Service did is a really smart way for other agencies to begin to think about their infrastructure,” says Serena McClain, the director of river restoration at the nonprofit American Rivers, which tracks dam-removal efforts. “The Forest Service is showing that the federal government can lead on this and demonstrate the possibility for the private sector and municipalities.”

In addition to the work in the national forest itself, the ecological success of the project hinges on a downstream effort to remove two more barriers that prevent steelhead from reaching the forest as they migrate from the ocean.

The two projects have brought together a diverse, and unlikely, coalition of transportation departments, federal agencies, environmental nonprofits, local governments, and even the U.S. Marine Corps to help complete an ocean-to-headwaters restoration of more than 35 miles.

“This addresses one of the major threats to endangered southern steelhead,” says Sandra Jacobson, the South Coast regional director of California Trout, which is leading the downstream effort. “Once you open up the rivers, it allows a tremendous change in the accessibility of steelhead to their historical habitat so that they can go in and reproduce.”

A Group Effort

Large dam removals, like those on the Klamath River in California and Oregon, or the hotly debated Snake River dams in Washington, get lots of media attention. But smaller dam removals are quietly happening all across the country.

In the past 20 years around 1,100 dams have been removed in the United States — many of them aging, unsafe structures that had outlived their usefulness.

That’s the story in the Cleveland National Forest, too.

Not a lot is known about the early history of the dams there, but most were likely built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a public work program started to help Americans rebound from the Great Depression, says Kirsten Winter, a biologist in the Cleveland National Forest who has spearheaded the dam-removal project. It’s not unusual for dams to be built in national forests, but this high a concentration of small dams may be a regional phenomenon in Southern California forests.

Most of these original dams would likely have washed away over time, but in the Cleveland National Forest, Orange County increased the size of the dams using native rock and mortar from the 1940s through the mid-1970s. Gates were lowered in the spring and raised in the fall to control the flow of the rivers. The impounded water was used mostly for fish stocking and recreation and was also available for fire suppression.

But eventually, Winter says, the dams aged, and the county got tired of maintaining them. Many washed out in storms. A few were removed in the 1980s by the county, and the gates were taken out of the remaining dams. Most fell back under Forest Service jurisdiction.

In recent years it became clear that some of the dams posed safety hazards and impeded fish migration. As part of a federal recovery effort to recover populations of endangered southern steelhead, a plan was developed to remove the 81 dams in the San Juan watershed on Upper San Juan Creek, Trabuco Creek, Holy Jim and Silverado Creek.

Projects of this scope require environmental assessments under the National Environmental Protection Act. Because the Forest Service had the forethought to take a watershed view of the project from the get-go they only needed to complete one environmental assessment for the removal of the whole kit and caboodle, which helped make the permitting process more efficient.

With that in place, the dam-removal work began in December 2014. The project has a $1.2 million price tag, but the majority of funding hasn’t come from the Forest Service itself.

before and after — Before and after dam removal on San Juan Creek in the Cleveland National Forest. Photos by Julie Donnell, USFS

The project has generated a lot of interest and a diverse array of partners, including California Department of Transportation, Federal Highways Administration, Orange County Parks, Orange County Transportation Authority, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Marine Corps. The coalition has brought funds, organizational support, technical knowledge and a lot of energy to the process.

“People are really pretty enthused about removing dams,” says Winter.

Despite all the partners, it’s still been a learning experience, she adds, because the dams vary so much in size and accessibility. Some are just a few feet high and 10 feet wide. Others reach 14 feet in height and stretch up to 100 feet across.

To breach the dams and break apart the mortar, crews employed a wide range of techniques. For sites near roads, they bought in conventional excavators. Steeper canyons required the use of a nimble “spider” excavator. Explosives took down a few dams where appropriate, while other places required sledgehammers and jackhammers. An extra bit of muscle (organizational and otherwise) came from a partnership with Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton. Corps members have helped remove 31 dams since 2018.

Ecological Benefits

The biggest benefactors of the dam removals in the Cleveland National Forest will be steelhead — a type of salmonid. Like salmon, steelhead are anadromous, spending their time in both freshwater streams and the ocean. But unlike salmon that return to their natal headwater streams to spawn and die, steelhead will often spawn more than once.

They’re also a key indicator species, says Jacobson. “When they disappear, that means there are probably multiple issues within a watershed.”

In the San Juan, dams are one of them.

spawning steelhead — Endangered Southern California steelhead spawning in Maria Ygnacio Creek in Santa Barbara County, Calif. Photo: Mark H. Capelli, WCR (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“Dams create a very artificial situation,” says Winter. “It’s not just that they hold water, but they retain sediment and then they create these weird splash pools below.”

Without the dams, the streams are able to create a more natural gradient and pool structure. That’s good for other native wildlife like the arroyo toad and the arroyo chub, both federally listed as endangered, as well as the California newt, a California Species of Special Concern.

While the process of removing the dams can be a bit messy, “we’ve seen no negative effects to the habitat or to species due to the dam removal,” says Donnell.

One of the biggest concerns with any dam removal is ensuring that any trapped sediment released from behind the structures doesn’t cause ecological problems as it moves downstream. But Donnell says they’ve timed the removals to account for that and the streams naturally carry large sediment loads during storm events.

“We’re actually doing some of dams in phases rather than all at one time because of the sediment load that’s being held behind them,” she says.

In areas where dams have been removed, Donnell has already noticed an improvement. “The bedload and sediment transport have been able to naturally flow once again,” she says. “And the channel is starting to adjust back to a natural state.”

A Connected Watershed

As groundbreaking as the Cleveland National Forest’s efforts are, the benefits for steelhead hinge on the downstream initiative.

Just five miles inland from Doheny State Beach, around the town of San Juan Capistrano, two barriers on Trabuco Creek block steelhead from 15 miles of upstream spawning habitat in the San Juan Creek watershed.

A quarter-mile-long concrete flood-control channel runs underneath five bridges, including the north- and southbound lanes of Interstate 5. The drop and the speed of water flowing through the hardened channel inhibits steelhead from making it through the gauntlet.

Two barriers for fish passage on Trabuco Creek. Photo: Mike Wier / CalTrout

The second barrier sits a half-mile downstream, where another 20-foot drop under a bridge for the Metrolink regional railway poses an insurmountable roadblock for steelhead.

To solve both of these problems, California Trout is leading the multiagency design effort for a technical fish passage that will enable steelhead to navigate these obstacles using staggered weirs. At the I-5 obstacle, an additional fish transport channel will provide steelhead with an express lane to avoid the flood control channel and pass under the array of bridges.

The organization is working with fellow nonprofit Trout Unlimited, as well as Orange County’s flood control district and public works office, the city of San Juan Capistrano, California Department of Transportation, and the Metrolink railroad association.

“We just received funding to complete the design,” says Jacobson. The fish passages are expected to be completed around 2023 to 2025.

It’s one part of a larger regional effort by the South Coast Steelhead Coalition, which consists of more than 35 organizations working to recover stable populations of the species in Southern California. Removing barriers to fish passage is a key element of the strategy, as are ensuring adequate water quantity and quality and removing nonnative species that compete for limited resources.

But there’s one more objective: helping native rainbow trout. These resident trout are the same species as steelhead, but with a different life history — they don’t migrate to the ocean. Since steelhead have been blocked from the upstream waters for nearly a century, resident trout populations have suffered from genetic isolation.

Only two resident trout populations remained in the region and one had to be emergency evacuated by a bucket brigade following the Holy Fire in 2018, which burned across the forest and threatened the water quality in the streams.

Aerial view of I-5 barrier — A flood control channel that passes under Interstate 5 in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. blocks fish migration. Photo: Mike Wier / CalTrout.

The removal of all the stream barriers — on and off the forest — will provide an opportunity for aquatic species to be more resilient. The wildfire is a perfect example of why that’s needed, says Jacobson.

“It really gives the aquatic species the mobility they need to move around in response to drought, floods and wildfires,” she says. “It’s good for all sorts of species, too, not just fish.”

Ripple Effect

With the dam removals in the Cleveland National Forest nearing completion, Donnell says she’s hoping to soon begin presenting her data and methodologies so others can learn from the project.

“We’ve definitely heard from other forests and other districts wanting to know how we went about it, because this is new,” she says.

McClain says American Rivers has been sharing the project’s success story because it’s a good example of how to think holistically about managing water and restoration opportunities for aquatic ecosystems.

San Juan Creek in the Cleveland National Forest shortly after a dam was removed. Photo: Julie Donnell, USFS

But it also makes sense fiscally. Why spend money maintaining dams we don’t need?

“Even from a federal budget management perspective, we should be looking at where there may be projects on the federal books that are no longer serving a purpose,” she says.

Thanks to the coordinated efforts in the San Juan watershed, southern steelhead will have a better chance of survival. But efforts to try and aid their recovery also have a larger benefit.

“We’re not only restoring their environment, but also ours,” Jacobson says. “We’re actually improving the rivers overall.”

And in the process, they may have established a model for mass dam removal across the country.

Beat the COVID-19 Blues With These Wildlife and Nature Livecams

Just because we’re all self-isolated doesn’t mean we have to isolate ourselves from nature.

With the coronavirus continuing to spread and self-isolation becoming the norm, it feels more important than ever to embrace the power and beauty of nature. Sure, we can’t travel as much these days, but the modern world can still bring the natural world to us.

We’ve picked some great webcams around the globe to help keep you sane in these trying times. Depending on the time of day or night you’re reading this, they should offer you some solace and wonder for the long weeks ahead.

Tembe Elephant Park

One of several great livecams from Explore.org. This one brings you to a very popular watering hole on the Mozambique border.

Decorah Eagles

A rare opportunity to see bald eagles up close and relaxed in Decorah, Iowa.

Gorilla Forest Corridor

You may or may not see any critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas, but this is a heck of a peaceful site in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Coral City

An urban reef in Miami, Florida that’s part habitat, part science experiment and part art project. You never know who might swim by.

Cornell Lab’s Panama Fruit Feeder-cam at Canopy Lodge

Pay attention. All kinds of colorful birds fly by to sample the wares that scientists have left out for them at this conservation site in Panama.

Big Sur Condors

Two webcams from the Ventana Wildlife Society showcasing the amazing California condors in their care. The birds aren’t always on camera, but it’s worth sticking around to see them.

Otters and More at Monterey Bay

A neverending parade of sea otters, birds, harbor seals and other marine mammals will entertain you at this feed, courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Bison Watering Hole at Grasslands National Park

Again, you never know what wildlife you’ll witness onscreen, but the beauty of this site in Saskatchewan can take your breath away.

New York University’s Hawk Cam

Oh wow, an urban nest whose residents are mini-celebrities. This includes an active chat feature, so it’s one more way to connect with fellow enthusiasts.

Jellyfish at Monterey Bay Aquarium

Who knew jellyfish were so Zen? This livecam is about as relaxing as it can possibly get. Get lost in the gentle motion.

There’s more! We found one more essential livestream that we can’t embed but it’s worth opening a new browser tab to see:

Red Wolf enclosure cam — Check out one of the rarest predators on the planet, courtesy of the conservation breeding program at the Wolf Conservation Center, which also maintains several other great webcams.

Don’t find something you like above? You can also try going for a walk to see what wildlife or natural beauties you can find in your neighborhood. After all, self-isolation doesn’t mean we have to keep ourselves indoors all day and all night.

While you’re at it, bring your phone and share photos of what you see on iNaturalist or other citizen-science platforms — that’s one more way to stay connected with your community and avoid feelings of isolation. And you can help collect important scientific information along the way.

No matter what you do, please just stay safe. The world will still need you when all of this is over.

Fishing for Fun? It Has a Bigger Environmental Impact Than We Thought

New research shows that recreational fishing can sometimes be a huge problem — especially for threatened species of marine fish.

Let’s go fishin’! After all, a lone angler fishing from a dock or a few friends going out to sea can’t have all that much of an effect on fish populations … right?

Think again.

“When you’re floating in the open ocean, it can be hard to imagine that your hobby will have an impact on the overall health of a fishery,” says Sepp Haukebo, who works on recreational fisheries conservation issues for the Environmental Defense Fund. “But multiply the number of fish a single angler catches and discards in a day by millions of anglers and you have a significant harvest on your hands.”

Haukebo echoes points made in two new studies, published in the journals Fish and Fisheries and Frontiers in Marine Science, that show recreational fishing has a much bigger collective effect on oceanic species than previously realized, with nearly one million tons of fish caught every year.

Far from being an insignificant drop in the proverbial ocean, this is a massive amount of fish — about 1% of total global marine fisheries catch, a much higher number than many scientists and managers used to believe.

Collective Impact

So how is it that the actions of individuals can have such a far-reaching effect? Recreational anglers usually catch just a few ocean fish in a whole day, while industrial-scale commercial fishing often uses miles-long gear and catches tons of marine life at a time.

Part of the answer is scale: Previous research has shown that there are a lot more recreational anglers than there are commercial fishing vessels — at least 220 million people go fishing for fun every year all around the world.

The marina in Valencia, Spain. Photo: Mark Chinnick (CC BY 2.0)

That number is expected to grow as people and countries become more affluent, says Jessica Meeuwig, a professor at the University of Western Australia and a coauthor on the Frontiers in Marine Science paper.

Another part of the answer involves economics: For people and companies trying to make a profit from fishing — like with commercial fisheries — there’s an incentive to stop fishing when populations get low.

But if you’re fishing for fun, you’re paying for the experience, and the experience of catching a relatively rare fish is often considered worth paying extra.

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A little something we found whilst jigging! We are so lucky to have such an epic array of species like this Bohar snapper! Only found on pristine reefs… #jigging #verticaljigging #fishing #primezulufishing #primezulufishingcharter #mozambique #travelforfishing #travel #moz

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Indeed there are many threatened populations of fish where commercial fisheries are banned but recreational angling continues.

Additionally, a subset of recreational anglers called trophy anglers intentionally target the biggest individuals in a population, often with the goal of getting a perceived-as-prestigious certificate that says they hold a record for catching the biggest fish of that species.

This can affect entire species populations, explains Meeuwig.

“Recreational fisheries targeting larger fish means they are taking the most fit individuals, the big breeders, out of the population,” she says. Bigger fish tend to reproduce more often and have a greater number of young at a time. This culling preference is different from commercial or subsistence fishing, which aim to catch as many fish as possible, but not necessarily the largest individual member of a species.

There are other factors are play, although those aren’t always as clear.

“Recreational catch of threatened species is an issue that’s poorly understood,” says Peter Kyne, a senior research fellow at Australia’s Charles Darwin University who was not affiliated with either of the new papers. “In Australia, this is a significant issue for the grey nurse shark on the east coast,” he says. “Their habitat is close to major cities where recreational fishing levels are high. Even in remote areas of northern Australia, catches of river sharks are an issue — although they are protected, they’re similar in appearance to a number of common non-threatened species and anglers may not recognize them.”

A Regulatory Failure?

The research also found that most nations don’t do a very good job managing their recreational fisheries — especially when compared to their commercial fisheries.

“Governments fail to recognize that recreational fisheries can decimate populations” or that they can be as important to monitor as commercial fisheries, says Warren Potts, a professor of fisheries science at Rhodes University and lead author of the Fish and Fisheries paper. “This ignores or underappreciates recreational fishing’s economic and ecological effects and causes governments to fail to prioritize regulating the practice.”

The paper looked at the global state of management regulations for recreational fishing and found that only 86 nations define recreational fisheries in their national fisheries-management legislation.

More than half of experts surveyed for the paper raised significant concerns about their nations’ recreational-fisheries management. No experts from developing nations, where the popularity of recreational fisheries has exploded as international tourists seek out “exotic” places to fish, believed that their countries effectively manage those fisheries.

But Robert Arlinghaus, a professor of fisheries management at Humboldt University in Germany who was not involved with either paper, points out that many countries do employ a basic fisheries-management regulation called a minimum size limit — in other words, you can’t land a fish if it’s below a certain size and hasn’t had the chance to reproduce yet. This isn’t exactly the cutting edge of adaptive science-based management, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

Arlinghaus feels that characterizing the majority of the world’s recreational fisheries as ineffectively managed may be taking things a little too far.

“Recreational fisheries might not be managed optimally,” he says, “and I do think the governance and management systems could be improved in many areas of the world, but I’m not sure that recreational fisheries are generally managed poorly.”

By the Numbers

Another major issue with recreational fisheries management boils down to numbers — or lack of them. In most places nobody knows exactly how many fish are caught.

That’s another difference from commercial fisheries — it’s just easier to gather data when you’re dealing with a limited number of fishing vessels than with hundreds of millions of individual people.

cod net — Cod in a commercial net. Photo: Derek Keats (CC BY 2.0)

“Some countries keep detailed data on their recreational fisheries catch, but others don’t,” says Daniel Pauly, principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia and a coauthor on the Frontiers in Marine Science paper. He adds that some countries use different agencies to collect data from recreational and commercial fisheries, and those groups don’t always speak with each other or consolidate their findings.

“If you know there are recreational fisheries in a country, but there’s no data, you have to be creative,” says Pauly. “You can’t say ‘there’s no data, so we’ll assume nothing has been caught.’”

To resolve this data gap and estimate the global catch of marine recreational fisheries, the paper used a method called “catch reconstruction” — a mix of computer analysis and good, old-fashioned detective work.

Catch reconstruction, he explains, assumes that fishing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Even if you don’t have data on how many fish are caught or brought to shore, there’s often other information showing things like how many boats used a marina, how much fuel they used, and how much seafood was for sale in local markets.

That’s where Pauly and his team came in. They consolidated information from a variety of sources and built a bigger picture.

Pauly provided an example of how they accomplished this.

“In West Africa, many people thought there weren’t any substantial recreational fisheries, because there’s no catch data available,” he tells me. “But there are fishing lodges there for tourism, and those lodges post images of what people catch on social media and websites. We know how many people go to those lodges, because tourists entering the country are reported and they fill in where they’re staying. If we know how many people visit, how long they stay and what’s usually caught, we can estimate catch even with an absence of official statistics.”

This isn’t foolproof. Potts points out that this kind of formulation can cause complications. He notes that the paper estimated the catch from one fishing lodge and extrapolated it to two others, including one lodge that exists on paper but hasn’t actually been built yet. Pauly responded to this concern by pointing out that “we were able to generate first estimates of the catch of West African recreational fisheries … but the fact these these estimates can be improved goes without saying.”

Even though the results are estimates, they suggest two potentially troubling trends. First, all recreational fisheries catch is significantly increasing in developing-world nations, especially in Africa and South America. For example, the number of recreational fishing licenses in Brazil jumped from 276,500 in 2011 to more than 400,000 just two years later.

fishing brazil — Fishing off the coast of Brazil, with dolphins swimming nearby. Photo: Felipe Vaduga (CC BY 2.0)

Second, recreational fisheries targeting sharks and rays are on the upswing worldwide. Sharks and rays represented less than 1% of total recreational catch in the 1950s, but about 6% today, and are especially increasing in South America, the Indo-Pacific and West Africa.

“This is a cause for concern given the threatened status of many species of sharks and rays,” Meeuwig says. Previous research has shown that about 24% of sharks and related species are threatened or endangered. “The capture of large sharks is particularly worrisome,” she adds, because of their importance as breeders.

Swimming Forward

Arlinghaus says he feels the Frontiers in Marine Science paper represents a “Herculean effort” to gather global recreational catch.

It’s also an opportunity to shift our attention to a previously invisible or ignored problem. Increasingly, as scientists and environmentalists have been raising the alarm about commercial and industrial overfishing, they’ve implicitly or explicitly sent the message that fishing for fun has so little environmental impact that it wasn’t worth considering.

And Arlinghaus cautioned that the papers’ recommendations about recreational fishing have already been misinterpreted in some circles. A widely shared Nature News article about this paper claimed “hobbyists’ harvest of sharks and rays have soared, and catch and release is no solution,”— despite the fact that the paper did not address catch and release. Additionally, some on social media claimed that this paper was proof that all recreational angling needed to be shut down, which was not a recommendation issued by the paper.

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Arlinghaus warned against making those leaps in logic based solely on the data from these papers. “We can’t learn much about the conservation concerns associated with a fishery just by looking at landings,” he points out.

But the Fish and Fisheries paper did contain some recommendations for improvement.

“There are some basic guidelines for improving governance that can be followed and should improve the quality of a governance of a country’s recreational fisheries,” Potts says. These include clearly defining recreational angling in national legislation and stressing how its management differs from commercial fisheries. The paper also calls for increased cooperation with stakeholders to gather more effective data and ensure compliance with rules, and scientific monitoring of populations of fishes targeted by recreational fisheries — all things that are currently done relatively well in the United States and Australia, but done relatively poorly in large parts of the developing world.

“I want to commend these authors for their recommendations,” Haukebo says. “This framework is a great reference for any nation that is aspiring to improve, or even just establish, responsible management of their recreational fishery.”

While Haukebo and other experts say you don’t have to feel bad about “goin’ fishin’” with family and friends just yet, the science presented in these papers makes it clear that in some places individual actions can collectively pose a significant threat to marine species — and that’s something governments and conservationists around the world, not to mention anglers, need to start to address.

An Emerging Threat to Conservation: Fear of Nature

It’s called “biophobia,” a disconnection from nature that’s reducing our collective will to preserve species and habitats. But new research points toward some wild solutions.

What do we lose when natural spaces and species disappear?

Increasingly, research has shown that as species and ecosystems vanish, it also chips away at our ability to preserve what remains — because we no longer understand what we’re losing.

You probably see it all the time. The neighbor who puts pesticides on his lawn rather than deal with pesky bees. The kid who squirms and runs at the sight of a harmless garter snake slithering through the grass. The politician who votes against wildlife protection because she’s never seen a wolf in the wild. The corporation that wants to bulldoze the habitat of a rare frog, but frogs are gross, so who cares, right?

At best this can be termed “the extinction of experience,” where our cultural and natural histories fade from our memories and therefore our reality.

At its worst it becomes something even more concerning: “biophobia,” the fear of living things and a complete aversion to nature.

This isn’t the fiction of living in a cold, empty dystopia. Sadly it’s becoming a way of life for too many people — especially children.

A recent study in Japan paints a striking portrait of this problem. A survey of more than 5,300 school children in the Tochigi Prefecture examined their perception of local invertebrates — 14 insect species and one spider. The results? A collective “ew.” Most of the students saw the species as things to dislike, fear or abhor, or even as sources of danger. The less experience the students had with nature, the more negative their feelings.

The results were published earlier this year in the in the journal Biological Conservation.

Lead researcher Masashi Soga with the University of Tokyo says the study stemmed from observations about today’s nature-deficient children.

“Humans inherently avoid dangerous organisms such as bees, but children these days avoid even harmless animals such as butterflies and dragonflies,” he says. “I have long wondered why so many of today’s children react like this.”

Butterfly — A butterfly photographed in the greenhouse at Igashira Park, Tochigi Prefecture. Photo by Takashi Hososhima (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Soga says their survey echoed findings from around the world. For example, a 2014 study of 1,100 students in China elicited similar emotional reactions — and, like the Japanese study, found that direct contact with nature helped to turn biophobia into biophilia, the term popularized by biologist E.O. Wilson to refer to human connection with other forms of life.

Although the children’s reactions were somewhat expected, the new study did contain an unexpected finding: Many of the surveyed children revealed that their parents also expressed fear or disgust of the same invertebrates. In fact these parental emotions were strong enough to overwhelm any positive experiences the children might have gained from direct experiences in nature.

As Soga and his coauthors wrote in their paper, “Our results suggest that there is likely a feedback loop in which an increase in people who have negative attitudes towards nature in one generation will lead to a further increase in people with similar attitudes in the next generation — a cycle of disaffection towards nature.”

And that’s possibly the greater threat posed by extinction of experience. Soga suggests the generational loss — a condition previously dubbed environmental generational amnesia — could chip away at our societal ability to preserve what we’re losing.

“I believe that increased biophobia is a major, but invisible, threat to global biodiversity,” Soga says. “As the number of children who have biophobia increases, public interest and support for biodiversity conservation will gradually decline. Although many conservation biologists still consider that preventing the loss of wildlife habitat is the most important way to conserve biodiversity, I think preventing increased biophobia is also important for conservation.”

What’s to be done about this? The paper makes several recommendations, the most obvious of which is that children should experience nature more often. The authors also suggest establishing policies to guide these natural experiences and increasing educational programs about the natural world.

Helping parents to see species around them in a new light would make a difference, too.

And, of course, maintaining support for preserving the wild spaces where these “scary” and “icky” creatures live is the most important thing of all.

That’s a point reinforced by another recent study, which found that wild spaces located within urban areas — and the plants and animals that thrive in them — are particularly important for human health and well-being.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, the study examined attitudes toward Discovery Park, the heavily forested 534-acre public park in Seattle, Washington. It found that the public had the most appreciation for — and gained the most value from — the wildest parts of the park.

“I have seen orca whales, seals, fish, eagles, herons, shorebirds and many other sea creatures in their natural habitat,” one survey participant wrote. “Going here with people has allowed me to connect and talk with them about conversation that simply does not happen in everyday life,” wrote another.

The participants reported that their most valuable experiences in the park included encountering wildlife, walking through open spaces, exploring the beach and finding beautiful views.

“We saw that a large majority of participants’ interactions, especially their most meaningful interactions, depended on Discovery Park’s relative wildness,” says lead author Elizabeth Lev, a master’s student in the University of Washington’s Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab.

This is only possible because the park is relatively wild. After all, you can’t enjoy watching birds if there are no birds to follow; gaze at the sunset if it’s obscured by skyscrapers; or stop and smell the flowers if they don’t have room to grow.

Bald eagle at Discovery Park. Photo: Brandon Trentler (CC BY 2.0)

And yet even this long-protected space could someday become less hospitable to nature. Over the past few years a lot of people and organizations have suggested developing parts of Discovery Park or the neighboring area. Most recently a plan proposed building 34 acres of much-needed affordable housing and parking spaces adjacent to the park, bringing with them noise, traffic and pollution.

If anything like that happened, both the park and the people of Seattle could lose something vital. And that would continue the trend of chipping away at Seattle’s — and the world’s — natural spaces, leaving just tiny pocket parks and green-but-empty spaces that offer little real value to wildlife, plants or people.

“It is true that any interaction with nature is better than none, but I don’t want people to be satisfied with any small bit of grass and trees,” Lev says. “We have been in this cycle of environmental generational amnesia for a long time, where the baseline keeps shifting and we don’t even realize what we’re losing until it’s gone. If we can get people to understand how much meaning and value can come from having more experiences with more wild forms of nature, then maybe we can stop this cycle and move toward conserving and restoring what we have left.”

Building this understanding in an ever-more fearful and disconnected world may be the biggest challenge. Peter Kahn, the senior author of Lev’s paper and the director of the Human Interaction with Nature lab, made several suggestions for bridging this gap in this 2011 book, Technological Nature. They echo the recommendation about getting children into nature, but also include telling stories of how things used to be, imagining what things might be like in the future, and developing a common language about nature, “a way of speaking about wild and domestic interaction patterns, and their wide range of instantiations, and the meaningful, deep and often joyful feelings that they engender.”

No matter what techniques we use, this growing field of research illustrates that saving nature requires encouraging people to experience it more often and more deeply. That calls for additional research — Lev and her coauthors have published a toolkit that other municipalities can follow to study the value of their own wild spaces — and clear communication of the results.

“If we can continue to characterize and show people the benefits of these wild spaces,” Lev says, “maybe people will begin to see more value in keeping these areas undeveloped — for the sake of our mutual benefit.”

baby snail — Photo: Dirk (Beeki) Schumacher/Pixabay

Study Finds Staggering Economic Benefit From Protecting Wetlands

For example, in Florida, the loss of just 3% of wetland coverage resulted in $480 million in property damage during just one hurricane.

Mangrove forests, marshes, and seagrass beds protect inland areas from storm surges and strong winds. Over long periods, coastal wetlands like these build up sediment that mitigates sea level rise and local land subsidence.

A new analysis of property damage from Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastal storms has shown that counties with larger wetlands suffered lower property damage costs than did counties with smaller wetlands.

“Starting in 1996, the U.S. government started to produce damage estimates for each tropical cyclone in a consistent manner,” explained coauthor Richard Carson, an economist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla. Before that, the data were collected only for hurricanes, which hindered past attempts to put a price on the marginal value, or price per unit, of wetlands, he said.

With the complete data set, the researchers examined all 88 tropical cyclones and hurricanes that affected the United States starting in 1996. That time period includes Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.

A Protective and Economic Boon

In addition to property damage data for tropical cyclones of all strengths, “our data set has considerably more spatial resolution,” Carson said, “which is a result of large amounts of information on storm tracks, property location, and wetland location all being digitized for use in a geographical information system basis.”

First author Fanglin Sun, formerly at UCSD and now an economist at Amazon.com, added that “areas subject to flood risk in a county are more accurately estimated, based on local elevation data and detailed information on individual storm trajectories” and wind speeds throughout affected areas.

The finer level of detail for the storm data let the researchers finally begin connecting wetland coverage and storm damage on a county-by-county basis, Carson said. “A storm track moving a couple of kilometers one direction or the other allows the amount of wetland protection to vary within the same county.”

In terms of property damage, Sun and Carson found that a square kilometer of wetlands saved an average of $1.8 million per year. Over the next 30 years, an average unit of wetlands could save $36 million in storm damage.

Some wetlands were valued at less than $800 per year per square kilometer and some at nearly $100 million. That marginal value depended on many factors, including a county’s property values, existing wetland coverage, coastline shape, elevation, building codes, and chance of actually experiencing damaging winds. And each of those variables fluctuated over the 20 years the team studied.

Overall, the highest-valued wetlands were in urban counties with large populations and the lowest-valued were in rural areas with small populations. However, wetlands provided a greater relative savings against weaker cyclones and in counties with less stringent building codes — areas that might not expect or plan for a tropical storm.

The team found no significant difference in the marginal value of saltwater versus freshwater wetlands or mangroves versus marshes. “Forested wetlands tend to be better at reducing wind speed and marshes tend to be better at absorbing water,” Carson said, “so the specific nature of the storm when it hits an area is likely to matter. [But] our results suggest that, on average, there is no difference.”

The team published these results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on March 3.

Wetlands at Risk

Most areas that have experienced storm-related property damage in the past 20 years have also lost wetland coverage, the researchers found. They calculated that Floridians would have been spared $480 million in property damage from Hurricane Irma alone had the state’s wetland coverage not shrunk by 2.8% in the decade prior.

Moreover, recent changes to the Clean Water Act have made the remaining coastal wetlands more vulnerable.

“The federal government, with respect to the U.S. Clean Water Act, took the position that the previous wetland studies were not reliable enough for use in assessing the benefits and cost of protecting wetlands,” Carson said.

“The value coastal wetlands provide for storm protection is substantial and should be taken into account as policy makers debate the Clean Water Act,” Sun said. “It’s also worth noting,” she added, “that storm protection for property is just one of many ecological services that wetlands provide. We hope our study will spur future research quantifying these other services as well.”

With tropical storms and hurricanes expected to happen more often because of climate change, the team wrote, wetlands will be more economically valuable than ever.

This story first appeared on Eos.

When the War on Science Really Began

A new book, The War on the EPA, tracks the history and importance of the government agency — and how efforts to undermine it began decades before Trump.

The New York Times keeps a running list of all the environmental regulations that the Trump administration has worked to trash since taking office more than three years ago.

It’s at nearly 100.

That’s just the start. The administration’s anti-environmental agenda has also involved undermining and unraveling key government agencies, most especially the Environmental Protection Agency.

There it’s been death by a thousand cuts, with EPA staff facing untenable contracts, positions left unfilled and budget cuts across the board — not mention an appointed leadership that’s opposed to the agency’s own mission.

As bad as all this sounds, there’s some important historical context to remember: It’s been bad for a while, according to a new book, The War on the EPA: America’s Endangered Environmental Protections, which tracks the “systematic propaganda campaign to discredit science” that began decades ago.

The book comes from the keyboards of husband-and-wife writing team William and Rosemary Alley, also the authors of two other environmental books on nuclear waste and groundwater.

“We wanted to write a good, readable book giving people more understanding of why this agency is important, what they do, and the difficulties involved in doing their job,” says Rosemary.

They realized that in order to save the EPA, people need to know what it does — and a lot of people don’t.

“We are trying to get people to understand how this matters to them in their daily lives,” says William, who is also the director of science and technology for the National Ground Water Association and headed the office of groundwater for the U.S. Geological Survey for nearly two decades. “There’s a lot that EPA does, like when we drink water from the tap, we’re dependent on EPA.”

Unfortunately, when people do talk about the EPA, it’s usually misguided complaints.

“There’s been a long demonizing of the EPA for over-regulating things, but the reality is that it’s extremely difficult for EPA to regulate anything,” Rosemary says.

Case in point: Despite a slew of new chemicals in our daily lives, it’s been two decades since a new regulation addressed a drinking-water contaminant.

The Alleys also write about the complicated and time-consuming processes behind lots of other regulations — tracking how they were first established and what happened afterward. In many cases environmental regulations were loosened to accommodate industry after political pushback or legal challenges.

This plays out time and time again throughout the Alleys’ book. Among the cases they cover: why feedlots continue to pollute waterways; what went wrong in Flint, Michigan; the long battle to remove lead from gasoline and continuing efforts to make cars cleaner; the continuing fight over what constitutes “waters of the United States”; President Obama’s work to reduce mercury from coal plants and methane emissions from oil and gas operations — and Trump’s push to undo those and many other regulations.

It’s clear from the book that enacting protections to safeguard human health and the environment has always been an uphill battle — and that narrative runs alongside the agency’s own successful creation story, as the Alleys also explain.

The 1970s saw the establishment of the EPA with bipartisan support from Congress (after a veto by Nixon) and the creation of bedrock environmental laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

And for the first 10 years things went pretty well.

Part of the early success of the EPA came from strong public involvement, the Alleys say. In those days many environmental problems were incredibly visible — gray clouds of smog and trash dumped along riverbanks — and there was public pushback to fix them.

But in 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch to lead the agency, and she threw down every speed bump and roadblock she could to impede the agency’s work. Budgets were slashed, positions were cut and industry leaders were put in charge of environmental programs.

It’s nearly identical to the tactics the Trump administration has used in recent years.

Things improved slightly after William Ruckelshaus, the agency’s first administrator, was brought back in 1983. But when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives a decade later, the anti-science work began again and has continued ever since.

With Trump’s election it kicked into high gear.

“We could have just as easily titled the book The War on Science, because science is just the absolute critical underpinnings of everything the EPA does, and that of course has been just tremendously damaged under the current administration,” says Rosemary. “The war on science, of course, didn’t start with Trump, but it’s been exacerbated tremendously.”

After detailing how this anti-science agenda influences making and enforcing environmental regulations, the Alleys’ book ends with a look at why it will be critical to rebuild the EPA and the importance of scientific integrity.

“A lot of talent has been lost from the agency and that will be impossible to turn around overnight,” says William. “If we have four more years of this, I have no idea how we’ll get past that. [The Trump administration] is still rushing to try to get as much as they possibly can done. Or undone, as it seems.”

Rosemary says she hopes that their book will provide an important jumpstart to conversations about the critical role of the EPA and efforts to fortify it.

“If you don’t see what the agency does, it’s hard to communicate the risk when it’s damaged,” she says. “We want people to understand why we need a strong EPA as much today as we did 50 years ago.”