Knowing what we’re going through weighs heavily on us, but there are ways to express and alleviate that pain.
The questions come to me almost every day.
Sometimes a friend leans in toward me with a look of pain or confusion in her eyes. I’ve come to expect the question that’s about to follow.
Other times they arrive by email, direct message, or in response to a Facebook post. There’s desperation in them.
Their wording varies a bit, but many boil down to the same thing: “How are we supposed to handle the news about climate change and the extinction crisis?”
I try to answer as best I can. “We carry that burden because we have to. And we can.”
It’s up to people like me and you to take it on. Because many people, and other creatures, can’t stand up for themselves — especially those most directly threatened by the changes we’re seeing today. And the ones we’ll see tomorrow.
Another version of the question goes like this: “How do you live with the pain of knowing what we’ve lost and what’s coming?”
That’s a tougher question to answer.
We all need to develop our own survival strategies, of course, and those can be personal. But getting out into the wild world is a good idea for all of us. It helps to remind us what we’re losing — and what still urgently needs our help.
You can even start this close to home. I take daily walks around the neighborhood by myself or with my dogs and take the time to watch the birds, insects and plants that we encounter. I recommend that, too, even if you’re only outside for a few minutes. It helps to change your venue, if not your point of view. Of course, sometimes on my longer walks I find myself pacing so fast, with so much anxiety, it feels like the hounds of hell are nipping at my heels — but that in itself is a good reminder that sometimes we just need to slow…down…and…breathe.
I also stand in place and talk to people. Friends and loved ones, professional peers — some offer company and comfort, others guidance and perspective. Even brief conversations on the street or trail can be a welcome break from the pressure.
Most importantly, I talk to people directly involved in climate and conservation issues. They’re the ones doing the hard work, and their experience — even when they’re discouraged or exhausted — reminds me that people are still looking for greater understanding and answers. Their work and their stories, and often their pain, make a difference. You don’t need to be a journalist to do this; activists and experts live in almost every community and are easy to find on social media.
Take advantage of the quiet moments, as well. During my down time, I read — from the nonfiction books I review here at The Revelator, which expose me to new ideas, to fiction and comics. There’s nothing wrong with a little escapism.
And don’t forget to exercise if you’re able: As it turns out, endorphins work.
Personally, I also exorcise pain through artwork and cartooning. Creative expression works, too.
Through it all, I write and tell stories, here at The Revelator, on social media, and in person. That happens to be my job, and I can’t offer it to you at the moment, but whether or not you have a job like mine you can be deeply invested in the important stories of our time — read them, pass them along, and retell them yourself. Stories are how we make meaning.
Don’t be afraid to get upset or angry, either. Those are valid responses. Your pain and fear need an escape valve.
As a journalist covering these issues, there are also some things I can’t do.
Ethically, I can’t protest, call my elected officials, donate to political candidates, run for office, sign petitions, or generally be an activist.
But for those of you in other professions, those are great paths to action. They’ll help you fight the despair, and they’ll push progress at the same time.
No matter how many adaptive strategies you’ve been devising, let’s admit — it’s been a hell of a year.
And that’s why taking time off once in a while is also a good strategy.
We’re about to take our annual end-of-the-year break here at The Revelator. When we return the first week of January — rested and recharged, we hope — we plan to hit the ground running with some powerful, important stories and thought-provoking essays, starting once again with our predictions about some of the most pressing problems we’re likely to encounter in the year ahead.
We look forward to you joining us for what will no doubt be an eventful 2020. (Eventful may prove to be a drastic understatement. Better get some rest over the holidays, while you still can.)
We’re not disappearing completely during the next two weeks. Before the year’s up, we’ll revisit some of our most thought-provoking articles and essays from 2019. You’ll still see us on social media, although perhaps not as much (yes, that’s another strategy). And our newsletter will still come out every Thursday (subscribe here if you don’t already).
We want to keep having conversations. Even when we’re out of the office, our email inboxes stay open, and we want to hear from you. Send us story ideas. Tell us what you want to know more about or what you think needs to get done. Start writing an op-ed or essay for us. Share your thoughts and experiences about how these critical environmental issues are affecting you and the planet around you.
While you’re at it, we’d love to hear how you’ve carried the burden so far and learn more about your own coping strategies.
Because we’re all in this together, and one thing’s for sure: None of us can do it alone.
The country has done a remarkable job increasing its tiger population, but that’s also created problems it isn’t addressing.
Sometimes success comes at a cost.
Nepal recently announced that its tiger population had increased from 121 animals in 2009 to as estimated 235 in 2018, putting it firmly on track to fulfill its goal of doubling the number of big cats within its borders by the year 2022. The country has the largest number of Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris) outside of India.
But there’s a dark side to this population increase: More tigers in Nepal are dying.
According to a letter published recently in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, 55 adult tigers died in Nepal between 2009 and 2018. Tiger mortality was so high that the number of cats in the supposedly safe stronghold of Chitwan National Park dropped from 120 in 2013 to 93 last year.
The primary causes of the tiger deaths were deforestation, increasing human development, lack of prey and human-tiger conflict, says one of the letter’s authors, Achyut Aryal, a conservation biologist at the University of Sydney.
Humans didn’t directly cause most of these tiger deaths, though. Most of the mortalities occurred when tigers, which lead solitary lives, encroached on each other’s habitats and battled for territory or mates.
Some of these conflicts appear to have indirectly resulted from habitat degradation and other pressures from nearby human populations, which may have pushed tigers into new territories and put them in conflict with each other. This also appears to have increased human-tiger conflict.
Cub mortality was not counted in the new study — males that kill for mates also frequently eliminate cubs in order to get females to breed again — but Aryal and his collaborators calculated that adult male tigers were four times as likely to die as females, and about 60% of deaths occurred during mating season.
Aryal tells The Revelator he wasn’t surprised by this increase in tiger mortality. He actually predicted it back in 2015. A paper he co-authored that year calculated that Nepal would need to set aside an additional 2,000 square miles of tiger habitat in order to achieve and maintain its goal of 250 animals, each of which would need more than 20 square miles of dedicated territory. The authors also estimated that the amount of available prey in tiger habitats would need to nearly triple to support and feed that number of tigers. The paper called for expanding tiger territories into currently unprotected forests and establishing buffer zones to allow populations of both tigers and their prey to grow.
Tiger art in Nepal. Photo: Greg Younger (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Unfortunately those predictions and recommendations appear to have fallen on deaf ears. “The government and donor agencies are celebrating the success of doubling the tiger population, but they are not addressing human-tiger conflict problems and tiger deaths,” Aryal says. “They did not listen to independent advice. Government programs are more directed and influenced by donor activities for tiger conservation in Nepal.”
The new letter is quite critical of that status quo. “There is no room for complacency in agencies responsible for managing tiger populations, including the Nepalese government, funding bodies and conservationists,” Aryal and his coauthors wrote. “If the tiger habitat is deteriorating and cannot sustain more tigers, pushing tiger numbers higher than is sustainable will be detrimental and result in self-regulation of their numbers.” They’ve called for more studies into what the tigers need and can expect from their current habitats before the number of tigers dying ends up reversing Nepal’s hard-earned victories.
There’s not much evidence of that yet, but it’s an issue Nepal needs to address if it truly hopes to make its 2022 goal — something it would have already achieved if those 55 tigers had survived.
The snaring crisis in Southeast Asia appears to have claimed the lives of the country’s last wild tigers.
Are tigers extinct in Laos?
That’s the conclusion of a detailed new study that found no evidence wild tigers still exist in the country.
What researchers did find during a five-year camera survey of the biodiversity-rich Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area was evidence of snares — lots and lots of deadly snares, which are designed to trap and kill any animals that stumble across them.
It appears that tigers have now paid the ultimate price for the snaring crisis that plagues Laos and the rest of Southeast Asia.
“Snares are simple to make,” says Akchousanh Rasphone, a zoologist with the Wildlife Research Conservation Unit and lead author of the study. “One person can set hundreds or even thousands of snares, which kill indiscriminately and are inhumane for anything that is captured.” Most animals killed in snares are destined for Asia’s bushmeat markets, although tigers themselves are sought by wildlife traffickers for their valuable furs and body parts.
Illegal wildlife snares in Laos. Photo: Bill Robichaud/Global Wildlife Conservation (CC BY 2.0)
The loss of tigers in Laos was an avoidable, if not unexpected, tragedy. The most recent worldwide tiger population estimates, released in April 2016, put the number of tigers remaining in the country at all of two. The observation of those last two Laotian tigers came from the first year of the camera survey; they were never seen again — except, in all likelihood, by the trappers who killed them.
“Our team did what we could with our limited resources to conserve the species,” says Rasphone. “We did our best despite being defeated by the high international demand in the illegal wildlife trade for this species.”
Their deaths continue the slow decline of the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris tigris). Today their only healthy populations remain in Thailand, which at last count had about 189 wild tigers. The Indochinese tiger (previously considered its own subspecies) also persists at unsustainable levels in China (about 7 tigers), Vietnam (fewer than 5) and Myanmar (no reliable population count).
Unfortunately, the news of tigers’ extirpation in Laos hasn’t generated much attention in the country.
Tiger statue in Laos. Photo: Marko Mikkonen (CC BY 2.0)
“It seemed to spark very little discussion in Laos in terms of how to move things forward with regards to preventing extirpation of more species,” says Rasphone. “It occurs to me that the only thing that our government was concerned about was that the study made the country lose face, instead of taking it as a lessons learned and thinking about how not to repeat the same mistakes again for the species of conservation importance that are left.”
And that’s a big concern, as snaring affects a lot more than just tigers. The researchers also concluded that leopards (Panthera pardus) no longer exist in Laos. The species was last officially observed in the country in 2004, but conservationists had hoped that pocket populations remained in Nam Et-Phou Louey.
In addition, the researchers identified a wide range of large and small animals in snaring hotspots in Nam Et-Phou Louey, including other predators such as dhole (Cuon alpinus) and clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosi), and all appeared to have declining populations. “Based on our recent survey, the largest prey species, guar (Bos gaurus), has already become quite rare,” says Rasphone.
So is that it for tigers in Laos? Not necessarily. In theory, if the snaring crisis is ever resolved, the big cats could repopulate Laos from neighboring countries.
And Rasphone says her team still conducts surveys to find evidence “of what is and isn’t there.” She adds that the government wants additional surveys for both tigers and leopards, “although there isn’t funding for that at the moment.”
It should also be noted that captive tigers do still exist in Laos. Hundreds of genetically inbred big cats live in the country’s illegal and notoriously inhumane tiger farms, where they’re raised to be slaughtered and sold for their body parts. Laos has officially promised to shut down these facilities, which have been widely linked to illegal tiger trade, but appears to have made little progress toward that purported goal. In fact, evidence suggests that the Laotian government has actually allowed existing farms to expand and the number of farms to increase.
The state of the country’s wild animals remains dire, and Rasphone says her team’s study should serve to guide policy in Laos and other nations that still have tiger populations. “In my opinion,” she says, “the message of the paper needs to be carried as a lesson to other range countries and also be interpreted locally for the conservation of the remaining populations of species of conservation importance in Laos.”
With many experts calling the snaring epidemic an “extinction crisis” for Southeast Asia, the time to heed those lessons grows short.
Coming next: Tigers in Nepal face their own deadly challenge.
“Recalcitrant” seeds hold the secret to saving a critically endangered Indian tree — thanks to a bit of human help.
A team of Indian conservationists working to save a critically endangered tree from extinction just achieved an important conservation success, but first they had three major stumbling blocks to overcome.
Madhuca insignis by the river. Photo by Geeta Joshi. Used with permission.
The first was, of course, numbers. The trees, known only as Madhuca insignis, are few and far between. Originally declared extinct more than a century ago, the 60-foot-tall, fruiting species was rediscovered in 2004. A year later it was added to India’s national priority list of endangered trees, but few if any actual protection efforts followed. By the time conservationists finally conducted the first major survey of the trees’ population — a three-year process between 2013 and 2015 — only 27 individuals remained.
“We were really shocked and disappointed by that number, because previous records indicated 50 individuals in the wild,” says Anurag Dhyani, one of the paper’s authors and a scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in Kerala. “However, this is the case for most of the threatened trees in the Western Ghats and other parts of India.”
Roads, agriculture and other development have taken their toll on many of these tree species, including M. insignis, and those threats are getting worse: A planned hydroelectric plant in the Dakshina Kannada region would, if completed, wipe out 10 of the remaining M. insignis trees and harm the populations of 47 other rare plant species.
As if the tiny population and ongoing threats weren’t bad enough, the researchers encountered a second obstacle: Just 7 of those 27 trees were flowering and producing seeds.
And that led to the third challenge: The fruit-covered seeds themselves proved…difficult. A paper the researchers published in November 2019 in the Journal for Nature Conservation goes so far as to call them “recalcitrant.”
Madhuca insignis fruit with seed. Photo by Geeta Joshi. Used with permission.
“They are short-lived — maybe a few weeks,” explains Dhyani, one of the paper’s authors. “They have a high moisture content, which enhances microbial contamination and leads to rapid deterioration.”
The seeds also obstinately refused preservation methods. Dhyani says they can’t be dried to a moisture content level below 30% without injury, and they don’t tolerate freezing. “So storage in a seed bank is not feasible,” he says.
Åsmund Asdal, coordinator for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, who was not involved in this project, says trees like this produce what’s called “non-orthodox” seeds which defy normal preservation methods. Orthodox seeds, by contrast, “can be dried down to a very low moisture content — 3 to 5% water in the seed — and still keep the ability to germinate. This characteristic is necessary for long-term storage in below-zero conditions.” Many trees and bush species produce unorthodox seeds, which he says are more common in tropical areas such as Southeast Asia.
But from those difficulties, the first signs of success have emerged. The researchers managed to collect 300 M. insignis seeds, which they quickly planted in a nursery. Amazingly 275 of the seeds germinated — producing ten times as many seedlings as adult plants existed in the wild.
Seedlings galore! Photo by Geeta Joshi. Used with permission.
Within a year the seedlings had grown to heights of six inches or more — big enough to transplant 100 of them into Agumbe forest, one of their original habitats, which currently contains just two adult trees. By March 2019 a full 60% of those transplanted saplings had survived, and they’d reached heights of up to two feet — possibly enough to enable their long-term survival.
That’s critical, because the trees’ own nature may provide their own stumbling block in the wild. M. insignis is a river-based tree that, the scientists observed, tends to drop about three-quarters of its seeds into the flowing water. The rivers deposit the floating seeds on banks farther downstream, where they germinate in just two weeks, but the resulting seedlings don’t yet have the deep roots of their forebears and have a tenuous hold on the future. The researchers observed many of them get washed away during the monsoon period’s heavy rains.
If M. insignis had remained a populous species, it probably could have overcome that low recruitment rate just based on the greater number of seeds it would have produced. But with so few trees remaining and even fewer producing fruit, too few seedlings currently survive naturally. That’s why it needs a helping hand, something that might benefit other species as well.
Transplanted Madhuca insignis. Photo by Geeta Joshi. Used with permission.
“Based on my 10 years of research experience with endangered plants in the temperate and tropical region of India, I strongly feel collecting seeds and raising seedlings in the nursery to a certain size — 3 to 12 months — is of immense importance for rare plants,” says Dhyani. This will provide seedlings with a greater degree of safety from weather events, predators and pest insects.” Then, once the plants are big enough to be transplanted, they can be monitored to see how well they grow and survive — and, it’s hoped, the next round of seedling growth can begin.
Of course all of this takes money, sources of which are few and far between for endangered plants.
“It took a long time to start our conservation efforts on this rare tree,” says Dhyani. “One of the major factors is that funding for conservation projects is very limited globally, and major shares flow toward big cats, bears, elephants, rhinos and sharks. Plants are less funded, despite the universal fact that we cannot live without them. It’s a big challenge for young conservationists like me.” The current study was funded by the Karnataka Forest Department, but local agencies can only handle so much.
Still, Dhyani and his colleagues are already putting their experience with the species to good use. “We have initiated a rescue operation on Buchanania barberi, an evergreen endemic tree with two mature individuals remaining in the wild, and Indian sandalwood (Santalum album), the second most expensive wood in the world,” he says.
As for the future of Madhuca insignis, Dhyani says they’ll continue to monitor the transplanted seedlings: “Our success will be defined by whether they successfully flower and fruit.”
He hopes the rediscovery and successful germination of this tree will plant the seeds for other, similar initiatives.
“I believe these small steps will help to inspire other conservationists and the public to work and support other plants in urgent need of conservation globally,” he says. “It’s really difficult to say what form it will take, but surely we could save some species with little effort.”
When she was about 8 years old, Judy Elson received a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle from her great-aunt that featured North American birds. Her relative had a passion for feeding backyard birds, and Elson has carried on the tradition for the past 30 years, in turn passing on her enjoyment and dedication to her own children.
“They put together the same jigsaw puzzle I did as a child and started recognizing birds even before they knew they were interested in them,” she says. With 12 feeders in her garden in Cary, outside Raleigh, North Carolina, she observes about 50 birds per day from up to 22 different species. “I feed the birds to benefit them, but it also brings them in closer to where they are easier to see,” Elson says. “Most of my feeders are outside a bay window in my dining room where I can sit and watch the birds. That is so enjoyable and relaxing.”
Backyard bird feeding is one of the most common ways people engage with wildlife in many parts of the world. Estimates show that about half of households in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia feed birds. In Great Britain, homeowners provide enough food to support approximately 196 million birds.
While people have always fed birds with kitchen scraps and homemade feeders, the practice has substantially changed since the 1950s with the increased commercial availability of diverse bird foods and feeders, making it easier to attract a greater number of bird species to backyard gardens year-round.
Researchers are just beginning to understand the ecological impacts, positive and negative, of this massive human intervention. From helping birds survive the winter to boosting bird populations and reproduction, feeding is reshaping bird communities and behaviors and even altering migratory patterns.
A 2019 study led by researchers from the British Trust of Ornithology found an increase in the diversity of birds visiting garden feeders in the past 40 years in Britain. The study, based on data recorded by citizen scientists for the Garden Bird Feeding Survey, shows that “approximately half of all birds using feeders belonged to just two species in the 1970s, but by the 2010s, the number of species making up the same proportion of the community had more than tripled.” For example, according to Kate Plummer, a research ecologist with the British Trust of Ornithology and a lead author of the study, just 10 percent of volunteers saw wood pigeons and goldfinches at feeders in the 1970s, but now these two species are common visitors in close to 90 percent of gardens. After significant declines between the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, the goldfinch population has more than doubled between 1990 and 2015.
“We think it is the use of feeders that is in part driving these levels of increase,” says Plummer. “In the 1990s, bird food companies targeted goldfinches and started producing finer seeds, which made it easier for the birds to get what they needed in gardens.”
Bird food provided in British gardens has also affected the Eurasian blackcap, which has evolved a new migration strategy. For the past 60 years, blackcaps are more often choosing to spend the winters in Britain’s urban areas rather than migrating to the Mediterranean as they used to. A study concluded that milder winters combined with increased bird feeding have contributed to the change. “Feeding is causing species to adapt and evolve,” says Plummer, who also led this research.
It’s not just in Europe that birds are taking advantage of people’s feeding activities in their gardens. In 2017, Vancouver, Canada, residents elected the Anna’s hummingbird as their official city bird. Described by the city as “classy, urbane and stylish with the heart of a tiger,” the tiny bird now helps the city build awareness of birds in the urban environment.
Anna’s hummingbird is now the official bird of Vancouver, Canada. (Photo by John Krzesinski., CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Yet, Vancouver’s favorite bird is a relative newcomer to the city. In the past 20 years, Anna’s hummingbirds have expanded their winter range northward by more than 435 miles. A study based on long-term data from Project FeederWatch, a citizen science program in the United States and Canada led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada, found that the hummingbirds are now able to survive farther north in colder locations in part because more people are providing nectar feeders and planting exotic flowers in their gardens that bloom in different seasons, including the winter.
“It was quite rare to find an Anna’s hummingbird in the winter north of the California border 20 years ago,” says David Bonter, avian ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and one of the study authors. “Most of those birds can handle cold temperatures as long as they have something to eat, and more individuals are surviving winter in places where they could not have previously,” he adds. “What surprised everybody involved in the study is how quickly it happened.”
The impacts of human feeding extend beyond birds. For example, in Australia, flying foxes are increasingly living in urban areas because they can easily access food all year. People choose to plant native and exotic plants that flower in all seasons, which entices the bats to spend more time in those locations.
While feeding animals can in some cases lead to increased survival and breeding success, there can be negative consequences as well. For example, a 2019 study of the impacts of human feeding on a group of bottlenose dolphins in Western Australia found that, while other factors may have also played a role, both calf survival and female reproductive success were negatively affected by feeding.
Up for Debate
Backyard bird feeding is the subject of extensive debate. For example, what are the long-term ecological consequences of changing the migratory behavior of birds? “The amount of human food supplied every single day is gigantic, and that genuinely has had a massive effect on the overall environment and the population of birds,” says Darryl Jones, author of The Birds at My Table: Why We Feed Wild Birds and Why It Matters.
For example, in a 2018 article, scientists raised concerns about the risks associated with increased disease transmission. Garden feeders can indeed spread disease by bringing birds into contact with species they would not otherwise interact with. Risks can be higher if feeding stations are not cleaned on a regular basis, allowing food waste and droppings to accumulate. The number of greenfinches in the United Kingdom declined from a peak of about 4.3 million in 2006 to about 1.5 million individuals in 2016 after a disease outbreak that researchers hypothesized could be due to feeders. In the eastern U.S., bird feeders facilitated the transmission of an eye infection that decimated the house finch populations in the 1990s.
A paper exploring the impacts of wildlife feeding on migration and disease suggests that one of the benefits of migration is that it allows animals to leave habitats where parasites have accumulated and eliminates infected individuals that cannot survive the journey, and so can reduce parasite infection in populations. “Staying in one place increases exposure to infection,” says Richard Hall, an assistant professor at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia and co-author of the paper.
Feed Responsibly
According to Hall, the implications of bird feeding are also complex, and while feeders can facilitate the spread of diseases, they can in certain cases help improve bird condition.
“When you feed birds you aggregate them and that increases the transmission of parasites, but if you are feeding the right kinds of food it also means they can have a better immune function so even if they come in contact with another sick bird or parasite in the environment they may be better equipped to fight off an infection,” he says, “so there is a balance there.”
If done responsibly, many researchers say, feeding can help populations in need, especially in winter, and increase biodiversity conservation. “What we do as humans tends to have a negative impact on wildlife, and many of the species using garden feeders like goldfinches were negatively impacted by the intensification of agriculture. That’s why they were in decline, but now we are putting feeders and they are increasing,” says Plummer. “If we can compensate in some way for other negative effects we are having on some of these species, it feels like we are doing something beneficial.”
Garden feeders can help birds like the goldfinch rebound in numbers. (Photo by R.A. Killmer, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Backyard bird feeding also plays an important role in establishing personal connections with nature, with benefits to human health and well-being. “As we are more and more in big cities where nature is becoming rare and more difficult to encounter, bird feeding is a desperate search for some connection with nature. If you put a feeder in your garden, truly wild animals will come and visit you,” says Jones. “It is an extraordinary experience.”
The direct observation of the natural world can also get people to be more supportive of conservation efforts. “There is value in that human interactions with backyard birds make people realize the birds are in trouble, and we need to make more efforts to conserve what’s left,” says Bonter.
A 2019 study that surveyed participants of Project FeederWatch in the United State to understand the connection between people’s emotions and what they observed at bird feeders, found that most people who directly observed a problem at their feeders, such as the presence of a cat or sick birds, reported they would take action.
“There is a high percentage of people who do something in response to what they see,” says lead study author Ashley Dayer, an assistant professor of human dimensions in the department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech. “People are doing a lot more than just the feeding itself. They are managing the predators out there, they are cleaning the feeders, they are taking a lot of actions.”
In Australia bird feeding is strongly discouraged, even though the proportion of people feeding birds is the same as in the Northern Hemisphere. “People are strongly motivated to feed birds and care about them, but they are doing so in the complete absence of any information or advice and don’t know how to do it properly,” says Jones, who just published a book, Feeding the Birds at Your Table, to advise people how to feed birds responsibly.
Backyard bird feeding can have benefits as long as it is done correctly, and a number of resources such as Project FeederWatch provide guidelines and steps people can take to create a safe feeding environment for birds, such as frequently cleaning feeders, spacing them far apart from each other to reduce exposure to disease, providing nutritionally appropriate foods, planting native species or recording data to allow scientists to better understand bird populations. With a recent study published in Science revealing that bird populations in the United States and Canada have fallen by 29 percent since 1970 — even species “once considered common and wide-spread” — people may become even more motivated to put out feeders to help birds, so making sure it’s done correctly will be important.
To reseed or not to reseed? Replanting burned landscapes is a natural response, but doing it wrong comes with costs for species and even the climate.
In 2017 the Thomas fire raged through 281,893 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, California, leaving in its wake a blackened expanse of land, burned vegetation, and more than 1,000 destroyed buildings.
More tragedy soon followed. When rains finally arrived in January 2018, the waters hit hills where grasses, trees and shrubs had all been burned away. The resulting mudslides, exacerbated by the fire-hardened soil, killed more than 20 people.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons some local residents wanted to take action right away, in the weeks after the fire, to bring life and color back to the charred hillsides by scattering the ground with seeds of the state’s iconic California poppy.
Such efforts wouldn’t have prevented the mudslides, but the impulse to do something after a wildfire is natural, especially following a deadly catastrophe. But is reseeding a burned landscape the right way to go?
It turns out reseeding isn’t always ecologically beneficial or effective. Most of it is undertaken with the intent of curbing erosion or limiting the spread of invasive plants. But according to a growing field of research, in some ecosystems reseeding doesn’t have those desired effects — and can even inhibit the ability of native plant communities to recover. That, in turn, can harm other native wildlife and even the climate.
Sometimes, experts say, the best thing to do is actually nothing. But that can be hard for the public to understand when wildfires hit so close to home.
“The general public still sometimes expects to see the helicopters flying over the chaparral after fires, throwing that grass seed out there,” says Jan Beyers, an emeritus scientist with the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station.
“Well-meaning community groups and even private citizens think they’re actually helping by reseeding and don’t know that they may be causing more harm,” says Liv O’Keeffe, senior director of communications and engagement at California Native Plant Society.
It’s not just a few eager residents who feel the call to reseed. Reseeding’s been a common tactic of state and federal agencies across many parts of the western United States for decades, and still is in some areas. In the Great Basin alone, millions of acres of public lands have been reseeded after wildfires — a lot of them with non-native grasses.
So with evidence mounting against large-scale reseeding, why is it still done?
That answer varies across the West, as each ecosystem presents unique challenges. And things get even more complicated in places where we’ve caused the biggest disruptions to the environment — land that been has heavily developed, overrun by invasive species, or trampled by hordes of hungry cattle.
The Hard Truth: Doing Nothing Works
“Most of the time, reseeding after wildfire is not a good idea,” says Andrea Williams, the director of plant science at the California Native Plant Society.
The appropriate action to take post-fire, according to the organization’s newly published fire-recovery guide, depends on where the fire happened, how intensely it burned, and the type of habitat affected. And sometimes the worst damage comes not the fire itself, but from firefighting with bulldozers and other heavy machinery that take a big toll on the environment. In those cases, more advanced restoration, including reseeding, could be needed.
In much of California, though, reseeding isn’t necessary, she says. Wildfire is a natural occurrence in the state, and most native plants are adapted to it. Some species will only germinate after a fire, while others benefit from the light and space that’s created in burned areas. In the weeks and months following a wildfire, nature can put on a show.
“If you get the appropriate timing and intensity, you’ll get native wildflowers that you don’t see except after a burn, like the fire poppy,” says Williams. “And that’s because the char and ash produce chemicals that signal them to come up and bloom and take advantage of that space in the shrubland that’s there after a fire.”
Within about five months, native shrubs and oaks will also start sprouting, she says.
“So seeding in those instances, particularly with non-native species and even with native species, is generally a bad idea.”
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what landowners and land managers have done for decades.
“We’d load up an airplane with grass seeds and fly the entire fire area and just drop seed,” says Eric Huff, staff chief of the Forest Practice Program for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). “Everyone felt good — like they’d done something to arrest erosion — but grass-seeding over large scales like that was not effective.”
Forest growth in Yellowstone National Park, May 2009. (Photo by Kent Kanouse, CC BY-NC 2.0)
In fact, the majority of studies conducted in forests across the West showed that seeded areas were no better at preventing erosion than non-seeded areas, according to a 2011 survey of the scientific literature by researchers from the U.S. Forest Service and Northern Arizona University. Even when seeded sites did produce more plant cover on the ground, it was rarely enough in the first two years to help hold soils in place.
Seeding is also done to help prevent invasive species — plants that originate in another area and, once introduced, pose a threat to their new habitat’s biological diversity — from taking over before other species can recover. But on that front, researchers have found it’s mostly a toss-up — it only works about half the time. That’s because most of the treatments meant to limit invasive species actually used non-native seeds, which, though they may not be aggressively harmful, can still crowd out native plants.
“This review,” the authors wrote in their study, “suggests that post-fire seeding does little to protect soil in the short term, has equivocal effect on invasion of non-native species, and can have negative effects on native vegetation recovery with possible long-term ecological consequences.”
Beyers, who was one of the contributing scientists, says the mounting research helped change practices among agency staff in California. But it’s been harder to get the message out to the general public, and other states have continued the practice — for example, Arizona, where a recent burn was sprayed with barley seeds.
When non-native grasses are reseeded they can do real harm.
One of the places where this has been apparent is in chaparral, the shrub-dominated ecosystem that thrives in California’s Mediterranean climate and is home to many of the state’s native plant species. Introducing non-native grasses there often ends up providing fuel for fires, says Richard Halsey, director of the California Chaparral Institute. Most of the grasses are annuals that die out by summer and provide dry tinder, often referred to as “flash fuels,” that ignite more quickly than studier shrubs during summer and fall fire season.
Chaparral is better left alone after a wildfire. Reseeding that was previously carried out by state and federal agencies “only destroyed ecosystem integrity and ended up causing a more flammable environment,” he says. “Unless the landscape’s been overrun by weeds already, people just ought to go home and leave the place alone and not introduce anything else into the system.”
Reseeding efforts, to him, are just “litigation mitigation” — a way for municipalities to say they’ve at least done something after a fire, even if it’s not effective. “The city or the county could say, ‘We did what we could, we’re sorry the hillside came through your living room when it rained,’” he says.
Huff says Cal Fire generally advises against reseeding with grasses, excepted in limited circumstances and for small areas, like a 100-square-foot space around a creek or another municipal water source. The agency does work with local landowners to replant trees after wildfires, though. The program uses mostly seedlings that are 1-2 years old. “We follow a specific seed-zone map that matches native species with the proper elevation,” says Huff.
Land managers have mostly adapted. A more common practice than seeding these days is mulching, which can yield some better erosion-prevention results, she says, but she cautions that the mulch needs to be free of weed seeds, a common problem in straw and wood-chip mulches, to avoid creating the same problems that happen with intentional reseeding.
Cheatgrass and Cows
Out in the Great Basin — the sweeping expanse dominated by sagebrush steppe that stretches across the intermountain West — we find a different situation.
Reseeding after wildfires here is still a common practice, says Francis Kilkenny, a research biologist with the Forest Service and the technical lead of the Great Basin Native Plant Project, a joint effort with the Service and Bureau of Land Management.
That’s because these lower, drier elevations can be prone to “recovery failures,” he says, as opposed to forested ecosystems which tend to have more moisture and a better chance of natural recovery.
A bedeviling invasive species unintentionally introduced in the United States in the late 1800s makes recovery in the steppes even harder. Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is often the first plant to establish itself after a wildfire. An annual, dense-growing grass that dies and dries out by summer, it’s also a notorious “flash fuel” that can drive more wildfires, creating a vicious cycle. It also dies earlier than native vegetation, extending the fire season.
To break that pattern, land managers will often seed an area after a wildfire with other quick-growing grasses. Crested wheatgrass (Agropyron cristatum), a fire-tolerant, non-native perennial, is a favorite. It comes with its own problems, but it’s good at outcompeting cheatgrass, and cattle enjoy it.
And that’s another objective of managers on public lands — providing forage for grazing.
Cattle on the landscape, however, create another kind of vicious cycle. They trample the biological soil crust that provides cover between native bunchgrasses. Intact, the crust can prevent cheatgrass seeds from taking hold, but once it’s been broken, the seeds have an easier time.
Cheatgrass invades after soils have been degraded by grazing, road building and other development, or off-road vehicles. So more grazing can mean more cheatgrass, which means more fire, which means more wheatgrass seeding, which results in more forage for cattle.
Across Nevada this kind of reseeding of non-native grasses has turned the sagebrush steppe into “basically a cow range with monocultures of crested wheatgrass,” says Laura Cunningham, the California director of the nonprofit Western Watersheds Project. “And that’s not a good habitat for other native species like sage grouse and mule deer.”
Reseeding with non-native grasses like crested wheatgrass to beat out cheatgrass achieves the goals of suppressing invasive species and providing forage, but it comes at the expense of biological diversity, as crested wheatgrass also outcompetes almost every other native species it’s been measured against, says Kilkenny.
The cost of that tradeoff hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“Negative long-term effects of these species [of non-native grasses] on ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, and wildlife habitat have been documented,” wrote Kilkenny and other scientists in a 2019 study.
And that has led to a change in practice.
A prescribed burn treatment is done to reduce hazardous fuels from non-native plants and to prepare the area for native plant seeding for restoration. (Photo by Austin Catlin, USFWS, CC BY-NC 2.0)
From 1940 to 1980 virtually all reseeding was done with a mix of non-native forage grass, dominated by crested wheatgrass. In the following two decades, land managers began using some native seeds. By the turn of the century, there were more native seeds than non-native being used in reseeding and the mixes often contained a combination of grasses, forbs and shrubs. The most commonly used native species are Sandberg bluegrass (Poa secunda), Lewis flax (Linum lewisii) and big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata).“Part of the reason for that is that there’s been more development of native species, so there are more options on the market,” says Kilkenny. Short supply and high costs for native seeds have previously been cited as limiting factors.
But not every kind of native seed is cheap or easy to get. Some seeds, like sagebrush, must be harvested from wild plants, and growing seedlings often requires planting them by hand rather than having a machine toss them in bulk. That’s why land managers tend to favor seeds for perennial grasses that grow in a row-crop type environment.
“The technology that’s used to grow wheat has been transferred to growing these native bunchgrasses,” says Kilkenny.
It’s still rare to find native-only seed mixes being used. But research has shown that when it does happen, they can do nearly as well as crested wheatgrass in competing with the dreaded cheatgrass.
Still, progress continues. A 2017 study led by USGS ecologist David S. Pilliod analyzed treatments of public lands and found that the upward trend in reseeding with native species is likely to continue because, “research suggests that locally adapted native seeds can perform better than seeds from distant locations or elevations.”
The Need for Natives
Protecting native plants and working to restore areas where they’ve been displaced can be slow going — but a number of other native residents depend on the outcome. One of those is the greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), which has become a species of conservation concern.
The bird, which ranges across the Great Basin, slipped in numbers to fewer than 200,000 as sagebrush-steppe habitat was lost to fire, development and invasive species. Sage grouse chicks depend on the cover of sagebrush and other shrubs to hide from predators and they need the native forbs and insects that grow in these intact habits for food.
A female greater sage-grouse with one of her eight chicks on Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge in Wyoming. (Photo by Tom Koerner/USFWS, CC BY 2.0)
“Chick rearing is dependent on having a highly biodiverse plant community,” says Kilkenny. “So if your goal is to increase sage grouse habitat, you would want to try to use natives as much as possible.” Post-fire habitats reseeded with crested wheatgrass lack ecological diversity and have been shown to be much lower in insect diversity, including pollinators, he says.
Helping to restore native plant communities in the sagebrush steppe provides both biological diversity and structural diversity — which will be key to boosting numbers for the greater sage-grouse.
Maintaining biodiverse plant communities is important not just in the Great Basin, of course, but everywhere we want healthy ecosystems.
Native plants have coevolved with native pollinators like bees. “The whole system of life depends on the plants and the complexity of the native species that are locally adapted to that area,” says Williams, of the California Native Plant Society.
Biodiversity and healthy native plant communities will also be even more important as a warming climate changes the world around us.
“What people are pushing these days is to have resilient systems,” she says. “And the basis of a resilient system is a diverse system.”
“I hope to inspire viewers to see these species with new eyes — or to see them at all,” says artist Zoe Keller.
Artist Zoe Keller specializes in drawing animals and species that may not be around much longer.
“In darker moments, I think of my drawings as a ‘mourning’ ritual,” says Keller. “So many of the species that I have studied will be gone within my lifetime, or that of the next.”
From her studio in Portland, Oregon, Keller, age 30, puts her heart — and back — into each of her massive, lifelike artworks. Drawn in graphite on sheets of paper as big as eight or nine feet across, her compositions often feature dozens of species large and small. Many of the images, which can take more than 300 hours to complete, depict their animal subjects positioned around each other in intricate patterns. Others capture the fragile ecosystems in painstaking detail.
Photo courtesy Zoe Keller.
Her latest exhibit series, visible now at her website or through Portland’s Antler Gallery, features the birds, mammals, snakes, plants and invertebrates she observed during an artist’s residency at Zion National Park. Many of the species depicted are endangered or at risk.
“I lived in Grotto House, the original ranger station in the middle of the park, and spent every day hiking, photographing and sketching,” she says of the series. “I also had the opportunity to spend time with park staff learning more about the park’s varied ecosystems and wildlife. I even got to participate in a Utah State University snail survey! The residency’s immersive quality was perfect for the way that I work.”
The Revelator spoke with Keller about her art, the amazing biodiversity it depicts, and the messages her drawings convey about the biodiversity around us.
You tend to work in such a larger-than-life format, and weave together multiple species in each image. Why that choice? And what do you hope viewers will learn or experience through this work?
The decisions of scale and complexity are also in the interest of highlighting organisms at the ecosystem scale. I love charismatic megafauna, but my heart really lies with the smaller species, and with those that are sometimes lost completely in the background: Invertebrates, at-risk plants and fungi, amphibians and reptiles that don’t get their due. By including these smaller species in my work, and by rendering them with the same time and reverence that I would put into drawing a large mammal, I hope to inspire viewers to see these species with new eyes — or to see them at all.
Graphite is a very humble, relatable medium, and by working at such a very large scale — by pushing the medium in ways that viewers maybe haven’t seen before — I hope to create lots of little toe-holds for consideration and conversation.
If I can capture the audience with initial questions of “How was this made?” “How long did this take to draw?” or with the recognition “I used to draw with pencils when I was a kid,” then I hope to have created a small moment in time where an understanding of the species within the pieces can be imparted.
How does the process of learning about these at-risk species and places affect the art — and you?
A wonderful way to learn about an organism is to draw it. Even though my work is two-dimensional, in order to make the drawing look real, I have to understand the organism’s anatomy, how it moves (if it moves) and how it interacts with other species within its ecosystem.
My favorite parts of the practice I’ve developed are the moments when I encounter a species in the wild that I only knew through drawing.
Did you have any challenges in completing your most recent series on Zion National Park?
My greatest challenge with my Zion series, as with all of my work, is time. As a young artist working in the age of social media, there is an incredible pressure for output, a special problem when all aspects of your process are inherently slow.
For the past few years every series that I developed has operated under the pattern of one month research, five or six months drawing, and two to four weeks of packaging the work. (“Packaging” includes writing artist statements, creating the work’s page on my website and creating informational zines to accompany the show.)
Because my larger series are entirely speculative — I have no guarantee that the original drawings or reproductions of the work will sell — this timeline is essential to allow me to have the time to complete commissions and commercial work and create merchandise that will pay my bills in a definite way. As my career progresses, I hope to stretch series out over several years, so that my drawings can be enriched by deeper research, more in-person experiences in the wild, closer collaboration with the scientific community, and, of course, more time in the studio.
What comes next for you?
2020 is just starting to take shape. I have a couple of conservation collaborations in the works that I’m excited about, and a couple personal projects that are so far just in the concept stages. I am also excited to have an artist residency at Acadia National Park in Maine. I began making illustrations inspired by the traditions of scientific illustration while living on the coast of Maine in 2013. I’m excited to return to this landscape with a more developed studio practice.
The new book All Hell Breaking Loose explains why top military officials have bucked the anti-climate trend of the Trump administration, but it ignores the elephant in the room.
Three years into the Trump administration, its anti-climate and anti-science agenda is well established. Despite dire warnings from the world’s leading scientists about the threats from rising greenhouse gas emissions, the administration has stubbornly continued to deny climate change, obstructed and undermined efforts to curb it, and moved again and again to roll back existing regulations that help reduce emissions.
Under Trump there’s only one government agency whose top officials continue to take the threat of climate change seriously, albeit out of the public spotlight: the Department of Defense.
As international threat expert Michael T. Klare recounts in his new book, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, U.S. military leaders view climate change as a threat to the country’s security — as well as global stability. Klare explores what they’re doing about it, mostly behind the scenes.
With long experience studying national security issues, Klare is currently director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. He’s written extensively about the military and global resources, including The Race for What’s Left and Blood and Oil.
“While discussion of climate change has indeed largely disappeared from the Pentagon’s public statements, its internal efforts to address the effects of global warming have not stopped,” Klare writes.
Klare begins by tracing the evolution of the Pentagon’s understanding of the potential dangers of climate change, which goes back more than a decade. The Department of Defense has published numerous reports and briefs since and is currently conducting an assessment of the climate-related threats to the hundreds of U.S. military bases at home and abroad. While the study isn’t complete, results so far have shown that half of all bases face at least one climate-related threat. Many face several.
What Pentagon analysts are most concerned about is not endangered species, like some other government agencies, but other humans.
“They see climate change as ratcheting up global chaos, which in turn means a greater likelihood of U.S involvement in ugly foreign wars,” writes Klare.
In some places climate-related disasters such as droughts, heat waves and hurricanes may trigger mass migrations and failed states; in others climate change may not be the sole threat or even the greatest, but it could make a bad situation catastrophic. It’s considered a “threat multiplier” — one that, in the age of globalization, can lead to far-reaching failures of energy, food and health systems.
“Try to picture a food-price crisis occurring at more or less the same time as a major pandemic and a mass migration event: the resulting chaos, distress and contention are almost unimaginable,” he writes.
As climate change worsens, the U.S. military will face more humanitarian crises. Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 and the quick succession of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017 gave a preview of what’s to come — and the extensive resources needed.
Climate-related threats to food and water can also trigger what Klare calls “failed-state syndrome,” like in Mali where resource scarcity, social unrest and natural disaster helped create political upheaval. Countries like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia could face similar threats.
There’s also the potential for clashes among the world’s heavyweights. A melting Arctic will open up access to shipping, drilling and other kinds of economic exploitation, which could prompt conflict between Arctic neighbors like the United States, Russia, Norway and Canada. Not coincidentally, the United States recently restocked its Cold War stash of military equipment and weapons housed in caves in Norway, presumably in the case of conflict with Russia, writes Klare.
And across the world, China could go head-to-head with India over vital flows in the Brahmaputra and other rivers as melting Himalayan glaciers curtail water resources. A similar situation over water conflict could emerge between India and Pakistan, too, writes Klare.
And then there are the threats emerging at home. The military is already dealing with rising seas, increased inland flooding, and more severe hurricanes and wildfires. These aren’t small problems: The Department of Defense mobilized more than 30,000 personnel in the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.
Klare’s review of both foreign and domestic threats from climate change is exhaustive and alarming, especially on top of what we already know about how climate change threatens vital ecosystems and species across the globe.
He makes a convincing case that there’s ample reason for military leaders to be concerned — not to mention the rest of us: “It follows that if the armed services are worried about the safety and survival of their vital systems, we should be equally worried about our own.”
Of course, many of us already are worried, which is why the last part of the book — what the Pentagon is actually doing about all of this — is so important… and also a bit disappointing. Klare reveals that many of the military’s efforts to “go green” — for example, by using fewer fossil fuels — have been less about environmental concerns than strategy. Convoys to carry gasoline to remote military outposts are vulnerable to attack; using solar or other technologies to power barracks or vehicles reduces that risk.
And some programs were, well, less than they first appeared. For example, in 2006 the USS Stockdale set off as a part of the “Great Green Fleet,” so named because the boat was using some “alternative fuels” to reduce its dependence on oil. But Klare reveals that the boat was actually running on a mix of 90% oil and 10% liquefied beef fat. It’s hard to imagine that’s either a green or scalable replacement for the petroleum used to power a destroyer across an ocean.
Other efforts have yielded better results, though. Today the different service branches use more solar and other renewables. And efforts are underway to vastly increase fuel efficiency of planes and ground vehicles.
And along the way they’ve achieved some measurable results: From 2011 to 2016, the DoD’s consumption of petroleum for operating forces declined 20%. The energy supplied by renewables at home has also climbed 12% over 2003 levels.
Klare lists a few other statistics, but it’s hard to put all of it into context as the book fails to mention the overall climate footprint of the U.S. military — which other sources point out is more than in most other countries. There’s also no mention of the sweeping environmental, social and related implications of U.S. imperialism, a significant omission.
Indeed the idea of the U.S. military being a big green savior is a tough pill to swallow. Sen. Elizabeth Warren found that out earlier this year, when she introduced the Department of Defense Climate Resiliency and Readiness Act, which seeks to ramp up the military’s potential when it comes to renewables and energy efficiency.
She received some swift backlash from progressives, including author and activist Naomi Klein who tweeted that, “The most powerful war machine on the planet is never going to be ‘green.’”
Still, Klare claims that “given the immense size of the U.S. military establishment and its proven ability to embrace technological innovation, the Department of Defense is one of the few institutions in American society with the capacity to make a real difference in slowing the pace of warming.”
But will that be enough? If climate change worsens the threats the military has identified, and makes military action more likely, the chances of reducing our armed forces’ carbon footprint will get even slimmer. As Klare’s own reporting shows, the vast, worldwide social and political upheaval that we’ll likely experience due to climate change means we badly need civilian, as well as military, arms of government to get on board.
New books out this month dig into some of humanity’s ecological ills — and unearth a classic satire that should still inspire.
‘Tis the season — to save the planet.
We’ve picked the seven best environmental books being published this December, covering everything from saving pangolins to sustainable living. There’s even some weird fiction and classic comics in the mix. A few of this month’s books are academic tomes aimed directly at working conservationists, but you’ll also find titles to inspire just about anybody on your gift list — including yourself.
If we have any hope of saving the world’s most trafficked animal from extinction, we need to know everything about it. This academic book — edited by some of the world’s top experts on pangolins — aims to set the stage to help conservationists understand the biology and ecological roles of these scaly anteaters, as well as the human cultures that covet and threaten them. Most importantly, the book digs into the solutions that will help to address, and possibly resolve, this rampant illegal trade before it’s too late.
Imagine this book as “My Year of Living Sustainably.” Coplan, director of an environmental litigation clinic at Pace University, spent 12 months trying to make low-carbon lifestyle decisions without giving up the comforts of suburbia. Not everyone can take the same path that he did (he kayaked to work, for example), but this book aims to show that individual action against climate change is not just possible but quantifiable.
Money is often at the root of our environmental ills, but could economic systems actually support sustainability, biodiversity and justice instead? This new textbook lays out the foundation for what it calls “economics for the 21st century.”
A pricey academic book, but can you really put a price on understanding the political power exerted by the Russian energy industry? We’ve felt the effects of that power in the United States over the past few elections, and it isn’t going away any time soon — unless, as this book argues, the rise of renewable energy helps to topple the oil oligarchs.
We’re now in a world where species find themselves crammed into increasingly tiny, patchy habitats. Because of this they also often suffer from inbreeding, loss of genetic diversity and other threats that increase their likelihood of extinction. This textbook — by a team of eight experts — discusses those risks and the management options for reversing them.
This month’s only beautifully horrific, ecologically themed, paranoia-inducing, post-climate-apocalypse science-fiction novel starring a fish and a fox (well, kinda). Like the rest of VanderMeer’s weird fiction, this novel explores the “broken places” left behind by humanity’s environmental destruction while telling a terrifying and hypnotic story.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” So goes the classic line from Pogo, one of the great comic strips of the 20th century. This reissue of the strip’s first book from 1952 remains painfully and hysterically relevant, as lead character Pogo Possum runs for president and defends the environment of a fictionalized Okefenokee Swamp. Creator Walt Kelly is somewhat forgotten today outside cartooning circles, but this book (along with another more comprehensive Pogo reprint series) should serve as a reminder of his stories’ sharp satire and timeless appeal.
Well, readers, that’s our last book list of 2019, but don’t despair if you’re still looking for gifts —you’ll find dozens of other recent eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.
A debate over the future of trophy hunting points out that many effective alternatives to funding and supporting conservation have started to emerge.
Would banning trophy hunting actually harm conservation efforts, as some scientists argue? Or do other more effective approaches to funding species protections already exist?
Those are the conflicting positions taken over the past few months by dozens of scientists and conservation leaders, whose dueling letters in the journal Science have kicked off a debate over the future of the often-divisive practice of hunting big game for big bucks.
The controversy started this past August when an initial letter in Science — from conservation biologist Amy Dickman of the University of Oxford, four additional authors and more than 120 other signatories — argued that banning trophy hunting would “negatively affect conservation efforts” and that “hunting reforms…should be prioritized over bans.”
The authors did admit that many of them consider trophy hunting “repugnant,” but they also argue that controlled trophy hunting is still better than unregulated killing, which they say can have “serious repercussions for conservation and animal welfare” because it’s more prevalent in areas without tourism operations.
As you might expect, a flurry of responses from other scientists quickly followed. The Oct. 25 issue of Science contained six letters refuting the Dickman letter’s claims, with counterarguments ranging from the ethics of trophy hunting to the lack of scientific evidence for its benefits.
Several letters also pointed out that more effective conservation funding options already exist. One response even labeled the Dickman letter “defeatist” for defending business-as-usual practices instead of promoting these alternative conservation activities.
That letter argued that bans actually offer an opportunity for conservation to develop new ideas. “Trophy import bans present an opportunity to rethink how we can conserve wildlife in non-extractive ways that are consistent with shifting public opinion,” the letter stated.
Katarzyna Nowak, the lead author of that response and a fellow at The Safina Center (as well as a Revelator contributor), says the letter had two main goals.
“We wanted to get behind some of the visionary non-extractive efforts already happening and show that trophy hunting is not irreplaceable,” she says. “There is so much innovation happening in Africa, led by Africans. I don’t want to call these ‘alternatives’ necessarily, because everything mentioned in our letter is already happening.”
One of the approaches identified in the letter involves diversifying nature-based tourism beyond wildlife viewing and photography. An example is a series of bushcraft hunter-gatherer training courses taught in conjunction with the Hadza people in Tanzania.
“Bushcraft has a very small footprint and makes for a much richer cultural exchange between foreign tourists and local people,” Nowak says. “You spend an extended period of time learning from people on their land. You aren’t just coming in and shooting something within hours of landing at the airport. A lot of us are not against hunting. We’d love to see [more of] the kind of hunting in the bushcraft course.”
Another option Nowak points to is the development of agri-tourism, which brings visitors to a farm or ranch — an especially valuable funding option in areas along the boundaries between agricultural and natural lands. For example, fences made of beehives have been effective at keeping elephants from destroying crops in Kenya and Tanzania (elephants are afraid of bees, which can sting their eyes and other tender parts). A group of Tanzanians have taken advantage of the unique nature of these systems by forming an NGO to encourage visitors touring a nearby national park to also come see the bee fences on local farms.
Other options include transitioning to resource management by indigenous communities, which has successfully protected natural resources in parts of Ethiopia. Tourism reforms could encourage domestic tourism, which keeps income within the country that generates it. Domestic tourism in many developing countries is currently nearly nonexistent; residents travel mainly to visit friends and relatives, not to see the sights.
Although these types of activities are starting to take off, they remain limited. The Dickman letter argues that these new options are not “viable alternatives” in most places, especially regions that “are too remote or unappealing to attract sufficient visitors.”
Nowak counters that argument, saying it takes time for new systems to proliferate.
“We have to be patient,” she says. “It will be slow at first, but to continue to say year after year that trophy hunting is irreplaceable and not taking any alternatives seriously is a problem.”
She points out that no single idea is likely to supplant trophy hunting on its own, but adds that having multiple options — not just trophy hunting or photo-tourism — improves the overall chance of success.
Other researchers and experts agree.
“Alternatives to trophy hunting are a big part of the current discourse,” says Chelsea Batavia, a post-doctoral researcher in Oregon State University’s Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. “Those who say ‘either trophy hunting or nothing at all’ are struggling from an incredible lack of imagination. Some of these alternatives are novel and experimental, but that is the nature of adaptive management.”
Batavia also approaches the debate from a different angle. She co-authored a letter making an ethical case for ending trophy hunting.
The Dickman letter, she says, “strongly stated that there is sort of incontrovertible evidence for trophy hunting. There is not scientific consensus on it and we wanted to push back.” That pushback is strongly grounded in both ethics and science.
“Scientifically, in some settings, trophy hunting does support conservation and locals,” Batavia says, “but there is an obvious cost to individual animals.” Other, more complex ethical issues include whether the practice aligns with accepted principles — such as “killing is wrong” — or exemplifies unacceptable virtues, such as aggression. Another argument addresses whether or not animals have rights; if they do, killing one and taking a body part surely violates those rights.
Ethically, Batavia argues, we should address the effects of those lost lives in our policy, but she says trophy-hunting advocates don’t go down that road.
“To remain wedded to this one practice that has so many ethical issues around it, without even having a serious conversation about other options, is a problem,” she says.
Richard Thomas of TRAFFIC, a nongovernmental organization working globally on trade in wild animals and plants, also agrees that well-regulated hunting can have positive impacts for some species — for example, the restoration of the southern white rhino — but he stresses that good management and regulation play critical roles.
“Trophy hunting has to be sustainable and well-managed, and seen to be well-managed,” he says. “There needs to be transparency about where benefits derived from it are going.”
The Dickman letter acknowledges that current levels of transparency for trophy hunting leave “considerable room for improvement,” but it also argues that the practice is still important to reduce poverty through sustainable wildlife management, a major element of African countries’ ongoing call for a New Deal for Rural Communities.
However, several of the other responses questioned how much trophy hunting actually benefits people and communities. Nowak’s letter cited a study that showed local inhabitants in Kyrgyzstan “receive basically no economic benefits” from trophy hunting, and a report from Economists at Large found that communities in trophy hunting areas only see, on average, about 3 percent of the gross revenue. In addition, the report found that trophy hunting income represents less than 2 percent of total tourism revenues in Africa.
There’s one more point to consider: Thomas warns that the legal export and import of hunting trophies can provide a cover for illegal activities such as poaching. We’ve seen this with elephants, rhinos, lions and other species.
The letters in Science come at a precarious time for trophy hunting, which faces changing public opinion and a rise in regulations against it. France, Australia and The Netherlands have recently banned importing trophies from certain species. Something similar could happen in the United States, where the recently reintroduced Prohibiting Threatened and Endangered Creature Trophies (ProTECT) Act aims to amend the Endangered Species Act to prohibit the import of trophies from endangered and threatened animals.
The industry is obviously feeling the pressure, which some experts speculate may have led to the Dickman letter and also contributed to the nature of the subsequent discussion. After the letter was published, some of its signatories were revealed to have ties to pro-hunting organizations, including the Dallas Safari Club and Safari Club International. Before this revelation, Science did not require writers to its letter section to follow the journal’s normal policy of declaring potential conflicts of interest. It now does.
Pangolins: Science, Society and Conservation
Live Sustainably Now: A Low-Carbon Vision of the Good Life
The New Environmental Economics
The Energy of Russia: Hydrocarbon Culture and Climate Change
A Practical Guide for Genetic Management of Fragmented Animal and Plant Populations
Dead Astronauts
I Go Pogo