Should Plants and Animals That Relocate Because of Climate Change Be Considered Invasive?

Thousands of plant and animal species are already shifting their ranges in response to a changing climate. Will they be welcome?

This story was originally published by Ensia.

Caribbean corals sprout off Texas. Pacific salmon tour the Canadian Arctic. Peruvian lowland birds nest at higher elevations

In the past 100 years, the planet has warmed in the range of 10 times faster than it did on average over the past 5,000. In response, thousands of species are traveling poleward, climbing to higher elevations, and diving deeper into the seas, seeking their preferred environmental conditions. This great migration is challenging traditional ideas about native species, the role of conservation biology and what kind of environment is desirable for the future.

In a 2017 review for Science, University of Tasmania marine ecology professor Gretta Pecl and colleagues wrote, “[C]limate change is impelling a universal redistribution of life on Earth. For marine, freshwater, and terrestrial species alike, the first response to changing climate is often a shift in location.” In fact, Pecl says, data suggest that at least 25% and perhaps as much as 85% of Earth’s estimated 8.7 million species are already shifting ranges in response to climate change.

But when they arrive, will they be welcome? Traditional definitions classify species according to place. “Native” species arrived without human help and usually before widespread human colonization, so are likely to have natural predators and are unlikely to go rogue. Non-natives are newcomers and suspect. Though 90% cause no lasting damage, 10% become invasive — meaning that they harm the environment, the economy or human health. Last year a multinational report flagged invasive species as a key driver of Earth’s biodiversity crisis.

How we define species is critical, because these definitions influence perceptions, policy and management. The U.S. National Invasive Species Council (NISC) defines a biological invasion as “the process by which non-native species breach biogeographical barriers and extend their range” and states that “preventing the introduction of potentially harmful organisms is … the first line of defense.” But some say excluding newcomers is myopic.

“If you were trying to maintain the status quo, so every time a new species comes in, you chuck it out,” says Camille Parmesan, director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, you could gradually “lose so many that that ecosystem will lose its coherence.” If climate change is driving native species extinct, she says, “you need to allow new ones coming in to take over those same functions.”

As University of Florida conservation ecologist Brett Scheffers and Pecl warned in a 2019 paper in Nature Climate Change, “past management of redistributed species … has yielded mixed actions and results.” They concluded that “we cannot leave the fate of biodiversity critical to human survival to be randomly persecuted, protected or ignored.”

lobster claws — Climate change may push more American lobsters north into Canadian waters. Photo: Derek Keats, (CC BY 2.0).

Existing Tools

One approach to managing these climate-driven habitat shifts, suggested by University of California, Irvine marine ecologist Piper Wallingford and colleagues in a recent issue of Nature Climate Change, is for scientists to adapt existing tools like the Environmental Impact Classification of Alien Taxa (EICAT) to assess potential risks associated with moving species. Because range-shifting species pose impacts to communities similar to those of species introduced by humans, the authors argue, new management strategies are unnecessary, and each new arrival can be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Karen Lips, a professor of biology at University of Maryland who was not associated with the study, echoes the idea that each case is so varied and nuanced that trying to fit climate shifting species into a single category with broad management goals may be impractical. “Things may be fine today, but add a new mosquito vector or add a new tick or a new disease, and all of a sudden things spiral out of control,” she says. “The nuance means that the answer to any particular problem might be pretty different.”

Laura Meyerson, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island says scientists should use existing tools to identify and address invasive species to deal with climate-shifting species. “I would like to operate under the precautionary principle and then reevaluate as things shift. You’re sort of shifting one piece in this machinery; as you insert a new species into a system, everything is going to respond,” she says. “Will some of the species that are expanding their ranges because of climate change become problematic? Perhaps they might.”

The reality is that some climate-shifting species may be harmful to some conservation or economic goals while being helpful to others. While sport fisherman are excited about red snapper moving down the East Coast of Australia, for example, if they eat juvenile lobsters in Tasmania they could harm this environmentally and economically important crustacean. “At the end of the day … you’re going to have to look at whether that range expansion has some sort of impact and presumably be more concerned about the negative impacts,” says NISC executive director Stas Burgiel. “Many of the [risk assessment] tools we have are set up to look at negative impact.” As a result, positive effects may be deemphasized or overlooked. “So that notion of cost versus benefit … I don’t think it has played out in this particular context.”

Location, Location, Location

In a companion paper to Wallingford’s, University of Connecticut ecology and evolutionary biology associate professor Mark Urban stressed key differences between invasive species, which are both non-native and harmful, and what he calls “climate tracking species.” Whereas invasive species originate from places very unlike the communities they overtake, he says, climate tracking species expand from largely similar environments, seeking to follow preferred conditions as these environments move. For example, an American pika may relocate to a higher mountain elevation, or a marbled salamander might expand its New England range northward to seek cooler temperatures, but these new locations are not drastically different than the places they had called home before.

Salamander on moss — A marbled salamander. Photo: Richard Bonnett, (CC BY 2.0)

Climate tracking species may move faster than their competitors at first, Urban says, but competing species will likely catch up. “Applying perspectives from invasion biology to climate-tracking species … arbitrarily chooses local winners over colonizing losers,” he writes.

Urban stresses that if people prevent range shifts, some climate-tracking species may have nowhere to go. He suggests that humans should even facilitate movement as the planet warms. “The goal in this crazy warming world is to keep everything alive. But it may not be in the same place,” Urban says.

Parmesan echoes Urban, emphasizing it’s the distance that makes the difference. “[Invasives] come from a different continent or a different ocean. You’re having these enormous trans-global movements and that’s what ends up causing the species that’s exotic to be invasive,” she says. “Things moving around with climate change is a few hundred miles. Invasive species are moving a few thousand miles.”

In 2019 University of Vienna conservation biology associate professor Franz Essl published a similar argument for species classification beyond the native/non-native dichotomy. Essl uses “neonatives” to refer to species that have expanded outside their native areas and established populations because of climate change but not direct human agency. He argues that these species should be considered as native in their new range.

They Never Come Alone

Meyerson calls for caution. “I don’t think we should be introducing species” into ecosystems, she says. “I mean, they never come alone. They bring all their friends, their microflora, and maybe parasites and things clinging to their roots or their leaves. … It’s like bringing some mattress off the street into your house.”

Burgiel warns that labeling can have unintended consequences. We in the invasive species field … focus on non-native species that cause harm,” he says. “Some people think that anything that’s not native is invasive, which isn’t necessarily the case.” Because resources are limited and land management and conservation are publicly funded, Burgiel says, it is critical that the public understands how the decisions are being made.

Piero Genovesi, chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Invasive Species Specialist Group, sees the debate about classification — and therefore about management — as a potential distraction from more pressing conservation issues.

“The real bulk of conservation is that we want to focus on the narrow proportion of alien species that are really harmful,” he says. In Hawaii “we don’t discuss species that are there [but aren’t] causing any problem because we don’t even have the energy for dealing with them all. And I can tell you, no one wants to remove [non-native] cypresses from Tuscany. So, I think that some of the discussions are probably not so real in the work that we do in conservation.”

Indigenous frameworks offer another way to look at species searching for a new home in the face of climate change. According to a study published in Sustainability Science in 2018 by Dartmouth Native American studies and environmental studies associate professor Nicholas Reo, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Dartmouth anthropology associate professor Laura Ogden, some Anishnaabe people view plants as persons and the arrival of new plants as a natural form of migration, which is not inherently good or bad. They may seek to discover the purpose of new species, at times with animals as their teachers. In their paper Reo and Ogden quote Anishnaabe tribal chairman Aaron Payment as saying, “We are an extension of our natural environment; we’re not separate from it.”

The Need for Collaboration

The successful conservation of Earth’s species in a way that keeps biodiversity functional and healthy will likely depend on collaboration. Without global agreements, one can envision scenarios in which countries try to impede high-value species from moving beyond their borders, or newly arriving species are quickly overharvested.

In Nature Climate Change, Sheffers and Pecl call for a Climate Change Redistribution Treaty that would recognize species redistribution beyond political boundaries and establish governance to deal with it. Treaties already in place, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates trade in wild plants and animals; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; and the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora, can help guide these new agreements.

“We are living through the greatest redistribution of life on Earth for … potentially hundreds of thousands of years, so we definitely need to think about how we want to manage that,” Pecl says.

At the heart of these questions are values. Genovesi agrees that conservationists need a vision for the future. “What we do is more to be reactive [to known threats]. … It’s so simple to say that destroying the Amazon is probably not a good idea that you don’t need to think of a step ahead of that.” But, he adds, “I don’t think we have a real answer in terms of okay, this is a threshold of species, or this is the temporal line where we should aim to.” Defining a vision for what success would look like, Genovesi says, “is a question that hasn’t been addressed enough by science and by decision makers.”

At the heart of these questions are values. “All of these perceptions around what’s good and what’s bad, all [are based on] some kind of value system,” Pecl says. “As a whole society, we haven’t talked about what we value and who gets to say what’s of value and what isn’t.”

This is especially important when it comes to marginalized voices, and Pecl says she is concerned because she doesn’t “think we have enough consideration or representation of Indigenous worldviews.” Reo and colleagues wrote in American Indian Quarterly in 2017 that climate change literature and media coverage tend to portray native people as vulnerable and without agency. Yet, says Pecl, “The regions of the world where [biodiversity and ecosystems] are either not declining or are declining at a much slower rate are Indigenous controlled” — suggesting that Indigenous people have potentially managed species more effectively in the past, and may be able to manage changing species distributions in a way that could be informative to others working on these issues.

Meanwhile, researchers such as Lips see species classification as native or other as stemming from a perspective that there is a better environmental time and place to return to. “There is no pristine, there’s no way to go back,” says Lips. “The entire world is always very dynamic and changing. And I think it’s a better idea to consider just simply what is it that we do want, and let’s work on that.”

200 Years Ago My Family Built a Dam — Now My Organization Is Tearing It Down

A river-restoration advocate looks back at her family’s forgotten history to gain new insight into the history — and future — of our country’s rivers.

If you look at a map of a watershed, it branches like a family tree. Pennsylvania’s Cacoosing Creek flows into the Tulpehocken, which flows into the Schuylkill, which flows into the Delaware, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean.

My Great Aunt Kathryn (we called her Kaki) lived in a house on North Church Road in Robesonia, Pennsylvania. When you walked in the front door, arriving for a family reunion or a Fourth of July picnic, you were met by a wall of family photos — my mom’s cousins Hank, Mike and Andrea. Kaki and my grandmother Anita as girls.

And hanging among the photos of our own family tree was a little pen and ink drawing of a mill.

Nearly two years ago, I saw a story online in the Reading Eagle. It was about grants for river-restoration projects from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The organization I work for, American Rivers, was getting $275,441 “for the removal of the Paper Mill Dam on Cacoosing Creek and riparian corridor and stream bank restoration in Spring Township.”

After some quick emailing with my mom, we confirmed it’s the Van Reed Paper Mill Dam — the one in the picture on Aunt Kaki’s wall. While the picture had been there throughout my childhood, I’d never paid much attention to it, never registered the fact that my family had built a dam. American Rivers and partners are making final preparations, and the dam will be torn down in the coming weeks.

The Lenape were here first, hunting, fishing, traveling and living along these creeks and rivers. When my mom’s family, the Van Reeds, settled in Berks County around the time of the Revolutionary War, the Lenape had already lost all claims to their ancestral lands thanks to agreements broken by European settlers.

Around 1825 my great-great-great-great grandfather Henry Van Reed built the dam and paper mill at the confluence of the Cacoosing and Tulpehocken (the “place of owls” and “land of turtles” according to The Story of Berks County, published in 1913). My ancestors owned and operated the dam and mill for 70 years.

painting of farm, town and mill — An 1872 painting of the view of Henry Z. Van Reed’s farm, paper mill and surroundings by artist Charles C. Hofmann. Image: public domain

The revolutions of our water wheel turned trees into paper, the creek into profit. All across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, dammed rivers spun wheels and turbines, powering the Industrial Revolution. Today there are more than 90,000 dams on rivers across our country. Many are outdated, unsafe, or no longer serve a purpose.

The defining characteristic of a river is that it flows — they’re meant to run free. Harnessing a river with a dam stops the water, backs it up, changes the water quality and temperature, prevents the movement of gravel and sediment, and blocks aquatic life from moving up and downstream. When rivers, the veins and arteries of our planet, are clogged and sick, it’s a health problem for all of us. So when a dam outlives its usefulness or its costs outweigh its benefits, American Rivers works to set the river free.

Removing a dam can restore river health and water quality, bring back fish and wildlife, eliminate public safety and flooding hazards, and create new recreation opportunities. American Rivers’ new report Rivers as Economic Engines details the jobs and other economic and community benefits that come from dam removal and watershed restoration.

Put simply, free rivers work better. It’s why American Rivers set a goal to remove 500 dams in five years, and why we are training local leaders, improving policy and pushing for additional funding to enable the removal of thousands more.

Removing the dam on Cacoosing Creek will restore more than seven miles of habitat for American eel, trout, blacknose dace and white suckers. It will revitalize the health of the entire ecosystem. Nationwide more than 1,700 dams have been removed to restore rivers, and Pennsylvania leads the nation in dam removal.

When I shared the news of the dam with my extended family, my cousin David summed it up well. He wrote, “I’m struck by the idea that the same ideals that motivated the Van Reeds to build the dam (e.g. improve their quality of life) are now motivating its removal.”

I don’t think Henry Van Reed would ever have dreamed there would be a massive movement to tear down dams like his and restore rivers in Pennsylvania and across the country. For him that would have been antithetical to progress. But what’s unimaginable can become reality. What’s impossible can become possible.

2020, this year of reckonings, feels like a good year to imagine new possibilities. It feels like a good year to question the things that no longer serve us — including the mindset that we can take from the natural world without giving back, without any responsibility or reciprocity. Personally, I’m recognizing the privilege wrapped up in the fact that for generations my family benefitted from a dam built on stolen land. One thing I’ve learned is that I need to go back to go forward, getting to know my own roots a little better.

This story may just be about one small dam on one small creek. One family’s story. But for me, firing up the yellow excavator to demolish my family’s dam and restore Cacoosing Creek is proof that it’s possible to put a little bit of the world back into balance. For me, it feels like coming full circle, a small but powerful revolution, turning toward something new, life-giving and free.

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

What’s Really Behind Dwindling Numbers of Woodland Caribou?

Wolves often get the blame for killing caribou in Canada’s boreal forests, but the real threat is human activity, new research finds.

A logged forest is a changed forest, and for woodland caribou that could mean the difference between life and death.

A recent study in the Journal of Wildlife Management tracked the survival rates and population growth of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) across two areas of northern Ontario, Canada. In one area about a third of the forest had been logged 30 to 50 years ago. In the other, the only disturbances were from natural events.

The research found “substantial differences” in the survival of adult caribou between the two areas.

The animals, it turned out, fared considerably worse in the previously logged landscape — so badly that the researchers, led by John Fryxell, a professor at the University of Guelph and executive director of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, concluded it would lead to a dwindling population. The unlogged habitat, however, they found “should be considerably more capable of sustaining caribou.”

The high mortality rates for the caribou in the logged forest are mostly due to wolf predation, but human changes to the landscape help make that possible. Development has been a driving force behind declining caribou numbers throughout their range.

As a result of these human disturbances, the caribou population in North America is in a precarious position. Woodland caribou once ranged across half of Canada and the northern reaches of the contiguous United States. But they’re now gone from their southern range. In Canada’s boreal forests, the animals are listed as threatened under the federal Species at Risk Act, Canada’s version of the Endangered Species Act.

While woodland caribou have evolved to live with forests disturbed by wildfire, they haven’t fared well in forests disturbed by people. One of the biggest threats is habitat fragmentation from commercial logging, mining, oil and gas — and all the roads associated with those activities.

road through tar sands mine — Tar sands mining in Fort McMurray, Alberta fragments habitat for caribou. Kris Krüg, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But here’s the twist: Moose do better in these disturbed landscapes, and that puts caribou further at risk, albeit indirectly.

Previous research has found that moose prefer the vegetation that grows in these early successional forests that follow a large-scale disturbance, like commercial logging. And a higher density of moose attracts more wolves, which are also able to move faster and hunt farther by following linear clearings like roads and pipelines in these developed areas.

While moose are the primary prey for wolves, caribou that wander into these forests become another tasty target.

“The bottom line,” Fryxell explains, “is that the combination of vegetation changes, increase in road density, increase in moose, and consequent increase in wolves threaten long-term viability of woodland caribou in boreal landscapes of Ontario, in a similar fashion to many other parts of Canada.”

A national assessment found that around 70% of Canada’s local populations of woodland caribou were no longer self-sustaining.

So what’s to be done?

Last year provincial managers in Quebec floated the idea of killing wolves to protect caribou herds. Their idea met with public backlash, but wolves in British Columbia weren’t so lucky. During the winter of 2019-2020, a whopping 463 wolves were killed by the B.C. provincial government for the stated purpose of protecting populations of southern mountain caribou, another caribou ecotype.

Some of the money to pay for the kill came from Coastal GasLink, a company actively clearing land in caribou habitat for a pipeline, the Canadian news outlet the Narwhal reported.

And a recently published study in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation found that the culls were not likely to aid caribou and pointed out several shortcomings in previous research that called for such wolf-control measures.

There are other, and better, options — like habitat protection and restoration.

Fryxell’s study concluded that “the most secure conservation measure would be to set aside extensive tracts of boreal forest with natural patterns of disturbance to sustain viable caribou sub‐populations.”

Research shows that the animals need at least 65% of their range undisturbed to have a good shot at survival.

And helping caribou will come with other environmental benefits. Canada’s 2018 federal action plan to restore caribou stated, “Boreal caribou is also considered by many to be an indicator of the overall state of Canada’s boreal forest ecosystem.” So keeping forests intact or restoring habitat is a proposition that would benefit not only caribou but many other species.

Rage Against the Anthropocene: The Extinction Crisis Gets an ‘Eco-slam’ Soundtrack

A Swedish death-metal album mourns species we’ve recently lost — and reminds us that we can all stand up against extinction.

Raging, guttural vocals. Pounding snare drums. Blazing-fast guitar riffs.

For Swedish death-metal musician Peter Hauschulz, these are the sounds and emotions of the extinction crisis.

Hauschulz’s new solo grindcore project, Extinction, has just released an eight-track EP called “Smoldering Enfoulment.” The “eco-slam” songs tell the tales of recently extinct (or nearly extinct) species, such as the cryptic tree-hunter and the Miss Waldron’s red colobus.

Most of the songs, Hauschulz says, were inspired by articles published here at The Revelator.

The album was released July 21 on Bandcamp and is now available for download, with proceeds supporting several environmental organizations and social-justice causes. Physical copies are being distributed on old-school audio cassette — recorded over tapes found in thrift stores.

That recycling approach is echoed in the band T-shirts and other merch — and even in the music itself. The album was mostly recorded in an aluminum storage space about 30 feet away from a local recycling dump. Hauschulz played all the instruments and sang the main vocals, then mixed in guest vocals from performers based in Poland, the Czech Republic and Portland, Oregon.

We spoke with Hauschulz about Extinction (and extinction), and you can preview several songs below:

First up, what’s an “eco-slam”? And why death metal for such an already dark topic?

I’ve always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of extremes in death metal, which often takes lyrical concepts to an absurd degree of foreboding exaggeration, while the music itself is equally eager to achieve a kind of rhythmically visceral and disturbing impact. There’s a sub-genre of death metal called “slam,” which is often some of the most ridiculous and lowbrow of the style and is an excellent opportunity to combine Neanderthal-esque delivery with relevant factual concepts and content. The idea is to subvert the extreme metal expectation that the topics must necessarily be comically grotesque and therefore easy to brush off as gory escapism, while also adhering to the underlying spirit of death metal in plainly confronting the horrors of reality.

<a href="http://extinctionevent.bandcamp.com/album/smoldering-enfoulment">Smoldering Enfoulment by Extinction</a>

What were the origins of this project?

The idea for the project first took hold after I had read a National Geographic article sometime shortly after New Year in 2019. It was a small, touching story about how a tree snail (George) had been declared extinct just a few days earlier. Something about it just struck an unexpected nerve. I hadn’t really considered how many known species were going extinct every day.

It was a perfect fusion of a genuinely dark topic that really wasn’t being processed, either in the extreme metal community or at large, and therefore a ripe topic for deeper exploration.

(George’s story was one of two songs on an Extinction demo album called “Anthropogenic Degradation of Ecosystemic Vegetation,” released last year.)

For me, art and music are at their best when they seek to entertain, inform, inspire and connect with the listener. I felt that there was an opportunity to artistically energize the topic by connecting it to charity causes as well. It’s very easy to become discouraged or feel like one isn’t “doing enough” for the world, so I’m hoping to support the idea that we can all contribute in different ways according to our own needs and values and abilities, and not be held to an arbitrary standard of perfection that may be more discouraging than anything.

A few dollars here and there may not seem to be much, but it’s important for me to try to align aspirations and ideas with actions. I hope that doing so artistically may inspire others to find clever ways to bring their unique talents and ideas to the world.

<a href="http://extinctionevent.bandcamp.com/album/smoldering-enfoulment">Smoldering Enfoulment by Extinction</a>

What are your creative goals when developing music and lyrics about such a difficult subject, and what do you hope your listeners will get out of it?

My main goal with the project is to develop and foster connection between myself and the world, myself and other people, and hopefully inspire people’s connection with their world, too.

Of course, encased in that is my own impulse to continuously challenge myself and hone my craft, so I hope listeners experience a feeling of deep urgency as a result of the music, but also a sense of inspiration to harness that feeling for something positive.

What’s your writing process?

The process often involves a lot of iteration, bouncing from concept to experimentation on guitar or drums and back again, until it seems like it’s congealing into something unique and alive. My primary musical focus is on the rhythms first, since I’ve always loved the way that aspect of music can reach deep into the core of a body and electrify it and give it motion.

I try to set the lyrics together in such a way that they amplify the music and give it a conceptual direction for that movement. For instance, the lines “flames of greed lick their black boots, inferno of corruption boils the frog, our spirit croaking for release, from the hell of our own kind” in the song “Electile Dysfunction” are some of my favorites in capturing the wretched spirit of greed behind so much of our planetary destitution.

Why did you pick some of these species to profile? What drew you to the need to tell their stories in musical form?

I tried to represent a wide variety of species types, including those outside the more relatable ones that are cute or fuzzy, because things like mosses and trees are certainly just as important, but less often make it into headlines or story form. I also tried to focus on species whose extinction was more or less directly caused by human activity, whether by direct hunting or deforestation — something that highlights our essential relationship and the negative consequences of our actions and choices as a species on the planet.

<a href="http://extinctionevent.bandcamp.com/album/smoldering-enfoulment">Smoldering Enfoulment by Extinction</a>

You have a unique approach to merchandise and the physical distribution of your music. Where did the idea of recycled goods come from?

Growing up in largely DIY punk scenes, it was common for smaller bands to screen print logos on thrift-store shirts. That seemed to be the most appropriate way to minimize the band’s resource footprint while also opening the door to unique artistic opportunities. So far, the best result is when I can find an old novelty shirt from a vacation at Sea World or some other aquarium. Stamp a giant Extinction logo on top of a frolicking dolphin or killer whale and now it has become more than just a gift-store item.

Speaks for itself really pic.twitter.com/tNFkVJX497

— EXTINCTION (eco-slam) (@Capt_Grapefruit) July 14, 2020

What comes next? I know you already have a follow-up album in the works, and you were planning on touring before the pandemic hit.

Next for Extinction is a bit up in the air, like for many bands and people of all inclinations all over the world. I’ll be creating a music video in the coming months for one of these songs, continue writing a follow-up, which will be water-species themed, probably release a charity compilation single in a few months, and seek out like-minded collaborators of all types to start collecting a live lineup.

Oil and Gas in Flux: After a Series of Stunning Defeats, What’s Next for the Industry?

Environmental, economic and political forces have converged, threatening to finally upend fossil fuel dominance.

When Dominion Energy and Duke Energy unexpectedly cancelled plans to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline on July 5, environmental advocates throughout the Southeast cheered.

But even a few days later, Mark Sabath, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, still seemed a bit shocked by the victory. His organization worked for six years to stop the 600-mile-long pipeline, which would have transported fracked gas through West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.

“We were surprised in terms of it happening when it did,” he says of the companies’ decision. “But it was certainly something we were thinking for a long time should happen.”

Of course, should and would are often a world apart. In fact, just a few weeks earlier, the energy companies had won a substantial victory when the Supreme Court ruled that their pipeline could cross the Appalachian Trail.

So when the word came down that Dominion and Duke were throwing in the towel, it caught a lot of people off guard. And it wasn’t unique — the announcement came along with a wave of other bad news for the oil and gas industry, including bankruptcies and more stalled pipeline efforts.

In his weekly column for The New Yorker, Bill McKibben summed it all up: “It’s been a truly awful few days for the fossil-fuel industry, which is another way of saying that it’s been an unexpectedly good few days for planet Earth.”

Indeed, at quick glance, the industry looks like it’s on the ropes, but what does it all mean in the big picture? Here are some takeaways.

Cutting Corners Backfires

In a statement on the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which had ballooned in cost from an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion, the developers blamed “the increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States.”

But there’s much more to the story than that. One of the biggest factors, Sabath says, is that the developers — and their government boosters — didn’t follow the rules.

“Cutting corners — and pressuring the agencies to cut corners with their environmental reviews — certainly slowed things down and made it more difficult to finish the project,” he says.

Lorne Stockman, senior research analyst at Oil Change International, an anti-fossil-fuel advocacy group, explained in a blog post that federal agencies rubber-stamped eight permits without proper review.

“But none of these could stand up to scrutiny when challenged in a court of law, and all were eventually revoked or suspended,” wrote Stockman. “The fact that [the Atlantic Coast Pipeline] can’t be built without violating the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act or the National Environmental Protection Act should be an important and concerning lesson.”

This short-circuiting of environmental review is a common thread Sabath sees in two other pipeline decisions that came just a day after the Atlantic Coast announcement.

On July 6 the Supreme Court nixed an attempt by the Trump administration to jumpstart construction on the Keystone XL pipeline — stymied for a decade — that would carry 830,000 barrels of oil sands from Alberta, Canada to Nebraska. The effort had been halted, pending further environmental review, because the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t properly study how endangered species in rivers would be affected by pipeline crossings.

And that same day a U.S District judge ruled that the already-pumping Dakota Access pipeline, long opposed by the Standing Rock Sioux, needed to halt operations until the Trump administration properly conducted the review required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

“We certainly saw with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline there was evidence that political higher-ups, at the developers’ urgings, were sticking to the developers’ preferred timeline and urging staff not to conduct the kind of environmental review that should have been done,” says Sabath. “In the end, I think that backfired and it’s the same thing that’s now causing problems for Dakota Access and Keystone XL.”

Industry Clocks Some Wins

It turns out that the victory for tribes and environmentalists that halted the Dakota Access pipeline’s flow is now in limbo.

The company behind that project, Canada’s TC Energy, has appealed the ruling and asked for a stay on the decision to shut down the pipeline while that appeal is considered. On July 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a temporary stay — meaning oil can keep flowing — while it considers whether or not to make that stay permanent during the appeals process.

It’s too soon to say yet if this will indeed end up being a win for industry, but minimally it gets a tiny reprieve.

And despite some high-profile setbacks, like with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, oil and gas companies have also notched a few other victories.

The same Supreme Court ruling that blocked construction of Keystone XL will allow the continued use of Nationwide Permit 12 on dozens of other pipelines. This permit, issued by the Army Corps, is a general Clean Water Act permit that lets developers expedite permitting for projects crossing waterways by allowing the use of a general, instead of project-specific, permit.

pipeline and pickup truck — Construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. Photo: Tara Lohan

And things could get even easier for pipeline developers after the White House issued a rule that would weaken the country’s bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act. The new rule would limit public review and speed up permitting for infrastructure projects like pipelines and powerplants.

This new ruling comes after the administration had previously issued three executive orders to help speed up pipeline permitting.

Murky Economics

While the industry has faced legal ups and downs, the news is mostly bad from a financial standpoint — especially for companies heavily invested in shale gas.

Chesapeake Energy, a pioneer in the fracking industry, filed for bankruptcy protection on June 28 with $10 billion in debts — although not before doling out $25 million in bonuses to executives.

Chesapeake may be one of the most well known in the business to falter, but they aren’t alone. Just a few months ago Whiting Petroleum, once the largest producer in North Dakota’s Bakken shale, filed for bankruptcy protection. So too did Denver-based Extraction Oil & Gas. And California Resources Corp, the state’s largest oil and gas producer, followed them into Chapter 11 in mid-July.

Many more are likely to follow. Rystad Energy, an analytics company, recently warned that 250 oil and gas companies could file for bankruptcy protection by the end of 2021 as demand continues to fall, renewables outcompete them in the energy market, and pressures mount to address climate change.

Even the majors are affected. Last year Chevron wrote down $10 billion in assets, mostly in shale gas holdings.

In many ways, the industry has been its own worst enemy.

Wells and hay fields — Oil and gas wells in North Dakota’s Bakken shale. Photo: Tara Lohan

Fracking is more resource-intensive than conventional drilling. Companies drilled at a frenetic pace to try to recoup costs, but in the process they produced a glut of gas, further driving prices — and profits — down.

“The reality is that the shale boom peaked without making money for the industry in aggregate,” found a report from the financial advisory firm Deloitte. “In fact, the U.S. shale industry registered net negative free cash flows of $300 billion, impaired more than $450 billion of invested capital, and saw more than 190 bankruptcies since 2010.”

And while exports of liquified natural gas are rising, The New York Times reported that “future profits may be meager.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered another huge hit, along with an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia that sent oil prices to record lows in March. Last month BP announced they would trim $17.5 billion off their assets as energy demand falls.

It’s a harbinger of things to come.

“BP said that the aftermath of the new coronavirus pandemic would accelerate the transition to a lower-carbon economy, in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” Reuters reported.

The Energy Landscape Shifts

For years environmentalists have warned that oil and gas reserves would end up being stranded assets for energy companies when a shift to a less carbon-intensive economy makes those fossil fuels unburnable.

We are beginning to see this taking shape with these recent pipeline decisions. All of these projects have been in the works for at least six years. And in that time the urgency of the climate crisis has come into sharper view and a number of states have decided to push ahead with clean energy commitments, despite federal opposition to action on climate change.

Some of these states are the same places where new pipelines have been proposed.

“We certainly saw that with the Atlantic Coast Pipeline,” says Sabath. “States like Virginia and North Carolina are moving quickly now toward clean energy and zero-carbon goals that are inconsistent with gas and oil infrastructure. It doesn’t make sense to have major projects that would lock you into carbon emissions that will not be permitted in your state in a couple of years.”

In March Virginia passed the Clean Economy Act to make the state’s electricity sector carbon free by 2045. And in 2018 North Carolina’s Gov. Roy Cooper signed an executive order to help spur a transition to a clean energy economy in his state.

People and Politics Hold the Power

Ups and downs in the oil and gas industry aren’t new. But the collision of crises in this current moment — the pandemic-induced demand reduction, the political and financial realities of climate change, surging clean energy, and legal reckonings on high-profile projects — are a steep challenge.

How well oil and gas companies rebound — if they do at all — may largely depend on November’s election.

But beyond politics, there’s one other big factor that will determine how this all plays out: the people.

People gathered — Dakota Access Pipeline protest by the White House, Feb. 8th, 2017. Photo: Victoria Pickering, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Mounting public opposition and effective organizing against projects that risk environmental and human health have become big forces.

“The only reason that there were substantial legal challenges in the first place is because of the epic organizing that preceded the lawsuits,” McKibben wrote about the three recent pipeline decisions.

And the communities whose voices are rising to the top are ones that have historically been silenced. “People are starting to listen to communities of color, low-income rural communities and tribes,” says Sabath. “I think — and hope — that some of those groups who might have been marginalized in the past may be heard now.” The NEPA changes may reduce one of the primary tools those groups have for voicing their concerns, but the extremely vocal activist networks that have developed over the past few years will continue to protest and organize.

Those voices — in combination with a rising global chorus of opposition to fossil fuel dominance — could ensure that mounting economic and environmental crises instead become opportunities for change.

‘Essential’ But Unprotected: How the United States Fails Its Most Important Fish Habitats

A new report concludes U.S. waters “have insufficient protections for a healthy future,” and that the problem has gotten worse under the Trump administration.

“No wetlands, no seafood,” reads a popular bumper sticker in coastal North Carolina.

This argument is simple, eye-catching and undeniably true from a scientific perspective: if we want healthy populations of fish, crabs and shrimp, we need to protect key habitat where they live, breed and feed.

But do we?

The answer to that question, according to new report from the Center for American Progress, is a resounding no.

Not only that, things have gotten worse for fish habitats — and consequently, fisheries — since the Trump administration took office. And that puts fish populations, ecosystems, and part of the human food system at risk.

The heart of the problem, according to the report, lies the way we manage what’s known under U.S. law as an EFH, or “essential fish habitat.” These EFHs represent 800 million acres of habitat, including breeding and feeding sites for nearly 1,000 federally managed species, covering everything from coral reefs to rivers and wetlands.

Under the EFH regulatory structure, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration works with U.S. fisheries management councils — groups that consist of government managers and representatives from industry, academia and the environmental community — to identify and map these habitats.

The law also gives fisheries councils virtually all the power and responsibility to protect these critical habitats and the sensitive species that live in them from manmade threats, including destructive fishing gear.

Unfortunately, according to the new report, councils are largely not using their power to protect. Despite their designation as “essential,” most of these habitats have no additional protections at all — they’re not managed differently than any other kind of marine or river habitats. Much of the rest isn’t protected strongly enough, according to the Center’s examination.

Essential fish habitats — Map of essential fish habitats overlaid with those that have protections in place. Source: NOAA

Ocean policy analyst Alexandra Carter, the report’s lead author, tells me they set out to understand the scope of the problem, but did not expect what they found.

“We were floored at how much identified EFH there is, but how little actual protections result from it,” she says.

In fact, the report concludes with an alarming warning, “The vast majority of U.S. waters have insufficient protections for ensuring a healthy future for American fisheries and oceans.”

The Weakest Link

Of the few areas that had protections, three-quarters had what the authors call “minimal protections” — usually just minor modifications to fishing gear that don’t accomplish much conclusive good.

One example of such a minor gear modification can be found in the Gulf of Mexico, where bottom-trawl nets dragged across the seafloor feature a heavy chain called a “tickler,” which improves catches by stirring up bottom-dwelling species like crabs, but which can also do a lot of damage to the habitat. In order to minimize the risk of damage, the EFH protection established by the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council requires the tickler chain to have one link weaker than all the others. This supposedly enables the chain to break, if necessary, rather than continue to damage habitat.

This sounds good in principle, but according to Carter, “There’s no rule about how weak the link is supposed to be. It just has to be weaker than the other links.”

In many cases, the requirements to protect identified these key habitats consist entirely of things that fishermen were already doing, such as gear modifications put in place because they improve fishing, not because they protect the habitat

“That means there’s little additional protection, if any at all,” Carter says. “A list of new rules that consists of things people were already doing is not really what we think of when we think of a new protected area.”

How can this be? Well, according to Gib Brogan, an Oceana senior campaign manager who wasn’t involved in this report, the process of identifying what counts as EFH is a scientific one with clear guidelines, but what’s supposed to be done to protect an EFH once it’s identified is a lot more flexible.

“There’s been a lot of latitude given to the fisheries management councils,” he says. “Fishery managers have to make rules to minimize the adverse effects of fishing, but there’s lots of discretion about what exactly that means. And it’d be tough to make the case that the councils are fully implementing and fully achieving the requirements of the law. Habitat protection is often treated as a nuisance by managers, addressed not because it’s a priority but because the courts say they have to after they’re sued.”

A Worsening Problem

While this is a longstanding problem, it, like many other environmental issues, has gotten worse during the Trump administration.

“Science-based management is the key to modern fisheries, and the current administration doesn’t value science particularly highly,” Brogan says.

The regulations and processes for identifying EFH haven’t changed, but Carter notes that there’s been a noticeable change in attitude among the councils as a result of the Trump administration’s anti-regulation agenda. It was pressure from the New England fisheries management council, for example, that resulted in recent news that an Atlantic marine protected area would lose its protections. And a recent Executive Order solicited recommendations from councils for ways the administration could reduce regulatory burdens on fisheries.

EFH — Source: Center for American Progress

There have also been other, non-EFH related cases where the administration ignored science when getting involved in fisheries management, including issues related to recreational fisheries management and issues related to marine zoning.

“If we just let the councils ask the president to allow fishing in all our MPAs and not have any protections in essential fish habitats, we’re just not doing the best we can for our ocean ecosystems,” Carter says. “The councils are poised to take advantage of any opportunities to allow more fishing. It’s my opinion that with the Trump administration these opportunities seem to be much more abundant than in previous administrations.”

Of course, most of the protected EFH areas aren’t what scientists typically talk about when discussing marine protected areas, especially in the context of a goal to strongly protect 30% of the ocean by 2030. But experts say establishing stronger protections in EFHs would contribute to the same goals.

The report also cites the administration’s trade policies and the continuing threat of climate change as elements that have worsened EFH protection over the past three and a half years.

Can We Solve This Problem?

The report includes two key suggestions for improving the way we use EFH regulations to protect the oceans.

The biggest is to introduce a new requirement that any identified essential fish habitat have at least some substantive protections, usually in the form of restricting what kind of destructive fishing practices can or can’t take place there. Just noting that a place is important and should be protected without giving it any kind of actual protection, the authors say, is not especially useful. And while there’s value in allowing the councils broad latitude to make solutions that work for local conditions, the fact that so much EFH remains unprotected or minimally protected is cause for concern and a reason for reform.

The report also suggests ways to improve the public consultation process for designating and protecting essential fisheries habitats. This is often used for other environmental regulations under U.S. law and has allowed for a more transparent and effective process.

“We should have EFH, but we should improve it so it’s meaningful,” Carter says. “If we’re not doing what we can to preserve the valuable resources we have in the ocean, we are failing the future fishing industry of America. Protecting the ocean is a promise to the future to maintain public resources for the benefit of everyone.”

A Virus Wiped Out 90% of This Turtle Species. Can It Recover?

Australia’s Bellinger River snapping turtle nearly went extinct in just months — before anyone knew it was in trouble. Conservationists are working to make sure it doesn’t disappear forever.

In most cases an extinction takes decades of slow attrition and population declines — a death by a thousand cuts.

Sometimes, though, a species can nearly vanish in the blink of an eye.

Take the strange, scary case of the Bellinger River snapping turtle (Myuchelys georgesi). A few years ago, an estimated 4,500 of these colorful critters swam the waters of the Australian water system for which they were named, a 44-mile river in the state of New South Wales, about six hours north of Sydney. They were probably never a populous species, and they faced a few problems from egg-eating predators, but otherwise these turtles hung on just fine.

Then disaster struck.

In 2015 canoeist Rowan Simon and a friend were paddling down the Bellinger River when they noticed a turtle sitting on a rock. It should have jumped back into the water as they approached. It didn’t. They got closer and found a shocking sight — its eyes “were grown over with this disease,” as Simon recounted to the Sydney Morning Herald last year. They found another sick turtle 20 minutes later.

That was the first sign of a disease that, in under two months, would wipe out more than 90% of the species. In addition to blindness, the virus reportedly caused inflammatory lesions and internal organ failure.

Today as few as 150 Bellinger River snapping turtles remain, making them one of the world’s 25 rarest turtle or tortoise species. Australia has declared them critically endangered and devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars toward the species’ conservation.

“I don’t know of any similar wildlife mortality like this,” says ecologist Bruce Chessman of the University of New South Wales-Sydney. “Of course, the chytrid fungus has wiped out some amphibian species quickly, but I don’t know of anything equivalent with turtles.”

Chessman served as the lead author of a recent paper that provided an estimate of the Bellinger River snapping turtle’s precipitous decline. “There’s a lot of uncertainty because, as the paper says, trying to get a reliable estimate of a very rare species over 70 kilometers of river is quite challenging. But we think it’s about 150-200 animals remaining. The risk of extinction is real because of the small number left.”

Virus-plus?

The researchers also examined several hypotheses about how a previously unknown and still unidentified virus could have killed so many turtles so quickly.

They didn’t find much.

“It’s all a bit of a mystery,” Chessman says. “There’s still so much we don’t know. We know it’s a reptile type of virus, but we have no idea where it came from, how long it’s been in the Bellinger River, or how it managed to apparently spread upstream rather than downstream at a rate of up to a kilometer a day, which is really quite bizarre.”

Previous research had suggested that some additional contributing factor — perhaps abnormal water temperatures, pollution or malnutrition — may have magnified the effects of the virus so that it caused so many fatalities. Current research, however, has found no specific evidence to support those hypotheses — at least, not yet.

“We can’t rule out that some sort of unusual environmental conditions in the preceding months were related to it somehow, but we don’t really have the information to understand what that was or what it may have been,” says Chessman. “Unfortunately, there isn’t that much information about what happened in the river until these sick and dead turtles started showing up in February 2015.”

The Bellinger River in September 2019. Photo: Michael Coghlan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Even our understanding of the virus — what it does and how it kills — continues to lag.

“Because the species is so critically endangered now, it’s not permissible to try infection trials with the few adults that are remaining,” Chessman explains. “So it’s still not possible to get that experimental confirmation about what infection with the virus really does to the turtles.”

All of this leaves the teams working to conserve the turtles with a great deal of uncertainty.

“We really don’t know what the prospects are in terms of further disease outbreak and mortality,” Chessman says. The few remaining turtles also face threats from predators, mostly introduced red fox, as well as from native species such as monitor lizards.

There’s also a genetic threat. Another Australian turtle species, the Macquarie turtle (Emydura macquarii), appeared in the Bellinger River in recent years. The newcomers are slightly more aggressive than the native species, so they outcompete them for food, and there’s evidence they’ve started to breed and hybridize with Bellinger River snapping turtles.

“The challenges are ahead,” Chessman says. “But everyone’s giving it their best.”

That “everyone” includes the NSW Department of Planning Industry and Environment, other government organizations, local conservation groups and experts around the world.

And that collaboration may represent hope for the species.

The Last Chance Leads to the Next Generation

After his first warnings reportedly fell on deaf ears, Rowan Simon and another friend returned to the river, where they gathered up 50 dead and dying turtles and presented them to the local council.

The collection process “was pretty horrific,” Rowan told the Sydney Morning Herald.

That confrontation finally motivated action. But by then — just two months after the first signs of the disease — very few turtles were left.

At the last minute, conservation teams rescued 17 healthy mature and immature Bellinger River snapping turtles from an upper stretch of the river the disease hadn’t yet reached. They soon became the core of a captive-breeding population at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo. Another 19 immature turtles (also healthy) were collected in November 2016 and sent to Symbio Wildlife Park to start a second captive-assurance population.

That effort has paid off — and probably saved the species from extinction.

The captive turtles promptly got down to business and started breeding. Today more than 130 healthy turtles live at the two breeding facilities. Taronga Zoo announced the birth of the most recent 35 turtle babies this past May.

More importantly, 20 captive-born animals have been released back into the river, where they’re constantly monitored through surveys and radio transmitters.

So far the released turtles appear to be healthy, and their survival rate remains quite high. As of this past March, 17 of the released turtles were still being tracked; one turtle had died, while two more had disappeared after their tracking devices failed. That month 16 of the released hatchlings were collected, tested and rereleased. Gerry McGilvray, co-lead of the Bellinger River turtle conservation program for the NSW government, told The Guardian that the youngsters “appear to be in good health and there’s no evidence of exposure to the virus.”

That makes the Bellinger River snapping turtle an interesting parallel to the current COVID-19 pandemic: The virus seems to have caused greater mortality levels in adults than in immature turtles, for as-yet-unknown reasons.

“The older ones seemed more susceptible than the younger ones, which of course is true with coronavirus as well,” says Chessman.

A Long Road Ahead

Of course, you need to produce a huge number of hatchlings to make up for losing 90% of a species. That will take time — a lot of it — and the effort faces some very strict physical limitations.

For one thing, very few mature females remain — just 5% of the total wild population. On top of that, 88% of the remaining turtles are immature, meaning they won’t reach breeding age for several years — another 10-12 years in the case of the released hatchlings.

Bellinger turtle hatchlings — Two Bellinger River snapping turtle hatchlings. Photo courtesy NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment

That means it would take decades for the population to come anywhere close to recovery even if the zoos keep producing and releasing young, and if the virus doesn’t have a resurgence.

That timeline shouldn’t come as a surprise, as it often takes decades for threatened species to recover once (or if) the threat that put them at risk is contained. As examples, the Chessman team’s paper points out the difficulties faced by two other turtle species that faced enormous declines:

…a population of northern map turtles (Graptemys geographica) in the USA took 27 years to recover after a period of harvesting in which abundance declined by ~50% … and there was no recovery of a common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) population in Canada 23 years after loss of 39% of nesting females to predation by otters…

For now, though, the Bellinger River snapping turtle’s declines have ceased.

The biggest question, though, is whether that status quo will persist.

“The means of recovery are in place, potentially, but there’s ongoing uncertainty about further mortality from disease,” says Chessman. “We just don’t know really what’s going to happen to these young turtles that are being released once they reach maturity. Will they then succumb to the disease and die, or was it perhaps more of a one-off event?”

Other uncertainties include the potential threat of more bushfires like the ones Australia experienced earlier this year. Several media reports have suggested debris from the fires fell into the Bellinger River, potentially affecting the turtles’ food supplies. (Despite more than four months of inquiries, the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment’s public affairs office would not answer questions about how the fires may have affected the river.)

Extinction Inspiration

Although we don’t know much about the river basin’s water quality before the turtles got sick, we know a lot more about it now — because this near-extinction has motivated the community.

Soon after news of the virus and mass turtle deaths emerged, a group of citizens banded together to form Bellingen Riverwatch (named after the nearby town with a slightly different name than the river itself). Now community volunteers, schools and other organizations conduct monthly water-quality tests across three rivers, a process that’s continued even amid the pandemic.

The results have been mostly good, with a few concerns. Elevated phosphate levels have shown up several times. Tests for February and March found that several sites that, at certain moments, failed to meet guidelines for dissolved oxygen established by the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council, indicating unsafe conditions for “aquatic life and the macroinvertebrates that our turtles love to eat.” The water’s oxygen content is potentially important for the Bellinger River turtle, a butt-breathing species that takes in some oxygen through its cloaca while it’s underwater. If a turtle can’t get enough oxygen from the water, it must come to the surface, putting it at increased risk of predation. Although concerning, there’s no indication this is currently a threat to the species.

Bellingen Riverwatch uses an icon of the critically endangered Bellinger River snapping turtle in its logo.

But the most recent Riverwatch report, published June 24, found the river to be in “great” shape, with no visible pollution in most sites and only slight rises in certain phosphate levels or algae in others.

Swimming Forward

Although many questions remain, the Bellinger River snapping turtle appears to have been saved from extinction — for now.

Of course, the threat of another potential outbreak still looms large — as it does for other wildlife species and even people around the world.

“Situations like this are of course unpredictable and could in theory happen anytime and anywhere — kind of like COVID,” says biologist Craig Stanford, the lead author of a new study about the threats faced by the world’s turtle and tortoise species. What’s happening with the Bellinger River turtle, he says, “concerns all of us, but it’s hard to take lessons from it to prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

But there’s one lesson from the Bellinger River that we can all carry forward: If you see a turtle or other animal that’s displaying signs of illness or unusual behavior, raise the alarm. It could be the start of something catastrophic — and an opportunity to bring a coalition and a community together to fight for a good cause and make a difference.

A Dam Comes Down — and Tribes, Cities, Salmon and Orcas Could All Benefit

You may not have heard much about the long fight to remove the Nooksack Dam near Bellingham, Washington, but its detonation this week will prove ecologically and culturally important.

The conclusion to decades of work to remove a dam on the Middle Fork Nooksack River east of Bellingham, Washington began with a bang yesterday as crews breached the dam with a carefully planned detonation. This explosive denouement is also a beginning.

Over the next couple of weeks, crews will fully remove the 125-foot-wide, 25-foot-tall dam, allowing the Middle Fork Nooksack to run free for the first time in 60 years. With the dam’s removal, 16 miles of river and tributary habitat will open up to help boost populations of three threatened Puget Sound fish species: Chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout.

“This project has always ranked at the top of the list for fish recovery projects in this area because of the sheer number of miles of river habitat that are available upstream in a fairly remote and pristine area,” says Renee LaCroix, assistant public works director for the city of Bellingham, which owns the dam. “There’s no other single project in this area that can match this.”

Two local tribes, the Nooksack and Lummi Nation, have been behind the effort to help restore fish passage and the river’s ecological integrity.

“Our natural resources are our cultural resources,” says Trevor Delgado, the Nooksack tribal historic preservation officer. “With this removal we get a little piece of our home back — a place where our people have visited for hundreds of generations.”

LaCroix says the project has no downsides for the city, and it’s expected to increase the resilience of the municipal water supply, remove a safety hazard for kayakers, help fish recovery and restore culturally significant resources for the tribes.

Proponents also hope to see indirect benefits for endangered Southern Resident killer whales. This population of orcas ranges across Pacific Northwest coastal waters and relies on dwindling numbers of Chinook as a main food source. Fewer than 80 of the whales remain, and Chinook populations have fallen so low that the orcas have started altering their traditional migration patterns as they search for fish to eat.

But even with the dam removal’s many benefits and municipal and tribal support, the path to this moment hasn’t been easy.

The History

The Middle Fork Nooksack drains glacier-fed headwater streams that run off the icy summit of 10,778-foot Mt. Baker. The Middle Fork joins the North Fork and then the mainstem of the Nooksack River, which travels to Bellingham Bay and Puget Sound. The entire Nooksack watershed stretches 830 square miles across Washington and into British Columbia.

map of diversion dam and region — Image: American Rivers

For generations the river and its surrounding habitat have physically and spiritually nourished Indigenous peoples — including the Nooksack Indian Tribe and the Lummi Nation.

But all that changed when the dam was built in in 1961 to divert water to the city of Bellingham to supplement its main water supply in Lake Whatcom — the drinking water for the now-85,000 residents in the city and county. As soon as it went up, the dam obstructed fish passage, altered the river’s flow, and disrupted the ability of tribal members to use a culturally significant area.

For the past four decades, Delgado says, the Nooksack have pushed for dam removal. They got close in the early 2000s, when the Nooksack and Lummi Nation entered into an official agreement with the city and state to work on a solution that would allow fish passage, including the possible installation of fish ladders. But despite years of work, a suitable fix wasn’t found, and the effort had completely stalled by 2016.

The following year the nonprofit American Rivers, which works on watershed restoration and has extensive experience in dam-removal efforts, stepped in with financial backing from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. American Rivers’ April McEwan assumed a project management role and brought parties back to the table and soon into agreement on a plan to remove the dam and reengineer the city’s water intake from the river.

“What we know about dam removal is that if you can remove the infrastructure and restore the channel to natural conditions, that’s always the best way to get fish passage,” says McEwan.

The final cost of the project came in at around $20 million — way more than the city could afford on its own. About half of the cost eventually came from the state and the city is collaborating with federal agencies on the distribution of another $2 million in Pacific Salmon Treaty funds. But before applying for that money, the city had to complete costly initial design and permitting work. Private foundations — largely the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, along with Resources Legacy Fund — picked up 70% of those initial costs.

LaCroix says help from American Rivers and the foundations was hugely important in getting the project “shovel ready” so it could apply for the construction funds it needed.

Removing the dam infrastructure was just part of the cost, though. Reworking the city’s water intake also required some tricky engineering.

A Plan Comes Together

The Middle Fork dam is not a pool dam built for water storage. Much of the time, water flows over the top until dam operators drop a floodgate to divert water to new locations. That water travels about 14 miles through tunnel and pipeline to Mirror Lake, then Anderson Creek, and to Lake Whatcom before finally being delivered to residents’ taps.

Before removing the dam, engineers had to move the water intake 700 feet upstream and situate it at an elevation that still enabled city water withdrawals throughout the year, regardless of flow conditions.

They also needed to make sure that the rushing water didn’t sweep up fish and accidentally send them through the water-supply system.

“The solution required a fairly complex design in the intake structure, including a fish exit pipe out of that structure to put fish back into the river in a way that meets current environmental permit standards,” explains LaCroix.

project schematic — Project layout for the removal of the Middle Fork Nooksack diversion dam and rebuilding of water intake. Credit: City of Bellingham

Despite the cost and the work, she says, being able to continue to meet their municipal water obligations while opening up habitat for threatened species has been a win-win.

“I think there’s a lot of benefits to having a dam removal versus fish passage — the main one being that you get a free-flowing river that can be a dynamic ecosystem and change over time,” she says. “A static fish ladder just can’t provide that same level of ecosystem benefit.”

Restoration Success

Despite local authorities’ championing dam removal on the Middle Fork, the project has largely flown under the radar, overshadowed in the Pacific Northwest by heated discussions about a much larger potential project — removing four federal hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake River, a major tributary of the Columbia River.

Proponents of dam removal there see it as the best chance for recovering threatened salmon populations, including Chinook, which could help starving Southern Resident killer whales. Those dams also provide irrigation water, barge navigation and hydropower, so there’s been more pushback against removal efforts.

Previous dam removals around the country, however, have proved successful at aiding fish recovery and river restoration.

Most notably the 1999 demolition of Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River restored the annual run of alewives, a type of herring essential to the food web. The fish run has gone from zero to 5 million in the two decades since dam removal. Blueback herring, striped bass, sturgeon and shad have also extended their reach. And the resurgence has brought back osprey, bald eagles and other wildlife, too.

The overwhelming success of river restoration on the Kennebec helped to spur a nationwide dam removal movement that’s now seen 1,200 dams come down since 1999. Last year a record 90 dams were removed in 26 states, including 20 dams in California’s Cleveland National Forest.

spider excavators removing dam — Spider excavators remove a dam on San Juan Creek in California’s Cleveland National Forest. Photo: Julie Donnell, USFS

The results have been seen in the Pacific Northwest, as well, which boasts the largest dam removal thus far in the country. In 2011 and 2014, the demolition of two dams on Elwha River, which runs through Washington’s Olympic National Park, opened up 70 miles of habitat that had been blocked for a century. Scientists have started seeing all five species of salmon native to the river coming back, particularly Chinook and coho. Bull trout, they’ve observed, have increased in size since the dams were removal.

Benefits on the Middle Fork Nooksack

McEwan hopes to see a similar outcome on the Middle Fork.

Like the Elwha the Middle Fork Nooksack is a relatively pristine river with little development, and dam removal is expected to provide a big boost to fish. The additional miles of spawning habitat are important, but so is the temperature of that water.

The dam removal will open access to cold upstream waters, which are ideal for salmon and getting harder to come by as climate change warms waters and reduces mountain runoff.

Aerial view of river and trees — Middle Fork Nooksack canyon just below the diversion dam. Photo: Wendy McDermott

“This is really great for the climate change resiliency for these species,” says McEwan.

Steelhead will get back 45% of their historic habitat in the river, and scientists expect Chinook populations to increase in abundance by 31%.

That could help Southern Resident killer whales.

“When you get to the ocean, it’s a little bit of a black box in terms of what you can model and say definitively is going to help, but more fish is better for orcas,” McEwan says.

Upstream habitat will see benefits, too.

Oceangoing fish like salmon enrich their bodies with carbon and nitrogen while at sea. When they return to their natal rivers to spawn and die, the marine-derived nutrients they carry back upriver become important food and fertilizer for both riverine and terrestrial ecosystems — aiding everything from trees to birds to bears.

“Once the fish start making their way back, it will start changing the whole ecological system,” says Delgado.

But any ecological benefit from salmon restoration, either in the ocean or the upper watershed, won’t be immediate.

“The population of salmon on the Middle Fork is so low that we expect it’s going to take quite a while to rebound,” she says. “But the big picture is that what’s good for salmon is good for the region — our history and our destiny are intricately intertwined.”

After decades of work, that process of restoration has finally begun.

Study: Only 5% of Conservation Journals Comply With Principles for Fair and Open Access

Our research finds ethical problems that lock certain researchers out of the conservation and biodiversity publishing system — and offers resources to help decide where to submit new research.

Biodiversity conservation needs to be informed by science. The body of scientific knowledge, meanwhile, ought to be accessible to those whose work would benefit from using it (e.g., conservation practitioners) and reflect the perspectives of a diverse global network of researchers.

But that’s not always the case. In one recent study, nearly half of surveyed conservationists said it was “not easy” or “not at all easy” to access scientific literature in their work. Too often, the survey found, the publishing practices of academic journals — the primary outlet researchers use to disseminate their work — can provide a major barrier to achieving these aims.

Having experienced this ourselves, we recently published a study that asks: Do conservation and ecology journals use ethical publication models, what does this mean for conservation, and what can researchers do about it?

To answer those questions, we assessed the websites of 426 conservation and ecology journals against the Fair Open Access principles, developed by scholars and librarians to help transition toward more ethical publishing practices.

The five FOA principles are:

The journal has a transparent ownership structure and is controlled by and responsive to the scholarly community;
Authors of articles in the journal retain copyright;
All articles are published open access and an explicit open access license is used;
Submission and publication are not conditional in any way on the payment of a fee from the author(s) or their employing institution, or on membership of an institution or society;
Any fees paid on behalf of the journal to publishers are low, transparent and in proportion to the work carried out.

Most conservation research, we found, is published in journals that do not follow these principles.

According to our analysis two-thirds of journals, publishing almost half of all articles, complied with only one or two FOA principles. Only 20 journals (5%), publishing less than 1% of all articles, complied with all five principles. The majority of assessed journals charge high publishing fees to authors, restrict access to the published research to those that can pay, and take sole copyright ownership of the research produced by the conservation community.

ethical publishing — Source: “Ethical Publishing in Biodiversity Conservation Science,” Conservation & Society

Moreover, four publishers owned 80% of the 25 journals with the highest impact factor — a metric often used as a proxy of journal prestige when researchers decide where to publish. These publishers tended to have lower FOA scores, meaning researchers publishing in many prestigious journals must comply with more restrictive publishing practices — which potentially exclude researchers in lower-income countries from submitting their work to these highly read outlets.

This reveals major ethical problems within the conservation and ecology publishing landscape. Academics from lower-income countries, as well as researchers that are part of NGOs, are often excluded from publishing and reading many conservation journals. This exclusion is likely a barrier to evidence-based conservation in the most biodiverse and threatened parts of the world.

This barrier may partly be a consequence of the limited control by the conservation science community: A third of journals appear to be run entirely for profit, rather than being controlled by scholarly bodies.

What can researchers do about this?

While recognizing that there can be tradeoffs when selecting journals, authors can help address these practices by “voting” with their research papers — in other words, submitting research to publishers with the more ethical publishing models.

To help enable that decision process, our research provides scores for each of the conservation and ecology journals we assessed. Those results can be found here. We encourage researchers to consult this database when deciding where to submit their research.

Together we can start a shift toward a more equitable landscape of research publication and use in conservation — and that can only further enable our goals of protecting species in need around the planet.

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

Northern Fish Are Tough, But Can They Survive Climate Change?

Fish in the northern reaches of the planet are adapted to thrive in some of the most dynamic conditions, but new research finds that some species are showing decline.

Summer has finally arrived in the northern reaches of Canada and Alaska, liberating hundreds of thousands of northern stream fish from their wintering habitats.

Through the long winter, many have endured cramped, icy quarters with perilously low oxygen levels. Others have recently journeyed incredible distances from large rivers and lakes to small summer habitats upstream.

Northern stream fish come from a long line of hardy adapters. Their ancestors were well equipped to survive multiple ice ages and then go on to colonize some of the coldest newly accessible northern habitats. They thrive in some of the most dynamic conditions on the planet, from short intense summers, with up to 24 hours of sunlight, to long cold winters with limited light and food.

But the survival tools these fish have used for millennia — exceptional tolerance to cold, slow growth rates and long lifespans — could be a disadvantage as environmental conditions in the north warm and more fast-paced species move in.

Our research team set out to see how stream fishes were responding to unprecedented environmental changes across their northern ranges. Ultimately, we wanted to know how these changes might affect the hundreds of thousands of people in Alaska and northern Canada that rely on local fisheries for food, culture and economic security.

A Good News Story?

On the surface, the results from our study appear to provide a “good news” story. Warming temperatures were linked to higher numbers of fish, more species overall and, therefore, potentially more fishing opportunities for northerners.

Initially, we were surprised to learn that warming was increasing the distribution of cold-adapted fish. We reasoned that modest amounts of warming could lead to benefits such as increased food and winter habitat availability without reaching stressful levels for many species.

salmon under water — Salmon migration in Togiak National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: USFWS

Yet, not all fish species fared equally well. Ecologically unique northern species — those that have evolved in colder, more nutrient-poor environments, such as Arctic grayling and Dolly Varden trout — were showing declines with warming.

Fish Strandings and Buried Eggs

Recent news headlines run the gamut for Pacific salmon — from their increased escapades into the Arctic to massive pre-spawning die-offs in central Alaska. Similarly, results from our study revealed different outcomes for fish depending on local climatic conditions, including Pacific salmon.

We found that warmer spring and fall temperatures may be helping juvenile salmon by providing a longer and more plentiful growing season, and by supporting early egg development in northern regions that were previously too cold for survival.

In contrast, salmon declined in regions that were experiencing wetter fall conditions, pointing to an increased risk of flooding and sedimentation that could bury or dislodge incubating eggs.

Interestingly, we found that certain climatic combinations, such as warmer summer water temperatures with decreased summer rainfall, were important in determining where Pacific salmon could survive. Summer warming in drier watersheds led to declines, suggesting that lowered streamflows may have increased the risk of fish becoming stranded in subpar habitats that were too warm and crowded.

The Fate of Northern Fisheries

The promise of a warmer and more accessible Arctic has attracted mounting interest in new economic opportunities, including fisheries. As warming rates at higher latitudes are already two to three times global levels, it seems probable that northern biodiversity will experience dramatic shifts in the coming decades.

Fish under water — Arctic graylings. Photo: USFWS Mountain-Prairie/ Mark Conlin

Despite the many unknowns surrounding the future of Pacific salmon, many fisheries are currently thriving following warmer and more productive northern oceans, and some Arctic Indigenous communities are developing new salmon fisheries.

As warming continues, the commercial salmon fishing industry is poised to expand northwards, but its success will largely depend on extenuating factors such as changes to marine habitat and food sources and how many fish are caught during the freshwater stages of their journey.

Even with the potential for increased northern biodiversity, it is important to recognize that some northern communities may be unable to adapt or may lose individual species that are associated with important cultural values.

For example, many Yukon First Nations, including Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, have voluntarily refrained from fishing their main traditional food of chinook salmon to help stocks recover. Other communities that rely on increasingly vulnerable northern-adapted species such as Arctic grayling and Dolly Varden trout may also be at risk to future changes.

Although climate change action is urgently required at the global level, there are still tools that environmental managers can employ locally to reduce some of the effects. For example, watersheds with an elevated risk of flooding during the salmon incubation period could have more stringent streamside habitat protections, such as preserving larger areas of streamside vegetation from development, actively revegetating disturbed areas and conducting site-specific erosion and sediment control studies. In dangerously warm and dry years, fishing quotas could be reduced to limit salmon die-offs.

Ultimately, we advise that getting ahead of these impending changes by preserving the integrity of large intact watersheds will be key for protecting these evolutionary superstars from new human-driven pressures.

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

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.