Should We Be Feeding Birds and Other Wildlife?

Feeding wild birds in our backyards can have big ecological implications. But there are some best practices, researchers are learning.

This story was originally published by Ensia.

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.

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.”

Goldfinch on a bag — 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.

The Bad Seeds: Are Wildfire Recovery Efforts Hurting Biodiversity?

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 regrowing — 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.

Prescribed Burn — 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.

“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.”

Art as Witness to the Extinction Crisis

“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.

Keller in studio — 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.”

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Snakes of Zion National Park 🐍 inspired by my @zionnps 2018 Artist Residency and now on view at @antlerpdx on Alberta Street in Portland, Oregon. I loved exploring all of the different scale shapes in this price. Snakes are so magical! The species depicted in this piece are: Desert Striped Whipsnake, Ring-necked Snake, Wandering Gartersnake, Gopher Snake, Great Basin Rattlesnake, California Kingsnake, Groundsnake, Nightsnake, Western Lyresnake, Sonoran Mountain Kingsnake, Smith’s Black-heaeded Snake, Mohave Patch-nosed Snake, Red Racer

A post shared by Zoe Keller Art (@zoekellerart) on Jun 14, 2019 at 8:16am PDT

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.

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Subtle moonglow hues in this commission from 2018 🌙

A post shared by Zoe Keller Art (@zoekellerart) on Oct 23, 2019 at 9:16am PDT

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.

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So excited to share my new series that is down at @scopeartshow Miami Beach with the wonderful folks at @antlerpdx 🖤 This is one of three 12” x 12” drawings where two snakes species, one a potential predator, and one potential prey, are peacefully entangled. In this drawing, a juvenile Northern Pacific Rattlesnake and a California Mountain Kingsnake are entwined. 🐍 If you would like to see an online preview of the show, email gallerist@antlerpdx.com 🖤 it’s such an honor to be showing alongside their stellar lineup!

A post shared by Zoe Keller Art (@zoekellerart) on Dec 3, 2019 at 8:17am PST

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.

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Fungi of Hurricane Island, Maine, 2014. Looking forward to returning to Maine in 2020 🍄

A post shared by Zoe Keller Art (@zoekellerart) on Nov 20, 2019 at 8:51am PST

For more of Keller’s art, including tutorials and previews of works in process, visit her on Facebook or Instagram.

Could the Pentagon Be a Climate Change Leader?

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.

‘We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us’ — December’s Most Important Environmental Books

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.

Pangolins: Science, Society and Conservation edited by Daniel Challender, Helen Nash and Carly Waterman

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.

Live Sustainably Now: A Low-Carbon Vision of the Good Life by Karl Coplan

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.

The New Environmental Economics by Éloi Laurent

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.”

The Energy of Russia: Hydrocarbon Culture and Climate Change by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen

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.

A Practical Guide for Genetic Management of Fragmented Animal and Plant Populations

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.

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

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.

I Go Pogo by Walt Kelly

“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.

Scientists: Trophy Hunting ‘Not Irreplaceable’ for Conservation Funding

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.

When Should We Consider a Species Recovered?

Conservation lacks a common definition of species recovery. A new tool called the "Green List of Species" could change that by focusing more on ecological function than population size.

Around the world animals and plants are disappearing at alarming rates. In May 2019 a major U.N. report warned that around one million species were at risk of extinction — more than at any other time in human history.

Conservation scientists like me focus on predicting and preventing extinctions. But we see that as an essential first step, not a final goal. Ultimately we want species to recover.

The challenge is that while extinction is easy to define, recovery is not. Until recently, there was no general definition of a “recovered” species. As a result some species recovery plans are much less ambitious than others, and scientists don’t have a common yardstick for recognizing conservation successes.

To address this challenge, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission — the world’s largest network of conservationists — is developing a Green List of Species to highlight species recovery. This tool will complement the well-known Red List, which highlights endangered species.

While the Red List focuses on extinction risk, the Green List will measure recovery and conservation success. As a member of the team charged with making the Green List a practical conservation tool, I see it as a way of measuring the impact of conservation and communicating conservation success stories, as well as learning from failures.

Defining Recovery

To know how much conservation has accomplished, and to encourage ambitious conservation goals, we need an objective way to measure progress toward a species’ recovery. Studies of recovery plans developed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act show that some plans consider a species recovered even if its population remains the same or shrinks during the recovery effort. A standard definition of recovery would prevent such inconsistencies and encourage wildlife managers to aim higher.

Conservation scientists have long attempted to identify the different facets of species recovery. Reviewing these efforts our team came up with several requirements for considering a species fully recovered.

As I explain with an international group of colleagues in a new study, one key idea is that populations of the species should be “functional.” By this we mean that they are able to perform all the roles that the species is known to play in ecosystems where it exists. This may seem like an obvious measurement, but in fact, some species that are considered to be “recovered” in the United States fail this test.

The Kirtland’s Warbler was declared recovered in the United States in 2019 but will still rely on land managers to maintain stands of jack pine where it nests and control parasitic cowbirds that prey on it. Joel Trick/USFWS, CC BY

What’s Your Function?

Each species has many kinds of ecological functions. For example, bees help plants reproduce by pollinating them. When birds and bats eat fruits and later excrete the seeds, they help forests regenerate.

Similarly, when salmon swim upstream to spawn and then are consumed by bears and other predators, that process moves essential nutrients from the oceans up into rivers and forests. And when flammable grasses burn in the U.S. Southeast, they fuel fires that maintain longleaf pine forests.

All these critical functions are possible only when enough members of the key species are present. Put another way, keeping a species alive is not enough – it also is essential to keep its functions from going extinct.

Functional Extinction

Scientists have known for decades that species may persist at such low numbers that they do not fulfill the ecological roles they used to perform. This can be true even if significant numbers of animals or plants are present.

One example is the American bison, which is a great conservation success story in terms of preventing its extinction. Hunting reduced bison to just a few hundred individuals in western states at the end of the 19th century, but conservation initiatives have restored them to public, private and Native American lands across the West.

Today bison do not appear to be at risk of extinction. However, they occupy less than 1% of their historical range, and most of the roughly 500,000 animals that exist today are raised for commercial purposes. Fewer than 20,000 bison live in conservation herds – a small fraction of their pre-Columbian population, which totaled millions or tens of millions.

Current IUCN classification for American bison. IUCN, CC BY-ND

Even though bison are not at risk of extinction, for the purposes of their contributions to the ecosystems and landscapes they once inhabited, I believe the species should be considered to be functionally extinct and not a fully recovered species.

This does not mean its conservation is a failure. To the contrary, according to new conservation metrics that I and other scientists have proposed for the Green List, the bison would receive high scores on several counts, including “conservation legacy” — meaning it has benefited significantly from past protective efforts — and “conservation gain,” or potential to respond positively to further initiatives.

A Full Recovery

For contrast, consider another species widely viewed as a conservation success story: The osprey. Populations of this fish-eating bird of prey crashed across North America in the 1950s to 1970s, primarily due to poisoning from the insecticide DDT and its derivatives.

Conservation efforts since then, including a federal ban on DDT and provision of nesting structures, have resulted in a dramatic recovery, back to population levels before the declines. Actually, many U.S. and Canadian populations of osprey now exceed historical numbers. Under the Green List criteria we are proposing, this species would now be considered ecologically functional in most if not all parts of its range.

Ambitious Goals

Conservation scientists have long considered a species’ influence on others and on the ecosystems it inhabits to be a fundamental aspect of its essence and its intrinsic value. The Green List of Species initiative seeks to go beyond simply preventing extinctions to defining recovered species as those that are ecologically functional across their natural ranges. This new focus aims to encourage conservation optimism by highlighting success stories and showing that with help, species once at risk can reclaim their places in the web of life.

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

Ecological Genocide: Moscow Attempts to Bury Its People in Garbage

Construction of the largest solid-waste landfill in Europe threatens to permanently damage the health of Russia’s rural citizens and trash the country’s reputation.

Russia’s authorities and its people have recently found themselves locked into two powerful political conflicts.

One, in Moscow, stems from the elections to the City Duma, where the arrests of unregistered independent candidates sparked the largest political protests the country has seen in six years.

The second, which achieved less worldwide media attention than the Moscow protests, started in the remote Arkhangelsk region of the Russian North. Protests there have not been about an election but a plan to build what would be the largest solid-waste landfill in Europe and import millions of tons of toxic garbage from the capital.

Both cases illustrate how, for the first time in far too long, people in Russia have begun to regain their sense of solidarity and possibly their right to dissent — despite cynical and brutal attacks by oligarchs and officials.

The movement against the garbage launched on Sunday, September 22, when rallies were held in the city of Arkhangelsk and more than 10 other settlements throughout the greater Arkhangelsk region. Protesters united against the proposed landfill, construction of which had already begun in secret near Shiyes, a remote railway station in the North.

Shipment of garbage 750 miles from Moscow to Arkhangelsk is not a small problem. Moscow and the greater Moscow area produce an estimated 20 percent of Russia’s total waste: up to 7.2 million tons of municipal solid waste and about 6.1 million tons of industrial waste annually.

Moscow can’t handle its own garbage. Every day 9.5 thousand tons of municipal waste are transported from the capital to nearby landfills that have long since outlived their capacity. Since 2013, 24 of the Moscow region’s 39 landfills have closed.

At some point authorities started transporting garbage from closed landfills to other, still-operating ones — a decision that proved highly controversial among local residents and sparked anti-garbage protests first raged in Moscow in the spring of 2018.

After that the authorities decided to move the problem away from the capital to the North and literally bury it in the vicinity of the Shiyes station. The giant landfill — which has been situated in a swampy area where streams flow into the large rivers that feed the waters of the Baltic region and White Sea — would have the capacity to accept 46 million tons of unsorted waste from the Moscow region over a 20-year period.

Trash crisis in Moscow is simply being SHIFTED to local regions by building so-called „ecotechnoparks“ such as at Shiyes in Arkhangelsk 🇷🇺.

Locals fear health & environmental risks & have been completely EXCLUDED from decision-making processes📋.

👉https://t.co/gaSxhn5FoV pic.twitter.com/dsMCgXDleZ

— EnvironmentalJustice (@EnvJustice) August 28, 2019

The first phase of construction began in 2018 after crews conducted large-scale tree felling, including a forest outside the designated railway section.

The project organizers did not consult with region’s residents, municipal authorities or experts.

Most importantly, the plan didn’t undergo an environmental review, even though it obviously threatens the lives and health of local people.

How do we know that this landfill will be a problem? We only need look to the rest of the Russian Federation.

Russia disposes of more than 30 billion tons of waste every year. Massive, open-pit landfills, many dating back to the USSR, occupy almost 10 million acres. Little of this waste is recycled; the Moscow region has about 400 waste-recycling plants, but they operate at only about 20 percent capacity and reuse just 4 percent of the country’s waste.

Nationwide, no attention is directed toward revising this culture of consumption and waste management. Primitive landfill storage and incineration are, simply, cheaper.

Perhaps as a result, the country avoids talking about the harmful effects on the population and the environment. Other Russian landfills have emitted dangerously high levels of pollutants into surrounding communities, and residents in many locations have complained of headaches, nausea and a variety of other health problems. In the Moscow region a dozen children were recently hospitalized due to air poisoning from a landfill. Another dump, near the city of Balashikha, reached a height of 260 feet, and stray dogs, rats and other animals living in and around it have terrorized the locals. Another open-air landfill, in the town of Klin, sits just 1,300 feet away from local school, spreading illness among the kids.

Everywhere the soil erodes, the groundwater gets polluted, and the atmosphere is tainted with landfill gas generated by the fermentation of waste. Only 40 percent of citizens use clean water, and only 11 percent of wastewater is treated. The use of contaminated water can lead to outbreaks of intestinal infection and other diseases, which are often observed in southern Russia.

The people of the North, obviously, do not want to drink similarly poisoned water, nor do they want their landscape destroyed. They go to their forests to hunt and to gather. And most importantly, they love their land.

Locals first learned of the project when hunters stumbled across ongoing construction in the forest. Environmental activists investigated and people quickly united in protest by deploying field camps and blocking the construction site.

The protests have not stopped since last fall. Every day people stand on duty at five key posts, constantly living “on the front line.”

The administration has responded in predictable and horrific fashion: with beatings, detentions, fines, arrests and criminal cases.

Despite the protests, the authorities have not abandoned the intention to build a landfill, and police batons are still used against civilians defending their homeland. Clashes of indignant citizens with security company forces occur regularly and the police are always on the side of the latter. Dozens of trials are ongoing, with activists being arbitrarily tried for hooliganism and “unsanctioned” rallies. (In Russia, every rally or protest, except for single picketers, must be pre-authorized by local authorities or it’s considered illegal.)

The three most notorious cases included an attack on April 9 during a visit by human-rights activists, the beating of protesters on May 10 while construction workers unloaded fuel from a helicopter, and an assault on August 6 where two people were hospitalized after environmentalists formed a human shield to try to block a truck from delivering fuel to the construction site.

Minor skirmishes continue to occur almost daily — more than a year after northerners first began fighting against this landfill.

There are no leaders to jail, though; the protests are all spontaneous outpourings of citizen action. As a result, the police’s attempts to detain the “instigators” merely result in an influx of new protesters.

There has been a bit of official progress, although it hasn’t resulted in much actual change. Recently Russian President Vladimir Putin and the construction company decided to officially “freeze” the project until the company received necessary documentation from government agencies, but the builders secretly and illegally continue to move forward with construction.

Since the protesters still refuse to leave their camps, the fights continue as well, as do the beatings, detentions and court decisions. Fabricated criminal cases don’t close.

The government ignores what is happening. The price of the contract with the private security company amounted to 1.1 billion rubles — this money, from the budget of Moscow, has been paid to a group of men who guard a hole that now sits in the place of illegally cut-down forest.

At the same time, the development company is trying to seduce the locals with the promise of new jobs and the latest technologies. They call the huge landfill “Ecotechnopark,” with the cynical motto: “Safe. Environmental. Profitable.”

That’s far from the truth. The implementation of the Ecotechnopark project will inevitably lead to an environmental catastrophe, according to Russia’s own Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights and several other government bodies. If constructed it will undoubtedly lead to an increase in the morbidity and mortality rates of residents of nearby areas — a possible disaster that could affect the entire Euro-Arctic region.

Russia’s own laws would be ignored if this landfill is built and put into operation. The Sanitary and Epidemiological Rules do not allow waste disposal, landfills, cemeteries and other sites that are sources of chemical, biological or radiation pollution near groundwater that would be used for drinking, household and medical purposes. They also prohibit the use of swamps with a depth of more than 1 meter. The construction site of the Ecotechnopark consists of swamps several meters deep which are the sources of streams flowing into Vychegda River, which itself fills the waters of the Northern Dvina.

If this landfill is built, illness and death in the North will increase significantly. A poisonous landfill filtrate, coming into contact with the swamp would seep into river waters. In conditions of high humidity, unsorted garbage will rot and fall into marshy soil, leading to microbial or chemical contamination. This damage will be irreversible.

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Russia‘s north rallies against dump for Moscow‘s trash exports #landfill #russia #environmental #environment #environment #pollution #climatechange #moscow #archangelsk #schijes #themoscowtimes #arkhangelsk #shiyes #activist #protesters #solidarity #sandrilina

A post shared by Sandrilina (@sandrilina) on Sep 23, 2019 at 5:59am PDT

It is difficult to overestimate the damage to the Russian Federations reputation at both the regional and federal levels over this past year. The “smart” idea to take waste to the northern swamp had long ceased to be such. The initially weak anti-garbage protests now have a very tangible political color, as people who stood up for their land a year ago now also stand for their dignity. What started as a local problem has become interregional.

This is the authorities’ main miscalculation: Over the year people have gained organization skills and learned how to raise funds, gather their strength, and hold on.

It’s a fight the world should pay attention to. The forced, armed shipment of Moscow garbage to the region represents a new era and new kind of environmental catastrophe, something others may face in the future.

But in Russia, this threat has given rise to a new kind of activism and awareness. And if that growth is allowed to continue, it could turn the tide of trash. After decades of rampant, hysterical and reckless consumption, the protests have forced people to take their eyes off the plunder of resources and the country’s treasury, which has for far too long ignored the need to “pay the bills.”

Now, not paying for the health, safety and integrity of the environment is rapidly ceasing to be an abstract topic. It’s literally an attempt to bury people in garbage — and that can’t go on.

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.

We Need to Talk About Environmental Projects That Fail

Celebrating success is great, but a new study finds patterns we can learn from — including the fact that we ignore failure at our own peril.

For Allison Catalano, a former U.S. Navy logistics officer and strategic-management consultant, learning from failure is the key to success.

“I’ve always been a part of organizations that handle failure head on — or at least attempt to,” she says. Addressing failure, she adds, shows us what doesn’t work so that we can find out what does.

Now a Ph.D. candidate at Imperial College of London, Catalano is researching two important environmental questions: What makes conservation projects fail? And what can we learn from those failures?

These are crucial questions. We’re in a time of accelerating environmental crisis, and the conservation movement has limited resources. The consequences of a project’s failure can be far-reaching, ranging from the loss of species habitat to a population decline — or even, in a worst-case scenario, extinction. That makes it critical to focus efforts on projects that are likely to succeed — or to start each project on as good a footing as possible — because time is running short for many species, and it’s possible we won’t be able to solve every problem.

Fortunately there’s a field dedicated to studying what works in conservation and what doesn’t — scientists like Catalano who dedicate their professional lives to learning how to get the most bang out of the few bucks we have to spend.

“The goal of my Ph.D. research is to examine how failure is handled in conservation at individual, team and organizational levels,” says Catalano.

That research has generated a new paper, published this fall in the journal Biological Conservation. Catalano and her colleagues combed through thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles to try to understand why certain projects failed.

It was harder than you might think.

For one thing, published papers don’t always describe things in easily digestible terms like “success” or “failure.” Catalano’s paper notes the challenge in locating published examples of failure, as only 3 percent of articles included the word “fail” in the title and only 2 percent of articles used it within searchable keywords.

For another, in too many cases it’s hard to tell if a conservation project succeeded or failed in achieving its goals because those goals were never explicitly stated. For example — as I reported on earlier this year — some marine protected areas make the mistake of not fully defining their criteria for success.

But most importantly, we just don’t talk enough about failure. At least in the academic literature.

Silence Doesn’t Equal Science

Catalano and her coauthors found that although conservation projects often fail, those failures are seldom covered in the literature. Out of more than 4,000 studies examined about the success or failure of conservation projects, only 59 — less than 1.5 percent — contained any amount of detail about why a project failed.

There are reasons for this.

“Most people are reluctant to publish failure stories,” Catalano tells me. First, failure is a career liability. Many scientists and organizations are concerned that publishing their failures will damage their reputations or lower their chances of future funding. Second, some scientists believe journal reviewers will simply reject “failure stories” because they don’t present new discoveries.

She notes that both these forms of reluctance may, in fact, point to a publishing failure.

“There’s just not much in the way of incentives” to discuss failure in peer-reviewed scientific literature, she says.

Other conservation scientists agree we’re not doing a good enough job publishing stories of conservation failure.

“It’s a lost opportunity for conservation if we don’t study, document and try to understand failure,” says Nathan Bennett, a research associate with the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Fisheries and chair of the IUCN People and Oceans Specialist Group, who was not involved with this study. “It’s hard to admit to our mistakes, and the culture of conservation organizations and agencies does not encourage sharing or learning from failure.”

But without a record of failed conservation actions, we’re hampered in our understanding.

“We may be making the same mistakes or investing in the same failed conservation initiatives again and again,” Bennett says.

Many researchers told Catalano that they felt not discussing failure was itself a failure.

“I actually interviewed several of the article authors as a follow-up for a future paper, and several told me that they felt strongly that their stories needed to be shared,” she says.

Learning From Failure (and People)

Still, Catalano’s research offers lessons from the relatively few published papers about projects that don’t succeed.

Among the 59 “failure” articles they reviewed, Catalano and her team found some recurring patterns. The most common problem wasn’t a lack of resources, poor data, or insufficient understanding of the behavior of an endangered species. It was this: not making sure community members were aware of, involved in, and supportive of the conservation project.

“Many of the articles in this literature review included examples of the breakdown of trust and communication between stakeholders,” Catalano says. “Once this happens, it takes a long time to build it back up, and often the conservation project ends before a positive outcome can be achieved.”

That creates an opportunity.

“People are a big part of the problem, but happily they can also be a large part of the solution if we start to learn more effectively from failure,” she says.

Ignoring the human dimensions of conservation is a long-identified problem, as Bennett’s research revealed in a paper published in 2013.

“My research shows that the support of local people is fundamental to the long-term success of conservation,” Bennett tells me. “The support of local people often depends on perceptions of legitimacy, good governance and feelings of fairness. When they’re not engaged or when they feel that conservation will negatively impact their livelihoods, they tend to actively oppose or take actions to undermine conservation.”

Looking Outside and Ahead

What can be done to help conservation professionals learn from failure? Getting failure stories published may take a paradigm shift.

In the meantime, stories of failure are certainly out there — they just aren’t being published in academic journals or available in a centralized repository.

“The conservation science literature is dominated by academic authors, but most front-line professionals are outside academia,” says Justina Ray, president of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. She says most people with direct, on-the-ground experience in conservation success and failure don’t rely on academic journals; instead they talk about their results in one-on-one conversations and meetings, as well as documents like grant reports.

Ray wholeheartedly agrees with the paper’s conclusions that we could all learn from failure in a more structured way. But, she adds, she’s not sure academic literature is the best place for that. For an academic who wants to learn this stuff, there’s just no substitute for building relationships with experienced practitioners.

At least one effort is underway to turn this around. The Wildlife Conservation Society recently launched something it calls the Failure Factors Initiative to help individuals and groups anonymously report on projects that don’t pan out so others can adapt their own efforts.

Catalano wants the conservation community to push this forward and try to learn from failure. She says she hopes her research program helps to inspire a culture shift in conservation science, and to promote structures for analyzing mistakes so we don’t endlessly repeat them.

Editor’s note: Nathan Bennett and article author David Shiffman are alumni of the Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Conservation Biology, and Justina Ray has recently joined the scientific advisory board for that group.

What Will It Take to End Extinction?

Endangered species face ever-increasing threats around the world, but conservationists are stepping up to the challenge with innovative ideas to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis.

Could inventing a better air conditioner help to save species from extinction?

It’s an idea so crazy it just might work — and it’s just one of many new and innovative conservation initiatives in development around the world to help stem the tide of biodiversity loss.

Stopping the extinction crisis won’t be easy, but success is both necessary and possible, according to a panel of experts who gathered this past October at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Appearing on the panel were Alex Dehgan, CEO of Conservation X Labs and author of The Snow Leopard Project; Liba Pejchar, a conservation biologist with Colorado State University who studies ways to restore biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes; and George Wittemyer, also with Colorado State University and a globally recognized expert in elephant conservation.

extinction panel — Platt, Dehgan, Pejchar and Wittemyer speak on the “What Will It Take to End Extinction?” panel. Photo by Dale Willman/Society of Environmental Journalists. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I served as the moderator for the discussion, which took some powerful turns, examining the scope of the extinction threat, current conservation systems that work best, and the new concepts and initiatives making a difference for some of the world’s most imperiled species.

And yes, we talked about air conditioning — and a whole lot more.

Listen to the panel below: