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
Before they were reduced to near-extinction, bison shaped prairie habitats and landscapes through wallowing, pounding and grazing. They influenced ecosystems by converting vegetation into protein biomass for predators, including people, and by redistributing nutrients in these ecosystems.

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.

osprey
Ospreys are efficient hunters that help to regulate fish populations. Tracie Hall, CC BY-SA

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.

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.

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:

Westward Heave-ho: How a Federal Agency’s Move to Colorado Threatens Public Lands, Science and the Climate

The Bureau of Land Management relocation to Grand Junction reflects a widespread pattern of destabilization under President Trump.

When it comes to public lands, the National Park Service has better name recognition among Americans, but it’s the Bureau of Land Management, along with the USDA’s Forest Service, that has more influence. The BLM has jurisdiction over 246 million acres — more than the Forest Service and three times that of the National Park Service — and makes important decisions about oil and gas leasing, mining, grazing, recreation, and other uses of those lands.

Now it seems the BLM’s vast holdings may be in peril due to continued attacks on the agency by the Trump administration, including its decision to relocate the agency’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, and scatter other employees around the country.

All but about 60 of the agency’s hundreds of Washington, D.C. staff will be sent “out West,” including the relocation of congressional affairs staff to Reno, Nevada, and the distribution of the environmental staff to offices in seven states. In total more than 200  positions will be relocated. High-level officials in the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BLM, justified the move by saying it will bring the staff closer to the lands that they manage, most of which are in the West.

“Shifting critical leadership positions and supporting staff to western states — where an overwhelming majority of federal lands are located — is not only a better management system, it is beneficial to the interest of the American public in these communities, cities, counties and states,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.

Not everyone agrees, and some fear an underlying motive is to weaken the agency’s effectiveness and allow oil and gas companies better access to agency staff.

“[The Trump administration] wants the agency to be lock-step with state interests in western resource-extraction states like Utah,” says Peter Jenkins, senior counsel for the whistleblower group PEER, which helps support public employees working on environmental protection.

The fact that the Grand Junction headquarters will be in a building shared by oil giant Chevron only fuels the fire. But there are other reasons to be concerned about the move.

Unraveling From Inside Out

One of the biggest concerns with the dismantling of the BLM’s headquarters in Washington and the scattering of employees across the West is that it will undermine the effectiveness of the agency.

“This was the goal all along,” says former BLM ecologist Joel Clement. “It was to break government and reduce the regulatory state.”

Tim Whitehouse, director of PEER, agrees that the move was not intended to benefit the agency but rather to destroy it.

“There’s a narrative that the administration is decentralizing agencies and moving employees back to the field so that they can be closer to their regulated communities and their constituents,” he says. “But that’s not true. What they’re actually doing is breaking these agencies up and sending employees to remote locations that are difficult to reach and that are far from the powers making the decisions.”

oil drilling
Oil drilling on BLM land in Utah. (Photo by Wild Earth Guardians, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Dozens of former BLM employees wrote a public letter to Bernhardt asking him to reconsider the move. They argue that the move to Grand Junction would actually make it more difficult for constituents to reach the BLM, prevent the agency from being part of decisions in the capital, and increase costs significantly. “The proposed dismantling of the BLM Headquarters Office would adversely affect public service, sustainable management of public lands, and operational effectiveness with no discernable benefit to the agency’s mission under law,” the letter stated.

The concern doesn’t end there. Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) was so alarmed by the move that after repeatedly expressing concerns in meetings, letters and briefings without response, on November 14 he asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate the agency’s decision and the process by which it was made. “We are concerned about how this reorganization will impact the long-term ability of BLM to carry out their obligations and responsibilities,” he wrote.

BLM staffers told E&E News that as many as 75 percent of the  employees of the agency may leave BLM — a scenario that is already playing out at another federal agency. When two USDA agencies, the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, were relocated earlier this year, hundreds of employees quit. Rather than being alarmed by this, the administration actually seemed pleased. “What a wonderful way to kind of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time,” acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told NBC News.

If BLM follows a similar trend, the move could gut the agency.

A Larger Strategy

The BLM’s move to Grand Junction is about more than a single agency — it’s emblematic of bigger problems Interior has faced since the election of Trump. It highlights administration-wide attacks on employees working on environmental regulations and scientific research.

Shuffling employees around the country — and away from centers of power where they could be involved in decisions — has become par for the course for the Trump administration. In 2017 now-disgraced former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reassigned 27 senior executives of the Department of the Interior (of the 227 total). Several of those executives resigned, including Yellowstone National Park’s superintendent, Dan Wenk, who told CBS News he felt he had been reassigned as a “punitive action.” The Government Accountability Office conducted an investigation on the reassignments and found that there was insufficient documentation and inconsistent reasoning given to justify them.

They weren’t the only ones, though.

Clement used to oversee climate policy before he was abruptly reassigned to a position in an accounting office dealing with oil and gas companies. He blew the whistle on the Interior Department’s attacks on science in 2017, before leaving his position, and now works at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Out of everything they have done, the only transparent thing that has happened in the Trump administration is that they are openly serving industry,” he says of the BLM relocations. “And this might be the most glaring example of that.”

The discord in the department continued in 2018 when nearly all of the members of the National Parks Service Advisory Board quit over frustrations with Zinke. The board, which normally meets twice a year, had not been able to meet because Zinke had suspended all outside committees in order to “review their work.” Things have not improved after Bernhardt, a former oil industry lobbyist, took over the department following Zinke’s resignation.

PEER recently conducted a survey of high-level Interior Department employees and the results were damning. Anonymous respondents wrote that “morale of career staff is abysmally low,” and that staffers were leaving because “the agency is so unbearable to work at,” because of “inexperience, lack of competence and extreme political influence.”

“This lack of morale, the loss of long-term staff is a real concern and an impact we will see into the future,” says Jenkins.

And that’s because the problems can be traced even higher up.

Most of Trump’s appointees to lead federal agencies have not been career staffers and have turned over frequently. For the most part, they’ve come from the private sector, not government careers.

“These people they are appointing don’t even think that the agency should exist at all, like [acting director William Perry] Pendley, who has actually advocated for selling off most of the BLM’s land,” says Jenkins.

Like many members of the Trump administration, Pendley is technically still an acting director and was never confirmed by Congress. Jenkins and many at PEER believe that the Trump administration is breaking the Federal Vacancies Reform Act by having acting directors operating in the capacity of permanent directors without any of the oversight that is normally part of the nomination process.

scenic BLM land
The Centennial Mountains Wilderness Study Area in Montana is managed by the BLM. (Photo by Bob Wick/BLM, CC BY 2.0)

“The Trump administration has been avoiding the requirements of the Constitution and figuring out workarounds…if they’re successful, they will have gone through three years without Senate advice and consent, which seems obviously against the Constitution,” says Jenkins, whose organization is in the process of taking legal action against the administration over the issue.

Issues of staffing and the effectiveness of agency workers is no small matter. Considering the vast amount of land under the BLM’s control, there are striking implications for the health of the American public and critical ecosystems. If the BLM continues to increase permits to allow drilling and fracking on federal lands, not only will greenhouse gas emissions grow unchecked, but there could be negative effects on public health. Air pollutants released by fracking can cause a variety of health problems, including respiratory issues, birth defects and cancer.

“[The West] is full of oil and gas extraction and industrial activities and the air is bad, really bad,” says Clement. The American West — with its millions of acres of scenic public lands — has a reputation for clean air and water, but as oil and gas activity in the region has increased, so has pollution, endangering health as well as the environment.

“American health and safety are not of much concern for this administration,” adds Clement. “That’s why they reassigned so many of us in 2017, that’s why they relocated science agencies to get people to quit, and that’s why they’ve marginalized science left and right.”

Enough With the Fake Rhino Horns

Scientists have once again developed a method to fabricate horns in the lab, supposedly to disrupt poachers and wildlife traffickers. Here’s why that won’t work.

Earlier this month a team of scientists announced they’ve developed a high-tech way to help save rhinos from poachers: They propose fabricating fake horns out of horse hair (which is also composed of inert keratin, like human fingernails) and then flooding the illegal market with their products, thereby lowering the price of powdered rhino horns so much that no one will ever want to kill another rhino again.

Sigh.

This isn’t the first time someone’s come up with the well-intentioned (yet illogical) idea of creating fake rhino horn, and it probably won’t be the last. But it should be the last, because there are several reasons why this concept, no matter how it’s executed, is doomed to fail.

Let’s explore them.

Perhaps most obviously, selling fake rhino horn doesn’t do anything to address the end-user demand for these illegal products, which are driven by either fortunes or phony medicinal claims. These are ultimately the reasons rhinos and many other species are poached in the first place. As a result the best way to eliminate the financial incentive to sell these wildlife products is to get consumers to understand why they shouldn’t be buying them in the first place. We’ve already seen this work; conservationists have finally started to make headway on curbing the shark-fin trade in China after extensive public-awareness campaigns called attention to the dangers the practice poses to people and marine ecosystems. Similar initiatives have started to help chip away at consumer demand for rhino horns there as well (thanks, Jackie Chan).

Progress still needs to be made on reducing the market for products from those species, as well as with other heavily trafficked animals such as pangolins, but that’s another reason why purposefully selling fake rhino horns is wrong: The more you say that any aspect of the market for rhino horn is okay, which is what happens when you put these fake products (or limited real products) up for sale, the more it will expand the market. We’ve seen this before in the surge of elephant poaching after a one-off sale of ivory tusks in 2008, which was meant to flood the market and reduce the profitability of poaching but horrifically backfired. Elephants had begun to recover before that, and now they’re in crisis. Rhinos are already in crisis — do we want to make things even worse?

On a broader and similar note, creating fake substitutes ignores a major aspect of what drives sales of many of these wildlife products. In traditional Asian medicine, “wild” products are considered more potent — and therefore more valuable — than anything that comes out of a lab or from a farm. That’s why China still has trouble commercializing its vast network of tiger farms (yes, you read that right). Consumers want wild products, so even if you do succeed in commercializing “fake” or farmed products, it will tend to normalize demand for all these biological byproducts and further drive desire for “prestige” animals poached from their native habitats.

Meanwhile some well-healed people are actually investing in the possibility of extinction. Rich consumers in China and other countries have been known to buy rhino horns, tiger bones, live tortoises and other species in anticipation that a species will become rarer or even go extinct in the wild, therefore making their assets even more valuable. That threat will never evaporate through the addition of fake products on the marketplace — because, yes, extinction is profitable.

rhino horns
Confiscated rhino horns about to be burned. Photo: Joanna Gilkeson, USFWS

Let’s get to the ethical aspects of this trade in fakes. For one thing many consumers — those who actually use powdered rhino horn as “medicine” instead of holding on to it for eventual sale — are already being exploited. They’re buying into false claims that rhino horn has curative qualities, including the recent and spurious assertion that it can treat cancer. By selling fake rhino horns, you become complicit in that lie and directly harm people who could, and should, seek more appropriate and effective medical care.

Another ethical quandary: How are you going to get these products into the black market without putting your undercover operatives in direct harm from the violent criminals who run wildlife trafficking networks? And do we really think anyone’s going to be able to squeeze these products into the same illegal market that professional law-enforcement operations haven’t been able to shut down? The chances of success there seem slim — and potentially dangerous.

Finally let’s address the invisible gorilla in the room: Selling fake rhino horn doesn’t do anything to resolve the inequality that inspires poaching. More often than not, people hunt illegally to support their families. The monies they get from poaching may mean the difference between comfortable living and going hungry. Sure, their pay comes from the people higher up the clandestine ladder — and sure, some poachers are more criminally minded themselves — but if we want to solve the problem of poaching, we always have to factor in the fate of people on the ground.

Having said all this, I have to point out that the current idea to sell fake rhino horns is just lab science. The researchers fully acknowledge that they don’t have an actual initiative to get these products into the market. They say it’s up to someone else to actually figure out how to make their idea a reality — so for now it’s basically a thought exercise, not a concrete plan.

I have a better idea: Let’s leave this fake horn concept in the lab where it belongs and commit to more practical initiatives to help rhinos — and people — in threatened habitats, where real assistance is desperately needed. With poaching and illegal trafficking still running rampant, rhinos don’t have time left for anything less.

Previously in The Revelator:

Another Deadly Year for Rhinos

How an Old Law Is Helping Fight New Plastic Problems

New legislative efforts to ban plastics are important, but a recent court ruling in Texas reminds us that enforcing existing laws is a crucial part of the plastics fight.

On October 15 a federal court approved the largest citizen-suit settlement ever awarded under the Clean Water Act: $50 million.

A fourth-generation Texas shrimper, Diane Wilson, used the citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act to sue the petrochemical manufacturer Formosa Plastic for violating the Clean Water Act. Formosa was discharging plastic pellets into Lavaca Bay, a water body located off the Gulf of Mexico halfway between Houston and Corpus Christi.

In the recent fight against plastic pollution, advocates and lawmakers have focused their attention on enacting new laws like plastic bans. But Wilson’s victory is a reminder that enforcement of existing laws is still a valuable tool in battling plastic pollution — and citizen suits can be leveraged to hold industry accountable.

To understand how this works, let’s go back almost 50 years.

The Clean Water Act was a part of the “burst” of federal environmental legislation enacted in the 1970s in response to perceived inadequacies in common law. Like its contemporary environmental statutes of the 1970s, the Clean Water Act contains a citizen suit provision allowing private citizens to sue facilities suspected of violating the law. But unlike its contemporaries, a violation of this particular law is relatively easy to prove. If a facility discharges a pollutant into water without a permit, a violation has occurred. The Clean Water Act also allows plaintiffs to sue for monetary penalties of up to $25,000 per day for violations (paid to the U.S. Treasury), a remedy that’s not available through other environmental statutes. As a result more citizen-suit provisions have been brought under the Clean Water Act than under any other environmental statute.

Formosa manufacturers lentil-sized plastic pellets called nurdles — the raw material for everyday plastic products. Because of their size, the pellets are difficult to remove from the environment and are easily ingested by marine life. The company’s Clean Water Act permit prohibited the “discharge of floating solids or visible foam in other than trace amounts,” but for several years Wilson noticed that pellets were being discharged almost daily from outfalls at the Formosa plant in Point Comfort, Texas, into Lavaca Bay. She also noticed a measurable decline in shrimp, crabs and mullets.

With her livelihood at stake, Wilson took action.

Using the citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act, she, along with the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, filed suit against Formosa in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in 2017, alleging that the petrochemical manufacturer was violating its permit and thereby the Clean Water Act.  At a bench trial in March 2019, a federal judge reviewed more than 2,400 samples of plastic, as well as 110 videos and 44 photos from Lavaca Bay. After considering the evidence and hearing from multiple witnesses including several experts, the court ruled in Wilson’s favor.

In its June 2019 order, the court found that Formosa’s discharges consistently exceeded “plastics of more than trace amounts.” Ultimately the evidence demonstrated that the company had violated its permit on more than 1,000 days and that the violations were “enormous.” The court order called Formosa a “serial offender” who had “caused or contributed to the damages suffered by the recreational, aesthetic and economic value” of the area.

The parties entered into settlement negotiations that were finalized on October 15.  The agreement requires Formosa to pay $50 million over five years for mitigation efforts to “provide environmental benefits to affected areas.” Formosa must also engage engineers to design a system to halt the discharge of plastic pellets and pay more the $3 million in attorneys’ fees.

Wilson and the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper’s win is a small, but important, victory in the fight against plastic pollution. Other environmental groups have already taken notice and are making use of the citizen-suit provision: The Southern Environmental Law Center recently filed its 60-day notice to sue Frontier Logistics, a pellet-packaging company, for plastic-pellet discharges into Cooper River in South Carolina.

In an era of decreased regulation, citizen suits offer a promising way to reduce plastic pollution by ensuring compliance with existing federal law. But public participation is also key. Citizen suits require citizen plaintiffs, and this victory wouldn’t have been achieved without Wilson and her efforts to document Formosa’s violations. As she told local media, “If we can do it, anybody can.” And thanks to her work, that next fight is already underway in South Carolina.

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.

The Trouble With Biofuels

The Trump administration has promised to expand their use, which would make farmers happy. But are consumers aware of biofuels’ potential consequences?

A ruckus over biofuels has been brewing in Iowa.

For months now the Trump administration has been promising to deliver a new biofuels package that would boost the market for production of soy- and corn-based alternative fuels. The move would help American farmers hurt by the administration’s tariffs, as well as ease their anger over changing regulations that have exempted several oil refineries from blending biofuels with their other fuels.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated that all fuels produced in the United States contain a minimum volume of renewable fuels. Part of that came in the form of biofuels, derived from living, renewable sources such as crops or plants. The term “biofuels” generally refers to the gasoline substitute derived from corn, while “biodiesel” is a diesel substitute derived from soybean oil or animal fats.

At the time many experts predicted biofuels would provide a renewable source of energy, help reduce the use of fossil fuels, and lessen the risks of climate change. After the Act was passed, the biofuels market jolted into life.

“In 2000 we used less corn for ethanol than sweeteners in soda,” says Jeremy Martin, director of fuels policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “By 2010 ethanol was up there with animal feed as the largest consumer of corn.” Last year total U.S. biofuel production reached 16 billion gallons a year, and industry projections anticipate continued growth.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the expansion of the biofuels industry — as a share of the fuel market and a lobbying power — is that the general public hasn’t really noticed. Compared with fracking or coal, biofuels aren’t the subject of many policy reports or New York Times op-eds. Media coverage of the biofuels package has been limited.

But as President Donald Trump continues to make promises about the future of biofuels, two important questions loom: Should the rest of the country care about what’s going on in Iowa and other corn-belt states? And is biofuel expansion something we should welcome or oppose?

Lobbying and Public Perception

The industry often referred to as “Big Corn” has a surprising amount of power and has actively intensified its lobbying efforts.

In 2018 several biofuel interest groups each spent more than $1 million to lobby the government over the Renewable Fuel Standard, an average increase from 2017 of around $200,000. This is obviously small change compared with what the fossil-fuel industry spends — the biggest oil companies each spend $40-50 million every year — but the biofuel groups’ efforts have paid off to some degree. Although the ethanol lobby has not made headway reducing the number of small refinery waivers issued by the government, they’re getting other desired results: The Trump administration favors raising the minimum ethanol volume in gasoline, something the oil and gas lobby opposes.

Critics say this lobbying has allowed the industry to successfully broaden its market without fully informing customers of the potential costs and concerns, which range from reduced gas mileage to increased air pollution.

Perhaps as a result, the public perception of biofuels — or what little we know about it — remains fairly positive.

Unsurprisingly, one place where public approval seems to be holding is Iowa, a state whose economy also depends on biofuels.

According to a public opinion poll by the Iowa Biodiesel Board, a state trade association, 65 percent of Iowans have a positive opinion of biodiesel, while just 4 percent have a negative opinion. Those numbers haven’t changed much over time.

“It’s holding pretty steady,” says Grant Kimberley, executive director of the association.

A national voter poll by the American Biodiesel Board released in October 2019 paints a similar picture. More than half of survey participants said they believed the federal government should encourage the use of biofuels.

Outside of trade group polls, though, there isn’t a lot of academic research on public attitudes to biofuels and biodiesel. Gallup and Pew Research opinion polls don’t ask about them, so we don’t know the true national consensus on biofuels, or whether biofuels are more popular than other nontraditional sources of energy such as fracking, solar or nuclear power.

What we do know comes from a few years ago.

Bret Shaw, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has researched public attitudes within his state. His papers from 2011 and 2012 (based on research conducted in 2009) are some of the most recent to document American opinion. Almost two-thirds of Wisconsinites surveyed told him they support the use of biofuels, which matches the Iowa poll. They correctly answered an average of 5 out of 9 questions about biofuels, demonstrating reasonably good knowledge.

However, Shaw’s studies suggested that public opinion may be more malleable and precarious than those robust approval ratings imply. In his surveys he found that renaming “biofuels” as “ethanol” negatively affected the opinion of Democrats but didn’t sway Republicans. Public opinion on both sides dipped when the surveys stated that adding biofuel blends could lower a car’s gas mileage.

When asked about ethanol’s impact on the environment, 41 percent believed it causes less damage than gasoline, 44 percent believed it was about the same and only 15 percent thought ethanol caused more environmental damage.

Shaw cautions that public attitudes may have shifted in the past decade, but his studies still present the clearest snapshot of public perception of biofuels — as well as the opportunity to better inform consumers about the products that go into their gas tanks.

So why should the public care, especially since they have so little choice in the matter?

What the Public Doesn’t Know Can’t Hurt Them — Can It?

Advocates of biofuels around the country tout them as better for the environment than fossil fuels, a fact that polls tell us the public doesn’t disagree with.

Scientists, on the other hand, have begun to question some of those environmental benefits. According to some studies, biodiesels emit more of certain pollutants than regular diesel, and biofuels can have a larger carbon footprint than gasoline, depending on where you start in the production cycle. These findings don’t seem to enter the public discourse.

Increased corn production can also harm farmland because it causes farmers to cut back on crop rotation, a process essential to maintaining soil quality and reducing pests. Farmers also have an increased incentive to plant corn in ecologically sensitive grassland or wetlands.

corn post-harvest
Corn stalks after harvest. Photo: Phil Roeder (CC BY 2.0)

But the effects of biofuel production on wildlife and public health are subtle and hard to separate from the consequences of food production. This sets biodiesel apart from other sources of pollution and environmental health, such as fracking, which are often much more immediately visible. For example, images of brown tap water were enough to mobilize national opposition to fracking. Intensified corn production doesn’t generate such arresting sights. Corn requires more fertilizer than other crops, and the toxic algal bloom caused by fertilizer runoff into the rivers is a visible consequence of increased corn production to meet biofuel demand. However, these blooms occur out of sight in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Union of Concerned Scientists advocates for cleaner energy, but stands neither for nor against biofuels.

“Our position is that all fuel producers should be cleaning up their act,” says Martin. “More emphasis on ‘how do we make biofuels better’ rather than just ‘let’s have more biofuels’.”

Although these problems have been identified and studied, if not widely discussed, some experts suggest that maybe they don’t matter in the long term.

“When they passed the first Renewable Fuel Standard, every forecast was that demand for gasoline would rise forever with economic growth,” says Martin. “Now most long-term forecasts reflect that gas consumption is likely to fall rather than rise. That means we’re headed towards ethanol use falling.”

He adds that wide-scale electric vehicle adoption, unthinkable in 2005, now looks closer to reality. Once that happens, ethanol use could go into freefall.

Back in Iowa, biofuels and biodiesel advocates remain bullish about market expansion, even though the government remains only partially on their side.

“In the near future we think we can easily double our industry,” says Kimberley, who doesn’t believe a widespread adoption of large electric vehicles in sectors like commercial trucking, where vehicles otherwise run on bio-blends of diesel, is coming anytime soon.

Meanwhile the drama in Washington continues. The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently held a subcommittee hearing on the Trump plan to exempt certain oil refiners from the Renewable Fuel Standard’s biofuel blending requirements. That plan made oil companies happy but enraged Iowa farmers. For now, that tension may continue to grow.

‘Science Be Dammed’: Learning From History’s Mistake on the Colorado River

A new book explains why policymakers nearly 100 years ago chose to ignore the best science on the Colorado River’s flow — and the dangers if we repeat their mistake.

TUCSON, Ariz.— In late October we joined a group of academics and water managers who gathered at the University of Arizona to hash over a pressing set of questions: As water scarcity overtakes the Southwest, what do we know about the Colorado River, and what do we need to know?

The meeting was a far cry from the way participants’ forebears approached this question nearly a century ago, when the leaders of the seven U.S. states that must share the Colorado River’s precious waters gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to hash out the final details of the Colorado River Compact.

The negotiators famously brokered a deal allocating far more water than the river has to offer — a deal we’re paying the price for today.

“They had a glaring need for sound information,” the Colorado River historian Norris Hundley wrote in his book Water in the West, “but no concerted attempt was made to call on the scientific community for help…. Without authoritative data, they had an opportunity to pick and choose information that best suited their interests and uncertainties. And that is what they did.” Science by Dammed

The conventional story of how this happened, enshrined in Marc Reisner’s seminal 1986 book Cadillac Desert, is that in overestimating the available supply of water, the authors of the 1922 Compact did the best with what they had — “about 18 years of streamflow measurement … During all of that period, the river had gone on a binge.” Our great misfortune, that conventional story would have us believe, was that the compact’s framers could not have known that they were allocating the water during unusually wet times.

In our new book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, we argue that the story is more complex than it appears in Reisner’s telling, in ways that are important as we struggle with the river’s overallocation today.

Returning to the seminal 1916 hydrologic analysis of U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Eugene Clyde LaRue, we argue that the decision-makers actually had available — had they chosen to use it — a relatively thorough, complete and almost modern picture of the river’s hydrology. They had available — but chose not to use — data suggesting a much smaller river in the years prior to the 18 years on which they were relying. Had they taken the science seriously, they almost certainly would have had to admit that the Colorado contained less water than they were assuming in making their rapid plans for its use.

LaRue was not alone; others agreed with his conclusion of a smaller river, including Herman Stabler of the U.S. Geological Survey and retired military engineer William Sibert, who reviewed the Compact’s allocations for the U.S. Congress in the months before the pact’s final ratification.

The problem in the 1920s was neither the lack of good science nor the inability of decision-makers to understand the basin’s hydrology. They were intelligent, skilled professionals — but they were motivated by the narrow interests of their own states and agencies. In an era driven by politics of competition for a limited supply of river water and federal dollars, those decision-makers had the opportunity to selectively use the available science as a tool to sell their projects and vision for the river’s future to Congress and the general public.

Their choice to do so would color most of the major policy decisions on the river, setting a precedent that would hold for decades as succeeding decision-makers also selectively used or ignored the available science

Today the Colorado River is fully used — most would say overused. Not a drop of its water reaches the Sea of Cortez unless by careful design, as happened in the spring of 2014 with an experimental environmental “pulse flow.” Demands for the river’s waters already exceed the available supply, a situation that will only grow more difficult with continued growth and the impacts of climate change.

“To study the past,” wrote historian Jill Lepore in her 2018 book These Truths, “is to unlock the prison of the present.” We wrote this story not simply to correct the historical record but because we believe it should inform our future decisions.

When LaRue wrote in 1916 — before the Colorado River Compact, before Hoover Dam, before all the development that was to follow — that “the flow of the Colorado River and its tributaries is not sufficient to irrigate all the irrigable lands lying within the basin,” he prefaced his observation with a caveat. “More complete data,” he wrote, “would probably indicate a greater shortage in the water supply available” (emphasis added).

LaRue’s first point is easy to grasp: There simply wasn’t enough water. But his second point may be the more important — the need for humility in the face of uncertainty. The need to build that humility and uncertainty into the institutions we construct to use and manage the river.

That’s the challenge before us now. There is, in fact, less water. Our best modern understanding suggests LaRue, Stabler and Sibert were right — that there probably always was less. But with climate change it’s crystal clear, and the best science of the first decades of the 21st century suggests we don’t know how far below us the floor lies.

As water-management communities proceed after October’s meeting, we must learn from our mistakes and move forward without ego, without cherry-picking the science that fits our arguments, and with an expectation that future events will create an uncomfortable lack of certainty. Only then can we prepare and adapt for a more parched world, address the question of what comes next, and begin to correct the mistakes made by our predecessors.

Based on an excerpt from the just released book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.

How to Make ‘Farm-to-closet’ Clothing a Reality

The new book Fibershed explains how to build a textile economy that benefits both people and the planet — and why we desperately need it.

If I were to open my refrigerator, the origins of most of the food wouldn’t be too much of a mystery — the milk, cheese and produce all come from relatively nearby farms. I can tell from the labels on other packaged goods if they’re fair trade, non-GMO or organic.

But if I were to open my closet, it’d be a different story. I know shockingly little about where the clothes I own come from, what chemicals went into making them, or how far they may have traveled.

In recent years the idea of eating from our own local foodsheds has become more popular, but can the idea of locally sourcing things we use be taken beyond food?

Rebecca Burgess wondered that, too. A trained weaver and dyer, she came up with the idea of a fibersheds project about 10 years ago to develop an eco-friendly, locally sourced wardrobe.

The project led to the establishment of a nonprofit, Fibershed, to put some of her experiences into practice. Now Burgess has expanded it even more in her new book, Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists and Makers for a New Textile Economy.

As Burgess writes, we’re still a long way from local fibersheds supplying our clothes, but fixing that paradigm is the focus of the book.book cover

Burgess describes fibersheds as “place-based textile sovereignty…focused on the source of the raw material, the transparency with which it is converted into clothing, and the connectivity among all parts, from soil to skin and back to soil.”

Essentially, it’s knowing a lot better where your clothes come from. But it’s also about disconnecting from a harmful system and reinvigorating a local, place-based economy where the process of “farm to closet” is beneficial for the environment and all the people involved in the supply chain.

The main focus of the book is explaining the tough work of how to create a fibershed, but she starts with why we need one to begin with. And it’s a pretty convincing picture.

“The [textile] industry utilizes thousands of synthetic compounds, often in various combinations to soften, process and dye our clothing, many of which are linked to a range of human diseases, including chronic illnesses and cancer,” she writes.

About 98 percent of the clothes sold in the United States are made overseas, many in factories where workers face dangerous conditions. These days we also buy more clothes than we have in the past, and we keep them for less time. “Fast fashion” — clothes designed to last just two weeks before being thrown away — is a real thing. And a real problem.

The entire textile economy — much like the industrial food economy — is bad for people and the planet.

So what do we do about it? Burgess spends most of her book focusing on how to build the infrastructure to produce the materials we need locally, ethically and sustainably. And she doesn’t skirt around the fact that this is really tough to pull off.

As she found in her initial year-long project, getting local clothes is not nearly as easy as getting local food because the materials for clothes need to be processed in multiple stages. That takes specific equipment and skilled labor — something in short supply in the United States these days.

Take cotton, for example.

Burgess’s home state of California still grows a lot of cotton, but most of it is shipped overseas for combing and spinning, and then to be cheaply made into clothes. And what’s grown here is almost all genetically modified.

“Global-scale commodity systems have done a very good job of making it harder and more expensive to purchase a locally grown cotton T-shirt than it is to drive to a box store and purchase an equivalent garment grown and constructed on several different continents,” she writes.

That doesn’t mean the system can’t be changed. Doing so means supporting existing farmers and helping them transition to more climate-friendly farming practices, she says. Burgess weaves a whole chapter about how good farming techniques can help build healthy soil, an important component for making the most of water resources (which can be sparse in California) and helping to sequester carbon.

fibershed chart
Source: Chelsea Green

As an example she points to California grower Sally Fox, who breeds naturally colored cotton (apparently not all cotton is white) in the Capay Valley and implements soil-building farming practices rotating cotton with heirloom wheat and a flock of Merino sheep.

Burgess also stitches together examples of other plant and animal-based fibers being used in her region of Northern California and explains why they can help supplant the need for synthetic and chemical-based fabrics we mostly rely on now.

There’s flax, which produces linen, and is best suited for growing during California’s rainy season when farmers don’t need additional irrigation water. And of course the use of water-thrifty hemp has experienced a resurgence since most restrictions on farming and selling it have been lifted.

And then there are a litany of animal fibers. In her region in Northern California alone, she writes, there are around 20 different types of sheep being raised, as well as Huacaya and Suri alpaca, mohair goats, llamas, Angora rabbits and guanacos (a close relative of the llama).

But finding the fiber is just one part of the equation. Processing all of this raw material — each of which requires different techniques — is the biggest obstacle.

California produces 3 million pounds of wool a year but has the milling capacity for just 10,000 pounds. That’s a very big gap to close — but Burgess and her collaborators are trying. They have a plan for a “closed-loop manufacturing model” that will help bring the right milling equipment close to home and connect it to local producers and artisans. But it comes with a price tag of $26 million.

Every fibershed is likely to have different costs depending on local materials, equipment and expertise, but they all face the same conundrum: How do you produce enough locally sourced materials to fund the systems to make even more locally sourced materials?

In order to move forward projects like this one in Northern California and in other communities around the country, we’ll need vastly more demand and real commitment from clothing companies and retailers. There’s less in the book specifically focused on how consumers can actively help drive that process. But there are ample resources if you want to learn more about what fibersheds are being developed where you live or how to engage in the process yourself. Don’t expect the book to read like a “how to” manual, though. It’s more of a thoughtful discussion of issues, obstacles and solutions, including meeting on-the-ground farmers and producers who are putting these practices to work.

At the very minimum the book has made me rethink virtually everything my closet, and even a shift in consuming thinking at this point seems like a step in the right direction. Supporting fibersheds may not be as simple as shopping at farmers markets instead of box stores, but Burgess drives home the tremendous value in just trying.

Her yearlong local clothes experiment 10 years ago, for example, led to new friendships and the launch of four new businesses. Engaging in this kind of process, she writes, creates “opportunities to build new relationships that are rooted in sharing skills, physical labor, and creativity, all of which carry meaning, purpose, and a way to belong to one another and to the land.”

That’s the perfect antidote to “fast fashion” and a reminder that our allegiance to a disposable, throwaway culture — the one that produces plastic bottles, flimsy T-shirts and weak interpersonal relationships — is what needs to be tossed.