No whale hunts in Iceland last year were just one sign of the public's fading appetite for whale meat.
One of the most important global conservation events of the past year was something that didn’t happen. For the first time since 2002, Iceland — one of just three countries that still allow commercial whaling — didn’t hunt any whales, even though its government had approved whaling permits in early 2019.
Many people may think of whaling as a 19th-century industry in which men threw harpoons at their quarry by hand. But humans are still killing whales today in other ways. Thousands of whales are struck by ships, entangled in fishing lines and harmed by ocean noise every year.
However, most nations support a commercial whaling ban that the International Whaling Commission, a global body charged with whale management, imposed in 1986 to prevent these creatures from being hunted to extinction. Iceland, Norway and Japan have long been exceptions to this international consensus.
I study marine ecology and conservation and spent the 2018-19 academic year on a Fulbright fellowship in Iceland. It is encouraging to see countries come to realize that whales are worth more alive than dead — for their spiritual value, their role in tourism and the ecological services that they provide. As more Icelanders adopt this view, it will be good news for ocean conservation.
The Ecological Value of Large Marine Mammals
For years, ecological studies of whales focused on how much fish they ate or krill they consumed, which represented costs to fisheries. Starting around 10 years ago, my colleagues and I took a fresh look at whales’ ecological role in the ocean.
Whales often dive deep to feed, coming to the surface to breathe, rest, digest — and poop. Their nutrient-rich fecal plumes provide nitrogen, iron and phosphorous to algae at the surface, which increases productivity in areas where whales feed. More whales mean more plankton and more fish.
Whales also play a role in the carbon cycle. They are the largest creatures on Earth, and when they die their carcasses often sink to the deep sea. These events, known as whale falls, provide habitat for at least a hundred species that depend on the bones and nutrients. They also transfer carbon to the deep ocean, where it remains sequestered for hundreds of years.
Whales are economically valuable, but watching them brings in more money than killing them. “Humpbacks are one of the most commercially important marine species in Iceland,” a whale-watching guide told me one morning off the coast of Akureyri. Whale-watching income far outweighs the income from hunting fin and minke whales.
Whale watching in Skjálfandi Bay, Iceland. Photo by Daniel Enchev, (CC BY 2.0)
The End of Icelandic Whaling?
For years after the international moratorium on whaling was adopted in 1986, only Norway allowed commercial whaling. Japan continued hunting in the Antarctic under the guise of “scientific whaling,” which many whale biologists considered unnecessary and egregious.
Iceland also allowed a research hunt in the 1980s, with much of the meat sold to Japan, but stopped whaling under international pressure in the 1990s. It resumed commercial hunting in 2002, with strong domestic support. Iceland was ruled by Norway and then Denmark until 1944. As a result, Icelanders often chafe under external pressure. Many saw foreign protests against whaling as a threat to their national identity, and local media coverage was distinctly pro-whaling.
This view started to shift around 2014, when European governments refused to allow the transport of whale meat harvested by Icelandic whalers through their ports, en route to commercial buyers in Japan. Many European countries opposed Icelandic whaling and were unwilling to facilitate this trade. Whalers no longer looked so invincible, and Icelandic media started covering both sides of the debate.
In May 2019, Hvalur — the whaling business owned by Kristján Loftsson, Iceland’s most vocal and controversial whaler — announced that it wouldn’t hunt fin whales, which are internationally classified as vulnerable, this year, citing a need for ship repairs and declining demand in Japan. In June, Gunnar Bergmann Jónsson, owner of a smaller outfit, announced that he wouldn’t go whaling either. These decisions meant that the hunt was off.
During my year in Iceland, I met for coffee every couple of weeks with Sigursteinn Másson, program leader for the local whale-watching association IceWhale and representative of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. At times he seemed animated about the prospect that no whaling permits would be allotted. At others, he looked gloomy because whalers and their allies in the Icelandic government had co-opted the conversation.
“I worked on gay rights in Iceland, which was opposed by the church, and mental health for 10 years,” he told me. “They were peanuts compared to the whaling issue.”
Campaign Whale led a protest in 2009 outside of the Icelandic Embassy in London demanding an end to whale hunts. Photo by Campaign Whale, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
At first, both companies insisted that they would start whaling again in 2020. But Jónsson’s outfit no longer plans to hunt minkes, and Másson doubts that whaling will continue. “Nobody is encouraging them anymore — or interested,” he told me last summer.
Now trade is getting even tougher. In 2018 Japan announced that it would leave the International Whaling Commission, stop its controversial Antarctic whaling program and focus on hunting whales in its coastal waters, reducing the demand for Icelandic whale meat.
Tourist behavior in Iceland is also changing. For years, tourists would go out whale watching, then order grilled minke in restaurants. After the International Fund for Animal Welfare started targeting whale watchers in 2011 with its “Meet Us Don’t Eat Us” campaign, the number of tourists who ate whale meat declined from 40% to 11%.
A Generational Shift
For many Icelanders, whale meat is an occasional delicacy. Over dinner a few months ago, I met an Icelandic woman who told me she thought whale was delicious, and she didn’t see why whaling was such a big deal. How many times had she eaten whale? Once a month, once a year? “I’ve had it twice in my life.”
About a third of Icelanders now oppose whaling. They tend to be younger urban residents. A third are neutral, and a third support whaling. Many in this last group may feel stronger about critiques of whaling than about hvalakjöt, or whale meat. Demand for hvalakjöt in grocery stores and restaurants has started to dry up.
Although few observers would have predicted it, whaling may end in Iceland not through denial of a permit but from lack of interest. How long until the world’s remaining commercial whalers in Japan and Norway, who face similar shifts in taste and demographics, follow a similar course?
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.
Climate change has caused record-breaking ocean temperatures, and that means more dangerous storms, trouble for coral reefs and big changes for our marine ecosystems.
Part of Joellen Russell’s job is to help illuminate the deep darkness — to shine a light on what’s happening beneath the surface of the ocean. And it’s one of the most important jobs in the world right now.
Russell is a professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona. From that dry, landlocked state, she’s become a leading expert on how the climate is changing in the Southern Ocean — those vast, dark waters swirling around Antarctica.
“This is an age of scientific discovery,” she says. But also, “it’s very scary what we’re finding out.”
Researchers like Russell have been ringing alarm bells in report after report warning that the world’s ocean waters are dangerously warming. Most of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gas emissions we’ve spewed into the air for decades has actually been absorbed by the ocean. Over the past 25 years, that heat amounts to the equivalent of exploding 3.6 billion Hiroshima-sized atom bombs, according to Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of a new study on ocean warming.
Now we’re beginning to witness the cascading repercussions of that oceanic warming — from supercharged storms to dying coral reefs to crashing fisheries.
There’s still a lot left to learn about these problems, but here’s a look at some of the top findings from researchers, along with what they hope to uncover next.
1. Yes, It’s Definitely Getting Warmer
There’s no doubt among scientists that the ocean is heating and we’re driving it.
The latest confirmation is the study by Cheng and colleagues, published this month in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which bluntly stated, “Ocean heating is irrefutable and a key measure of the Earth’s energy imbalance.”
The study found ocean waters in 2019 were the warmest in recorded history. And that follows a pattern: The past decade has also seen the warmest 10 years of ocean temperatures, and the last five years have been the five warmest on record.
“Every year the ocean waters get warmer, and the reason is because of the heat-trapping gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere,” says John Abraham, one of the study’s coauthors and a professor in mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas. “It’s concerning for sure.”
2. The Southern Ocean Has Been Hit Worst
Much of this warming occurs between the surface and a depth of 6,500 feet. It’s happening pretty consistently across the globe, but some areas have experienced higher rates of warming. One of those is the Southern Ocean, which has acted as a giant sink, absorbing 43% of our oceanic CO2 emissions and 75% of the heat, scientists have concluded.
That’s because the ocean basin functions like an air conditioner for the planet, says Russell. Strong winds pull up cold water from deep below, and then the cold surface water takes up some heat from the air. When the winds slow, the water sinks, more cold water rises, and the process repeats.
“The sinking water isn’t warm, per se, just a bit warmer than it was when the wind pulled it up,” she says. “In this way the Southern Ocean can sequester a lot of heat well below the surface.”
For that reason what happens in the Southern Ocean is globally important. And it makes new findings all the more concerning.
Melt water from the Nansen ice shelf fracture in Antarctica. Photo by Stuart Rankin (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Normal upwelling of waters from deep in the Southern Ocean has traditionally brought nutrients to the surface, where they then get moved by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world’s strongest ocean current, to feed marine life in other areas. But new research from Russell and colleagues found that this process will be disrupted as warm waters cause the Southern Ocean’s ice sheets to melt even faster. This will change the historical upwelling and could trap nutrients instead of pushing them out.
That, she says, will “begin to starve the global ocean of nutrients.”
3. A Lot of Changes Are Happening
As bad as that sounds…there’s a lot more.
One of the most obvious results of ocean warming is higher sea levels. That’s caused in part because water expands as it warms.
But there’s also the effect on sea ice. The warmer the water gets, the more ice melts — as is happening in Antarctica. Not surprisingly rates of global sea-level rise are accelerating. This means more property damage, storm surges, and waves lapping at the heels of our coastal communities.
Warmer waters also mean more supercharged storms. An increase in heat drives up evaporation and adds extra moisture to the atmosphere, causing heavy rains, more flooding and more extreme weather events.
The aftermath of Cyclone Idai, one of the deadliest storms in history, in Mozambique, March 2019. Photo by Denis Onyodi: IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre (CC BY-NC 2.0)
In some places it can make drier conditions worse, too. When air rises and cools below the dew point, it turns into clouds or precipitation. “But in places like Arizona or Australia, where rain is generally formed when air is pushed upward over mountains, “the warmer atmosphere might not be cold enough to cause rain,” explains Russell. “This is how a warmer atmosphere carrying more moisture might actually rain less in some places — contributing to drought and therefore fire.”
The recent study in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences identified warming waters as “one of the key reasons why the Earth has experienced increasing catastrophic fires in the Amazon, California, and Australia in 2019 (extending into 2020 for Australia).”
And that’s not all.
Warming ocean waters also contribute to the rise of colonies of algae that can produce toxins deadly to wildlife and sometimes people.
These harmful algal blooms pose a problem even way up in the Gulf of Alaska, where the annual algae season has gotten longer, says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“That’s all, of course, due to warmer water,” he says.
The biggest change in the region may be along the coast of the Bering Sea, where water temperatures have historically been too cold for the blooms to occur — but that’s starting to change.
“Now the water temperatures are getting up to the point where they’re warm enough to support these harmful algal blooms,” Thoman says. Toxins from the blooms can work their way up the food chain and have even shown up in some marine mammals in the areas. “People are concerned about whether it’s safe to eat their staple foods,” he says.
4. Marine Heat Waves Are Getting Worse
While temperatures are rising across the world’s oceans, some areas are also seeing dangerous short-term spikes known as marine heatwaves.
Scientists anticipate that these heatwaves, which can be fatal to a long list of sea creatures, will continue to get more severe and more frequent as the ocean warms. By the end of the century, conditions in some areas may be akin to a permanent heatwave.
That’s likely to be bad news for everything from seaweed to birds to mammals, and it could result in fundamental changes for food webs and the animals and coastal economies that depend on those resources.
“Collectively, and over time, an increase in the exposure of marine ecosystems to extreme temperatures may lead to irreversible loss of species or foundation habitats, such as seagrass, coral reefs and kelp forests,” a December 2019 study in Frontiers in Marine Science found.
And these changes likely aren’t far off. These marine heatwaves “will emerge as forceful agents of disturbance to marine ecosystems in the near-future,” the researchers wrote.
We’re already seeing what that would look like.
Marine heatwaves off Australia have spurred oyster die-offs and losses to the abalone fishery, and one event in 2016 caught the world’s attention when it caused severe bleaching of the biodiverse Great Barrier Reef, triggering mass coral deaths.
An aerial view of widespread coral bleaching in the northern Great Barrier Reef, 2016. Photo: Terry Hughes, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CC BY-ND 2.0)
And scientists now believe that “the blob,” a mass of warm water that persisted off the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska from 2014 to 2016, led to the starvation of an estimated 1 million common murres (Uria aalge) — a normally resilient seabird. The warm waters likely reduced and changed phytoplankton communities — an essential part of the marine food web. But that’s not all. The warm waters increased the metabolism — and the appetite — of big fish like pollock and salmon. That demand spike crashed populations of forage fish that murres usually find plentiful.
Most recently a prolonged marine heatwave off the coast of Alaska led to the closure of region’s commercial Pacific cod fishery for 2020 — the first time that’s ever happened.
“When you cancel whole fisheries, that really impacts people’s lives and livelihoods,” says Thoman.
5. What We Don’t Know
Scientists have enough information now to tell us that we need to quickly change course. But there’s still a lot to learn about how warming temperatures will affect myriad species in the sea, not to mention weather patterns and coastal economies.
One current line of research is to better understand how ocean warming affects weather.
“We know that a warmer ocean means more water evaporates into the atmosphere,” says Abraham. “Consequently, it makes the weather more severe because humidity drives storms. We would like to quantify this. So how much worse is weather now and how bad will it be?”
Some of that information will come from existing systems.
Deploying an Argo float. Photo by NOAA
“We live in a time of great change, and the ocean is telling us these stories mostly through our incredible Argo floats,” says Russell. This global network of nearly 3,900 floating sensors can measure temperature, salinity and pressure at varying depths across the world’s oceans.
But in the Southern Ocean, Russell works with an even more advanced group of biogeochemical sensors. They measure nitrates, which can tell researchers about the building blocks of nutrients for the food web. They also measure oxygen, “how the ocean is breathing,” she says, and pH, which helps tell the carbon content of the water.
Russell says she’d like to see this technology put to use in more waters around the world.
“We’re trying to get a global biogeochemical Argo array, but so far haven’t gotten funding for it,” she says. “I’m desperate to see the rest of the ocean because it’s all connected and it’s mixing quickly.”
The Arctic, she says, is one place where this technology would play a particularly valuable role.
“It’s so shallow in many places, and under ice for so much of the year, that we haven’t really been able to get a big float array up there,” she says. “But the Arctic is critical to our national interest and it’s relatively unstudied. Can you imagine that, in this day and age?”
There’s plenty to keep researchers busy, but the rest of us also need to act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because, the researchers of the Advances in Atmospheric Sciences study concluded, the oceans are so vast that they’ll require years to dissipate all of this excess heat and register the changes we’re starting to make today. Cutting emissions, they wrote, is the only way to reduce “the risks to humans and other life on Earth.”
And they’re not the only ones in trouble — orchid species around the world face increasing threats from illegal trade and habitat destruction.
More than 200 years ago, the Scottish botanist William Roxburgh published Hortus Bengalensis, a thick book cataloging hundreds of medicinal plants collected at the East India Company’s botanical gardens in Calcutta.
Among the hundreds of plants appearing in the book’s pages was an orchid originally collected in the Chittagong region of what is now Bangladesh. Identified at the time as Cymbidium alatum, the orchid now goes by the taxonomic name Theocostele alata.
You can’t find the species in Bangladesh anymore, though. No one has officially observed Theocostele alata there since Roxburgh made note of it in 1814.
And it’s not alone. According to research published this month in the International Journal of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Theocostele alata is one of 32 orchid species native to Bangladesh that no longer appear within its borders.
That represents the extinction of 17% of Bangladesh’s 187 known orchid diversity.
Researchers call the loss “alarming” due to the flowers’ ecological uniqueness and their potential medicinal, horticultural and ornamental values.
“If this rate continues, there will be no trace of orchids in the near future,” says Mohammed Kamrul Huda, a professor of botany at the University of Chittagong and lead author of the study.
Huda and his colleagues spent nearly a quarter of a century, from 1996 to 2019, conducing field research throughout Bangladesh to catalog the country’s existing orchids and look for previously described species. They even searched herbariums and private collections for species they couldn’t find in the wild, to no avail.
The paper blames habitat destruction for most of the disappearances, although it’s hard to determine exactly when these orchids went extinct in Bangladesh. In most cases the last official observation of a species, like the plant described by Roxburgh, occurred more than a century ago.
A species called Anaectochilus roxburghii, which grew in damp gullies at the edges of forests, was last recorded in 1830 near Sylhet, a large and culturally important Bangladesh city. Huda and his coauthor Ishrath Jahan, also with the University of Chittagong, blame the area’s “rapid deforestation” for the orchid’s disappearance.
Another species, Habenaria viridifolia, grew in the Lower Bengal region and hasn’t been observed since 1890. The paper ascribes its disappearance to habitat destruction and overexploitation.
And then there’s Spathoglottis pubescens. This species, which once grew near Sylhet and Chittagong, was last seen in Bangladesh in 1999 — ironically enough, by Huda and his fellow researchers. Its last known habitat was developed shortly after the observation.
The Bigger Picture
Experts say the loss of orchid species in Bangladesh embodies similar problems that orchids face around the world.
More than 1,500 orchid species currently appear on the IUCN Red List, the international database of threatened species and their known extinction risk. Of those 195 are assessed as “critically endangered,” 349 as “endangered,” 185 as “vulnerable to extinction,” and 74 as “near threatened.” Another 212 species appear on the Red List as “data deficient,” meaning no one knows how well they’re doing in the wild.
That’s just a fraction of the estimated 30,000 orchid species worldwide, but the Red List still provides a snapshot into the conservation status of these unique plants, which face threats ranging from habitat loss to overzealous commercial exploitation. Collectors have been known to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for rare orchids, and the trade has already driven several species extinct. In one of the most recent examples, collectors wiped out 99% of a newly discovered species in Vietnam once they got word of its location (many researchers now keep species locations secret to avoid a repeat of the tragedy).
The loss of local orchid species affects people, too. Many are edible or have medicinal qualities, and familiarity with orchid species plays an important role in nearby communities. Orchid declines in China, for instance, were accompanied by a loss of traditional knowledge associated with the orchids and a decline in their cultural role, according to a study published this month in the journal Anthropocene.
So why are so many orchids at risk, despite the ubiquitous nature of some well-known varieties in our garden stores and grocery shops?
For one thing, habitat loss and illegal trade are hard forces to counter.
For another, most orchid species are not commercially or even experimentally cultivated — because we don’t know how to do so.
In part that’s because orchids evolve in incredibly specific habitats. Take them out of those conditions and they simply don’t grow.
It’s more than depending on a certain temperature range or given pollinator: Orchids evolved to rely on very specific fungi at different points in their life cycles. Each species has a series of symbiotic relationships (called mycorrhizae) with various fungi, first as seeds and then as adult plants. If we don’t know which fungi an orchid species uses throughout its life, then we can’t grow them.
And the truth is we don’t know much about most of those fungi.
“There are certain groups of fungi we know are more common with orchids than other groups,” says Dennis Whigham, founding director of the North American Orchid Conservation Center. “But at the species level, they’ve just never been described. In my lab we have the largest collection of living orchid mycorrhizae, and probably 99.9% of the ones that we’ve analyzed are new to science.”
If orchid habitat is destroyed, we could potentially also see the extinction of unique resident fungi.
“When we change the environment, the fungus is probably the first thing to sort of bite the dust,” says Whigham. “When that happens, it’s impossible for the orchids to be sustained.”
Back to Bangladesh — and Beyond
Although the habitat that these extinct orchids needed may no longer exist in Bangladesh, there could still be hope for some species.
For one thing, it never hurts to keep looking. Huda reports that even though field expeditions failed to turn up those 32 species, other surprises awaited them. “We rediscovered some orchid species while doing field observations,” he says. “Some of them were thought to be extinct by other researchers.”
And few of these species, like Acanthphippium sylhetense — last seen in Bangladesh around 1880 or 1890 — have been successfully cultivated in other countries for years. Even Theocostele alata, the species last seen by Roxburgh, occasionally turns up for sale online in the United States — for as little as $29.99.
Finally, many of these species have historic ranges spreading beyond Bangladesh into other countries and may still exist there. Even Spathoglottis pubescens, the species Huda himself last observed in Bangladesh, is still known from India and China.
That doesn’t necessarily mean these wider-ranging species are in the clear. In fact, it’s impossible to know. Of the 32 species Huda and Jahan list as regionally extinct in Bangladesh, only four have been assessed by the IUCN. Podochilus khasianus appears on the Red List as a species of “least concern,” although the listing notes it has disappeared from four countries and its presence in one more is “uncertain.” Paphiopedilum venustum (the “charming paphiopedilum”) and P. insigne (the “splendid paphiopedilum”) both appear as “endangered” due to “ruthless collection for regional and international trade.” Gastrochilus calceolaris is listed as “critically endangered” because of habitat degradation and trade — an assessment that hasn’t been updated since 2004.
Huda says other nations should take their study as incentive to protect these 32 species, as well as other orchids within their borders.
“If those countries meet the same factors responsible for the loss of species in Bangladesh, the same result may happen,” he cautions. “Immediate action plans are required from conservationists and leaders on a global level to protect these beautiful and valuable species.”
As for Bangladesh, Huda and his colleagues have now turned to assessing the 155 species that remain there. They hope to determine the various species’ conservation status and suggest possible remedies to prevent further biodiversity loss in the country. “Maybe we can look through the status of other plant species as well to evaluate the degree of threat,” he suggests.
And he hopes others will join them. “I think all conservationists and researchers of biodiversity should work to raise awareness regarding these issues,” he says.
“This is a global issue,” echoes Whigham. “We need to conserve hotspots where there are a lot of orchids now and use scientific approaches to figure out how to grow and restore native species in the future.”
Unfortunately, the time to pay attention to orchid conservation grows short as species around the world continue to lose ground or disappear. Bangladesh is just one example, but it wasn’t the only one announced this month. Just a few days after Huda’s paper appeared, another study in the journal Oryx suggested that nine more orchid species from Madagascar — each observed by scientists just a single time — may have also joined the ranks of the extinct.
Sadly, more are sure to follow.
Art credits: Gastrochilus calceolaris by G. King and R. Pantling from “The Orchids of the Sikkim-Himalaya,” 1889. Dendrobium ruckeri by Sarah Anne Drake (credited as “Miss Drake”) from Edwards’s Botanical Register, 1843. Vrydagzynea albida by Carl Ludwig Blume from “Collection des Orchidées les plus remarquables de l’archipel Indien et du Japon,” 1858.
Citizen scientists are helping speed up efforts to replant and regrow dying reefs, but is the labor-intensive process really the best answer?
Visit a coral reef off the coast of Miami or the Maldives and you may see fields of bleached white instead of a burst of colors.
Coral reefs are in a death spiral. Many of the world’s major reefs — which give the oceans life, support fisheries, prevent storm damage, provide medicine and create ocean-based tourism opportunities — are expected to disappear by 2100. Experts say coral decline has numerous causes, including chemical runoff, plastic pollution, disease and overfishing.
But the main culprit is climate change, a crisis with no quick fixes.
As the late Ruth Gates — one of the world’s foremost coral experts and former director of the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology — told me two years ago, shortly before her death: “A significant cut in greenhouse gas emissions is required to save corals…not to mention, us. Such an endeavor will require government and public cooperation, and it will take time.”
Coral reefs don’t have much time, so experts around the world have used whatever tactics were in their reach to try to give corals a fighting chance. Much of their focus has been on top-down, policy-driven approaches like creating marine protected areas, banning toxic sunscreens, and cracking down on the illegal capture of reef fish.
But a growing number of experts, building on efforts by Gates and others, have taken a more bottom-up approach: coral reef restoration, or the process of repopulating deteriorating reefs with healthy coral. And they’re tapping citizen scientists to help with the effort — people participating in scientific projects organized by experts.
There’s evidence that this type of restoration could solidly support the full range of reef-conservation efforts underway. But given the extent of the crisis and what’s at stake, is repeatedly putting new crops of corals into harm’s way the answer?
Climate Change Threats
Though reefs cover less than 1% of Earth’s surface, they support more than a million different species, including many types of algae — like sea grasses and sea lettuces — and a broad range of animals from starfish to shrimp to sharks, as well as people. Experts estimate that corals pull $375 billion into the global economy every year, mainly by fostering tourism, supporting fisheries, and contributing to medicine and storm protection.
Despite their value corals have been in decline for decades. Scientists responded by initiating the first reef-restoration efforts about 50 years ago. Since then restoration efforts have been tailored to meet the needs of corals prioritized at specific times and places. In the 1970s, as coastal development boomed, scientists focused on expanding corals’ habitat by strategically placing shipwrecks, concrete pipes, tires and other manmade structures underwater on which corals could grow. By the early 2000s, scientists had become more interested in addressing other localized risks to reefs — such as overfishing, irresponsible tourism and invasive species.
But climate change poses an even more far-reaching threat.
Bleaching — a precursor to coral death caused by stressors including warming waters — has left nary a reef unscathed around the world. Most corals thrive in temperatures between 73-84 degrees Fahrenheit. Oceans naturally undergo seasonal warming, which leads to temperature fluctuations high enough to bleach some corals. In the past corals could recover from bleaching events once waters cooled. Scientists say it takes 15 to 25 years for a reef to recover from serious bleaching and become healthy enough to support a rich host of marine life. But today, with the relentless and extreme warming our oceans now face, corals are running out of possible recovery time. It’s becoming much harder for them to make a comeback.
A major coral bleaching event on part of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Photo courtesy of Oregon State University, (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Not only does climate change raise the temperature of the oceans, resulting in inhospitable conditions for corals, it deposits excess carbon dioxide into the water —increasing seawater’s acidity. More acidic waters can erode hard corals’ skeletons and make it more difficult for corals to grow. The cumulative effects have been seen around the planet. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 27% of the world’s coral population has died over the past three decades.
According to UNESCO, bleaching on coral reefs across the world was first documented in 1983, but since then its frequency and severity has quickly accelerated. In a 2017 report, the organization identified the cause of bleaching on 72% of its so-called “globally significant” reefs from 2014 to 2017 as record-breaking ocean temperatures.
Marine biologist Maria Anderson says a dying coral reef is a painful thing to witness.
“During bleaching, the usual reef hues of browns, purples and greens are replaced by a white ghost town,” says Andersen, a resident marine biologist at Ocean Group Maldives who is part of an upstarting coral reef replanting project based at InterContinental Resort, a hotel on Raa Atoll. “Soft corals appear as white blobs that melt off rocks and hard corals turn into fragile skeletons. The only way I can describe it is heartbreaking.”
Secret Weapon # 1: The Public
To stem this tide, restoration efforts now mostly involve growing corals in undersea nurseries and transplanting them onto dying reefs that are losing coral. Like saplings being replanted in a fallen forest, young corals can help regenerate an ecosystem that’s becoming barren.
But the work can be expensive and labor-intensive. According to researchers it can cost more than $150,000 to restore one reef — a small fortune in low-income coastal communities that may struggle to find funding.
That’s why restoration efforts have grown increasingly reliant on the help of citizen scientists. This has significantly reduced the high price tag of restoration by replacing paid labor with volunteers — without any noticeable decline in success. Research shows the growth and survival rate of the corals planted by citizen scientists is almost identical to corals planted by experts. When handled properly, the corals replanted by volunteers survive at a rate of at least 80%, and often exceeds 90%, says Dalton Hesley, a senior research associate at the University of Miami Benthic Ecology and Coral Restoration Lab, who led that study.
“Replanting is an investment,” Hesley says. “These corals should, in theory, live indefinitely, and you should expect to see growth over the years.”
A healthy staghorn coral colony two years after it was planted on a reef in the Florida Keys. Photo by FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
But that’s only if we also take necessary action to prevent further degradation of, and ultimately remediate, the oceans, he says. Unless the world addresses climate change, runoff, pollution and development, reefs will continue to decline and risk being lost forever.
At this moment in Earth’s history, “I don’t think it should be a matter of choosing one over the other,” says Andersen. Both large-scale efforts to address the climate crisis and labor-intensive replanting efforts are necessary to give reefs a chance of surviving Earth’s current extinction crisis. “We have to meet somewhere in the middle, finding renewable resources while also restoring reefs. We can’t just sit around and wait, leaving corals in limbo.”
Secret Weapon # 2: Genetics
“On first glance replanting may seem like a distraction from mitigating climate change, which is what we have to do if we want to save reefs,” says Andersen. But she says restoration can give corals a better chance — especially when they’re coupled with recent efforts to supercharge replanting by genetically identifying the most diverse and resilient species.
A well-planned, diverse reef is probably the best remedy to bleaching, Andersen says.
“I’ve heard of hundreds of restoration projects around the world, but none that have failed,” she says. “But if one happened to fail, I would assume its leaders failed to create enough coral diversity.”
Hesley agrees: “With high diversity there’s strength.”
Thousands of species of hard and soft corals have been identified to date, and each of these species has varying levels of resistance to stressors. Even within a species, scientists have identified different gene patterns that can convey different benefits.
“Some corals grow very quickly, some are less prone to disease, some bleach less, some are hardier during storms, for example,” Hesley says. “There’s not one coral species or individual that excels across the board, so we must focus on creating high levels of coral diversity.”
Larger-scale reef restoration projects, like the program Hesley is involved in at the University of Miami, keep track of coral genetics using DNA analysis, ensuring coral diversity. Smaller-scale programs in rather remote places, like Andersen’s project in the Maldives, often do not have in-house access to labs and genetics testing, which can be prohibitively expensive.
Andersen says these challenges require her to go through a complex research process and collaboration with coral geneticists on a different atoll to pinpoint the most and least resilient coral species. Then, she must carefully remove fragments of coral from reefs known to have survived past bleaching events so that they can be used to spawn more hardy corals. After that, she monitors the donor reef and fragments to ensure they stay healthy. These preliminary parts of the replanting process, which require permits and extraordinary precision, are left up to the professionals.
Choosing coral parent colonies to aid reef restoration efforts. Photo by FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Promise and Challenges
When it comes to giving dying corals another shot, Hesley acknowledges that coral reef restoration is not a perfect solution. He says finding adequate funding, staff and volunteer labor, and addressing the root causes of reef decline — climate change and local stressors to reef health — are lingering challenges.
However, Anderson says the benefits of reef restoration, especially those powered by citizen scientists, are strong compared to their drawbacks. This has led to projects cropping up on reefs all around the world, developed by scientists hired by research institutions and hotels alike.
One of the most exciting she’s seen is a citizen-science restoration project led by Peter Harrison of Southern Cross University in Australia, who has developed a backpack-sized inflatable coral spawn catcher and nursery pool in which baby corals can grow until they’re big enough to be replanted.
Of course, even volunteers can only do so much. Harrison has also pioneered use of robots to swiftly distribute baby corals onto nearly 7.5 acres of damaged reefs, doing a job in just six hours that would take several human hands at least a week. If perfected, it could put volunteer seeding efforts effectively out of business.
But there’s always a role for people willing to help. After corals are propagated, whether it’s by hand or machine, citizen scientists can help care for them in undersea nurseries.
All of this requires careful planning. Andersen emphasizes the importance of establishing clearly defined goals for restoration, based around a community’s needs and available resources. Another aspect of a successful restoration effort, she says, is an effective and accessible training program that primes citizen scientists on how to participate and, ultimately, care about the future of corals.
And that ties into the fundamental reason why citizen science still matters: because restoration buys time for corals. Experts at the Smithsonian Research Institute have found that the more living coral a reef has when exposed to highly acidic waters, the more likely it is to survive, instead of bleaching and dying.
Meanwhile, the efforts help to connect people to something that otherwise might stay out of sight and out of mind beneath the surface of the ocean.
“I don’t think a lot of people who get involved in restoration initially have that emotional attachment to coral reefs simply because they haven’t had a chance to care about them,” Andersen says. “Restoration gives them the opportunity to make a connection, to really understand how dire the situation is, and to do something that can help.”
When a species is critically endangered, every individual matters.
Visitors to the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery in Colorado can get a chance to meet a rock star of the wildlife world: a black-footed ferret named Stevie Nicks.
Named after singer Stevie Nicks, this cute and ferocious little carnivore is part of the captive-breeding and release program that has saved her species. Today more than 1,400 black-footed ferrets live in the wild — a major success for a species that was believed to be extinct just 30 years ago.
Unfortunately Stevie can’t be released to live in the wild — she’s blind, so she could never survive on her own.
But she’s still part of the breeding program, and as a resident of the museum she helps her species by serving as a public face of the extinction crisis. From her safe enclosure, she can inspire visitors who get the rare opportunity to see a live black-footed ferret play and even hunt whenever her keepers give her live rodents.
Black-footed ferrets aren’t out of the woods yet. They still face threats from habitat loss and sylvatic plague and other diseases, but hardworking conservationists have managed to save them from disappearing forever.
Learn more about Stevie and black-footed ferrets in our video below.
Cat Tale, a new book by journalist Craig Pittman, takes us on a wild ride into the science and politics of saving an iconic species.
It’s not even February yet, and Florida panthers are already having a bad year. Three have been killed by vehicles and one by a train in the first two weeks of 2020 alone.
The big cats once ranged across the South but now are mostly found slinking between fragments of habitat in southern Florida. Traffic poses a significant hazard: Last year 23 panthers were killed by vehicles — a significant blow to a wild population that hovers precariously at only around 230 animals.
But there likely wouldn’t be any Florida panthers today if it weren’t for decades of work to save them. The story of how Florida panthers, a puma subspecies, were rescued from the brink of extinction is expertly told in the new book Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle To Save the Florida Panther, by journalist and New York Times best-selling author Craig Pittman. Pittman’s been tracking the story for 20 years at the Tampa Bay Times.
The cast of characters and wild turns of event in Pittman’s book seem like the stuff of fiction. There’s the Stetson-wearing Texas cougar hunter Roy McBride, who becomes a master panther tracker. Veterinarian Melody Roelke rings the alarm on the panther’s genetic problems, only to have her male colleagues look the other way. And the arch villain of the story, a biologist nicknamed “Dr. Panther,” establishes himself as the preeminent expert but is actually fudging his research and colluding with developers.
Pittman traces these and other characters through years of discoveries, mistakes, public backlash and breakthroughs — a fledgling program to radio-collar and track the animals that taught important lessons about tranquilizing big cats high up in trees; a failed captive-breeding program; a failed reintroduction plan in north Florida; and a last-ditch effort to bring in new genes by releasing Texas cougars in panther habitat.
The story is tragic, inspiring and deeply poignant. In his prologue Pittman calls it a “scientific cautionary tale.” As we grapple with mass extinction across the world, he writes, “This is a guide to what extraordinary efforts it takes to bring back just one sub-species — one that’s particularly popular — and what unexpected costs such a decision brings.”
Pittman talked to The Revelator about the threats that panthers continue to face and what lessons we can learn about saving other endangered species.
When you first started writing about panthers 20 years ago, what did you think about their prospects?
Author Craig Pittman. Photo by Dirk Shadd.
My first stories were around 1998-1999. Nobody knew if the Texas cougar experiment had worked yet. Things looked pretty grim and a lot of developers were proceeding on the understanding that panthers wouldn’t be a problem anymore, so it was OK to build in panther habitat.
Things looked dire at that point and it wasn’t until around 2001 or 2002 where you started seeing these new kittens being born and thinking maybe things would be OK. The concern then became making sure that the Texas cougar genetics didn’t swamp the panther genetics.
We know that panthers aren’t out of the woods yet. Is there clear science on what would be considered a recovered population?
Ever since scientists drew up the very first recovery plan decades ago, they said the key was to have three [geographically] separate populations of about 250 or 300 panthers. Obviously, we’re still a long way from that and from even starting a second population. You could call what’s going on in central Florida the start of a new population, but there’s just a handful of panthers there. If they choose to follow those particular goals, they’re a long way away.
But I phrase it that way because [the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] did not follow their own recommendations when they down-listed manatees [from endangered to threatened]. They didn’t follow their recovery plan. They just said, “Well, this computer model says it’s OK, so we’re going to say it’s OK, even though the threats are still there.”
I call manatees “the endangered species you can see,” because they will show up everywhere people are — they’re in your backyard canal, swimming around your dock. At the time I wrote that book, they were an endangered species, but one that you could see with your own eyes.
Panthers, not so much. Panthers are very elusive. They don’t like to be around people. So they’re more of an abstract concept to a lot of folks. People know the panthers exist, but they’ve never seen one. So it’s not quite as personal with panthers.
And the other thing that I wrote about in Manatee Insanity is that the Save the Manatee Club, and specifically its cofounder Jimmy Buffett, came up with this brilliant marketing concept called “adopt a manatee,” where they took the IDs from a whole bunch of the manatees that the state had been following and, for a contribution of around $5 or so originally, you could adopt a manatee. You’d get a little adoption certificate with the name of your manatee on it and its background.
People became personally invested in the fate of their particular manatee. I was digging through state archives and I saw letters from, you know, Mrs. Johnson’s fourth grade class in Mesa, Arizona to the Citrus County Commission saying, “Why are you being mean to our manatee and not passing this rule to make boats slow down?”
They found a way to make people all over the country care about individual manatees as a way of getting them to care about the species as a whole. There’s no similar project for panthers and generally most of the panthers don’t have nicknames like the manatees do.
There are people who absolutely love panthers, mostly in the abstract. And there are some folks who would dearly love to see a hunting season opened on them and feel like the government’s lying about how many there are. But I think the majority of Floridians support panthers and are happy that they seem to be coming back.
Your book is a really incredibly in-depth case study of what it takes to save one endangered species. Are there lessons we can learn from it about saving other species?
I like what Melody Roelke said — at the point where they started to realize they needed to take action [to save the panthers], it was almost too late to do anything. So her advice was, if you see it heading this way, take action immediately. Don’t dawdle around and get into arguments and get mired down in bureaucratic red tape about what you’re going to do.
They really were almost too late to save the panther. It basically came down to five female Texas cougars breeding with the remaining male panthers. And had that not worked, that would’ve been it. They’d probably be gone by now.
The other thing is, if you’re going to spend this much money and work this hard to bring back an endangered species, think about what’s going to happen afterwards. What are the ramifications going to be? Because as we saw with the captive-breeding experiment that they started and then dropped, they had not planned very well. They had figured out they were going to take these panther kittens out of the wild and breed them in captivity to put [grown] panthers back in the wild, but they hadn’t really thought about where they were going to put them and how they were going to train these captive panthers to be OK in the wild.
What are the biggest threats they face now?
The reason I waited so long to write this book is because I needed a good ending and I finally got one. [Editor’s note: We won’t give it away, but it’s a doozy.]
But just because I found an ending for the book doesn’t mean the story of the panther is over. We’re now dealing with this mystery ailment that’s afflicting some panthers and bobcats, to the point where they can’t walk and scientists don’t know why.
We’ve also got more large development coming down the pike headed for the area [where most panthers live]. In particular there’s a proposal backed by the governor — who is supposedly pro-environment — to build this enormous toll road right through panther habitat, which would bring more development into that area.
One of my colleagues, Lawrence Mower, just wrote a story where we’d gotten copies of some emails from Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who study the panthers saying this will just basically be a stake in the heart of panther recovery if you build this toll road through there.
So there are continuing threats, and we’re a long way from them being considered recovered. But things are looking hopeful in ways they haven’t for a long time and all because of the very hard work from these folks who labored for years mostly in anonymity because they believed in the cause and they believed that what was going on was something worth devoting their lives to — even though it led to burnout and fighting and depression and, in one case, suicide.
In a way, I wrote the book to call attention to the role of those unsung heroes to say, look at what they did, look at the risks that they took, look at the brutal work days they put in trying to figure this out — sometimes even against the public’s own desires.
Kanab, a small Utah town that’s home to the famous Best Friends Animal Society, took an unconventional path to face down a frac sand mine that threatened the region’s aquifer.
A sign at the north end of Kanab, Utah, proclaims the town of 4,300 to be “The Greatest Earth on Show.”
It’s a rare case of truth in advertising.
Kanab sits just seven miles north of the Arizona state line, at the crossroads of some of the Southwest’s most beautiful places. In every direction a geologic wonderland awaits. To the north is Zion National Park with its breathtaking valley of 2,000-foot-tall rust and white sandstone cliffs. The sweeping expanse of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument stretches to the east of town, and just to the south you’ll find the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.
You don’t even need to leave Kanab, which is ringed by the famously red-hued Vermillion Cliffs, to get socked by jaw-dropping beauty.
It’s this landscape that drew Susan Hand to Kanab 25 years ago when she opened Willow Canyon Outdoor to sell gear, maps, books and coffee to local and visiting adventurers. And it’s this landscape and the community’s gateway-to-the-wonderland experience, the economic bedrock of this tourism-dependent town, that she worried would be destroyed by a new industrial project proposed for development 10 miles north of town last year.
Kanab, UT is a popular tourist destination. Photo by Tara Lohan.
There, a company called Southern Red Sands LLC had announced plans to build a facility to mine and process massive amounts of sand for use by oil and gas companies conducting hydraulic fracturing. The sand is a lesser-known but substantial aspect of the fracking process. Round grains of silica sand serve as a “proppant” to keep underground fissures in the shale open as oil and gas are pumped out. Fracking a single well can require thousands of tons of sand.
“I really wanted to keep an open mind, but the more I learned about the project, the more concerned I got,” Hand told The Revelator when I visited Kanab in September.
She had reason to be worried. The first decade of the fracking boom relied heavily on so-called “frac sand” sourced mostly from Midwest states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, where mining reduced verdant green hills to piles of dust.
Frac sand in Wisconsin. Photo by Tara Lohan.
But mining in the Midwest has its limits. Sand is expensive to ship across the country, so as fracking has taken off in Utah, Texas and New Mexico, companies have looked to find more local sources to trim costs.
That’s when the proposed mine in Kanab entered the story.
Southern Red Sands, a two-person start-up backed by Utah real-estate developer Kem Gardner, hoped to establish the region’s next frac sand mine in a scenic area of state-owned lands outside Kanab called Red Knoll.
City and county officials quickly gave their blessing — and a combined 1,200 acre-feet of water rights a year — after only cursory consideration.
But residents became concerned about impacts to scenic beauty, water resources and local businesses. They teamed up to fight back, forming a community group called Keep Kanab Unspoiled.
It was beginning to feel like a familiar story.
The struggle between extractive industries and environmental protection is not a new one in Utah. A fight is still raging nearby over the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante, both of which President Trump slashed in order to increase drilling and mining opportunities.
Despite public pushback and some legal challenges, though, the frac sand mine seemed to be cruising toward approval as recently as October. It still needed an environmental impact assessment from the Bureau of Land Management, and the two water transfers needed approval from the state engineer. The project definitely wasn’t a done deal, but in industry-friendly Utah, it had a good shot.
So it may have come as a surprise to a number of residents when Southern Red Sands announced at the beginning of January that it was abandoning the proposed project.
What happened? And are there any lessons that other communities fighting extraction threats can learn?
“Speak out, pull together like-minded neighbors, organize and don’t give up,” Hand told me after hearing the news. “But also, try to be nice.”
Surprisingly, it’s that last bit that may have made a big difference — along with a good hard look at the economics of the endeavor.
The Threats
Von Del Chamberlain is a white-haired, soft-spoken Kanab resident. Born in 1934, he spent his youth exploring the red rock and his career studying the stars. The astronomer and former director of Salt Lake City’s Hansen (now Clark) Planetarium retired to his hometown 15 years ago and hoped to start a public observatory.
He realized that Kanab’s prized dark-night skies would be threatened by a 24-7 mining operation. But that wasn’t even his biggest concern with the project.
“The beauty here is the thing that will sustain this area economically for as far in the future as we can possibly see,” he said.
Opponents like Chamberlain usually cited two big concerns: environmental impacts, particularly the threat to water resources, and the local economy. But in Kanab it’s hard to separate the two.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of an economy you want to develop here,” said Hand. “Even if you have an industrial economy or an extractive economy — if you don’t have water, you’re out.”
The water supply, which draws on underground aquifers, currently supports the town’s tourist-driven economy, ranching, and the county’s biggest employer — Best Friends Animal Society, known worldwide through the Dogtown TV series on the National Geographic Channel. The nonprofit owns a 3,700-acre sanctuary, the country’s largest no-kill animal shelter, and would have been the mine’s closest neighbor.
Best Friends, which employs 400 locals and draws 35,000 out-of-town visitors a year to its sanctuary, came to see the proposed mine as an existential threat. Their property relies on wells, seeps and springs that come from the same aquifer the project’s two wells would tap.
Groundwater seeps to the surface at the Best Friends animal sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. Photo by Tara Lohan.
Last July Kanab’s city council approved a 50-year contract for 600 acre-feet a year of water rights for the project and Kane County Water Conservancy District, which oversees water servicing for the unincorporated areas of the county, agreed to provide an additional 600 acre-feet of water. That combined amount equals about 740 gallons per minute, although Southern Red Sands contended it would use only about a third of that.
Many local residents were shocked by the water-rights transfer. A 2016 water needs assessment found that Kane County Water Conservancy District’s reliable supply would be in deficit by 2035. And the district’s executive director, former state representative Mike Noel, has been a vocal advocate for a pricy proposed pipeline to send Lake Powell water to southern Utah communities, including near Kanab, under the premise that the region is already running short on water.
“We knew that it would damage our seeps and our springs, and we weren’t sure yet the full impact besides some drawdown to our groundwater, but we were really concerned,” Bart Battista, an environmental engineer responsible for facilities management at Best Friends’ Kanab sanctuary, told me. “It boggles my mind that the city wasn’t as concerned.”
But documents unearthed by local radio station KUER showed that officials at nearby Zion National Park already were concerned that the project could reduce flows into the East Fork of the Virgin River, which flows through the park, by reducing the amount of water from underground seeps and springs that feed the river.
Wanting to learn more about how the project could affect the region’s water, Best Friends commissioned a study from hydrogeologist Kenneth Kolm of Hydrologic Systems Analysis, a firm that’s completed water studies for other Utah towns.
Kolm found that the mine posed the potential for decline in productivity to wells owned by both Best Friends and the city’s water supply. The project could also decrease flows into nearby Kanab Creek and dry up perennial streams and springs, including one that feeds an area of habitat that’s home to the Kanab ambersnail — currently federally protected as endangered.
The amount of water being withdrawn wasn’t the only issue. The proposed project site and its sandy soil are also vitally important to local hydrology.
“The sand is the first ticket to collecting water,” said Hand. It captures rain and holds it in place long enough for it to sink into the water table and not run off. But the sand is exactly what would be removed from the site, further threatening the region’s water supply.
“I realized for the first time how small and vulnerable our watershed actually is,” she added.
Southern Red Sands hoped to start digging on 640 acres of land around Red Knoll, an aptly named rise of coral-colored rock and sand. The area is managed as part of Utah’s School and International Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), where state-owned property can be leased (often for resource extraction), with revenue being funneled to education.
The operation would have started by bulldozing all the trees, shrubs, grasses and forbs, then scraped up to 30 feet of the earth from the exposed surface. The sand would then be processed — washed with water and chemicals, then dried and sorted — in a facility with up to six 120-foot-tall silos. After that it would be loaded into trucks and hauled out.
A small fraction of the remaining sediment — mostly the fine silts and clays — would be put back on the land. But that change in geology could mean a big change for the aquifer. How big would depend on the scope of the project, though.
In addition to the SITLA land, Southern Red Sands had acquired placer claims — mineral exploration rights — for 12,000 surrounding acres managed by the BLM. And although the company said it planned to mine only 700,000 tons a year from the SITLA property, the facility would have had the capacity and water rights to accommodate much more.
“If they’re building a plant with a capacity of 3 million tons a year, that’s presumably because they expect to be able to produce that,” Dean Baker, a Kanab resident and opponent of the project told me in December. “They may never do that, but you don’t build extra capacity without the idea that you might use it.”
The Resistance
Water issues are paramount in arid Utah, but the mine was likely to come with some other potential problems.
If Southern Red Sands did build out to end of their claims, they’d be within 10 miles of Zion National Park and workers at Best Friends would be looking over their fence line at the operation — not to mention potentially breathing its dust.
Mining, processing and trucking frac sand can release tiny particles of crystalline silica into the air. Inhaling those particles regularly can cause lung disease, including cancer and silicosis, a chronic disease that, like “black lung” for coal miners, can be deadly.
Dust in the air at a frac sand processing facility in Wisconsin. Photo by Tara Lohan.
The facility would likely run with lights and noise 24-7, which could be detrimental to wildlife. And adding more diesel-spewing, slow-stopping big rigs hauling 50,000 pounds of sand down the town’s one main road concerned residents, too.
With so much at risk, opponents employed a number of tactics to try to fight the mine.
Keep Kanab Unspoiled held community meetings. They invited Kolm, the geologist who did the independent study, to report his findings, and started an online petition to discourage the company from moving forward.
Best Friends — an established national nonprofit with considerably more financial resources — took the lead role in mounting legal challenges. The organization filed an appeal of a conditional use permit approved by the county and formally objected to the water transfers, which needed to be approved by the state engineer.
But during the fall, Best Friends decided to shift tactics. Lawsuits could just lead to years of legal battles, something beyond the organization’s longstanding mission.
“We might alienate our donors and members,” Battista explained. “The appeal of Best Friends crosses party boundaries — animal welfare is something everybody can support.” Apparently environmental action is not.
They decided the best approach was to sit down and talk with the company and its backers.
Battista couldn’t disclose details of the negotiations — which went on for months — but on Jan. 9 Best Friends and Southern Red Sands released a joint statement saying that the company “had decided not to pursue its business ventures in Kane County.”
The members of Keep Kanab Unspoiled were elated by the news.
“It’s so heartening how so many people from our community came together to amplify a voice that is seldom acknowledged by our elected representatives and institutions,” Hand tells me. “I’m relieved that an area I love won’t be sacrificed on the altar of fossil fuel consumption. I’m grateful that this threat to our travel and tourism economy is diminished.”
It would be comforting to think that the driving force behind the decision boiled down to preserving the scenic beauty or the region’s groundwater resources, but it’s more likely it had to do with money.
“Economics played some role,” Battista said. “The market for frac sand has changed and [Best Friends] had financial viability assessments of the project to show that the mine wouldn’t be a good idea. Economically it just didn’t make sense to any of us. I think that our studies corroborated that.”
This was a main talking point of Keep Kanab Unspoiled, bolstered by research done by Baker, who also happens to be an economist and cofounder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The frac sand industry — and the larger fracking industry — is volatile. The number of rigs drilling for oil tends to fall when prices get low. Rigs plunged with falling prices from 2014 to 2016 and last year saw record declines in rig numbers. In addition, fracking costs more than traditional drilling — and the industry has also been overspending to keep the fracking boom from going bust.
A research organization in Norway found that the amount of money being spent to drill for oil by 40 U.S. shale oil companies outpaced the money being made by selling that oil. That deficit cost companies almost $5 billion in just the first quarter of 2019, DeSmog reported in August.
It’s a scenario that’s happened before.
With oil prices now around $60 a barrel, the industry is hanging on. If prices dip much lower, it could be trouble. A decade into the fracking frenzy, investors are worried that the best spots have been drilled and many debts won’t be paid.
There’s even more uncertainty when it comes to producing and selling the sand. Companies used to rely almost exclusively on Midwest sand, but now more areas are getting in on the game.
The consequences of failures in the fracking business model are real.
Falling oil prices and a shifting market for frac sand recently took down Emerge Energy Services — owner of eight frac sand facilities in Wisconsin — which filed for bankruptcy last summer and left behind unsafe levels of arsenic and heavy metal contamination for the community to clean up.
That’s a scenario that Baker worried could happen in Kanab. Southern Red Sands said their intended market was in Utah’s Uintah Basin 350 miles north, but a new frac sand mine just opened in the basin. “It’s almost inconceivable they’d be able to compete with them because the biggest cost with frac sand is the shipping,” said Baker. “There are some operations in the San Juan basin [in New Mexico and Colorado] but it’s not clear to me that they could beat those out either.”
Even though economics played a role in halting the project, he believes community efforts were important, too.
“The fact they faced serious legal obstacles at every step in their path had to be a factor,” he said. “It is a nice, and unfortunately rare, victory for the environment.”
Best Friends worked to ensure the hard-earned victory wasn’t short-lived, either. It also purchased Southern Red Sands’ 12,000 acres of mineral rights.
“We want to make sure that no one else comes in here in two years if the market’s better and tries to put in another sand mine, we just don’t think that it’s the right thing for this area,” says Battista. “We want to make sure that in perpetuity, there’s not a threat to the sanctuary.”
As for Hand, she’s now looking at the bigger picture. She saw the fight over frac sand in Kanab as a microcosm of the global fight over fossil fuels and climate change.
“While we can embrace a sense of triumph, it’s likely to be brief,” she says. “When it comes to protecting wild places and using our resources carefully, our work will never be done. The next development project is already bubbling. I do feel more hopeful for each success, but climate change marches on.”
A vulnerable culture living in a severely degraded section of the Colombian Amazon is in desperate need of international respect and support.
To visit South America’s indigenous Koreguaje tribe — and see the destruction that has been wrought upon it — you need to start in the southwestern Colombian city of Florencia.
Arriving by air in Florencia, which is the capital of Caquetá Department, gives you a panoramic view of the region’s near-total conversion from Amazon rainforest to cattle pasture. Only a few pockets of forest remain, surrounded by urban sprawl and agriculture.
The profound effects of this mass deforestation become even more evident when traveling by land and river deeper into Caquetá.
Along the Orteguaza River, from Puerto Arango down to the Caquetá River — a journey of about 55 miles — grasslands and cows dominate what was once forest. The degradation of the land, waterways and riverbanks is evident everywhere you look, and the lack of consciousness of this damage can feel demoralizing.
Caquetá itself is a microcosm of Colombia’s most pressing social and environmental problems. Land is power in Colombia, and the thirst for land in Caquetá has been the main driver behind conflict and deforestation for decades.
The seeds of mass land conversion and conflict in the department (Colombia’s equivalent of a state) were planted with abandoned development projects that encouraged migration to the Amazon frontier in the 1960s. Since then the landscape has been entirely transformed by pastures and coca plantations. Coca, the base ingredient for cocaine, is a sacred medicinal plant to many South American tribes, including the Koreguaje, who call it “hipie.”
Deforested land, cleared for cattle pasture along the Orteguaza River. Caquetá, Colombia. Photo by D.H Rasolt.
Much of this destruction starts on a small scale before ballooning out of control.
“Laws for land titling and wealthy landowners encourage poor smallholder farmers to clear land to eventually consolidate into large ranches,” Amazon deforestation expert Dr. Dolors Armenteras told me recently. As a result around 1% of landowners in Colombia hold 81% of “productive” land.
The process often begins with land grabs and fires, which portend mass-scale land conversion along new and expanding frontiers of deforestation. Insecure land tenure and negligent state enforcement even allow this process to occur within protected national parks and indigenous territories.
“The result is the transformation of nominally public forests into private, forest-free landholdings,” Armenteras and co-authors wrote last year in Nature.
Deforestation rates have skyrocketed in Caquetá since the 2016 Colombian peace accords, even in designated indigenous reserves and protected national parks. As a result Caquetá is now the Colombian Amazon’s most active deforestation frontier.
And also one of its last lines of defense.
The Koreguaje Tribe and the Orteguaza River
The area along the Orteguaza is the current home of the Koreguaje tribe, a proud and deeply threatened ethnic group whose ancestral territories stretched all the way to Florencia.
The Koreguaje see themselves not just as protectors of the forest, but part of it. They refer to themselves and their still-widely spoken language as “Korébajü,” which is interpreted through their worldview as “people of the earth.”
It’s a testament to their resilience that they’ve been able to preserve their language this long, as indigenous languages are severely to critically endangered in many parts of Colombia and South America.
Despite this long history and success in preserving their culture, today fewer than 2,000 Koreguaje endure in their territories following a painful history of forced enslavement, Christianization, land grabbing and displacement dating back to the 18th century.
Smaller populations of Koreguaje live in the slums of Florencia and Bogotá, where they fled after the cocaine trade brought deforestation, aerial glyphosate spraying, assassinations and forced displacement to their homelands in the early 1990s — all occurring within the context of Colombia’s prolonged civil war. This violent “epoch of the coca” lasted until the mid-2000s. Many of the members of this diaspora have unsuccessfully petitioned to reclaim land that was lost.
I’ve worked with the Koreguaje for nearly four years, on projects ranging from water quality to food security, alternative energy and income sources, and the transmission and preservation of traditional knowledge. Their situation urgently needs more attention — not just for their sakes, but to protect an ecologically vital section of the Colombian Amazon.
What remains of Koreguaje territory now represents some of the only standing forest along the degraded Orteguaza River, though their ability to keep living off the land and river has been seriously compromised.
The Koreguaje have traditionally survived on fishing, a rotational form of subsistence slash-and-burn agriculture common to Amazonian tribes known as “chagras,” and occasional hunting. Seasonally flooded palm-tree forests known as “cananguchales” along the Orteguaza and the less voluminous Peneya River are at the center of traditional Koreguaje health and culture.
But these bodies of water and the many fish that spawn within them are disappearing. Fish throughout the region are also contaminated with mercury from illegal gold mining, and the reduction of ancestral territories following conflict and deforestation has greatly diminished the food available from chagras and hunting.
Koreguaje woman preparing fish within a flooded forest. Photo by D.H. Rasolt.
It’s not only the Koreguaje who are at risk from the destruction of their surrounding ecosystems, including the Andean-Amazonian Piedmont. According to geographer Juan Gonzalez, who worked for years along the Orteguaza studying sediment flow and soil erosion, the river “serves as a confluence of different water types that are critical to the integrity of communities and ecosystems tens to thousands of kilometers downstream.”
Neglected Guardians
Through all of this, the Koreguaje and neighboring Muina-Murui (“Huitoto”) communities that live along the Caquetá River have remained “guardians of the forest” in this highly threatened, important part of the Northwest Amazon.
I spoke with Koreguaje leader Oliver Gasca last year while in his reserve.
“We know our territory,” he told me emphatically. “We know how to live here, what animals to eat, how to raise a family, and we respect our land and the Mother Earth. Look all around this region. It is pasture and dying land. Now look at us. We are the only ones with trees, and we keep losing more land and people.”
Despite their moderate success in protecting local forests, the Koreguaje’s rights and holistic worldviews continue to be neglected.
As Gasca recounted: “White people come and tell us what we need to do: We need to stop hunting because the animals are disappearing. We need to stop fishing because the fish are contaminated with mercury from gold mining. We need to stop working our chagras, we need to stop having many children because there is not enough food and territory for them and we need to stop using our traditional plants when we are sick…
“This all used to be our home and we were strong and the forest was strong. And people come here and tell us what we need to do after they caused all of these problems with their Western worldviews? They need to listen. We will go extinct — and so will the forest without us.”
While Gasca’s feelings — which echo those of many indigenous leaders — are entirely justifiable, that categorical “us against them” perspective has the potential to change. There are people listening, and there are tools, initiatives and global movements gaining momentum that recognize the importance of indigenous rights and distinct worldviews.
Importantly, Colombia also has a legal structure that supports strong environmental and indigenous rights to life, health, education, autonomy and territory, although in practice these rights are consistently ignored or violated. In fact, it’s a running joke among those trying to improve the situation that Colombia is “a lawless country with the best laws in the world.”
But the legal framework for protecting and preserving the Koreguaje culture and territory remains in place, and international pressure and support are likely needed to ensure its effectiveness and accountability.
Global Movements and Agreements
The “Guardians of the Forest” paradigm recognizes indigenous communities as stewards of the immense biodiversity and “ecosystem services” of tropical forests, and it’s easy to see why.
Globally, indigenous communities manage at least 300 billion metric tons of carbon within their forested territories, above- and belowground. Indigenous territories also contain approximately 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Evidence from around the world has shown that indigenous communities with secure rights and tenure to their collectively held lands have extremely low rates of deforestation and land degradation. Policies for further securing indigenous land rights and amplifying their territories are also becoming recognized as some of the most cost-effective means of curbing deforestation and mitigating global climate change, and were recently recognized as such in a 2019 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Forested Koreguaje territory is visible in the background beyond an active deforestation frontier in Caquetá, Colombia. Photo by D.H. Rasolt.
And a “Rights of Nature” movement, firmly grounded in holistic indigenous worldviews like that of the Koreguaje, has been gaining steam around the world, especially in Colombia. But the actual impact of any shift away from anthropocentrism remains to be seen.
Broad legal frameworks, such as the Colombian constitution and international environmental, human and indigenous rights accords and declarations, are an important component in protecting vulnerable indigenous people like the Koreguaje, especially if governments are held accountable. Unfortunately these agreements often neglect distinct indigenous worldviews and the unique circumstances communities deal with on a daily basis.
The recent “Leticia Pact,” developed in response to international uproar over rising deforestation rates, is an example of a broad-brush regional agreement, among seven Amazonian countries, aimed at coordinated forest management. But most Koreguaje leaders I spoke with this past year were unaware of the details of the pact, and when they learned more, they were skeptical about its implementation and upset that indigenous communities had not been properly consulted or included. They also felt the pact failed to respect their autonomy.
These are common contentions of indigenous people, whose rights and worldviews are consistently marginalized while the “Western world” goes about its unsustainable business.
Community-based Research and Projects
A more open collaboration between researchers and indigenous leaders could be powerful.
Scientists, in particular, have much to gain by understanding the more “sustainable models” that underlie the traditional practices and knowledge of indigenous people. Conversely, introducing scientific tools that support communities’ autonomously determined needs could help protect their traditions, knowledge and capacity to monitor, adapt and defend against threats. I, and other researchers, have gained a great deal of knowledge and perspective by working with the Koreguaje, while helping them to implement techniques and projects to increase resilience and preserve traditions.
To Koreguaje leaders, though, any project is relatively superficial when it doesn’t fortify the connection between the increasingly disconnected tribal youth and the culture’s dying traditions.
As the displaced Koreguaje leader Juven Piranga told me, “Without the roots, the tree won’t grow.”
Piranga expressed fears that the impending deaths of the few remaining wise elders could also spell the death of the Koreguaje culture.
Supporting efforts to document and transmit the unique circumstances, knowledge, language and traditions of the Koreguaje and other critically threatened cultures should be of high priority to researchers and citizens alike.
Possible Economic Alternatives
Indigenous tribes throughout Colombia are being bombarded with propaganda about the economic benefits of opening up their territories to visiting outsiders, and the Koreguaje are no exception.
Colombia’s tourism industry is booming, but unfortunately the message forced upon indigenous leaders is shortsighted and deceptive. Mass tourism, “ecotourism,” and the more niche sectors of “ethnotourism” and “ayahuasca tourism” (ayahuasca, or “yage,” is a sacred traditional hallucinogenic drink for the Koreguaje) all pose high degrees of cultural risk for the Koreguaje and other traditional Amazonian tribes.
More integrated and circular economic solutions that respect and reinforce traditions, autonomy, pride and ecosystems are needed if alternative income sources are to be part of the answer for the Koreguaje. These approaches must still be implemented with caution by those looking to trade with Koreguaje communities, to avoid a dependence on external markets that might lead to the abandonment of other traditional practices.
The preservation and commercialization of directly sourced traditional “crafts” from indigenous communities, especially those made from natural fibers and pigments, holds promise. Profits can be reinvested into community-based-programs that fortify traditions and conserve and regenerate ecosystems where the natural fibers and pigments flourish. Koreguaje women make crafts of deep cultural significance from the fiber of the cumare palm tree, with natural pigments from countless different endemic plants.
Other integrated alternative income options for the Koreguaje — assuming their remaining ecosystems are preserved — could include high-value non-timber forest products that incorporate an intercultural collaboration between modern agroecological models and traditional farming practices. Their neighbors, the Muina-Murui, are already incorporating these models.
From the consumer side, supporting integrated and circular socioeconomic systems has the potential of making positive impacts within vulnerable communities like the Koreguaje.
Solutions Through Systems Thinking
The imminent risk to, and potential disappearance of, the Koreguaje and their surrounding ecosystems must no longer be viewed as an isolated circumstance. It’s caused by systemic problems and has cumulative consequences. As an international community, we must think more in systems, as the Koreguaje do, if we are to fully appreciate the importance of their culture and territory.
The devastating loss of the Koreguaje would mean the loss of countless generations of accumulated knowledge, traditions and practices developed sustainably within their ancestral lands. This loss will be felt throughout the region. The degradation of the Orteguaza River will continue to have basin-scale impacts on the increasingly threatened downstream ecosystems of the Amazon. Mass-scale deforestation in Caquetá threatens irreversible biodiversity loss, while contributing to the Amazon’s march toward the tipping point of becoming a carbon source. The Koreguaje have demonstrated their ability to protect the forests of their territories, and neither they nor the interconnected living planet can afford to lose any more.
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.
Hundreds of blazes could push threatened species closer to extinction. But the roots of Australia’s wildlife crisis are indicative of a much larger problem.
The hundreds of fires racing across Australia have captured the world’s attention and left an indelible scar on the continent, with at least 27 human lives lost, 15 million acres consumed and nearly 2,000 homes destroyed. And then, of course, there are the animals, shown dead or scarred in unforgettable photos. The exact number of wild creatures killed in the blazes won’t be known for a while, but one estimate, from University of Sydney ecologist Chris Dickman, puts it at a staggering 1 billion animals.
With record droughts and high temperatures fueling the bushfires, experts warn that Australia’s present horror could be a harbinger of climate-amplified disasters to come for the rest of the world.
And while this could inspire a wake-up call for climate action, it should also ring alarm bells about the extinction crisis — and shine a light on the historical factors that have made the conflagration and resulting biodiversity loss so devastating.
Biodiversity up in Flames
Globally the planet is experiencing an unparalleled biodiversity crisis, with as many as a million species facing extinction. The problem is perhaps most acutely felt in Australia, where more than 1,800 plant and animal species are federally listed as threatened. The island nation is one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, with upwards of 80% of its plant and animal species found nowhere else.
The wildfires could wipe out some species directly or, in the aftermath, through loss of food, habitat and shelter.
It’s an extreme situation for a country that normally experiences some level of recurring natural fire.
“Many Australian plants and animals are fire-adapted, but this fire event occurred at a scale and intensity that is unprecedented,” says wildlife ecologist Sarah Legge, a professor at the Australian National University and principal research fellow with the University of Queensland.
“When fires are smaller in area and of lower intensity, relatively smaller proportions of populations are affected and species are able to recover between fire events,” she says. “Now, in this event, such large areas have been simultaneously affected so severely that populations will struggle to recover.”
Climate change is making Australia’s fire seasons longer and more severe. And fire frequency is also increasing in many areas of the country, making it harder for even fire-adapted species to bounce back from each successive event.
“We’re already seeing ecosystem collapse in some areas,” Legge says. “For example, the alpine ash forests of the high country are being transformed from biodiverse wet eucalyptus to an attenuated, scrubbier and more flammable forest.”
The scale and intensity of fires are bad news for a lot of wildlife, and experts estimate that around 200 threatened species have already been affected.
Some could be brought to the brink of extinction. The Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-sized endangered marsupial, may have already lost as much as 95% of its habitat.
A similar fate could await the long-footed potoroo, a small marsupial found in east Gippsland, Victoria, and the spring midge orchid near Batemans Bay on the coast of New South Wales, says Legge. Species with the smallest distributions are at the greatest risk, even those few with protective measures in place.
“For some species, many years of conservation effort have been obliterated in the space of a few weeks,” she says. “We face a future where these events will recur at increasing frequency.”
Extinction History
Although the current news is grim, Australia’s wildlife crisis actually predates the most recent fires and can be traced back to the beginning of European colonization.
At least 90 species have gone extinct in Australia over the past two centuries, and the country now has the inglorious honor of holding the record for the most mammalian extinctions in the world, including the first mammal declared extinct from climate change — the Bramble Cay melomys.
In fact, in the past 200 years the country has lost more biodiversity than any other developed nation, according to a November 2019 study published in Conservation Letters, which Legge co-authored. The biggest drivers of these losses include invasive species and rampant habitat destruction.
And all these historical problems are compounded by a lack of modern political will.
Recent research by The Guardian found that under 40% of Australia’s federally listed threatened species have accompanying recovery plans. The paper also found that no new critical habitat for threatened species has been listed since 2005.
The inaction has come with a cost. Australia has lost a third of its native vegetation since European colonization, according to a study published last year in Conservation Science and Practice. Researchers also found that the majority of the species listed as threatened are seriously affected by habitat loss, which comes from clearing land for agriculture, mining and other development.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
In 1999 Australia passed the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) to help protect the country’s biodiversity and ecological communities. But since then the Act has done little to stop habitat destruction. The study estimated that 19 million acres (7.7 million hectares) of potential forest and woodland habitat for threatened species were destroyed between 2000 and 2017, much of it to create livestock pasture.
Shockingly 93% of that lost land was never referred to the federal government to be evaluated for the development’s potential impact on nearby species — a requirement under the guidelines of the EPBC Act.
This was more than a policy failure.
“It’s hard for any reasonable person to see how 7 million hectares of unassessed, unapproved destruction of threatened species habitat can be other than unlawful,” Martin Taylor, one of the report’s co-authors and a conservation science manager at the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia, said when the report was released in September. “The government is failing to enforce a law designed to halt Australia’s extinction crisis.”
The Mount Cooper striped skink lost 25% of its potential habitat to development during this period, making it one of the biggest losers in the enforcement failure. The Keighery’s macarthuria, a small flowing shrub, lost 23% and the southern black‐throated finch 10%.
Even more well-known species suffered. The beloved koala — perhaps the poster child for the current fires — lost around 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares), 2% of its potential habitat.
Photo: University of Sydney
The study’s authors concluded that “Australia’s flagship environmental legislation is almost completely ineffective at limiting the ongoing loss of potential habitat for listed terrestrial species and communities… As habitat loss is the primary cause of species extinction, we urge mechanisms that protect habitat be embedded within the federal legislation.”
The federal government does not appear to have responded to the study about the EPBC Act, but the month after the study was published it appointed a review of the law with the goal of reducing what it called “green tape” and making things even easier for businesses and farmers. The move was praised by the National Farmers’ Federation in an Oct. 29 press release that called the Act “convoluted.”
Political Will and Public Pressure
Weak enforcement of legislation isn’t the only problem. Protective efforts also suffer from a lack of funding.
The Conservation Letters study revealed that Australia is spending just 15% of what’s needed to avoid extinctions and recover its threatened species. And it spends far less than many other countries, such as the United States, which has a high success rate for saving species listed as endangered — though it should be noted that the Trump administration has taken steps to weaken the Endangered Species Act, which has been responsible for those accomplishments.
Australia would likely need an estimated $1.27 billion (U.S.) a year to recover its listed threatened species. If that seems like a big price tag, the study’s authors point out that the government gave out $735 million in tax credits to coal companies alone in 2018. Australian citizens, meanwhile, spend twice the needed amount every year caring for their pet cats (which are another major driver of native species loss).
“Funding for conservation — and conservation actions — tends to be short-term and ephemeral, and thus doesn’t support long-lasting change or improvements,” says Legge. “Responsibility for the environment is shared between states/territories and the commonwealth, which can lead to buck-passing.”
At the helm now is Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has been criticized for his cozy relationship with the coal industry and for not doing enough to tackle the climate crisis — something he’s been increasingly called out on amid the current wildfires.
His inaction on climate change has earned him comparisons to President Trump, who continues to roll back environmental regulations in the United States. As California firefighters arrived last week in Australia to help fight blazes fueled by the hottest and driest year on record, Trump moved to weaken his country’s landmark National Environmental Policy Act and exclude climate change from analyses of the potential impact of infrastructure projects.
Will Australia take a different course and galvanize the public and politicians around action to strengthen environmental regulations to fight climate change and protect wildlife?
Legge says she already sees the events pulling communities together and inspiring an urge to “do something.” She hopes it results in researchers and governments working together in a more coordinated way to tackle the crisis.
“Still, there will have to be a seismic shift in our approach, given the potential for fires to wipe out previous efforts so quickly and thoroughly,” she says. “I think most conservationists are feeling shell-shocked right now — how do we respond to this event, and to this future?”
These are questions the whole world will need to answer.
Books out this month also address protecting pollinators, Florida panthers and other endangered species.
The New Year got off to a rocky start, with deadly fires throughout Australia and international political tensions rising to a frightening level.
What’s the best way to get past the dread and return to action? One option is to turn your attention toward new and proven ideas for saving what matters most.
Below you’ll find the eight most interesting, inspiring and energizing new books coming out in January 2020. Half of them cover the climate crisis in one way or another, while the rest take on issues related to animals and wildlife. Some are for professional conservationists, while others are for anyone interested in the issues that define our modern world. All are worth your time.
Ever feel paralyzed by the scope and threat of climate change? You’re not alone, but this new book aims to turn that around and get people moving. Part of it discusses the best individual actions we can all take, while the rest focuses on identifying the most important societal and political actions to prioritize. Along the way the book busts some myths perpetuated by the climate-denier industry and even debunks a few misconceptions held by well-meaning environmentalists. Jaccard can be a bit too provocative at times, but he backs his conclusions up with the latest science and delivers a book worth reading and discussing — not to mention acting upon. (Guide is out in paperback this month, with a free open-access PDF available in February.)
Méndez argues that the climate crisis is also a crisis for public health, especially in lower-income communities of color, and that both problems can only be solved by addressing issues of environmental justice. His book, subtitled “How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement,” taps into Méndez’s own research into California communities and grassroots activism to show how the problems that plague us can also bring us together — but only if we invite everyone to the table.
This broadly themed book addresses the complexities of our social environments — for example, how group behavior gives rise to bullying — but a lot of what it discusses applies to worldwide environmental issues, too. The result is a combination of psychology and economics that illustrates how the human “herd instinct” can be put to good use to solve the climate crisis and other problems.
Every day is Earth Day, just as every day is another opportunity to eat a cookie — or help teach kids to take care of the planet. This is the sixth book in the deliciously fun “Go Green with Sesame Street” series, which just goes to show you that “C is for Conservation.”
Pittman has done more than probably any other newspaper journalist to document the twists and turns of efforts to conserve and protect the Florida panther — not to mention the failures we’ve had along the way. Now he revisits the history of these critically endangered big cats and the people who helped them in this remarkable work of longform reporting.
A stunningly beautiful photo book — shot like a moody black-and-white movie — showcasing endangered species and the fragile, human-influenced environments in which they precariously hang on. Biologist E.O. Wilson (Half-Earth) provides the foreword.
Here’s something different: a thick, square-bound magazine from the folks behind The Nib, the web’s best political cartooning site (which often covers environmental topics). This collection includes short stories, art and gags by more than three dozen writers and cartoonists, covering topics like extinction, wildlife trafficking, livestock, and our relationships with our pets. The result is a heady mix of politics, journalism, philosophy and eye-opening humor.
Victory gardens helped feed communities and troops during the first and second world wars. This book aims to translate that success to a similar effort: establishing year-round pollinator-friendly gardens in our backyards to help boost populations of bees, birds, bats, butterflies and other species — and in the process help “win the war against pollinator decline.” It’s not just for backyards, though; Eierman also discusses lawn alternatives (get rid of that grass!) and how to apply the same ideas to other areas throughout our developed communities. The book includes a resource list to help readers apply its recommendations to the needs of plants and wildlife in various parts of the country.
Well, that’s it for this month. Stay tuned for a fresh batch of books on February’s list in a few short weeks. Until then you can find dozens of additional eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.
“Every year the ocean waters get warmer, and the reason is because of the heat-trapping gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere,” says 
And it’s not alone. According to research published this month in the 
What’s the best way to get past the dread and return to action? One option is to turn your attention toward new and proven ideas for saving what matters most.
The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success
Climate Change From the Streets
Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work
It’s Earth Day, Cookie Monster!
And Here We Are: Stories From the Sixth Extinction
The Nib: Animals
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