The Words of Water: Why Environmentalists Are Losing the Water Wars

It all boils down to diluted language that minimizes the perception of how we’re devastating our rivers and other bodies of water.

In the 1870s the colonizing American government rounded up “Indians” and put them in boarding schools and forced them to learn English. The American government knew one thing: If you take away a person’s language, you take away their culture and their soul. It’s the first and most important step of colonization and a necessary type of violent oppression. If you want to subdue people and landscapes and cultures, you must first describe and define them in the words of the oppressor and colonizer and teach them to use those words.

Environmentalists are losing the “water wars” because they have had their language stolen — they are taught to use the language of their oppressor, and they often repeat that story, and thereby oppression, constantly in their communications.

My first exposure to this problem was more than a decade ago when I was in a meeting with the head of a government organization that wanted (and actually still wants) to build a dam on the Cache la Poudre River in northern Colorado. I was complaining that the river was already being drained by dams and diversions, and he replied to me and said that what was actually happening was that “senior water-rights holders had ‘swept’ the river.”

My jaw dropped.

They weren’t “farmers” or “cities,” which are actual people who are harming the river — they were “senior water-rights holders.”

river farms — Turtle river watershed. Photo: Lance Cheung/USDA

They weren’t “draining the river.” They had “swept” it, as if the complete draining and destruction of the river made it cleaner.

And finally, it wasn’t even a “river.” It was just “water.”

Over the years I collected these words, metaphors and euphemisms because they’re repeated by the water agencies and establishment — I call them “water buffaloes” — and often by the environmental groups that work hand-in-hand with them. Here are just ten examples of a whole institutionalized and legalized system of linguistic and cultural oppression describing river destruction:

1. When farms and cities drain and destroy a river, the water buffaloes instead call it a “consumptive use.”
2. When environmentalists try to keep water in a river, it’s said to be a “non-consumptive use” rather than protecting a natural flowing river.
3. When one water-rights holder illegally takes another’s water, it’s said to be an “injury,” whereby the person is legally and financially injured, but not the river itself, which can be drained and destroyed.
4. When you drain water out of a river, your “water right” is said to be in “priority,” but the river itself usually has no right or priority at all.
5. When water is drained out of a river or trapped behind a dam, it’s called “storage” and likened to a “bank account.”
6. When water is purposely left in a river and flows in the actual riverbed, it’s said to be “delivered to the water-rights holders downstream,” or the riverbed is described as the “conveyance mechanism.”
7. When more water runs down the river than is minimally required by law, it’s called an “excess” or a “waste.”
8. The water buffaloes sometimes don’t call it a river, or even “water” — they call it “supplies.”
9. The water buffaloes also measure water in “acre-feet,” a phrase that describes draining water out of a river and placing it on land.
10. And finally, a big one: Believe it or not, when a “water right” is drained out of a river and trapped behind a dam, it is said to be legally “perfected.”

If you are a professional environmentalist and trained in water law or hydrology, you’re taught this language in college and law school. At work, you repeat it day after day in meetings, phone calls and emails. The water buffaloes like this because you use their language, and they invite you to their meetings and give you a seat at the table. At best, the language sanitizes the destruction of living rivers and entire nonhuman life forms. At worst, the language solidifies the systemic, institutionalized oppression of living rivers and the people who protect them, thereby stealing your culture and your values.

When Aldo Leopold paddled through the 2-million-acre wetland of the Colorado River Delta in 1922, he said the river was “everywhere and nowhere” and described it as a “milk and honey wilderness” full of “hundreds of lagoons” containing “deer, quail, raccoon, bobcat, jaguar and vast flocks of waterfowl.” Now the Colorado River Delta is almost 100 percent drained, and the small effort to restore it is often described with bland scientific terminology. The tiny amount of water that the United States and Mexico are allowing to be pumped into the “restoration zones” is measured in “acre-feet.”

Language is a tool of political manipulation — when you use and repeat your opponent’s language, you solidify their status and your own oppression.

Consider this mumbo-jumbo that you hear when talking to water agencies: “When a water right is in priority, you perfect it by sweeping the river so that excess supplies are held in storage for consumptive use.”

What really happened? They dammed, drained and destroyed a river, which is a living, breathing life force — the veins of the planet — providing survival to a vast array of nonhuman creatures that have entire cultures and languages of their own.

If they steal your language, they steal your soul. Don’t let them.

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.

Naomi Klein: Gearing up for the Political Fight of Our Lives

The author and activist talks about climate hope, grief and her new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal .

This week millions of people from more than 150 countries are expected to take part in a global climate strike — an effort spurred by students who have been striking weekly to demand action on climate change.

In the United States, activists hope meaningful policy will follow protest. Naomi Klein’s book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal makes the case for one specific way forward — the proposed Green New Deal. It’s a plan to slash global emissions along with addressing other issues of economic, racial and gender justice.

“Young people around the world are cracking open the heart of the climate crisis, speaking of a deep longing for a future they thought they had but that is disappearing with each day that adults fail to act,” she writes in the book.

For years Klein — author of bestsellers such as The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything — has been sounding an alarm about the growing climate crisis, but also peeling the curtain back on the machinations of the powerful interests that are profiting from the fallout.

Her latest, a collection of essays and speeches spanning 10 years along with timely new material, provides a compelling look at how we got to where we are and where to go next. We spoke to Klein about why the Green New Deal is gaining momentum, why justice is at the core of climate action, and what’s at stake in the 2020 election.

Your book is a progression of your essays over the span of a decade. What did you notice in looking back over those years?

I found reasons for hope and there was also a lot of grief. We’ve lost a lot over a decade. This is really such a fast-moving crisis, even though it gets marketed as a slow-moving crisis.

Author Naomi Klein. (Photo by Kourosh Keshiri)

I don’t think we’re losing Arctic ice or Antarctic ice in a manner that is at all slow. I write in the book about my time at the Great Barrier Reef in the aftermath of the huge [coral reef] die-off there — it was incredibly rapid. [Today] the Amazon is in flames, as are so many tropical forests. These are the major features of our planet and they are rapidly changing.

It’s also enraging. At the presidential Democratic primary debates Joe Biden actually said that the reason [the Obama administration] didn’t take action when they were in office was because they didn’t know how bad things were. But they did know.

At the same time, I also feel a tremendous sense of excitement and hope. Here we are talking about an economy-wide transformation thanks to absolutely incredible grassroots organizing by groups like Sunrise and bold leadership from folks like [Representative] Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the Squad and [Senator] Ed Markey.

You write a lot in the book about intersectionality — why things like universal health care and economic justice issues need to be part of action on climate change — which is also a core part of the Green New Deal. Why is that important?

I think there are common-sense reasons and there are strategic reasons.

I was in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and it was obvious that the huge loss of life — studies put the number at around 3,000 or 5,000 — was not as a result of those ferocious winds and waves. People did die from those, but not by the thousands. They died in the thousands because the healthcare system had been systematically neglected, partially privatized, was so brittle and neglected that it was knocked out by the storm along with the electricity system that had also been so systematically neglected and prepared for privatization. And so that was what killed people.

To me the idea that health care is somehow an add-on to what a climate policy should be seems to come from folks who haven’t spent much time in real-world places that have been devastated by climate change-charged disasters.

But then there’s also the strategic reason, which is that we need to build a vision that people will fight for, that people will see benefits from in the here and now. One of the big problems with these kind of market-based responses such as a carbon tax, cap and trade or some rollout of renewables is that for a lot of working people struggling with economic insecurity, these policies have come to be equated with their electricity bill going up at the same time they’re watching the big polluters get completely off the hook.

And that’s why in France the slogan of the Yellow Vests [grassroots movement] was, “You care about the end of the world, we care about the end of the month.” I think the beauty of the intersectional vision of the Green New Deal that includes well-paying unionized jobs and the need for treating health care as a human right and child care as a human right, is that it doesn’t make people choose between the end of the month and the end of the world.

There have been a lot of ideas over the years about how we should tackle the climate crisis. Why is the Green New Deal getting so much support now?

A lot of different reasons. Some of it has to do with brilliant organizing and courageous leadership from the people already mentioned. And just the energy and the moral clarity of this young generation of climate activists who are really clear that they are fighting for survival. They’re fighting for their futures, and we’re just plain out of time, and they’re not interested in hearing speeches about how seriously politicians take climate change if they don’t actually have a plan that’s in line with the science to cut global emissions in half in the next 11 years.

I think that’s really changed the political landscape.

I think the other thing that’s made people so open to an approach like the Green New Deal — which brings together economic, racial and gender justice with the need to lower emissions very, very quickly — is a widespread sense that the system we have is failing people on multiple fronts.

If we’re going to transform our economy as the IPCC has told us we have to do, then why wouldn’t we transform it in a way that attempts to address and redress all of these other crises at the same time?

Because we can’t ask people to choose between existential crises. If your family is facing eviction, if you’re afraid your kids are going to get shot by police, these are existential crises for you and it doesn’t help to have environmentalists going, “Yeah, yeah, but we have an existential crisis that’s for the whole world.” It doesn’t matter for you. It’s all existential, right? So we need a plan that says you don’t have to choose.

This would obviously be a big economic and societal shift, and yet we have a president who can’t even stand to see light bulbs getting more efficient. It feels like we have a really long way to go in a very short amount of time. How do you reconcile that?

It feels that way because it’s true. I’m in no way sanguine about our chances. I think that our chances of pulling this off are slim. But there is a pathway. When I wrote This Changes Everything in 2014 there were no major politicians who had any chance of governing who understood the scale of change required.

And now we have candidates that are just trying to outdo each other for who is going to spend more trillions of dollars transforming the economy in the face of the climate crisis.

What’s the pathway that you see as we head into 2020?

The pathway for the United States is that you elect somebody to lead the Democratic Party and run against Donald Trump who puts a Green New Deal at the center of their platform. They win against Donald Trump with a clear democratic mandate to bring it in on day one. You try to get the Senate and hold onto the House of Representatives. Then roll momentum from the election into countering the backlash that will obviously come from the vested interests who will try to keep this from happening.

Like I said, I don’t think the chances of success are good, but to me, the stakes are so unimaginably high that if there’s any chance, then the only conversation that matters now is, how are we going to improve our chances? How are we going to build a more powerful coalition?

Right now I think it’s all about getting a candidate coming out of the primaries who understands the urgency, has a compelling, bold Green New Deal platform, and has a proven track record of taking on powerful vested interests. Because you can say you believe in this, but if you don’t have a track record of standing up to corporate power and in fact have the opposite, then you’re not a credible messenger. And there’s no reason to trust you, because this is going to be the political fight of our lives.

Grizzly Reintroduction Into the North Cascades: A Question of Political Climate

Will the Trump administration’s recent changes to the implementation of the Endangered Species Act complicate the delicate strategy of grizzly restoration in this remote Washington wilderness?

Jack Oelfke, chief of natural and cultural resources for North Cascades National Park, sits outside behind the park’s main visitor center and mulls the challenges of establishing a healthy grizzly bear population in northwest Washington.

Oelfke has been working on wilderness issues for decades, and grizzly reintroduction has been his primary focus the past five years. Issues as culturally complicated as grizzles, he says, aren’t solved by time and focus alone.

“Reintroduction might be easier with some species — none of them are easy — but with the grizzlies the potential threats are there,” Oelfke says. “But if we want to honor the ethic of the Endangered Species Act, we need to reintroduce the grizzly.”

Grizzlies were first protected by the Act in 1975 after being nearly wiped out from most of their range in the 19th century. At the time the largest — and still the best-known — grizzly population in the contiguous United States lived in Yellowstone National Park. But small populations also persisted in four other areas along the Canadian border, including the North Cascades, which in 1991 was declared a suitable space to further grow and restore the species’ population. The remote, 9,800-square-mile ecosystem, a combination of glacier-cut peaks and thick virgin forests, is located under three hours’ drive from Seattle but remains relatively undisturbed.

Mount Shuksan and Picture Lake at North Cascades National Park and Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Photo: Jeff Hollett (public domain)

Reestablishing the species here hasn’t moved forward much in the past three decades. Biologists estimate that fewer than ten grizzlies roam the region, just a fraction of the 200 bears that would constitute a biologically restored, genetically healthy population.

But efforts to boost those numbers continue — albeit in a halting manner. After years of development, a plan to bring more grizzlies to the North Cascades was opened for public comment period in 2017. Under the plan reintroduction could take one of four forms: no action; ecosystem evaluation restoration (two years of capturing, transporting and releasing bears into the North Cascades complex); incremental restoration (moving more bears to the area more slowly); or expedited restoration (restoring the population every summer and fall until the goal of 200 bears is reached). The comment period closed ahead of schedule but it was recently re-opened again, with submissions due in October 2019.

Ryan Zinke grizzly — Then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announces support of Grizzly Bear Restoration efforts in the North Cascades Ecosystem, March 23, 2018 (public domain)

What does the near future hold for this plan? Oelfke appears cautious when speaking about the federal government’s recent reinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act — and with good reason. Two changes to the way the Act will be implemented could cause complications for reintroduction efforts.

First, the Trump administration has redefined how the Act will respond to conditions that species may face in the “foreseeable future,” making it harder to protect them from threats related to climate change. Second, it has added a requirement for considering the economic impact of reintroducing endangered or threatened species.

Despite the potential political pitfalls, Oelfke says he’s bullish about the future for grizzlies in the Cascades because of their remarkable adaptability and diverse diet.

“If you look at the historic range of grizzly bears, it goes far south well into Mexico and well into the Great Plains,” he says. He adds that the bears’ adaptability means grizzlies in the Cascades should do fairly well under current climate change scenarios, unlike some other species in the region that depend upon specific habitat conditions — snow-dependent wolverines, for example, which need around ten feet of snow to build their dens. Climate change models vary, as does the perception of how climate change will threaten grizzlies in the region, but what remains fixed is the ecosystem requirements for grizzlies — for all species, really — to have a large and diverse genetic pool.

As far as interpreting the economic impacts of grizzlies, Oelfke says it’s more about familiar battles of the past than about the future of climate change.

“Those who have expressed concern about this reintroduction are the cattle and sheep industry, because they fear loss of livestock,” he says. “Around the ecosystems where grizzlies exist, such as Yellowstone, there is some livestock depredation. But I would argue it’s quite small.”

The sprawling orchard industry on the southeastern boundary of the ecosystem has also expressed worries about Ursus arctos horribilis roaming near their apples, peaches and cherries, but Oelfke notes that many of these sites already use electric fencing to successfully thwart the black bears that also live in the region.

Although the federal government seems intent on putting a price tag on grizzlies, the economic value of a native species might actually run somewhere between priceless and infinite due to the ecosystem services the bears would provide. For example, grizzly droppings disperse seeds as the animals roam throughout the forest, a process that also helps fertilize the ground with rich nutrients from salmon.

Oelfke, who worked in the backcountry of Glacier National Park for ten years, says he used to see the influence of grizzlies “all the time. They’d churn up the ground, like rototilling gardens of subalpine meadow, which has very positive effects on the ecosystem.”

The efforts in North Cascades draw on years of experience restoring grizzlies in other parts of the country such as the Cabinet-Yaak area of Montana, where Jessie Grossman says she’s seen firsthand how the Endangered Species Act has helped to protect the species.

Grizzlies were almost extinct within the Cabinet-Yaak recovery zone 30 years ago. “They were in single digits,” says Grossman, project coordinator for the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, an organization that seeks to establish habitat connectivity between the United States and Canada. “They could have been extinct in this part of the world without the Endangered Species Act. The way it was written has done a lot of good.” Like the North Cascades, Cabinet-Yaak is still an active grizzly recovery area, with only about 50 bears.

The Trump administration’s changes to the Endangered Species Act could put that fragile recovery and others like it at risk.

“The Act is really important to conservation successes,” she says. “It allowed not only reintroduction but recovery of a lot of species. Any erosion of that Act is an erosion of a potential to protect or recover an important species.”

Grossman says she knows not everyone shares her personal affinity for grizzlies, but she sees them as a charismatic species that’s emblematic of an overall healthy ecosystem.

“Working on grizzlies is a way to have a tangible goal towards an intact, resilient ecosystem,” she says. “Connected landscapes are more resilient to climate change, and the species that are more genetically diverse within that connected landscape are more resilient.”

No matter what happens, the North Cascades remains important to the future of the grizzly species as a whole. Yellowstone grizzlies were recently placed back under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, in no small part due to the threat that population faces from climate change. Protecting and restoring the bears in other locations will help ensure the species’ long-term survival.

Back at the North Cascades Visitor Center, I see park ranger Marissa Bluestein wrapping up a demonstration discussing how climate change has already affected the wolverine population in the park. Even if grizzlies are more adaptable than other species to climate change, the overall ecosystem is not. She crystalized the crisis in one question:

“What would you do if your home kept shrinking?”

Neonicotinoid Pesticides Have Caused A Huge Surge in the Toxicity of U.S. Agriculture

The most widely used class of insecticides is dangerous for much more than its intended target, new research finds.

Scientists are warning about a second Silent Spring after a new study found that U.S. agriculture is 48 times more toxic to insects than it was 20 years ago.

A peer-reviewed study published in the journal PLOS One found that 92 percent of that toxic load can be attributed to neonicotinoids — the most widely used class of insecticides.

Neonics, as they are commonly called, are 1,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT, the infamous pesticide exposed by Rachel Carson’s work in the 1960s, says Dr. Kendra Klein, a report co-author and senior scientist at Friends of the Earth.

A big reason that neonics are so dangerous is that they persist in the environment — sometimes lasting up to 1,000 days. They remain in the soil and can be taken up by other plants. They’re also water soluble, so they wash into rivers, streams and wetlands. Their toxicity can build up in the environment and cascade from soil to plants, insects to birds.

Neonics first hit the agriculture market in the 1990s and are mostly applied as a coating on seeds. They’re used on 140 different crops but most prevalently on corn and soybeans.

“Farmers have a great deal of trouble finding uncoated seeds because these [pesticide] companies also dominate the seed market,” says Klein.

This is not the first study to raise concern about neonics. Based on earlier warnings, the European Union banned their use in outdoor agriculture last year. Similar efforts have been initiated in the United States but haven’t gained much traction so far. One bill, the Saving America’s Pollinators Act, which would suspend the use of neonics and establish a review process for other pesticides that could harm pollinators, has yet to make it out of committee in the House of Representatives, where it was introduced.

“Pesticide companies have a great deal of power in Washington, D.C.,” says Klein.

Other recent research on the plight of insects has been grim. A study published in April in Biological Conservation warned that 40 percent of the world’s insect species are facing extinction in the next few decades.

That’s bad news not just for insects but for the rest of us, too.

“Insects are the basis of the food webs that sustain all life on Earth,” says Klein. “Without insects we would have ecosystem collapse.”

For more, check out our video:

Overshoot: Trump’s Deregulatory Zeal Goes Beyond Even Where Industry Asks Him to Go

Automakers, utilities and appliance makers actually oppose some of the planned deregulation. But antiregulation hardliners are winning out.

The Trump EPA last month proposed a new plan to remove oil and gas developers’ responsibility for detecting and fixing methane leaks in their wells, pipelines and storage operations. This proposal to axe the Obama-era methane rule is notable for two reasons. First, it is a huge step backward in the race to stabilize the climate, just at the moment scientists warn we need to move forward with unprecedented speed. Second, it’s the latest in a growing list of Trump rollbacks opposed by the very industries they’re purportedly intended to help.

The Obama EPA put the methane rule in place for good reason: Methane is a powerful driver of climate disruption. While it doesn’t linger in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, for the 10 or 20 years it does stay up there it packs 80 times the heat-trapping punch. There’s increasing evidence that such methane leaks may be far greater in number and volume than previously thought. Unless stopped, they threaten to undermine global efforts to stem the climate crisis.

The world’s largest energy companies don’t seem to be particularly motivated by such concerns, so it was a surprise to some that ExxonMobil, Shell and BP publicly opposed the rollback. They do have a reason: fear that the move might undercut their sales pitch for natural gas as a cleaner source of energy than coal.

Still, one might expect even this most rabid anti-environment administration to yield to such industry titans. No such luck, and not for the first time:

In June a group of 17 car companies signed a letter asking Trump to temper his rollback of the biggest climate initiative of the Obama presidency — the greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars. This summer four large automakers took an even more aggressive stance, joining a pact with California to oppose the rollback. And just a few days ago, the arch-conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the chorus of voices urging Trump officials to rethink their plans.
Electric utilities that own coal-fired power plants have opposed steps initiated by the Trump administration this spring to roll back the Obama EPA’s limits on mercury pollution from those very same power plants.
The administration’s reluctance to implement the 2016 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which would cut the use of potent greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), has drawn fire from the air-conditioning and refrigeration industries that use the compounds. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and more than a dozen Republican senators have weighed in, urging Trump to send the Kigali Amendment to the Senate for ratification.
The administration’s repeated efforts to eliminate or cut funding for the Energy Star program, which sets energy-efficiency labeling standards for appliances, electronics, lighting and other products, have met with consistent opposition from trade groups representing manufacturers, retailers and utilities.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s planned vehicle-to-vehicle communications (“V2V”) rule, expected to ease smog-caused traffic congestion and prevent hundreds of thousands of crashes and 1,000-plus fatalities annually, has stalled under the Trump administration. The auto industry supports the rule, despite its $2 to $5 billion price tag, but it appears to have run afoul of Trump’s “2 for 1” executive order prohibiting the issuance of any new rule absent the elimination of two existing rules sufficient to offset the costs of the new one.

In some of these instances, industry is split, and the Trump administration is choosing the scofflaws and ideological hardliners over the mainstream companies that tend to be more concerned about their public image, which used to be the backbone of the Republican Party. The methane rollback, while opposed by Shell and other big energy companies, comes at the request of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a trade group representing small drillers (with less than $5 million in sales) whose members are reportedly “giddy” at their unprecedented access to this administration. Trump’s planned rollback of the clean-car standards is backed by oil-industry groups and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. In other instances, such as the 2-for-1 order stalling progress on V2V vehicle safety standards, the ideological tail seems to be wagging the dog.

What seems lost on the deregulation hawks in the Trump administration is that the marketplace often needs regulation to spur innovation and growth. Before car companies install V2V technologies, they need government to set a standard for the whole industry so they can be assured other cars on the road will speak the same language. It’s the same for methane regulation. It’s not that companies particularly want to pollute. They’re just locked in a collective action problem: If some developers invest in plugging up their own leaks, they risk being undersold in the marketplace by free riders who don’t bother. Similarly, Energy Star labels help companies sell products, and standards that force car makers to cut emissions and refrigerant manufacturers to phase out HFCs also help U.S. companies stay ahead of the curve and remain competitive globally in the new green economy. Some of the big public-facing companies with a public image to uphold recognize this. The hardliners in the Trump administration do not.

As Adam Smith understood centuries ago, a functioning “free” marketplace needs a government to set the rules of the road and provide a level playing field. The fringe elements of the far-right wing that have gotten Trump’s ear have become so ossified in their own simplistic tropes about “freedom” and “job-killing regulations” that they’ve lost touch with common sense and with the basic tenets of the free-market economics they purport to uphold. And in the process, they’re upending crucial policies, the loss of which will cost the environment — and companies — dearly in the long run.

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.

Why Indigenous Hunting Is Essential to Forest Sustainability

Hunting has a bad reputation and is rarely considered in forest governance and conservation strategies. But what if, instead, we tried to learn from it?

Many of us think of the Amazon as an untouched wilderness, but people have been thriving in these diverse environments for millennia. Due to this long history, the knowledge that Indigenous and forest communities pass between generations about plants, animals and forest ecology is incredibly rich and detailed and easily dwarfs that of any expert.

For one thing, Indigenous people see animals and humans as integral to nature. This holistic view is often missing in contemporary, science-based forest governance and conservation strategies, which tend to focus solely on forest cover.

In my Silent Forest project I’m investigating how Indigenous communities in Colombia apply traditional ecological knowledge in wildlife management. Based on my research so far, I would like to argue that subsistence hunting, and the traditional ecological knowledge that guides and regulates it, must be recognized as a key forest-management strategy.

Obviously hunting of wild animals is unpopular among conservationists, and meaningless poaching for exotic pets and animal parts can never be justified. However, in many areas around the world, Indigenous and forest communities have hunted, and continue to hunt, for subsistence. For them hunting is not a sport or a recreational activity. It’s a food source and a way to balance animal populations. So, even though it may sound paradoxical at first, hunting can actually strengthen long-term environmental management, because it’s how Indigenous and forest communities assess forest health and meet their food-security and livelihood needs. It’s also why Indigenous and forest communities often have a vested interest in healthy forests and thriving wildlife.

hunted peccary — Hunted white-lipped peccary. Photo: Torsten Krause

At the same time, there’s an increasing risk of overhunting and commercialization, both by Indigenous and forest communities themselves and by the people who live in the region or come for business. Currently it’s relatively easy to buy wild meat in local markets, even though it’s illegal to sell meat sourced from wild animals in most Amazonian countries.

It’s likely that the scale of hunting and trade of wild meat in the Amazon is substantial. Overhunting should be a concern, not only for the sake of biodiversity conservation, but because large mammals and birds, like tapirs, deer, wooly monkeys or curassows, disperse seeds of many tropical tree species, playing critical ecological role in the forest food webs. Unfortunately, because this activity is illegal, the commercialization of wild meat goes largely unmonitored. Only a few studies have attempted to quantify its extent, though there’s still a shortage of data.

Clearly hunting is a leverage point for effective forest governance, but it does require careful balancing.

What Gets Measured Gets Done

Earlier this year I visited the Indigenous reserve of TICOYA — which stands for its three ethnicities, the Ticuna, Cocama and Yagua — in the Amazon Department of Colombia. There I spoke with Indigenous hunters from different communities living in the reserve. Many of them told me they noticed animal populations have declined. They also expressed worry that they personally engage in unlawful activities if they sell the meat, but admitted that there are few alternatives for obtaining necessary cash incomes for their families.

Loretoyacu River, Colombia, March 2019 — Loretoyacu River, Colombia. Photo: Torsten Krause

This shows how unmanaged subsistence hunting, in combination with illegality of trade in wild meat, can create uncontrollable conditions, where people still hunt and sell their catch but do so in secret and without reporting quantities or which species they hunt. This complicates monitoring and evaluation, making wildlife management unruly and the official data unreliable.

It also opens up issues related to justice: Indigenous people are frequently marginalized by state authorities, and their traditional forms of management are less often applied.

Meanwhile life in the Amazon region is changing. New market dynamics, environmental laws, cultural changes and loss of traditional ecological knowledge in the countries that share the Amazon all affect wildlife.

On one hand, food preferences among Indigenous people seem to be shifting. Young people are losing interest in hunting, and many look for jobs and opportunities in the cities.

On the other hand, the region is going through rapid development and national economic policies often see forest lands and resources for value extraction, which generates conflicts with Indigenous rights. The new waves of onslaught particularly strike the eye in Brazil, but manifest in most Amazonian countries. Economic development attracts many non-Indigenous settlers who come to work in mining or agriculture and do not have sensitive ecological knowledge or care for nature but like to eat wild meat or hunt for recreational purposes.

On top of these changes and emerging threats, we should keep in mind that illegal trade in timber and fauna is very profitable. There seems to be a surge in international demand for the parts of wild animals such as jaguar teeth, bones and hides.

The Dawning of the Indigenous Regime

All these links need to be better studied and understood. However, in these conditions of rapid change and high uncertainty, we have to make the best of what we have. That includes the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous people and forest communities.

In fact, those communities could help monitor the wildlife and support the design of fair, equitable and effective wildlife and forest management, as well as its implementation.

That’s important because research clearly shows that Indigenous territories are crucial for forest conservation. These lands typically have much lower rates of deforestation and forest degradation than the state-administered areas. In this sense, the value of traditional ecological knowledge is indispensable, and Indigenous institutions are the cornerstone of sustainable use of forest resources.

I saw this in action in Colombia, where hunters of the Indigenous, multi-ethnic TICOYA reserve understand the might of institutionalized collective action. Four years ago some of the hunters formed an association with the local Ticuna name Airumakuchi (loosely translated into “tigers of the water”).

talking to hunters — Talking to hunters in Ticoya. Photo courtesy Torsten Krause

Airumakuchi aims to unite the hunters of the Indigenous reserve and start to discuss wildlife management in order to maintain and increase the abundance of wild animals and attract them back to the forests surrounding the communities. In the initial phase, Airumakuchi received support from a large project led by the Center for International Forestry Research. Now the association stands alone as it strives to secure sufficient support from the state authorities.

The hunters may hold the keys to sustainable wildlife management, but it won’t happen without a system of checks and balances, informed by animal population monitoring with the ability to detect violations and enforce sanctions through local institutions designed for that purpose. At the same time hunting regulations — such as the designation and rotation of hunting territories, species dependent quotas and hunting seasons — have to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge and be designed and monitored by the hunting association, with the participation of the communities in the reserve.

Going further, Amazonian governments and their regional environmental authorities should contemplate testing small-scale legal trade of wild meat hunted by licensed Indigenous hunters coming from “certified” and sustainably managed forest areas. Such pilot projects can deliver metrics for monitoring and evaluation. For example, people who live in Brazil’s Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve have the right to traditional extractive practices such as hunting, fishing and harvesting of wild plants. And this is not the only such case; so-called “extractive reserves” are common and effective in Brazil. Wildlife-management strategies in other countries could learn from these examples too.

Sustainable forest management is easier said than done. But precisely for all the same reasons, a decentralized approach with organized local action can work. Empowering and investing in local hunter groups, providing forest and Indigenous communities with legal and practical tools to manage and benefit from their forests, could shape the practice of sustainable forest resource use while protecting the wildlife and increasing governance cost-efficiency. And that’s why Indigenous hunting should be included in any forest-management strategy.

This story is produced with support from the Swedish International Agriculture Network Initiative, SIANI.

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.

How to Fight Fake Climate Science on YouTube

A new study finds that fake science videos get millions of hits on YouTube. But scientists can help fix misinformation about climate change and other scientific topics.

This story was originally published by Ensia.

You probably know you can’t believe everything you see on the Internet. But you may still be surprised to find how easily fake science makes its way through YouTube and other social media sites — and how intentionally it’s being promoted.

A new study from a researcher at Aachen University in Germany about the prevalence of inaccurate climate science and conspiracy theories on YouTube illustrates the grim reality, but also a way to fix it.

The study used 10 different search terms on YouTube, such as “climate change,” “climate science,” “geoengineering” and “climate hacking,” and analyzed the results to see which videos supported the scientific consensus around climate change and which did not.

It also used an internet tool called Tor, which anonymizes users, in order to avoid YouTube’s practice of personalizing search results based on previously watched videos, location and other demographics.

Overall, most videos in the 200-video sample disagreed with the scientific consensus around climate change, and of those, 85 percent actively spread conspiracy theories. Videos that agreed with scientific consensus received more total views than those that disagreed, but by only 2,300 views — and both categories had almost 17 million views each.

YouTube has taken some steps to counter this, outlined in an update it published on its blog in July 2018. One major change was the addition of blurbs drawn from Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica next to videos on “well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation,” such as the moon landing.

But the study’s author, Joachim Allgaier, explores another solution that doesn’t involve YouTube changing its guidelines or algorithms. In the study, he writes, “YouTube and other online video-sharing websites have an enormous potential as tools for science and environmental education … [T]he professional communities from these subject areas will do well to engage effectively with these communication channels.”

In other words, scientists should step up to the plate and produce more YouTube videos that fit with the facts.

Getting more scientists actively engaged in science education is no easy feat — but, at least on YouTube, it is already happening. Channels like SciShow, Physics Girl, The Brain Scoop and more provide a wide range of science content. In Allgaier’s study, four videos from “Science YouTubers,” including SciShow, appeared in the sample and had the third highest views of all videos in the sample.

Scientists don’t necessarily have to create a new YouTube channel, buy fancy video equipment and hire a team of script writers or video editors in order to have an impact. SciShow, for instance, is hosted by non-scientist YouTuber Hank Green and others, but hires scientists as consultants to develop curriculum and video ideas. Crash Course, a channel owned by the same education company as SciShow (it’s called Complexly, and it’s owned by Green and his brother), also hires chemistry and geography experts.

There’s another angle on this that Allgaier notes. When he used the search term “chemtrails,” all but one of the videos in the sample actively supported the common conspiracy theory. If someone did search for that information, there might not be any scientifically accurate videos to counter all the conspiracy content. A similar pattern appeared with the term “geoengineering,” and Allgaier writes that the scientific term has been “hijacked” by conspiracy advocates to push their own agenda.

So, there’s something to be said for using those terms to intentionally push more real science videos into the search results for common conspiracies like chemtrails, and possibly reclaim words like “geoengineering” that have been corrupted.

Fixing misinformation and fake science online is not an easy task, and it won’t happen overnight. But maybe, as Allgaier says, instead of waiting for YouTube to take action, scientists can start their own ball rolling.

September’s Best Environmental Books: The Green New Deal, Vanishing Species and Effective Activism

This month brings important new books by Naomi Klein, photographer Joel Sartore, Jonathan Safran Foer and water activist Maude Barlow.

September has arrived, summer vacation season is over and it’s time to get stuff done — not just for the month ahead but for the future of the planet.

With that in mind, this month sees the publication of an amazing array of books on a wide range of environmental issues, covering everything from climate change to burning rainforests to protecting our water. We’ve combed through the catalogs to pick the 13 best new eco-books coming out in September, including titles from an impressive team of experts and award-winning authors. Check out our list below, pick the ones that are best for you or your family, and read up on new ideas for fixing what we’ve broken — then get to work.

The Green New Deal:

To start off our list, this month brings not one but two books about the need for a Green New Deal.

First up, Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein offers us On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. This collection of new and previously published reports examines the state of the environment around the world, ranging from the Great Barrier Reef to the Vatican. And as you’d expect from a firebrand like Klein, this impassioned, justice-oriented book presents a call for immediate transformation of the systems that have produced the climate crisis (and so many other crises along the way).

Taking a slightly different path, economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin brings us The Green New Deal, a cautionary tale that warns the world economy (if not the world itself) will fall apart in under ten years if we don’t take immediate action to mothball extractive energy technologies. Subtitled “Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth,” Rifkin’s book serves as a call for world governments to decarbonize their economies, post-haste.

Wildlife and Conservation:

The Missing Lynx: The Past and Future of Britain’s Lost Mammals by Ross Barnett — Eurasian lynx were wiped out in Britain 1,300 years ago, but there’s now an effort to bring them back to their old stomping grounds. Could other species, even megafauna, soon follow? Barnett look at the lynx and other extinct British species to see what we’ve lost following their disappearance from the ecosystem and what we might gain from rewilding projects. Along the way, he asks if these types of projects should even be conducted at all. That’s a timely, important question in this era when we’re even talking about brining extinct species like the mammoth back to life.

Gone Is Gone: Wildlife Under Threat by Isabelle Groc — Aimed at teenage readers, this profusely illustrated and thoroughly researched book looks at endangered species around the world — and what we can do to help them. Conservation icon Jane Goodall provides the foreword. (For juvenile readers, check out a similarly themed book out this month: Survival by artist Louise McNaught and writer Anna Claybourne.)

Vanishing: The World’s Most Vulnerable Animals by Joel Sartore — Critically endangered and extinct-in-the-wild species get the spotlight in this stunning, 400-page photography book, the latest in Sartore’s “Photo Ark” project for National Geographic. This could be your last chance to see many of these species, so take some time to linger on each image and reflect on the very real faces of impending extinction.

Climate Change:

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer — If we want to fight climate change, we (individually and collectively) need to put down the breakfast sausages and rethink many of our other agricultural products. A stylishly written and thought-provoking book from the author of Everything Is Illuminated and Eating Animals.

The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America’s Coasts by Gilbert M. Gaul — Hoo boy, the coastal destructive coming our way due to climate change and sea-level rise is going to be expensive…and taxpayers will carry the costs. Gaul, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, recounts the history of coastal development (or over-development, to be precise) and lays out the case for changing the way we regulate and subsidize risky construction.

Activism and Environmental Justice:

Whose Water Is It, Anyway? Taking Water Protection Into Public Hands by Maude Barlow — One of the world’s most notable water-justice activists provides a step-by-step guide to help communities keep themselves from going dry due to the actions of irresponsible companies and governments. (Check out our interview with Barlow.)

Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community From the Mining Industry by Joan Kuyek — Covering everything from how to stop a new mining project to figuring out how to clean up an abandoned mine, this important book offers activists a primer for taking on all manner of extractive industries that can harm human health and the environment.

Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature and Social Action by Kari Marie Norgaard — A sociological look at North American colonialism, focusing on the Karuk Tribe of northern California and their political struggles for environmental justice and food sovereignty.

And Two More for Good Measure:

Waste by Kate O’Neill — A simply titled book about a very complex issue: What do we do with all of our stuff? From food waste to plastic recycling to the remnants of our ubiquitous electronics, O’Neill examines the politics and future of what we throw away.

Rainforest: Dispatches From Earth’s Most Vital Frontlines by Tony Juniper — A gorgeous, thoughtful and increasingly necessary book examining the roles that rainforests around the world play in regulating our planetary systems. Juniper, a noted environmentalist who has spent decades working on rainforest conservation, devotes a good portion of this book to the threats that human-caused fires pose to these essential ecosystems — a timely topic, to say the least.

That’s our list for this month, but don’t stop here: You can find dozens of other recent eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.

Fighting Water Privatization with ‘Blue Communities’

Author and activist Maude Barlow talks about the growing global movement to protect public control of water resources.

It was 1985 and privatization, deregulation and free trade were in the air. Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan were negotiating a free trade deal — a precursor to NAFTA. Among the goods it would cover: “Water, including … mineral waters … ice and snow.”

That set off alarm bells for Canadian activist Maude Barlow, as she explains in her new book Whose Water Is It, Anyway? Taking Water Protection into Public Hands:

“I asked myself, Who owns water and who is making decisions about this precious resource? I had always assumed that water belongs to us all. But I was about to learn that the world was straining its water resources even then and that a number of private corporations and interests were moving in to take control of and profit from growing water scarcity.”

That year Barlow helped found the Council of Canadians, a nonprofit focused on democracy, trade and environmental issues, and jumped headlong into a global battle to protect public control of water resources — a fight in which she’s been a leading voice ever since.

Among her accomplishments, Barlow was instrumental in the United Nations’ decision to declare access to clean water a human right in 2010. She’s also received accolades for her efforts including the Right Livelihood Award and the Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship Award. She’s currently the honorary chair of the Council of Canadians, chair of the board of Food and Water Watch and a councilor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council.

In Whose Water Is It, Anyway? she writes not just about the hazards of water privatization but about proactive efforts that communities are taking to protect water resources, including the Blue Communities Project, which started in Canada in 2009 and has spread to cities, universities, unions and faith-based organizations around the world. Blue Communities commit to defending water as a human right, protecting water resources for the public trust and banning bottled water from municipal facilities and events.

We spoke to Barlow about the different forms that water privatization can take, the solutions offered by Blue Communities and our biggest water threat.

Water activist and author Maude Barlow. (Photo by Michelle Valberg)

What are some of the threats that water privatization poses to communities?

Water privatization has been proven in many studies and in real experience to be a terrible mistake. Handing control of water services to private companies removes public oversight of a crucial source of life and of what should unquestionably be a public service.

Private water and wastewater services employ fewer staff, cut corners on source protection, provide poorer customer service and charge higher rates. More recently, pro-privatization proponents have argued that public-private partnerships (P3s) are better than full privatization in that they maintain government control over the water source. However, in practice, there is little difference between the older forms of full water privatization and P3s, as both have to incorporate the profit motive into providing water services. So public funds that should go into delivery of services and water protection instead go to investors.

You’ve worked with a lot of communities that have fought back against water privatization. What have you learned?

Since 2000 some 267 municipalities around the world that had tried water privatization — including some big cities such as Paris and Berlin — have returned the management of their water services to public control. In many cases, the fight was long and intense and it cost the public money to buy back their water systems.

But there are many examples of increased quality control, more funding for water source protection and lowered water rates for the public once private investors are no longer a part of the equation.

Beside corporations controlling public water or wastewater systems, what are some other forms of water privatization?

Water is bought and sold under water market regimes in California and other parts of the world. Water becomes privately controlled when a foreign investor, company or government gets control of local land and water in what are called “land grabs.”

In other cases, when water is bottled for commercial sale, it is privately owned and many of the wells and water sources used by the big water bottling companies are under multi-year contracts.

Water is also considered a tradable good in “free trade” agreements and subject to the market disciplines of trade rules. Foreign investors can and have claimed ownership of water sources they use to produce their product in another country.

There is a mighty contest taking place in our world: Is water a commodity to be put on the open market like oil and gas or a public trust and a human right to be guarded as a commons for all time? This has been the fight of my life.

What’s gained by becoming a Blue Community?

A Blue Community is an act of hope. Instead of being against the many threats to water, a Blue Community offers a vision for the future based on the belief that water is a human right and a public trust. It also tackles the growing crisis of plastic pollution by committing a municipality (or university or place to worship, etc.) to phasing out bottled water on its premises.

Some Blue Communities take it a lot further. Berlin set aside a fund to promote safe tap water more broadly to the public and to provide drinking water refilling stations throughout the city.

A Blue Community realizes that we cannot protect source water and watersheds if we turn the decision-making about local water sources over to private investors. The Blue Community Project is also a wonderful educational opportunity to teach about water, why it matters and how we have to care for it.

What keeps you up at night?

The declining state of the planet’s water sources. We humans are polluting, mismanaging, diverting and over-extracting water at an unprecedented rate and the supply of clean water is dramatically dropping just as the demand is skyrocketing.

We have made serious inroads toward fulfilling the 2010 United Nations resolution recognizing the human right to water but it cannot be realized if there is no clean water to be found. The water crisis, just like the climate crisis, is a visceral threat to human rights as the competition for water is pitting rich against poor, urban against rural, industrial development against Indigenous survival, and region against region.

Only if we come together to protect water and share it more justly will we avoid the conflict that is hovering at the edges of our lives.

Pacific Bluefin Tuna Fishing Proposals Jeopardize Recovery Efforts

The Pacific bluefin tuna is vulnerable to extinction and yet fisheries managers may vote to increase the number that can be caught.

Pacific bluefin tuna remains a species at risk. Despite a 2017 agreement on a rebuilding plan by countries that catch the species, overfishing that began nearly a century ago continues, leaving this highly valuable fish at less than 4 percent of its historic size — and vulnerable to extinction.

When the managers responsible for Pacific bluefin tuna meet Sept. 2-6 in Portland, Oregon, they must reject proposals from Japan and South Korea that would raise quotas and put the future recovery of the population at risk. Instead, the decision-makers from the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, which jointly manage the species, should exercise caution, not increase catch limits, and focus on long-term sustainable management of the fishery.

The rebuilding plan that was passed just two years ago aims to return the species to 20 percent of its historic size by 2034. Japan’s proposal calls for increasing the catch of both juvenile and adult Pacific bluefin, and comes even after countries rejected a similar proposal from Japan last year. Any increase in catch quotas would exacerbate overfishing and delay or derail the chances of a recovery. Additionally, recovery depends on an increase in recruitment — an estimate of the number of new fish entering the population in a given year — but signs point to a possible decrease in recruitment last year. Managers should wait for the results of an official stock assessment, scheduled for next year, to confirm if the plan is working before even considering raising the bluefin quota.

Effective management should be based on responsible, sustainable quotas and stock assessments that account for uncertainty, not on overly optimistic expectations that recruitment will increase and then remain high. The constant back-and-forth on quotas for Pacific bluefin reinforces the need to agree on a science-based, precautionary harvest strategy that is tested in computer simulation. Modernizing bluefin management in this way will result in a more automated, transparent, predictable — and effective — system that moves away from contentious yearly debates to more forward-thinking, strategic planning.

Long-term, sustainable, international management is the last hope that any gains in the Pacific bluefin population won’t be immediately reversed by future decisions prioritizing short-term profit. At this year’s meeting, managers and the countries that depend on a healthy Pacific bluefin population must demonstrate their commitment to science-based, precautionary management by maintaining the established rebuilding plan and making progress by adopting a robust and sustainable harvest strategy for the species.

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.

This story was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts.