Four Ways Alaska’s Unending Warming Impacts Everyone

As remote Alaska warms and melts, it kicks off changes that will affect global systems and worsen climate change.

Here in my home state of Alaska, our long summer of record-breaking heat has finally come to a close. Even now, though, temperatures across the state remain well above average, with September representing yet another warmest-month-on-record in several locations.

alaska record temperatures — Alaska record temperatures documented on July 8, 2019. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin.

But as Alaska’s temperatures begin to drop with the arrival of autumn, so, too does the national attention that fires and heatwaves briefly brought to the state. News outlets have moved on to other climate-related stories such as the fires in the Amazon and the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian. In the process they’ve missed the bigger picture: Rapid warming in Alaska remains among the most troubling disruptions of the global climate.

In fact, experts tell us, the warming underway in “the last frontier” isn’t just a local phenomenon. It’s deepening the global climate crisis.

Melting Sea Ice Accelerates Warming…and May Disrupt Global Weather Patterns

While Alaska’s record 90-degree temperatures captured national headlines this past summer, fewer media outlets noticed the epic loss of sea ice along the state’s western and northern coasts. This melting occurred most rapidly in the Bering Sea, which lies between northwestern Alaska and Russia.

Sea ice here is the frozen ocean water that borders Alaska and adjoins the polar ice cap. It has been declining for years, but 2019 brought extraordinary melting that began in February, months ahead of norms. By August the ice had retreated over 150 miles from Alaska’s coast, an unprecedented distance that stunned long-time Arctic observers. Today, at a time when sea ice should be building back up, unusually warm air and ocean temperatures in many locations have delayed the autumn freeze.

In case you missed it, #Arctic sea ice likely hit its minimum extent for the year on September 18 at 4.15 million sq km (1.60 million sq mi). This year’s minimum is effectively tied for 2nd lowest in the satellite record with 2007 and 2016. Learn more: https://t.co/nS5v9qMVps. pic.twitter.com/elxH7DHqlb

— National Snow and Ice Data Center (@NSIDC) September 23, 2019

“Temperatures in the Bering Sea are running around 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average right now,” says Brian Brettschneider, a climate researcher with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “All that warmth needs to dissipate before ice can start forming again.”

As Brettschneider explains, delayed freezing at this time of year can set the stage for thinner sea ice throughout the winter, which can lead to earlier melting the following spring. This type of self-reinforcing process has long concerned climatologists. The temperature anomalies in the Bering also provide a striking example of the ocean warming that a recent United Nations report said is now occurring across the globe.

The loss of ice is already upending life in the Arctic by disrupting traditional access to fishing and hunting grounds, threatening coastal communities with erosion and increasing the potency of Arctic storms.

But bigger threats may lie ahead — scientists also believe disappearing sea ice is messing with global weather patterns, potentially increasing the ferocity of hurricanes and heat waves. As ice disappears, the temperature gradient decreases between the planet’s cold north and warmer southern regions. This evening-out of global temperatures has already started changing global wind patterns and climate scientists say it may contribute to the stalling of recent Atlantic hurricanes, including Harvey, Florence and the phenomenally destructive Dorian.

Meanwhile scientists have also attributed deep “wobbles” in the jet stream to Arctic warming. These “wobbles” may be intensifying heat waves like the one that brought dangerous 108-degree heat to Paris this summer.

Increasing Wildfires Torch the “Legacy Carbon” of Northern Forests

For many Alaskans 2019 was the summer of smoke.

In August wildfire smoke gave Anchorage the worst air quality of any U.S. city. Even in September, a month past the historical end of Alaska’s fire season, we still experienced road and school closures, evacuations, smoke and loss of property.

“For Alaska, the length of this year’s fire season was the stand-out part of the story,” says Brettschneider.

While the 2.5 million acres that burned in Alaska this year didn’t represent a state record, they still contributed to a record-setting fire season across the circumpolar North, with particularly large fires burning in Siberia. Researchers say the fires are part of a trend toward more frequent and severe Arctic blazes and a steadily lengthening fire season.

Alaska’s increasing wildfires matter globally for two entwined reasons. First, the millions of acres that now burn across the North pump carbon into the atmosphere, increasing global heating. In June alone Arctic fires released 50 megatons of carbon dioxide, more than the total annual carbon output of Sweden.

The kind of carbon being released also makes a difference. Arctic fires burn shrubs, tundra and extensive boreal forest. These types of areas contain up to 40 percent of the world’s land-based carbon, comprised of leaves, plants, roots and residue from previous fires, all lying in near-surface soils. But today’s hotter fires are burning this “legacy carbon,” a term researchers recently applied to carbon that has been safely sequestered for centuries. As this happens, a once reliable carbon sink becomes a source of carbon pollution.

Additionally, the increase in fire shortens boreal-forest burn cycles. Fires happen more often, burning down old trees and giving new trees less time to mature between conflagrations. As a result, forest composition has started transitioning away from old trees capable of storing more carbon to younger trees that store less. This shifting carbon balance, along with other factors such as thawing permafrost, may undermine the carbon-reduction goals that nations around the world have set under the Paris climate accord.

Alaska’s Melting Glaciers Raise Global Sea Levels

Receding glaciers have been a fact of life for my nearly 30 years in Alaska, but nothing I’ve seen compares to this past summer. Early in the season our glaciers lost their protective layer of winter snow, exposing bare ice to months of hot sunshine. This resulted in a hemorrhaging of meltwater that kept rivers roiling with the silty water of melting glaciers, even through a period of record drought.

“This is the continuation of a story that has been ongoing for several decades,” says Twila Moon, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

melting glacier — The Yakutat Icefield in southeast Alaska is considered by glaciologists to be among the “walking dead.” Photo: Maria-José Viñas/NASA

Moon explains that the comparatively low latitude of Alaska’s glaciers has made them vulnerable to melting for many years and that the amount of melting is a significant contributor to global sea-level rise.

Three studies published this year highlight the point. In one, an international research team estimated that the world’s mountain glaciers, which do not include the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, lost a hard-to-fathom 9,000 billion tons of ice over the past 50 years. Researchers further estimated that melting of mountain glaciers, which only constitute about 4 percent of land ice worldwide, fueled up to 30 percent of global sea-level rise throughout the 20th century. They pegged Alaska’s glaciers as the largest single contributor to the melting among the world’s mountain glaciers.

Another study of mountain glaciers predicted that, at current levels of fossil fuel use, Alaska would lose up to 50 percent of its remaining glacier ice in the coming decades, continuing the state’s role as the leading source of melting outside of Greenland and Antarctica. The study predicts another 10 inches of global sea-level rise from mountain glaciers alone — enough to drown low-lying coastal areas from Florida to Bangladesh.

A third study suggests scientists may still underestimate the speed of melting glaciers. By using underwater sonar surveys of Alaska’s LeConte Glacier, researchers discovered melt rates more than two orders of magnitude greater than previously predicted. If the findings test positively elsewhere, this type of melting may boost the estimated contribution of glaciers to rising seas.

The studies put tangible numbers on just how much sea-level rise is a result of Alaska’s famously melting glaciers. Perhaps the most worrisome of all climate change impacts, rising seas threaten to displace hundreds of millions of people from coastlines across the world, sparking famine, conflict and other human migration crises.

Thawing Permafrost and the Carbon Bomb

Slumping roads, sinking buildings, “drunken” forests comprised of leaning or toppled trees — if you live in Alaska, you know these as telltale signs of thawing permafrost.

Lowly permafrost is an often-unsung hero of carbon storage. Frozen in place by millennia of long, frigid winters, it consists of deep layers of leaves, bones, soil, mammoth tusks and other organic material — even caribou poop — that have accumulated in an undecomposed state over time. Scientists have long considered permafrost to be, like boreal forests, a permanent source of sequestered carbon.

Alaska’s permafrost has been thawing for decades. But sharply rising temperatures evidenced by this past summer’s heat have accelerated the change.

As Alaska climatologist Rick Thoman recently wrote on Twitter, “winters in Alaska aren’t what they used to be.”

Researchers at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks have documented permafrost warming enough to push near-surface soils above the freezing mark, even in deep winter. Researchers from Canada to Greenland to Siberia have observed similar warming.

In Alaska the thawing causes erosion that damages roads and other infrastructure and even threatens the survival of entire communities.

But the effects will also be felt on the global scale. The widespread decomposition triggered by this thawing threatens to release massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Scientists estimate this so-called “carbon bomb” could eclipse the annual emissions of China, the world’s largest polluter, and further undermine global efforts to reduce carbon.

frozen methane — Frozen methane captured in ice. Photo: Miriam Jones/USGS.

It would also pose a staggering financial burden. Researchers earlier this summer estimated thawing permafrost will add $70 trillion to the global cost of climate change, an expense that will be borne most by the world’s poorest people.

Alaska’s Warming Is Also the World’s

The rapid warming of Alaska has become a global spectacle, and experts tell us that its impacts will be felt around the world in the years ahead.

In part that’s due to the self-reinforcing nature of the processes now underway, where less sea ice begets less sea ice, more fire leads to more fire, and thawing permafrost jeopardizes the remaining permafrost.

It’s also due to the nature of the Arctic, which scientists increasingly see as a vital source of cooling for the entire planet. As that system destabilizes, livable climates elsewhere are put at risk.

But maybe all of that warming has inspired something, too. As research scientist Twila Moon observes, the public now appears more aware of the important roles played by glaciers and how their melting impacts drinking water supplies, agriculture, global sea-level rise and more.

“I’m really heartened about the increased awareness about climate change,” she says.

But Moon also cautions that there’s still a long way to go in terms of both awareness and action — not just in Alaska, but around the planet.

“We’re not at the level we need to be, given how fast the change is occurring,” she says.

For Indigenous Women, More Pipelines Mean More Threats of Sexual Violence

Tribal activists fear that permits to move the Keystone XL forward will bring not just economic and environmental impacts.

Later this month, the South Dakota Water Management Board will be holding five hearings on water permits needed for the Keystone XL pipeline expansion, which will cross several rivers as it makes its way from the tar sands in Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska. If the pipeline expansion is approved — it’s been on hold for nearly a decade — it will affect several tribal and First Nations communities along its route. Tribal activists fear this will bring not only economic and environmental impacts, but also sexual violence.

Angeline Cheek, a community advocate on the Fort Peck Reservation in Northeastern Montana, is vehemently opposed to the extension. As proposed, Keystone XL would cross just a few miles from the western side of the reservation. On the eastern side, across the North Dakota border, are the Bakken oil fields.

A vigil for murdered and missing Indigenous women in 2015. Photo by Thien V., Howl Arts Collective (CC BY 2.0)

Cheek’s organization provides workshops and information to reservation residents on the dangers of man camps in the Bakken area. Man camps are large company-owned housing units that people who come to work in the oil fields can move into.

With the Bakken oil boom, these man camps have increased in the region. Population growth because of an extractive industry leads to a surge of individuals — mostly men — who are paid well and living temporarily in rural areas they aren’t otherwise connected to. Since the boom, violent crime, sex trafficking, and rape cases have increased, according to tribal police and local activists.

Cheek and a group of advocates — whose motto is “no fear” — have also created a safety plan with input from the community in anticipation of these impacts. Part of the proposed plan is a text- and call-based early warning system to alert community members of missing people; AMBER alert is only for children.

Though the group has received support from some tribal programs and the broader community, tribal leadership has not signed onto the community safety plan. “I have relatives here who I don’t want to go missing,” Cheek said. “The tribe needs to start thinking ahead. …The tribe should be doing the work I’m doing. They should be thinking of preventative ways to keep the community safe.”

National attention turned to the Bakken in 2012, when Sherry Arnold, a white teacher, was raped and murdered by two men who came to the Bakken in search of work. Yet many Native victims don’t receive this kind of support, Cheek said. “When something happens to an Indigenous person, to a Native person, why isn’t that being heard? We’re just another number.”

The Sovereign Bodies Institute’s MMIW Database — the only comprehensive, up-to-date database tracking missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. and Canada — details 529 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, the states which Keystone XL will traverse. Nearly 80 percent of these cases are unsolved or no perpetrators have been found, and 30 percent are active missing persons cases. One of those women is Olivia Lone Bear, whose body was found nine months after she went missing from the Fort Berthold Reservation in the heart of the Bakken in October 2017. Some fear these numbers will increase if more man camps come to the Great Plains region.

Line of trailers — A man camp in the Bakken shale in 2013. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

The Canadian government has begun to recognize the connection between the extractive industry and violence against Native women. In June of this year, Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released a 1,200-page report concluding three years of community hearings, story gathering, and forensic research. The report showed a strong link between extraction zones on the missing and murdered women crisis in Canada. It specifically cited rotational shift work, sexual harassment in the workplace, substance abuse, economic insecurity, and a largely transient workforce as contributing to increased violence against Native women in communities near fossil fuel infrastructure.

Also, as an Amnesty International report notes, transient workers are often not counted in census numbers, leading to overwhelmed public services. According to the report, in British Columbia, “frontline service providers supporting marginalized individuals, such as women’s shelters and food banks, describe a situation of constant crisis, as needs outpace their capacity to respond.”

What’s worse, in the U.S., tribal communities often don’t have jurisdiction to respond to the increase in crimes. The Major Crimes Act of 1885 largely limited what crimes tribal courts can prosecute, and Oliphant vs. Suquamish in 1978 asserted that tribal courts cannot prosecute non-Native offenders, even those who live on tribal lands. When the Violence Against Women Act was last reauthorized in 2013, it expanded tribal jurisdiction to include some cases related to domestic violence, dating violence, and violation of protection orders. But it didn’t expand tribal jurisdiction to include sex trafficking or many other forms of sexual violence.

“One of the immediate fixes we’re pushing for is reauthorization of VAWA,” said Annita Lucchesi, executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute. The new version of the law would expand tribal jurisdiction to cover sexual violence, sex trafficking and stalking, among other changes.

In areas where tribes don’t have jurisdiction, either FBI or county sheriffs are supposed to provide support, depending on the state. But that doesn’t always happen. “What we’re seeing is that county sheriffs in [some] states and FBI in other areas are understaffed and underfunded,” Lucchesi says. This has real impacts. According to a Government Accountability Office report, federal prosecutors between 2005 and 2009 declined to prosecute 67 percent of the 2,500 cases in Indian Country involving sexual violence that were referred to them.

If tribes can’t hold individuals accountable for violence, what about the companies themselves? “I think companies have a responsibility to ensure that they’re holding their workers to a high standard of conduct on and off the job, especially if they’re living in company housing like man camps,” Lucchesi said. “And I think that they have a responsibility for public safety.”

Cheek agrees, and also thinks that the Department of Justice and local law enforcement can do more to protect their communities, including sharing data on crime. “They have the research, how come they aren’t letting the reservation know? How come they aren’t working with the reservations to develop safety plans?”

Though Native activists and communities often recognize and call out the connection between violence in their communities and the intrusion of extractive industries, mainstream environmental justice movements and gender-based violence initiatives often don’t overlap. As expansion of oil pipelines continues — like Keystone XL and Trans Mountain in Canada — activists remain vigilant about their impacts on the communities around them.

Resource extraction impacts more than just the economy and the environment. It can endanger the lives of Native women, as communities in Canada and North Dakota have already experienced. “It creates this culture of using and abuse,” Lucchesi says. “If you can use and abuse the water and land, you can use and abuse the people around you too.”

This story was reprinted from Yes! Magazine.

The Story of Plastic: New Film Exposes the Source of Our Plastic Crisis

The documentary looks at how to turn the tide on petrochemical companies that are driving a boom in plastic production — just when we don’t need it most.

Prigi Arisandi, who founded the environmental group Ecological Observation and Wetlands Conservation, picks through a heap of worn plastic packaging in Mojokerto, Indonesia. Reading the labels, he calls out where the trash originated: the United States, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Canada. The logos range from Nestlé to Bob’s Red Mill, Starbucks to Dunkin Donuts.

The trash of rich nations has become the burden of poorer countries.

It’s one of dozens of moving scenes in a new feature-length documentary called The Story of Plastic, directed by Deia Schlosberg and presented by The Story Of Stuff Project, the organization first known for its punchy digital shorts about consumption and environmental issues.

We all know by now that plastic waste is a problem — it’s washing ashore on beaches, swirling in giant ocean eddies, gumming up the insides of whales and seabirds, and embedding itself in the farthest reaches of the planet. But most media coverage focuses on the end of the line — where plastics end up — and not where they came from or why.

The Story of Plastic fills that void.

The film, which made its world premiere on Sunday, takes viewers on a global journey to Pennsylvania, Texas, California, the Philippines, Indonesia, China and India, among other places. It’s a trek through the supply chain that begins with fracked natural gas in the United States and ends with literal mountains of plastic waste on the other side of the world.

“I don’t think most people know that if you want it to stop plastic from going into the ocean in Indonesia you need to ban fracking in the Ohio River valley,” Stiv Wilson, the film’s executive producer, told The Revelator in an interview earlier this year. “So our intention with the film is to show the entire system of plastic and that includes every stage and also that upstream the human health concerns are way more significant than eating fish that’s eaten plastic — living next to a refinery for plastics is going to be far more dangerous.”

The film exposes the flawed and failed prophecy of recycling, which works well for glass and metals but fails miserably at dealing with plastics. Only 14 percent of plastics are recycled and only 2 percent effectively, the film explains. Most plastics degrade when recycled and don’t end up made into something as useful the second time around.

Heaps of useless plastic are then shipped abroad to countries like China, Indonesia and India, where much of it ends up polluting waterways and endangering drinking water and wildlife. Or it’s burned next to communities and farms. Local people are left to deal with the health implications — respiratory problems, skin rashes, shorter life expectancy, cancer.

All of that makes it a “life and death issue for most people — at least in this part of the world,” says Von Hernandez in the film. He works with the global collective Break Free From Plastic in the Philippines, where a local fisherman reports that these days, plastic makes up 40 percent of his catch.

As the film hops around the globe it relies on the voices of people working in their communities toward solutions to the plastic pollution problem. Shibu K. Nair, a zero-waste champion in India, has one of the most poignant lines. The “entire economy we have around recycling is possible because we have poverty,” he says. Waste pickers, mostly marginalized women, work for low cost.

But even this exploitative economy is starting to unravel as more and more countries follow China’s lead in refusing to take the waste of wealthier nations, and as more and more local groups unite internationally to tackle the problem at the source.

One of the key narratives of The Story of Plastic is tracking the timeline and talking points of the petrochemical industry, which produces some 400 million metric tons of plastic each year. And since 99 percent of plastic is fossil fuels, the folks behind plastics are the same as those digging for oil and gas: Exxon, Shell, Conoco Philipps, Dow Dupont.

We see how they cleverly market their products, push for personal responsibility in the face of corporate malfeasance, cheerlead for doomed taxpayer-funded recycling programs, and dole out piddling contributions for beach cleanups. All the while, they’re distracting the public from the true answer: the fact that we don’t need so much plastic crap.

While the industry pushes its plastic products as lifesaving (like medical devices and bike helmets), the bulk of it is stuff we didn’t have a few decades ago and don’t need now — things like plastic straws and single-serving packets of soy sauce. “We only use them once and they stay forever,” Tiza Mafira, a policy expert and lawyer in Jakarta, says in the film. “They’re not something that we need as an essential part of our lives and yet here we are — stuck with it.”

Watching The Story of Plastic is liable to make you take a (likely shameful) look at the ubiquitous presence of plastic in your own life. But the film’s message isn’t for each of us to ditch straws — the problem is far too systemic for that. Rather it’s a call for producer responsibility. Ramping up fossil fuel production, as the petrochemical industry’s doing right now, is the last thing we need as we attempt to manage our climate crisis. Companies instead need to design their products with a plan for how they will be reused, composted or effectively recycled. And we need to focus way more on reducing and reusing.

“The industry is out there pushing the idea that this is all because of bad management — that the waste is here because the government isn’t putting enough funding into proper waste management,” says Mafira. “But they’re distracting from the truth, which is that there’s no way you can manage this waste — it’s not meant to be managed.”

She adds, “I think we should ban together and have a serious discussion on a global scale because these companies are operating on a global scale.”

The Story of Plastic is currently making its way to film festivals around the country. Find a local screening and more information about the movie and its messages here.

Climate Change, Extinction and Other Frights: October’s Scariest Environmental Books

Who needs vampires or serial killers? These new books offer horrifying information — and thrilling solutions — on endangered species, sea-level rise, food security and corporate pollution.

“Horror,” wrote novelist and critic Douglas E. Winter, “is not a genre. It is an emotion.”

You know what else generates some horrifying emotions? Topics like climate change and extinction.

As we approach the Halloween season, let’s dive into those fears with a batch of new books about those most fright-inducing of environmental topics.

These books will scare you — honestly, you should be scared — but they also provide the information, ideas and potential solutions we need to get to a less frightening future.

In other words: We can defeat the monsters.

We’ve combed through publishers’ October catalogs and picked the nine scariest (and most informative) new environmental books coming out this month. Check out our list below and pick the best ones for your scary late-night reading.

Blowout by Rachel Maddow

The ubiquitous MSNBC host takes a deep dive into the many ways Big Oil threatens democracy around the world, most notably Russia’s interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election (although that’s far from the only example). This must-read book gets our vote for the scariest subtitle of the month: “Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth.”

Food or War by Julian Cribb

When people get hungry, they start to fight. When societies go hungry, they get desperate, sometimes leading to conflict, forced migration or war. Is that our future, in the world of climate change and food instability? This new book looks at issues of sustainability, identifies geographic areas of risk, examines how access to food can bring peace, and lays out a series of recommendations for the future.

Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food by Lenore Newman

We’ve eaten species out of existence and — like any good horror-movie monster — we can expect to repeat the pattern in the inevitable sequel. (Too bad those lost species won’t get resurrected for the next chapter.)

Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed and One Lawyer’s Twenty-year Battle against DuPont by Robert Bilott

This memoir provides a harrowing account of the author’s decades-long legal battle to hold the (in)famous chemical company responsible for covering up of one of the world’s worst cases of environmental pollution. It’s a terrifying true tale. (In addition to the book, Dark Waters, a movie version of this story, starring water defender Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, opens Nov. 22.)

Giraffe Extinction: Using Science and Technology to Save the Gentle Giants by Tanya Anderson

The long-necked African icons face such an increasingly lengthy list of threats that some giraffe populations and subspecies now face the truly terrifying possibility of extinction. This new book, written for high-school-age readers, looks at the problems and introduces kids to the monster-fighters — er, scientists — leading the effort to save giraffes from disappearing.

The Drowning of Money Island by Andrew S. Lewis

Many island nations around the world fear for their future under the threat of sea-level rise. For some islands the future is already here. Money Island off the coast of New Jersey, once an economic powerhouse, now serves as a storm-ravaged example of what’s to come for islands and other coastal communities.

Secrets of Snakes: The Science Beyond the Myths by David A. Steen

There’s absolutely nothing scary about this book…unless you have a snake phobia. But even then, Steen’s fun and informative tome will do much to calm those fears.

Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams

Land can erode, but so can a sense of self and a belief in our collective needs. Is that what’s happening to our country, and to the protections afforded to our vital public lands? The award-winning author (a board member of the Center for Biological Diversity, publisher of The Revelator) examines the state of the country, our political establishments and her own life. This book captures a lot of fearful emotions and realities, but it counters them with beautiful writing, insightful commentary, and a sense of solace and spirituality that comes from life in nature.

The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change by Robin Globus Veldman

Why aren’t supposedly God-fearing people more terrified about the dangers of global warming? This book upends previous theories that linked their skepticism to anti-science attitudes or apocalyptic beliefs. Instead it reveals how, over the past few decades, evangelical religious leaders and media outlets have selectively used the Bible to inaccurately portray climate science as an attack against religion and a way of life. Scary stuff!

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

Trump’s Decision to Hamstring California’s Climate Authority Is Illogical and Uninformed

Revoking California’s ability to set stricter air-pollution standards also misses three important benefits to California and the nation.

For five decades California and the federal government have worked together in an innovative exercise in federalism aimed at achieving cleaner air. California has played an important role in controlling greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, particularly from motor vehicles.

But now, contrary to law and in a massive departure from past practice, President Donald Trump has announced that his administration is pulling the rug out from under California’s feet by divesting it of its longstanding authority to adopt auto emission controls more stringent than the Environmental Protection Agency’s.

The action, implemented jointly by the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Administration, couldn’t come at a worse time. Less than a year ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called “ambitious mitigation actions” indispensable to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoiding the most disruptive and potentially irreversible effects of climate change.

California, supported by more than 20 other states, is already challenging the administration in court. But if the administration’s effort succeeds, the world will be deprived of California’s vital leadership, and the Trump administration will have shelved another important tool for combatting climate change.

Because of the severity of California’s pollution problems and the state’s early environmental leadership, the Clean Air Act specifically allows the state to apply for a waiver of the prohibition on state auto-emission standards more stringent than the federal government’s. California has sought waivers more than 100 times, and with one short-lived exception, EPA has granted every request — precisely as the law anticipated. Once EPA grants a waiver, any other state may follow California’s ambitious lead by adopting its standards.

The result is that more than a dozen states follow California’s more stringent standards, which is why many cars sold outside the state bear a sticker that says the car has met California’s standards. The auto industry has long since adjusted to these dual standards, not wanting to ignore such a huge market for its products.

But the president’s announcement amounts to a sharp deviation from established bipartisan practice by first revoking previously approved waivers for California, purportedly to achieve nationally uniform emission controls and eliminate “duplicative” regulation. This is likely to be followed by the adoption of rules that backtrack on the Obama EPA’s push to reduce greenhouse gas auto emissions — creating a double whammy in the fight against climate change.

In addition to being of questionable legality, EPA’s decision completely overlooks the most important advantages of the current system, as well as the waiver revocation’s significant downsides. To be sure, centralization may promote uniformity, and reducing overlapping authority may modestly decrease some administrative costs.

But the EPA’s analysis completely ignores the considerable downsides of revoking California’s authority both for the state and the entire nation. By granting a measure of standard-setting authority to California, the Clean Air Act neatly balances three important dimensions of regulatory authority which, unfortunately, are often misunderstood and conflated.

First, by granting authority to both the EPA and California, the Clean Air Act decentralizes power over standards, thus encouraging the states to act as “laboratories of democracy” that can test out regulatory approaches and standards which, if successful, can be adopted by other states and the federal government. And indeed, more than a dozen states have followed California’s lead.

On the other hand, by allowing only two sets of standards — the EPA’s and California’s — the law prevents automakers from being subjected to a welter of conflicting standards and overregulation that might prevent them from manufacturing cars to varying regulatory specifications. With two standards in place, both commanding significant market share, the auto companies are eager and able to manufacture and sell their products.

Second, by requiring that the EPA review and approve California’s waiver requests, the law requires some coordination, fostering efficient pooling of expertise and resources between the two levels of government.

But it also cultivates innovation by ensuring that California can act relatively independently of the EPA as long as it can show, as it has more than 100 times already, a compelling need for more stringent regulation. California’s persistent air-pollution problems provide plain evidence of such a compelling need. The allocation has allowed the state to engage in innovative regulation, such as its trailblazing requirements that automakers market low or zero-emission vehicles in the state. In fact several large automakers recently agreed to conform to the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas controls, notwithstanding the EPA’s effort to bury them.

Third, the waiver repeal ignores how the law’s modest overlap in authority creates a safety net and guards against undue industry control of regulatory agencies — a manifestation of “agency capture” by industry that is all too rampant under the Trump administration. As we describe in our book Reorganizing Government, distinguishing these discrete dimensions of authority and weighing the different tradeoffs involved are the keys to designing effective governance, but the EPA completely misses these considerations.

From a governance perspective, the agency’s revocation promises to wreak havoc with the Clean Air Act’s careful balancing of the tradeoffs associated with alternative regulatory allocations. From an environmental perspective, it would gut the strongest set of auto emissions standards in the nation, standards in use in more than a dozen states. And it sacrifices those standards for no better reason than to satisfy the administration’s unquenchable thirst for deregulatory pelts to put on display.

Right now we need to embrace bold efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — California’s innovation and leadership must be fostered, not squelched.

Congress should restore California’s emission-control authority to preserve a powerful weapon in the fight against climate change and deadly air pollution.

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

We’re Just Starting to Learn How Fracking Harms Wildlife

Mounting evidence proves that natural-gas and oil extraction threatens wildlife and ecosystems — much as it harms human health.

In January 2015 North Dakota experienced one of the worst environmental disasters in its history: A pipeline burst, spilling nearly 3 million gallons of briny, saltwater waste from nearby oil-drilling operations into two creek beds. The wastewater, which flowed all the way to the Missouri River, contained chloride concentrations high enough to kill any wildlife that encountered it.

It wasn’t the first such disaster in the state. In 2006 a spill of close to 1 million gallons of fracking wastewater into the Yellowstone River resulted in a mass die-off of fish and plants. Cleanup of that spill was still ongoing at the time of the 2015 spill, nearly a decade later.

Spills like these highlight the dangers that come with unconventional fossil-fuel extraction techniques that go after hard-to-reach pockets of oil and gas using practices like horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing (otherwise known as fracking).

But events like these massive spills are just the tip of the iceberg. Other risks to wildlife can be more contained, subtle or hidden.

And while many of the after-effects of fracking have grabbed headlines for years — such as contaminated drinking water, earthquakes and even flammable faucets — the consequences for wildlife have so far been left out of the national conversation.

But those consequences are very real for a vast suite of animals including mussels, birds, fish, caribou and even fleas, and they’re as varied as the species themselves. In some places wildlife pays the price when habitat is destroyed. Elsewhere the damage occurs when water is sucked away or polluted. Still other species can’t take the traffic, noise and dust that accompany extraction operations.

All this damage makes sense when you think about fracking’s outsized footprint.

It starts with the land cleared for the well pad, followed by sucking large volumes of water (between 1.5 and 16 million gallons per well) out of rivers, streams or groundwater.

Fracking Doddridge, West Va. — Fracking trucks and equipment in Doddridge Co, West Va. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

Then there’s the sand that’s mined for use during the fracturing of underground rock to release natural gas or oil. There are also new pipelines, compressor stations and other related infrastructure that need to be constructed. And there’s the truck traffic that surges during operations, or the disposal of fracking wastewater, either in streams or underground.

The cumulative footprint of a single new well can be as large as 30 acres. In places where hundreds or thousands of wells spring up across a landscape, it’s easy to imagine the toll on wildlife — and even cases with ecosystem-wide implications.

“Studies show that there are multiple pathways to wildlife being harmed,” says ecologist Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College who has worked for a decade compiling research on the health effects of fracking. “Biodiversity is a determinant of public health — without these wild animals doing ecosystem services for us, we can’t survive.”

Losing Ground

The most obvious threats fracking poses to wildlife comes in the form of habitat loss.

As rural areas become industrialized with each new well pad and its associated infrastructure, vital habitat for wildlife is altered or destroyed.

Fields with well pads — Habitat fragmentation in North Dakota’s Bakken shale. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

And it’s not just the area containing the well. The land or water just outside of the operation, known as “edge habitat,” also degrades with an increase in the spread of invasive plant species, among other concerns.

And large-scale development, such as miles-long pipelines, can change the way species move and hunt, often resulting in an increase in predation. The oil and gas development in Alberta, Canada, for example, created “wolf highways” that gave the predators easy access to an endangered herd of woodland caribou.

Roads, another kind of fragmentation, can be particularly dangerous for wildlife. A single fracked well can be responsible for 3,300 one-way truck trips during its operational lifespan, and each journey can injure or kill wildlife large and small. After all, it’s hard to get out of the way of a tanker truck carrying 80,000 pounds of sand.

And then there’s the big picture. Drilling within large, “core” forest areas previously located far from human development can be permanently detrimental for species such as migratory songbirds.

In one study, published in Biological Conservation in 2016, researchers examined the effects of unconventional gas drilling on forest habits and populations of birds in an area of West Virginia overlaying the Marcellus and Utica shales. The area has been at the center of the shale gas boom, with the number of unconventional wells in central Appalachia jumping from 111 in 2005 to 14,022 by the end of 2015. The study found that shale-gas development there during that period resulted in a 12.4 percent loss of core forest and increased edge habitat by more than 50 percent — and that, in turn, changed the communities of birds found in the forest.

The areas near well pads experienced an overall decline in “forest specialists” — birds that prefer interior forest habitat, among them the hooded warbler and Kentucky warbler, which are of high conservation priority, as well as cerulean warblers. These sky-blue endangered migratory songbirds have been dropping in numbers for decades, but researchers noted that the decline was 15 percent higher in their study area than in the greater Appalachian Mountains region during the same period.

Kentucky warblers prefer large core forest habitat and researchers have found they decline in numbers around shale gas development. (Photo by Andrew Weitzel, CC BY-SA 2.0)

“For migratory songbirds, large blocks of forest are very important,” explains Margaret C. Brittingham, a professor of wildlife resources at Penn State University who has studied the effects of fracking on wildlife. The birds do best in interior forest habitat with mature trees. They also serve as an important part of the forest ecosystem, helping to prevent or suppress insect outbreaks that can damage trees. “They’re co-evolved with the forest, feeding on insects and keeping those forests healthy,” she says.

Not all species declined in numbers from fracking development. The study found an increase in the kinds of birds that do well among humans and in developed areas — “habitat generalists” such as the American robin, blue jay and brown-headed cowbird, the latter of which are notorious brood parasites that leave their eggs in nests of other birds.

“I think the most alarming thing about all of this is what bird declines may indicate about the declining health of overall ecosystems,” says Laura Farwell, a postdoctoral research associate in the department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the Biological Conservation study. “I know it’s a cliché, but forest interior birds truly are ‘canaries in the coal mine’ for Appalachian forests experiencing rapid loss and fragmentation.”

Farwell adds that many other kinds of development contribute to habitat loss that result in biodiversity declines. Fracking is one more added pressure, but the consequences are quite significant.

“It just happens to be disproportionately affecting some of the largest remaining areas of undisturbed, mature forest left in the eastern U.S., and these forests are incredibly valuable for biodiversity,” she says.

Out West the industry is carving up a different kind of habitat, and that has other species on the ropes. Greater sage grouse, for example, depend on large home ranges composed of intact areas of sagebrush. Cattle ranching and development of all kinds have pushed the grouse near extinction, and continued unbridled oil and gas extraction in its remaining habitat could tip it over the edge.

A 2014 study co-authored by Brittingham found that oil and gas infrastructure and related disturbances to sage grouse can cause the birds’ populations to decline — or even disappear in areas with particularly high levels of oil and gas development.

Sage grouse have also been shown to exhibit high levels of stress from noise.

Noise poses additional risks for birds that depend on their hearing. A study published in Biological Conservation in 2016 found that noise from compressor stations, which run 24 hours a day, reduced the ability of northern saw-whet owls to catch prey. The researchers found that for owls and other “acoustically specialized predators,” noise can cause significant negative impacts on behavior, like a decreased ability to hunt, and that can ripple through the ecosystem.

drilling light — Lights on a drilling site in West Virginia can affect nocturnal wildlife. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

Light, too, can be a problem. Oil and gas operations in some places have turned once-dark rural areas into blazing mini-cities in quick time. A 2012 photo revealed that gas burned off from wells in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale was so bright it was visible from space — something not seen just six years before. Light pollution like this can be deadly for migratory birds and disrupt other nocturnal animals.

It’s in the Water

The fracking process uses a lot of water and much of that contaminated H₂O returns to the surface, bringing with it heavy metals, radioactivity, toxic chemicals (many of which are industry trade secrets) and high levels of salinity. Disposing of all that wastewater has created headaches for the industry and in some cases it’s now proving to endanger wildlife.

Spills or intentional dumping of wastewater or fracking fluid released 180 million gallons into the environment between 2009 and 2014, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. Unsafe levels of some contaminants have been found to persist for years, as was the case in North Dakota.

Not all spills and intentional releases of wastewater in streams create noticeable impacts like fish going belly up — some are more subtle and harder to see — but they may still take a real toll on aquatic life.

A 2019 study in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety looked at what happens when crustaceans called water fleas encounter a fracking-fluid spill. Researchers found that even when the fluids were diluted in a stream, their high salinity could decrease insect mobility and survival. The Canadian province of Alberta, the researchers noted, has recorded 100 such large-volume spills.

Lowly water fleas — in this case a species called Daphnia magna — may not seem like animals we should worry about, but like so many small creatures, they occupy an important niche.

“They are the basis of the freshwater ecosystem,” Steingraber explains. “When the water fleas are gone, the guys that feed on them are gone — frogs and fish die, and those that feed on them die and suddenly you have a biodiversity problem because you’ve knocked out a species at the bottom of the aquatic food chain.”

Some of this may already be playing out in other locations. A 2016 study published in Ecotoxicology that found a decrease in biodiversity of macroinvertebrates in Pennsylvania streams where fracking was occurring in the watershed — and, even worse, “no fish or no fish diversity at streams with documented frackwater fluid spills.” In some cases streams that once contained large numbers of brook trout had none left. The researchers concluded that “fracking has the potential to alter aquatic biodiversity…at the base of food webs.”

brook trout — Brook trout have disappeared from some streams in central Appalachia following fracking spills. (Photo by USFWS)

Elsewhere, it’s possible that contamination of surface waters has already taken a toll on the Louisiana waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla), a bird that breeds along forest headwater streams and feeds on macroinvertebrates. A 2015 study published in Ecosphere found that shale gas development had negative effects on the nest survival and productivity of waterthrushes and the researchers posited that “indirect effects on stream and terrestrial food webs from possible contamination” by the oil and gas industry could be to blame.

The research, which looked at sites in both the Marcellus and Fayetteville shale regions, showed that the birds’ feathers contained elevated levels of barium and strontium — two heavy metals associated with the drilling process — in areas where fracking had taken place. Much like when lead shows up in a human’s hair, the presence of these metals in the birds’ feathers is a sign that contaminants in the environment are making their way into animals’ bodies.

And that raises even bigger concerns.

As the researchers concluded in their paper: “Our finding of significantly higher levels of barium and strontium also suggests the possibility of surface water contamination by any of the hundreds of chemicals that may be used in hydraulic fracturing, including friction reducers, acids, biocides, corrosion and scale inhibitors, pH adjusting agents and surfactants.”

A similar line of inquiry is being pursued by other researchers. Nathaniel Warner, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State University, has been using the shells of freshwater mussels to read the changes in water chemistry in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny River. Mussels record environmental conditions in their shells each year — much like tree rings.

Warner and his colleagues have also found elevated levels of strontium in the shells of mussels living downstream from a site where treated fracking wastewater was discharged. Strontium, which is found in high concentrations in oil and gas wastewaters, is a naturally occurring metal with some medical benefits but which in large exposures can cause bone loss and other side effects.

But Warner says they are still trying to determine what the impacts are for mussels and aquatic ecosystems — not to mention the people who get their dinner from the river.

“We haven’t really gotten to the point where we can say this is harmful or not,” he says. “We really focused on the hard shell itself. But now we’re looking more at what happens in that soft tissue because muskrats and fish don’t really eat the shell that much, but they eat the soft tissue. And so what levels of contaminants or pollution ended up in that soft tissue compared to the shell?” He says that’s probably more important for determining what this really means for wildlife or even human health.

University of Wisconsin’s Farwell says that she’d also like to see more research on what the accumulation of contaminants in the bodies of waterthrushes means for other wildlife and for humans. “Air pollution is another important issue to consider,” she adds. “I’m not aware of any current studies that have looked directly at impacts of fracking air pollution on wildlife.”

You can add these topics to the long list researchers are hoping to explore, but there will still be a lot about how fracking and other extraction technologies are affecting wildlife that we don’t know. And with natural gas still projected to be one of the fastest growing energy sources in the United States, the time to understand its impacts on wildlife grows short.

“The industry boomed at such a rapid pace, researchers and policymakers could barely keep up,” she says. “And in most cases, we don’t have baseline data at impacted sites to compare with current numbers. Unfortunately, most of us studying fracking impacts have been playing a game of catch-up since the beginning.”

Here’s Our Best Opportunity to Save the Oceans — and Ourselves

A dire report about our climate and oceans underscores the great need for action. A global oceans treaty could help save the future.

It’s been said we should thank the ocean for every second breath of oxygen we take. In fact, we owe it far more than that.

Ocean and climate are inseparable.

The ocean absorbs up to 30 percent of the CO₂ emissions humans produce and stores 50 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere. It has borne the brunt of the climate crisis so far, taking in over 90 percent of the heat caused by the worsening greenhouse effect.

But not without consequence. A new special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that in a vicious feedback loop, this vital life-support system is under threat as the planet warms. As we feed our addiction to fossil fuels, levels of carbon dioxide continue to skyrocket, causing the ocean to become more acidic. As it acidifies, its capacity to act as a carbon sink falls.

And that’s very bad news. We need our oceans to help stabilize the climate. A healthy ocean, teeming with plant and animal life, fixes and stores carbon — a key survival tool for all of us.

Bleached coral — A transect line runs over purple rice corals at Lisianski Island that have bleached from warming waters. (Photo by Courtney Couch/ Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, CC BY-NC 2.0)

A Paris Agreement for the Ocean

Climate change isn’t the only crisis affecting the oceans. Since industrial fishing began in the early 1950s, 90 percent of the world’s large ocean fish — such as sharks, cod and swordfish — have been lost. And 90 percent of the planet’s fish stocks are now either fully exploited or overfished, according to the latest report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

A mass extinction of marine life is looming.

So what’s to be done?

Researchers say we’ll need to safeguard at least 30 percent of the oceans by 2030. But our track record so far is pitiful: Less than 4 percent of the ocean is protected. On the high seas, which lie beyond national jurisdiction, industrial exploitation continues almost entirely unchecked. These waters are home to some of the world’s most extraordinary wildlife — from the blue whale to the vampire squid — yet just 1 percent is protected.

This lack of regulation and transparency allows the lawless plunder of the oceans to continue, often driving with it the horrific abuse of fishing vessel crews — far from land and unable to escape.

But change could be on the way. As I write, the United Nations is hashing out the details of a new Global Ocean Treaty — due to be agreed in 2020. This legal framework would allow for the creation of high seas sanctuaries — a move that would be nothing short of essential for the future of our oceans and the survival of humanity.

Researchers have already supplied a protection plan that would work. By analyzing each hundred-square-kilometer area, of the 25,000 of these that make up the high seas, they have found the 30 percent that would be best for conservation and would help build the healthy and resilient sea that we need for the future of the planet.

Environmental Justice at Stake

There is, of course, much political maneuvering going on at the U.N. negotiations — who gets what and how each country can maximize their slice of the pie. But the truth is that proper protection for the high seas is the only fair solution.

Just as rich nations have reaped the benefits of carbon-fueled development, and now suffer fewer of the consequences of climate change, out on the high seas just 10 rich nations, including Japan, Korea, and Spain, take 71 percent of the catch.

Climate and ocean injustice again go hand in hand. For every degree Celsius of warming, caused mostly by wealthy industrialized countries, global fisheries catch potential will fall by more than 3 million metric tons. The impacts of this will be worse nearer the equator, where some countries may see their annual catches fall by half. Once again poorer countries will suffer —those more reliant on seafood protein, who have done far less to destabilize the climate and destroy ocean ecosystems.

Protection of the high seas is desperately needed for both ocean health and human well-being. It would mean havens for ocean wildlife that sustain and replenish the waters closer to shore. This would enhance fish stocks and food security, providing resilience to the challenges of a changing climate.

Time is of the essence. Change is already upon us. All around the world people are being forced from their homes, losing their livelihoods. The ocean does much to protect us from our own greed and insatiable need for growth; we need to protect it in return. This proposal would see just 30 percent of the ocean freed from the pressures of fishing, mining and pollution — surely the least we can do.

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.

Drought and Border Wall Endanger Arizona’s Wildlife

The public has long supported a state program to provide water for wildlife, but now human threats, including border-wall construction and climate change, are making a bad situation worse.

August is normally Arizona’s wettest month.

Not this year, though. The usual monsoon season failed to arrive, and just 1.5 inches of rain fell sporadically on the state throughout the month — the same period that the city of Phoenix experienced record high temperatures of up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit.

The soaring temperatures and specter of drought have left many Arizona residents worrying about their access to water.

It’s also driven wildlife managers to fret over whether the state’s abundant wildlife — which rely on infrequent rains — will have enough water to survive.

“As the drought has deepened, the waters that wildlife traditionally used are going away or have completely disappeared,” says Kevin Woolridge, a teacher at Blue Ridge High School in Arizona who, with his students’ help, has collaborated with the Arizona Game and Fish Department to monitor the drought and its impact on wildlife.

Meanwhile a new manmade threat to Arizona’s water has cropped up. The Trump administration has begun construction on a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border wall at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a UNESCO biosphere reserve. As part of construction, the Trump administration plans to pull up some of Arizona’s precious groundwater — not to hydrate people or animals, but to mix with concrete to build a 44-mile section of the border wall.

While the federal government spends billions on its wall across the border and sucks up some of Arizona’s last remaining ancient groundwater in the process, Arizona wildlife officials are asking the public for millions of dollars in donations to fund the delivery of water to animals in parched areas across the state.

A History of Water Capture Turns to Delivery

Beginning in the 1940s, long before the world was aware of climate change, ranchers in Arizona made the arid landscape more hospitable to their cattle by building concrete rain catchments.

At the same time, Arizona wildlife officials began doing the same thing to provide supplemental water to game birds such as quail and dove. When they noticed that all kinds of wildlife — including insects —were also drinking from catchments, they built more. In total 3,000 units for all species have been constructed across the state.

early water collection system — Arizona’s first efforts to collect water for livestock and wildlife date back to the 1940s. (Photo by Arizona Game and Fish Dept.)

For decades rainwater was enough to fill the catchments regularly. But as the global climate has continued to warm, Arizona fell into a long-term drought, and many catchments are now dry. With natural water sources also drying up, and animals going thirsty, officials with the Arizona Game and Fish Department have resorted to trucking out water to fill these catchments at a rate of 1.5 million gallons annually. They rely on donations from the public to keep the $1 million-a-year water deliveries going.

Experts say humans are the clear culprits for this water loss and need for water delivery.

“It’s hard not to see the effect of urban development on natural streams in Arizona,” says Hector Zamora of the University of Arizona, who has studied watersheds in southern Arizona. “Rivers that used to freely flow in the 1900s — such as the Gila River, the Sonoyta River and the Santa Cruz River — are now bone dry. Climate change will likely further degrade these already stressed systems.”

And Arizona is not alone. Similar situations are playing out around the country and the world. Wildlife officials are trucking in water to animals in southern Nevada, where the Bureau of Land Management has had to deliver water to feral horses in order to prevent their certain death. Water deliveries to wildlife are becoming more common in fast-warming areas, such as southern Australia, where without aid the country’s iconic koalas would die of dehydration, and in Kenya where elephants have also been spared by truckloads of water.

Across the world wildlife officials say rivers are drying up, and they are increasingly being forced to transport water to wildlife by truck and monitor catchments by helicopter, two costly and carbon-intensive modes of transport.

“My assumption is that burning fossil fuels to deliver the water to the catchment areas is impacting and exacerbating the overall situation,” says Woolridge, who is overseeing a catchment-sensor project developed by one of his students that could make it easier for Arizona to monitor water levels. “However, the cost of doing nothing is potentially catastrophic.”

Joseph Currie, habitat-planning program manager for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, agrees. “At present there is no relief in sight from the drought conditions and reduction in free surface water.”

It’s not a stretch to think humans might be next: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, population growth, increased development and intensifying climate changes will lead to “greater water demand in growing cities and reduced water availability could also affect [residents’] access to drinking water” throughout Arizona and the Southwest.

The Wall: Making Things Worse

Arizona Public Media reports that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates building along Organ Pipes Cactus National Monument will require at least 84,000 gallons of water per day pumped from the ground around Quitobaquito Springs and other natural water sources along the border.

Such springs are uncommon, according to Zamora, who adds that besides serving as important sources of water to wildlife, they are also culturally important.

“Quitobaquito Springs has been visited since prehistoric times by Native Americans and is considered sacred by the Tohono O’odham Nation,” he says. They were also visited by missionaries and the Forty-Niners during California’s Gold Rush.

Ancient waters feed the springs, meaning that they’re not currently being recharged, says Zamora. Once the water’s gone, it’s gone.

Working for Solutions

With waters around Arizona drying up, Currie is leading a long-term project updating existing water catchments across the state with troughs and tanks that are more smartly designed and placed.

One way he’s boosted the catchments’ design efficiency is to increase the size of the rainwater collection aprons, allowing for more rain to be caught and less to evaporate, and spacing catchments at least two miles apart — increasing the availability of water to a larger number of wildlife.

But replacing catchments is a slow process. The department is currently on track to replace just 20 a year. At that rate it would take 150 years to upgrade the entire system.

A big horn sheep visits a water trough in Arizona. (Photo by Arizona Fish and Game Dept.)

Historically the use of catchments to provide water for wildlife has been a controversial subject because of their potential to stagnate and spread disease, and possibly lead to deadly predator-prey interactions where water is made available. However, a small but growing body of recent research — including in California’s Mojave Desert — suggests that presence of manmade water catchments appears to increase biodiversity more than natural precipitation.

While the scientific consensus on water catchments is currently unsettled, Currie says he’s observed what appear to be positive effects of providing water for wildlife. Water catchments in Arizona bring a resurgence of mule deer, javelin, quail and other species in former ranching areas where they’d disappeared, he says. His team monitors catchments with trail cameras, which reveal that virtually every native species in Arizona — from chipmunks to eagles to elk — does indeed drink from troughs across the state.

He adds that building well-planned water catchments can make it possible “to better distribute wildlife in usable habitat so that certain areas are not over grazed by wildlife,” helping preserve the integrity of Arizona’s wild landscape. In his 22 years working with water catchments, Currie says the spread of disease hasn’t been a problem, and water quality in Arizona Game and Fish Department’s catchments remains high.

While Arizona’s water catchments and deliveries may help keep wildlife hydrated, a better strategy — not just in the state but worldwide — would be to more intelligently plan water use, says Benjamin I. Cook, climate expert at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

“It’s less about humans needing to proactively provide water for wildlife and ecosystems,” he says, “and more about managing human water withdrawals and water consumption so that enough is left for natural systems.”

As for the situation at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, sucking out Arizona’s natural groundwater to build the border wall, Zamora says, is probably an unwise use of water that will leave Arizona’s fauna — including its people — high and dry.

What’s the Best Way to Welcome Bats to the Neighborhood? The Goldilocks Approach.

In a warming climate, some bat houses could be death traps. But community-level bat boxes can help give bats more room and options to raise young safely.

From Batman to Bat Week, Stellaluna to FernGully’s Batty, bats — both fictional and real — capture our imagination. But their plight is becoming increasingly desperate because of the spread of deadly white-nose syndrome, increasing habitat loss and other environmental pressures.

That’s led to a new interest in constructing bat boxes — the bat equivalent to a bird house. Even “Shark Tank,” the entrepreneurial-themed reality show, is fronting the idea of building artificial homes for bats. While it’s good to see interest in helping our night-flying neighbors, there are important factors to consider before you dig out the wood and screwdriver or purchase a pre-fab bat box.

Recent observations suggest possible problems with bat houses, and a need to revisit artificial roost structures. In fact, existing approaches may only meet some of the varied needs of bats and could, in some cases, create death traps in a rapidly warming climate.

First we have the problem of too much of a good thing. Bats, particularly reproductive females and their offspring, need a warm environment to roost in during the day. Without it, reproduction is unlikely to be successful. But not too hot! Bats have small bodies with large wings of skin, making them susceptible to overheating and dehydration.

Bat box on house — After an overheating event at this bat box, when bats succumbed to the heat, this landowner installed an awning (mounted at peak of roof) that he opens and closes daily during peak afternoon heat, enabling bats to warm, but not overheat. (Photo by S. Dulc)

Bats dying from overheating has become a real concern around the world, with temperature records being broken and heat waves lasting longer every summer. What once looked like an inviting sunny location may now be a deadly hot spot.

When bats take up residence in an old building attic, they will move around inside the space to find just the right temperature to raise a pup, just like Goldilocks testing each bowl of porridge. In a bat house, this option is far more limited, meaning bats have a harder time finding a roosting spot that is “just right.”

In the wild, bats often move between rock or tree crevices that may be just right in the spring but too hot in summer, or too cold in spring but just right in summer. As outside temperatures fluctuate, bats move around to find just the right temperatures — whether in large attic roost spaces, between rock crevices or among tree bark cavities. Individual bat houses pose the same challenge.

Finding just the right temperature is important for bats because as our only flying mammal, they face a unique challenge — flying is energy-intensive.

Instead of burning fat to stay warm, reproducing female bats rely on surrounding air temperature to maintain body heat. Their warm bodies develop a fetus in a short period and produce ample milk for nursing their young. A roost that is warm ensures they don’t burn through too much fat and keeps their pup’s little body warm so it can grow and fatten fast, ready for winter. Roost temperature plays a critical role in determining whether a mother bat successfully raises her pup.

Bat “boxes” provide valuable shelter to a small but important subset of bats that are very important for helping control insect pests in our community gardens, farms and backyards. As older buildings give way to new tightly-sealed structures, roost sites grow scarcer. Long-lived females may be surprised to discover that the roosts to which they faithfully return each year are gone, with no other local options.

Bat boxes can help, but bats need more than a solitary outpost. Instead of just one box in one back yard, consider a few in different climatic corners of our neighborhoods — sunny, mixed sun and shade. Giving bats accommodation options that are all a short flight away is a great way to help them avoid problems with overheating and overcrowding. And a community approach is pretty much guaranteed to succeed because even though not everyone’s bat boxes will be occupied all of the time, or every year, each box plays a role in helping your local bats over time. This may be a better way to get to know your neighbor than asking to borrow a cup of sugar!

But as anyone who has dragged a stroller up the steps of a bus can attest, moving young can be difficult and energy draining. So keeping some boxes close together is an important tactic to provide passageways between boxes for females with young to move to cooler or warmer areas as needed. Building boxes back-to-back with passageways between is one option.

At the community level, green spaces can make an excellent location for a “mini-attic” built especially for bats. These provide more temperature and humidity options than a single bat box — more closely simulating old building attics. Constructing these “bat condos” can help any neighborhood become bat-friendly because what bats really need is not just a house, but a community.

Bat condo — This large “bat condo” built to house thousands of building-roosting bats provides a large range of microclimates, ideal for female bats to raise pups. (Photo by S. Dulc)

Fortunately, community bat programs, like those in British Columbia, Alberta, Alaska and Vermont are starting the work of talking to people about creating better conditions for bats across wider areas.

As white-nose syndrome spreads across the United States and Canada, bats need a helping hand more than ever. We are working hard to figure out how to do this in urban landscapes where our dependence on bats has largely been taken for granted. We recently piloted a promising new white-nose syndrome prevention tool, adding probiotic dust to some bat boxes in Metro Vancouver, with the goal of arming bats with the ability to fight off the deadly disease. This could give us another reason to erect bat boxes in our urban landscapes, but we won’t know how well this tool works for at least another year, as we test bats coming back from hibernation.

Overall bat boxes can be great tools for bat conservation, but if we want to help bats survive and reproduce by building artificial roosts (or protecting natural ones), it is important that our neighborhoods and local governments work together to ensure a wide range of nearby roost options for bats to move — so they always have the opportunity to find conditions that are “just right.”

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.

Trump’s Border Wall: Epitaph for an Endangered, Night-blooming Cactus?

The decline of a rare cactus in a national park epitomizes the Trump administration’s failure to protect endangered species along the border.

Construction is underway on a 30-foot-high steel wall along Arizona’s southern border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. As several reports have recently warned, the wall will hurt many endangered desert species, from Sonoran pronghorns to cactus ferruginous pygmy owls. To understand how the wall will further fragment habitats for these already-declining plants and animals, let’s go deep with one rare species that’s at grave risk: a cactus called the night-blooming cereus.

Sacamatraca, a beautiful and rare cereus known as Peniocereus striatus, has declined markedly over several decades and is highly threatened in much of its range, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Its scattered populations are often small — roughly 50 to 200 plants — and widely separated from each other. An important population of about 200 of these cacti finds its home on the southern border of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

This binational cactus patch was even in trouble before Trump’s call for a wall.

Why? The answer lies in the border that fragments nature’s cohesiveness. In 1849, when the Gadsden Purchase drew a line through the middle of the Sonoran Desert, roughly half of the cereus cacti along the Organ Pipe border became U.S. citizens, while the others still lived under the flag of Mexico. Over the past few decades, construction of roads in the United States and irrigated farms in Mexico have destroyed about one-tenth of the original population. Even more habitat has been degraded. Wood-cutting by Mexican families to heat their homes and cook food triggered further cactus declines by eliminating host plants the cereus cacti needed to survive.

When I first noticed the mortality 25 years ago, I asked the brilliant Mexican ecologist Humberto Suzán Azpiri to help me study this threatened borderline cereus population. At that time we had full cooperation from both Mexican and U.S. officials, including the biologists and law-enforcement staff inside Organ Pipe. With their permission we spent hundreds of hours in the field on both sides of the border, detailing the causes of the decline and planning possible solutions.

Each night we surveyed opposite sides of the border as darkness fell to catch sight of the gorgeous, ghost-white blossoms of the cereus emanating from what otherwise looked like dead sticks.

Flowers blooming — The night-blooming cereus in bloom. (Photo by Dr. Juergen Menzel, CC BY-NC 3.0)

We passed our research equipment back and forth over the waist-high vehicle barrier and collected data on floral blooms, visiting pollinators and seeds. We learned that on any single night, each cereus flower had fewer than a dozen potential sources of pollen from neighboring cacti on either side of the border. We learned that moths would fly up to 300 yards between flowers to gather nectar and deposit the pollen essential to fruit set.

Out in the stinkin’ hot desert, that’s a pretty long distance for pollen to travel from mate to mate.

When our technical paper on the effects of habitat fragmentation on the cereus cacti came out in Conservation Biology, we concluded that international cooperation would be critical to preserving host plants and allowing for pollination by sphingid moths — the two key factors for the survival of the cactus.

Now our capacity for transborder monitoring of this binational population has been fragmented. Though we remain fast friends, Humberto and I will never be able to replicate our first study with an impenetrable wall and two sparring government bureaucracies between us.

But it’s not just the collaborations of transborder conservation researchers that have been lost. The true danger is to the plants and animals that live there.

Border-wall construction will clear more landscape along the border and inevitably knock out more cacti. For each mile of wall, more habitat will be bulldozed for “enforcement zones,” then paved with high-speed patrol roads, staked with sensors and blasted with 24-hour flood lighting.

Both the 30-foot steel bollard wall and the flood lights will doom “collaborations” between hawkmoths — the co-evolved pollinators of the cacti — and the cereus themselves. Hawkmoths spend most of the night flying at heights of 9 to 30 feet, trying to sniff out cactus floral scents. For the moths that can make it over the 30-foot barrier, their perception of the flowers and their attractive scents will likely be disrupted by lights, noise and dust from construction.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is not the cereus’ only habitat, but similar situations will play out throughout their range and across the length of the border. New walls will disrupt ecosystems, stop wildlife migrations and push dozens, if not hundreds, of species in the borderlands closer to extinction.

And so the sacamatraca cactus has become “the canary on the border line,” foreshadowing localized extinctions as an immediate example of how border walls will harm plants and animals.

This unprecedented, lit-up, 30-foot monstrosity is a nightmare in the making, but it’s not one that either the Park Service or local Customs and Border Protection has recommended. There are already “Normandy barriers” that effectively block vehicle passage into the United States but do not fragment habitat or stop wildlife migration. Border Patrol has hundreds of cameras and sensors scattered throughout the wilderness, amounting to a complex network of surveillance technology. We already have a virtual wall — and one that’s far more effective than a medieval bulwark.

So what is the true price we’ll pay for an unneeded, frankly absurd wall in a national park that’s being built only to fulfill an uninformed political promise?

For one, it’s 624 million taxpayer dollars, and that’s just for the stretch along the park border.

But the true cost also includes things that are priceless: a cactus with a brilliant night blossom that makes a sphinx moth swoon; disrupted relationships among plants, pollinators and seed dispersers; and a half-century of cooperation among Mexican and U.S. biologists who now fear that their collaborative conservation efforts are all for naught.

The story of the sphynx moth and the night-blooming cereus is just one small tale in this looming national tragedy. From the desecration of Indigenous sacred sites to the scar it will cut across our public lands, the border wall will leave devastation in its wake.

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.