Antibiotic use in agriculture is a ticking time bomb, posing looming health risks to people and the environment.
The emergence of multiple pandemics in the animal agriculture industry over the past few decades, coupled with COVID-19’s suspected origins in wildlife meat markets, has prompted renewed calls from experts to transform the global food system to prevent diseases harmful to humans.
Industrial agriculture puts humans in contact with scores of animals in cramped conditions, which is ideal for disease transfer.
But that’s only one of the health dangers it causes. Antibiotics are used ubiquitously in all kinds of large-scale agriculture, causing antibiotic resistance and environmental toxicity that studies show we’re not prepared to combat.
Watch our new video to learn more about issues arising from antibiotic use in agriculture.
New research reveals clear guidance for reducing human-wildlife conflict and restoring wolf populations.
There’s one clear way to make both wolves and livestock owners happy: Make sure that predators have enough natural prey.
That may seem like an obvious answer, but now we have data to back it up. A team of researchers combed through nearly 120 previously published studies about the diets of gray wolves (Canis lupus) and found that in most cases the predators purposefully select wild prey when it’s available — even when livestock is nearby and abundant.
The paper, published March 20 in the journal Biological Conservation, pulled from research conducted in 27 countries and found consistent results across three continents.
Another conclusion: Owners who leave their livestock out to graze freely, especially in small groups, found their herds more vulnerable to predation. Sites that kept livestock under supervision and penned their animals, especially at night, suffered fewer losses. Using non-lethal deterrent methods such as fences and guard dogs also improved conditions. Not protecting herds, they found, increased the likelihood of predation by up to 78%.
The study also found that wolves show a tendency to eat native species that have their own defense mechanisms — horns, antlers and other sharp bits. Previous research has shown that wolves coevolved with antlered ungulates, making them the ideal, preferred prey.
These results offer clear guidance, according to the authors, who write that “wild prey populations should be maintained and restored wherever possible to provide enough food for grey wolves and to minimize the likelihood that they will attack livestock.” They add that their study may have relevance for reducing conflict between humans and other large carnivores around the world.
Of course, restoring prey populations presents its own set of challenges, but this research illustrates the value of having a healthy ecosystem: It keeps both humans and their domesticated animals safer.
The problem of overcrowded public lands and insufficient urban green space predates the pandemic. Are we finally willing to fund the solutions?
Across the United States, local authorities have sealed off public parks and open spaces, blaming visitors who failed to maintain social distance. What started with closed urban playgrounds spread like a contagion in its own right. In California the city of Santa Cruz banned surfing. In Colorado San Juan County issued an order threatening to tow vehicles belonging to backcountry skiers. “Socially distant” gradually became synonymous with “indoors.”
It was only a few weeks ago that going for a hike was seen as a reasonable way to shelter in place. Then the sun came.
Beachgoers and picnickers turned out en masse, making headlines from San Francisco to London. Mayors and governors scolded the public on live television as they announced new restrictions.
A playground closed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Rod Raglin, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A common refrain on social media lamenting the park closures has been, “Why can’t we have nice things?” But blaming ourselves for crowded parks misses the underlying issue: In many parts of the country, there simply isn’t enough public space to go around.
This problem is most pronounced in urban areas. An analysis of the country’s 100 largest cities found that only half of residents live within a half-mile of a park. Access is especially limited for communities of color and low-income groups, where neighborhoods lack public spaces to exercise, relax, gather, or simply breathe clean air.
This lack of city parks puts further pressure on nearby rural areas. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area (near San Francisco) and the Blue Ridge Parkway (near Washington, D.C.) had 15 million visitors apiece last year — more than triple the number at Yellowstone or Yosemite.
In the past decade, the National Park Service has seen a 15% increase in visits. But in that same decade, funding grew by less than .5% in real terms, leaving the agency unable to build new trailheads, expand parking lots or address a $12 billion repair backlog.
Crowds wait in line for shuttle buses at Zion National Park in 2017. Photo: Wayne Hsieh, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
When recreation sites become overwhelmed, access becomes self-limiting. In much of the country, finding a parking spot at a trailhead is a summer adventure in its own right. We’ve overcrowded and underfunded ourselves into this situation.
This problem has a straightforward solution. Safeguarding access to public spaces requires protecting more land and improving infrastructure in existing parks. Doing so has the double-effect of creating more space for nature while distributing the impact of visitors. These should be easy wins to support an outdoor recreation economy valued at $500 billion by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
There are any number of ways Congress could address this issue. A simple first step: Mandate that taxes on oil and gas drilling allocated to the Land and Water Conservation Fund are not diverted to other projects or left unappropriated. According to Congress’ in-house researchers, less than half of the $41 billion raised by the fund was spent to support public lands and recreation.
This lack of support is hardly accidental. “The Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,” wrote William Perry Pendley in 2016. He is now the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, overseeing a huge swath of federal public land.
Some officials are pushing a narrative in which landscapes are made whole through private development instead of public stewardship. Now, in the midst of a national emergency, we find ourselves unable to keep public spaces open at the time when we need them most — proof that this vision is gaining literal ground. With too little space to go around, staying home is the only way to stay safe.
The pandemic didn’t create this crisis. But in the confines of our homes, we should ask whether we’ve taken our parks for granted. Our stewardship of public spaces must be continually reaffirmed, so that we can all go out in search of social distance — and perhaps even solitude.
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.
Satellites can help monitor industry and highlight environmental harm. SkyTruth founder John Amos tells us how technological advances are driving conservation efforts — and how people can participate.
You never know what hidden truth may lurk in the background of a photograph.
John Amos learned that lesson more than 20 years ago, when he was working as a consulting geologist in Washington, D.C. There, a poster-sized image hanging on the office wall showed a satellite photo of Mount St. Helens taken about 10 years after its famous 1980 eruption. Most people looking at the photo were struck by the visible destruction caused by the blast and lava flows. But what grabbed Amos’s attention was another even larger area of destruction in the surrounding national forest, which bore the distinctive checkboard pattern of clear-cut logging.
“I didn’t really realize how our national forests were being managed,” he says. “And when I saw that the devastation from clear-cut logging greatly exceeded this apocalyptic, natural event … that was so stunning.”
That image stayed with him, along with others he saw over the years as a consultant for industry projects, including oil and gas drilling.
The mounting destruction of the landscape finally led Amos to take a big leap: In 2001 he left his well-paying D.C. job to start SkyTruth, a nonprofit aimed at harnessing the power of satellite imagery to inspire environmental protection.
The organization’s research has driven scientific studies, uncovered corporate and government malfeasance, and helped activists put a picture on their cause.
Nearly 20 years later the mission of SkyTruth hasn’t changed, but the available technology has vastly improved. So, too, has the potential to use these eyes in the sky to boost conservation and research efforts.
We spoke with Amos about the power of images, the next technological frontier and how ordinary people can begin “skytruthing.”
A big part of your work depends on satellite imagery. How do you access those images?
SkyTruth founder John Amos. Photo Courtesy of John Amos
There are satellites producing data that’s free for the public to access. And then there are satellites that have other capabilities that are operated commercially, where you have to pay for the data.
Luckily, one of the unsung great successes of the American space program was the launch of the Landsat series of earth-imaging satellites beginning in 1972. That has produced a tremendous body of images, although there have been times when it wasn’t really available to the public. During the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, as a consequence of the Reagan administration’s push to privatize government assets, they took the Landsat program data and gifted it to a private company. The data went from costing something like 30 or 40 bucks an image to $4,400. When I started doing this work, all but the biggest environmental groups were priced out of that technology.
Luckily that situation’s changed over the years. Now it’s all available for free. And in fact, as soon as it became available for free, Google downloaded all the Landsat satellite images at the time and made them publicly available. And then the European Space Agency has a tremendous earth-observation program, too. And their data is available for free.
But a lot of the work we do requires higher-resolution images than the ones that are publicly available. In some cases we’ve been able to get imagery gifted to us by the companies that operate those satellites so that we can demonstrate the kinds of things you can do with their imagery.
There’s so much that your organization has done with research and data, but the key mission all along has been focused on imagery. Why?
My initial motivation for starting SkyTruth was to produce pictures and give pictures away. You know, a picture’s worth a thousand words, seeing is believing, right?
I think images have the power to hit people at a brainstem level. So, rather than just hitting people over the head with well-documented reports, full of data about the impact of deforestation in Papua New Guinea, for example, show ’em a picture of what that looks like.
And because of this longtime series of earth-observation imagery that’s available, we can do time travel. We can show people what “normal” used to be, and what things look like now — and in some cases, project into the future.
That’s a really powerful tool because of this shifting baseline problem that we have. What we think of as normal is what’s around us right now, but a place could have been totally different 10 years ago. And people forget that. So showing that change is a powerful aspect of the imagery.
And over the years, tools have come along that have just exploded our ability to do that kind of visual presentation to people. One of the biggest ones was Google Earth. I just remember being amazed that I had imagery of the whole world at my fingertips and in a lot of places, very high-resolution, detailed imagery.
There can be a big gap between people getting information — or in this case, imagery — and actually taking action. How do you close that gap?
Producing unique data sets from imagery that are well documented and scientifically robust has become an increasingly important part of what we do. And it’s becoming increasingly doable with the advent of cloud-computing platforms.
One example is we use the Google Cloud platform that absorbed the millions of Landsat satellite images. We’ve built a process that analyzes those images once a year and creates a map of all of the land in Appalachia that’s actively being impacted by mining.
A map shows the footprint of the Kayford Mountain, West Virginia coal-mining operation superimposed on Landsat satellite image of Washington, D.C. Photo: SkyTruth, (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
And then we create a companion geospatial data set that anybody with any mapping skills can download and use. We give that away for free. I think seven or eight peer-reviewed studies have been done using that data set. One of them resulted in a legal action that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. There’ve been studies of not only environmental impacts, but human health impacts.
It’s our hope that there’s enough rational people in the world that science will still move the public policy needle occasionally in a positive direction.
We also don’t want to feel like we have to cover the whole planet all the time. So for anybody who’s interested or so inclined, we try to be public and open about the tools we use. And we point people in directions where they can start “skytruthing,” too.
One of the key tools for that is the SkyTruth alerts system, which is an interactive map where we publish environmental information that is timely and alert-worthy. People can sign up to get a notification anytime a new alert pops up within their area of interest. We’re hoping someday they can create their own reports and soon they’ll be able to create their own alert and publish it back into our system for anybody to see.
What are you focused on now?
Our organizational focus right now is applying machine learning to detect meaningful patterns in imagery and patterns in space and time.
We’re very excited by our continuing strong partnership with Google. They’ve been so helpful to us in being able to do really big projects, and now we have a new partnership with Amazon Web Services to use machine learning to automate the detection of oil pollution at sea.
We’re to the point where we’ve got a working prototype that we’re going to deploy this summer to be able to look at the whole ocean instead of just what a few interns can manage to do in a couple hours. That’ll open doors to a lot of other environmental monitoring opportunities.
As the satellite imagery constellations get better and better, and the prices come down, we will get access to imagery that is more detailed and capable. With that we’ll be able to notify people not only that we think something happened, but what we think it was, how big and bad it was, and when it happened.
Graphic showing the cumulative oil slick footprint for the BP / Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the northeast Gulf of Mexico. Created by overlaying all of the oil slicks mapped by SkyTruth on satellite images taken between April 25 and July 16, 2010. Photo: SkyTruth, (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
What else do you see in the future of conservation with this kind of technology?
In conservation we’re heading toward near real-time surveillance of areas of high conservation value or environmental concern.
We have a new partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society to work with them to figure out how to apply artificial intelligence-driven analysis of satellite imagery to better monitor enforcement and management of protected areas around the world — onshore and offshore.
But we still have the problem that you described, which is that you can now see in real time that there’s chainsaws cutting down trees in that orangutan reserve. But what are you going to do about it?
And that’s the question that is going to be harder to answer.
Protected area managers might not yet be geared up to be able to take action on a real-time alert. But I think as people realize that they can know that there is illegal logging happening that day, then they’re going to build a program around taking action based on that knowledge.
In the early days of our Global Fishing Watch program, people would say, “Oh, you’re going to bust the bad guys, right?” Well, no, of course we don’t have enforcement vessels on the water.
But by making all this fishing activity visible, we’re creating space for new ways to manage national waters and high-seas fisheries, and new ways to measure what’s happening out there and model the impact on ecosystems.
It brings to light a whole area of activity that creates all these new opportunities for science, research, regulation and management. But it also opens a big window for consumers who more and more want to know that the dollars they are spending when they buy fish are not supporting a company that uses slave labor on their fishing vessel fleet or is not doing environmental harm.
So I think in addition to possibly providing better enforcement by government agencies, there may be an even bigger potential in shifting society’s attitude toward that problem in a way that businesses have to respond to.
The Mindo harlequin toad, last seen in Ecuador in 1989, was feared a victim of the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus. Have other lost species survived, too?
If the Mindo harlequin toad had a yearbook photo, its caption might have read “most unlikely to be rediscovered.” The tiny, Christmas-colored species was declared “possibly extinct” two years ago, after not being seen in its Ecuadorian habitat since 1989. It and several other species from the same region have long been feared lost to the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus, which has already caused dozens of extinctions around the globe.
But you know what yearbook photo captions are like: They’re destined to be proven wrong.
And that’s what’s happened with the Mindo harlequin toad (Atelopus mindoensis). New research reveals that the long-lost species is alive — if not exactly well.
The rediscovery came as a surprise, since no one was looking for the lost toad.
“The team was not looking for Atelopus or even expecting them,” explains Alejandro Arteaga, president of Tropical Herping and the senior author of the paper announcing the species’ rediscovery. “The cloud forests where it lives are the most thoroughly documented in the country, and no one had seen them in 30 years.”
Instead, the research team — including experts from the Tropical Herping, the University of New Brunswick and other institutions — was on a private reserve documenting other Ecuadorian frog species. There, on a narrow path next to a creek, they saw a single juvenile frog sleeping on a leaf about a foot and a half off the ground. Upon inspection, they realized it bore the distinctive red-and-green coloration, elongated noses and mitten-like webbed fingers that had previously been used to describe the Mindo harlequin toad.
Amazed by what they’d found, the researchers returned to the site for a second visit and found five more frogs on the opposite side of the creek, including three juveniles and two adult males.
Photo by Jose Vieira, used with permission.
Arteaga wasn’t present for the discovery, but the team quickly conveyed photographs — they just didn’t let him know in advance what the pictures contained.
“My friends actually videotaped my reaction, as they knew I was going to be blown away,” Arteaga reports. “They were right. It took me several minutes to even realize that I was seeing an actual living Mindo harlequin toad. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.”
And there was more good news: Skin tests on two of the juveniles revealed no sign of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, the fungus behind the chytrid crisis. That doesn’t necessarily mean the fungus isn’t present in the reserve, or that other frogs or toads there aren’t affected, but it was another welcome discovery.
And while the rediscovery doesn’t indicate a very populous species, it does reveal that enough of them exist to keep breeding.
However, their survival remains precarious. The private reserve — the exact location of which remains undisclosed — has pristine waters and lacks predatory invasive trout that have caused amphibian declines in other parts of Ecuador, but that could change. The researchers caution that trout could easily make their way to the reserve, as could the pesticides currently being used upstream. Humans could also carry the Bd fungus or other infectious diseases to the habitat.
Now that the toad has been rediscovered, the real work begins. “We’ve already sent a proposal to obtain funding for monitoring and helping establish an ex situ conservation ‘backup’ colony,” Arteaga says. The paper also recommends intense additional searches both in the private reserve and throughout the toad’s historic range, as well as education programs to help local peoples understand the species and conduct citizen-science efforts to help assure its survival.
And, of course, this provides an incentive to see what other presumed-extinct harlequin toad species might still exist.
“After the rediscovery, we have started a ‘rescue mission’ project seeking to find the remaining 12 species that are still lost,” Arteaga says. Several other Atelopus species have been rediscovered in the past few years ago, so hope remains eternal.
Our desire for the companionship of exotic pets from around the world has fueled the spread of disease.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought widespread attention to the consequences of the wildlife trade. Just like in earlierpandemics, fingers have now been pointed at familiar places: wildlife sold for food in wet markets, and pangolins and other species poached for food and traditional medicine.
But there’s another common source of novel diseases: The exotic pet trade.
This lucrative $10 billion-$20 billion a year industry frequently involves taking wildlife from their native habitats and shipping them to opposite corners of the globe —sometimes legally, often illegally.
Both the legal and illegal pet trades carry risks of pandemics and smaller disease outbreaks not just to people but to other wildlife as well as livestock and pets.
Watch our video of some dangerous diseases stemming from the global pet trade:
A historic international treaty to protect marine biodiversity is currently being negotiated, but will it be strong enough to create reserves and boost conservation efforts?
Most of us have never been to the world’s immense last wilderness and never will. It’s beyond the horizon and often past the limits of our imaginations. It contains towering underwater mountain ranges, ancient corals, mysterious, unknown forms of life and the largest seagrass meadow in the world.
Yet it begins just 200 nautical miles off our shores. Technically referred to as “areas beyond national jurisdiction,” these remote expanses are known to most people simply as “the high seas.”
Their vast, dark waters encompass roughly two-thirds of the ocean and half the planet and are the last great global commons. Yet just 1% are protected, leaving these vital but relatively lawless expanses open to overfishing, pollution, piracy and other threats.
That could change soon.
In 2018, after more than a decade of groundwork at the United Nations, negotiations officially began for a new treaty focused on conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in the waters beyond national jurisdiction.
The proposed treaty is being developed under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was signed in 1982 and defined nations’ rights and responsibilities for use of the world’s oceans. The Convention itself is a landmark agreement that established many key environmental protections and policies, but over the years it’s become obvious that some gaps in its governance policy have left the ocean’s ecosystems open to ongoing and emerging threats.
The new treaty is intended to help fill those gaps, although, as with any international agreement, that presents challenges. Representatives of world governments gathered in 2018 and 2019 for three rounds of negotiations, but many parts of the key issues remained unresolved. Among them are plans to establish a framework for evaluating and implementing area-based management tools, which include marine protected areas, since no such systems exist now for the high seas.
Other items requiring agreement include establishing uniform requirements for conducting environmental impact assessments; how benefits from marine genetic resources may be shared among nations; and capacity building for management and conservation.
Many experts hoped the fourth negotiation session, originally scheduled to begin March 23 at the U.N. headquarters in New York, would lead to the finalization of the treaty’s text, but the meetings were postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That pause gives us an opportunity to understand what’s at stake a bit better.
“This is the first time that there’s been a treaty process devoted to marine biodiversity in the high seas and the first ocean treaty really to be negotiated in over 30 years,” says Peggy Kalas, director of the High Seas Alliance, a coalition of more than 40 environmental nonprofits and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “It’s a big deal, and it’s been a long time coming.”
But this historic opportunity is also one that could be squandered if the treaty fails to enact protections strong enough to actually safeguard ocean life.
“It has the potential to be a gamechanger for the oceans,” says Douglas McCauley, a professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology at U.C. Santa Barbara and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative. “But it’s still to be determined whether it will be just the treaty version of lip service.”
The Need for Protection
We’re all connected to the high seas, even if we never actually see them, says Morgan Visalli, a project scientist at Benioff Ocean Initiative at U.C. Santa Barbara. “It’s incredibly important for helping to regulate the climate, for providing oxygen, food and jobs.”
Even on land we depend on a healthy ocean. Phytoplankton in the ocean generate half our oxygen, and the ocean plays a key role in mitigating climate change — absorbing 25% of our CO2 emissions and 90% of heat related to those emissions. It’s also home to a rich diversity of species, some of which we’re still discovering.
But marine ecosystems face grave threats from an onslaught of abuses: chemical, plastic and noise pollution; deep seabed mining and other kinds of resource extraction; increased shipping; overfishing and illegal fishing; and climate change, which is altering both the temperature and chemistry of the waters.
Cargo ship at sea. Photo: Bernard Spragg, public domain.
Numerous strategies are needed to tackle these problems, including the bedrock component of reducing greenhouse gases.
But a key tool that scientists have identified to help restore biodiversity is establishing reserves, often referred to as ocean parks or marine protected areas.
We know pretty well how to do this in national waters — there are more than 15,000 of them already in places like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the Florida Keys. But few such protected areas exist in the high seas because there is no international framework to guide the process. One such effort to establish a marine protected area in Antarctica’s Ross Sea took years of research and diplomacy to implement.
It’s simply not feasible to scale the process — especially in the time we’d need to do it. That’s why creating such a framework for marine protected areas in waters outside of national waters is a key part of the new high-seas treaty negotiations.
And that fits into a larger global vision.
The participant nations in another international treaty, the Convention on Biological Diversity, are set to convene this fall. The agenda includes a goal of enacting an international framework to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030.
It’s a goal that scientists call a bare minimum. And it’s one that may be impossible to meet without the high-seas treaty.
“The science is clear, if we’re going to sustain a healthy, functioning ocean ecosystem, we need to be protecting at least 30% of the world’s oceans,” says Liz Karan, who leads efforts to protect the high seas for Pew Charitable Trusts, a member of the High Seas Alliance.
In anticipation of the treaty’s passage, scientists like Visalli and McCauley have already started modeling how new priority areas could be identified.
The high seas are our last global commons & essential to life on earth. As the UN weighs a groundbreaking #HighSeas treaty, we crunched 22 billion data points to identify hotspots of biodiversity deserving of protection on the high seas #OneOceanOnePlanethttps://t.co/yuwgkkZMuOpic.twitter.com/UdjupHfBPJ
— Benioff Ocean Initiative (@UCSBenioffOcean) April 7, 2020
The other parts of the treaty, including environmental impact assessments and genetic resources, remain vital areas of discussion, but conservation groups have stressed the importance of protected ocean reserves for protecting the planet.
“If we want the ocean to continue its role in climate adaptation and being able to absorb the excess heat that it does, we need to create areas of resilience for the ocean,” says Kalas. “And the best way to do that is marine protected areas.”
The Challenges
Of course the devil is in the details.
While thousands of marine protected areas already exist, they come with varying levels of protections — much like we see with public lands. Some can be very restrictive, like national parks, or continue to allow extractive activities, such as in national forests.
Current marine protected areas range from no-take reserves that ban all extraction to areas allowing multiple uses — the latter are more common. Not surprisingly, though, scientific studies have shown that the no-take reserves do a much better job at protecting and restoring biodiversity.
Whether the treaty will be a landmark conservation effort or enshrine the status quo has yet to be determined, says Karan. “Both potential pathways are currently reflected in the draft treaty text” at this time.
From a scientific standpoint, McCauley says, marine protected areas should actually protect the wild character of the area and that means no activities — like mining or bottom trawling — that would disturb habitat. And the protections need to extend down from the ocean’s surface, through the water column, to the seafloor.
A kelp forest in a marine protected area off the coast of California. Photo: Camille Pagniello, (CC BY 2.0)
To do that means figuring out how the new treaty would fit with a tangle of more than 20 existing governance organizations that regulate seabed mining, fisheries management and shipping regulations.
“One of our hopes is that this treaty would knit those pieces together and provide a little bit more coherence and compatibility with those issues, particularly with regards to conservation and sustainable use,” says Karan.
There would also need to be a process for scientifically evaluating areas proposed for protections, and how the established reserves would be managed, and the restrictions enforced.
“The whole process, the whole vision and opportunity to think about doing something smarter and better — for the ocean, for biodiversity, for us — ends if we don’t get strong language in the treaty and get that treaty to pass,” says McCauley. “There’s historical potential for the oceans, but we need to make sure people on the outside are watching the people on the inside [at the United Nations] in New York.”
Road Ahead
Even though official treaty negotiations are on hold awaiting a decision on rescheduling the talks, work continues among governments as they review and refine their positions on numerous proposals submitted by states and NGOs.
The United States has been a participant in the talks, but the treaty process has largely flown under the radar among the general public so far. Given President Trump’s position on environmental protections and distain for multilateralism (like the Paris climate agreement), that’s been pretty intentional on the part of environmental NGOs.
But as efforts may be nearing the finish line, this is starting to shift. Karan says there’s more interest from legislators about high seas governance and more need to have an engaged public who can advocate for strong conservation protections.
Things are complicated, though, by the fact that the United States never ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, widely considered a “Constitution” for the ocean.
There is hope from some of the participants that the United States could ratify the high seas treaty if it comes to fruition, say Karan. But no one is holding their breath for that. Kalas says the goal is that the treaty, once completed, would be widely supported, although it remains to be seen how many countries will sign on. “If only 40 countries ratify it, that wouldn’t make it as strong of an agreement as if all the United Nation’s 193 nations ratified the agreement,” she says.
But there’s a fine line between having an agreement that’s universally supported and one that establishes concrete conservation actions and protections.
“Our concern is that in trying to get everyone in the tent as it were, we’re going to wind up with a status-quo agreement,” says Karan. “As much as we want a treaty, we want one that will make concrete change on the water.”
And it’s worth remembering, we’re talking about a lot of water. When the next session convenes, she says, “states will decide the ocean’s fate.”
The Trump administration continues to strip away environmental protections in the face of the pandemic. History shows that the people can fight back — and win.
Never one to miss an opportunity, the Trump administration has repeatedly used the COVID-19 crisis as cover to enact unwise and dangerous environmental policies against the public interest and to forestall citizen input.
In recent days the Environmental Protection Agency has moved forward with weakening rules for automobile emissions and relaxing pollution standards. The Bureau of Land Management continues leasing for oil and gas drilling even as prices drop. And while much of the country remains under stay-at-home orders and faces the most disruptive public health crisis in a century, deadlines for public statements on forest plans have not been extended and formats for hearings about dams have frustrated citizens who wish to speak up for public resources.
Republicans are using today’s pandemic-related exigencies to undermine environmental protection and the public interest. We’ve seen it before. Hiding behind emergencies is from an old playbook.
Americans have heard excuses about national emergencies in the past and resisted them; we should again.
The cover of a 1967 newsletter shows a Kennecott open-pit copper mine in Bingham, Utah, and the proposed site of their mine in Glacier Peak.
For a success story that resonates today, we need only look back to the era of the Vietnam War. In late 1966 Kennecott Copper Corporation announced its intent to develop a massive open-pit mine at Miners Ridge, within the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area of the North Cascades in Washington state. The mine would be near the iconic Image Lake, where backpackers enjoy perhaps the greatest views in the entire Cascade Range.
The context of the Vietnam War allowed Kennecott to argue it was merely fulfilling its duty to provide essential materials for the war effort, under which the General Services Administration had established a plan to stockpile critical materials for national security. Seeking to get new mines into operation, the agency promoted incentives that included loans and technical assistance.
Amid all of this, Kennecott pitched its proposed pit as patriotic.
Conservationists quickly grew alarmed. The Wilderness Act, which protected 9.1 million acres of federal land and established the Glacier Peak Wilderness, had just been signed into law in 1964. A compromise in the law allowed Kennecott and other companies to mine claims, but conservationists opposed the giant corporation and demonstrated the obvious: that open-pit mining and wilderness were incompatible.
Everyone knew the mountains held copper — the place name was Miners Ridge, after all. During World War II, at a time when minerals were similarly in demand, the War Production Board approved a road to the mine site, but it never was built.
Kennecott Copper Corporation’s plan to develop an open-pit mine at Miners Ridge is the subject of the new book An Open Pit Visible from the Moon by Adam M. Sowards
This failure showed that maybe the copper in Miners Ridge really wasn’t that important after all. In 1967, as Kennecott pressed ahead, Polly Dyer, arguably the most important conservationist in Pacific Northwest history, reasoned in a public hearing that “If the Nation was able to pass through that desperate war effort without needing to utilize the copper in Miners Ridge, I am extremely skeptical about Kennecott’s assertion that it is necessary for today’s war operation.”
Dyer was right. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, who had authority over the U.S. Forest Service, which administered the wilderness, soon admitted that the war effort and the public’s standard of living would “not suffer” one bit if the mine was “left undeveloped.”
For all its talk of selfless service to the nation, Kennecott operated primarily to bolster its bottom line — and to establish the precedent of mining within wilderness boundaries. The company’s president was exasperated by having to try the case in the press against an angry public. In his view, the company’s interest was the nation’s interest.
All of this is tiringly familiar in 2020, when the president’s personal interests, antipathy to the press and the public, and desire to establish untoward precedents animate virtually every utterance and policy.
What are the lessons we can take away from this?
Kennecott never built its mine, and the site remains secure as wilderness today, but that was not accidental. It took the efforts of citizens and organizations like the North Cascades Conservation Council and The Mountaineers publicizing the threat, writing representatives, and showing up at hearings. Through it all, Northwesterners demanded that the public’s interest be protected against the corporate bottom line.
In summer 1967 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas traveled from his summer home in Goose Prairie, Washington, to attend a protest near the mine site. An aroused public, he said to 150 to 200 protestors on the trail, might “appeal to the community’s sense of justice” and declare there are values beyond “a few paltry dollars.”
The public interest, then and now, transcends the bottom line. It sustains democracy; it doesn’t suspend it.
We must not let our representatives use COVID-19 as an excuse to undermine environmental governance. We must continue to stand up for the protections that already exist, which protect not just our wilderness but human health.
History suggests that we can win these fights with determined resistance. Even amid the disruptions visiting our lives with lost lives and jobs, we need to keep one eye on the future and remember that our voices can make a difference.
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.
A summer of extremes leaves sobering questions about the state of Earth’s largest store of ice, capable of inundating coastlines worldwide as it melts.
“What happens in Antarctica affects us all,” says Ella Gilbert, a climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey.
But does everyone know what’s happening in Antarctica, let alone understand how events there could threaten communities around the world?
Some people may have gotten a hint during a brief few days in February, when international headlines reported record heat baking the Antarctic Peninsula at the height of the southern hemisphere’s summer. It was a rare moment in which our southernmost continent made worldwide news.
But the broader story — one that’s since been eclipsed by coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic — gained much less attention. February’s heat, it turns out, was just one in a string of climate-related developments on the continent that could affect the whole planet.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC.
As the COVID-19 pandemic shows, early dissemination of science-based information saves lives during a crisis. Scientists have long warned that the same is true of the unfolding climate emergency: If people receive — and believe — evidence that burning fossil fuels threatens the climate, we can come together to flatten the arc of rising temperatures and protect vulnerable populations, including low-lying coastal communities.
That’s particularly relevant when it comes to warming in Antarctica, where 90% of the planet’s glacial ice holds the key to stable sea levels across the globe. Scientists have expressed concerns about melting of the continent’s ice for some time now: It’s already raising sea levels and could dramatically flood global coastlines in the years ahead, potentially at a rapid rate.
But despite years of warnings, the question remains: Does the general public know enough about climate and the Antarctic to come together and reduce the threat?
Antarctica’s Climate: A Complex, Intertwined System
The first hint of Antarctica’s warm summer came in September 2019, when the sea ice surrounding the continent finished the austral winter well below the historic average, continuing a five-year trend.
Below-average sea ice in the Antarctic is not necessarily a direct factor of climate change — some scientists attribute the decline over the past five years to natural variability, although questions remain about the additional influence of anthropogenic forces. But we do know that ice-free ocean waters absorb more heat during the long days of summer, and that the waters in the Antarctic Ocean have already been made warmer by greenhouse gas emissions.
And as ice retreats each year, it can further intensify the effects of climate change because it’s no longer there to shield the water from the warming rays of the sun.
“Sea ice is very reflective,” explains Claire Parkinson, a NASA senior scientist who has studied polar climate systems for more than four decades. “As it retreats the sun’s radiation absorbs into the ocean, which helps warm the atmosphere.”
Antarctic sea ice shining in the sun in 2017. Photo: Nathan Kurtz/NASA
Because of this, some scientists say low sea ice, whether from natural or human causes, may have magnified the startling Antarctic warmth that came later in the year.
A second factor affecting the complex systems in the region also became evident in September, when sudden stratospheric warming occurred 20 miles above Antarctica. Scientists also attributed this rare occurrence for the southern hemisphere to natural variation. However, as with low sea ice, it added heat to an already warmed Antarctic Ocean, and scientists believe this later helped fuel Australia’s devastating wildfire season by disturbing on-the-ground weather systems.
As Parkinson explains, even “natural” warming events are now amplified by the impacts of human activities on the climate, including deforestation and carbon pollution. “Climate systems are very intertwined,” she says.
Unprecedented Melting
Things got worse in November. As the austral summer approached, news of West Antarctica’s dramatic melting of snow and ice trickled northward to the rest of the world. By December melt rates were estimated at a whopping 230% above average.
It was the beginning of a summer of widespread melting.
The Belgian scientists who first reported the development used climate models to estimate melt rates, but satellite images revealed direct effects of melting two months later. Analysis by scientists at NASA and the University of Colorado showed widespread pooling of meltwater on the surface of the George VI Ice Sheet in West Antarctica. Such pooling is a marker of rapid melting that is ordinarily more common in the comparatively warmer climates of Alaska and Greenland.
Jewel-toned ponds of meltwater on the George VI ice shelf. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Alison Banwell, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies Antarctic ice shelves, says the lakes were larger in size and number than anything seen over the past 20 years. “They were also present almost continuously from December to March,” she says. “It’s the longest duration we’ve seen in recent history.”
Banwell, whose work ranges from analyzing satellite data to wading into Antarctic melt pools to install monitoring instruments, says early indications suggest the George VI region may have experienced the warmest air temperatures in two decades of observation, though she cautions that analysis is not yet complete.
According to Banwell the warmth appears consistent with human-caused climate change.
The next troubling sign came in January, when researchers found evidence of warming when they drilled a nearly 2,000-foot hole to the bottom of the Thwaites Glacier, one of West Antarctica’s largest ice masses. Instruments lowered into the hole showed warm ocean water swirling underneath the ice, signaling melting at a critical part of the glacier. David Holland, a physical climate scientist from New York University associated with the research, wrote that it “suggests that [the Thwaites] may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea level rise.”
Researchers digging out the drill site after a three-day storm with winds reaching 50 knots. Photo: David Holland, NYU
The Thwaites, which is the size of Great Britain, has long been considered one of the world’s most important glaciers in terms of global sea-level rise because it acts as a dam against the massive West Antarctica ice sheet. If melting destabilizes the Thwaites, as Holland says may be happening, ice from the massive ice sheet would pour into the ocean.
News from the Thwaites Glacier was soon followed by the February “heatwave.” The record-breaking temperatures, which scientists called “incredible and abnormal,” occurred on February 6 and 9, when the air at two West Antarctica locations reached nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit — far above the more typical high of 50 degrees and all-time records for the entire continent. The overheated air helped melt an estimated 20% of the region’s seasonal snow accumulation in just six days.
Antarctica heatwave. NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC.
Gilbert, the climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, attributed the heat to a “perfect storm” of meteorological conditions, where high pressure over South America pushed warm air over the Antarctic Peninsula, creating optimal conditions for dry, warm “foehn winds” to roll down local mountains and produce rapid temperature increases.
But Gilbert, who wrote about the heat in Britain’s Independent newspaper, says this occurred against a backdrop of ongoing Antarctic climate change.
“In the simplest sense,” she tells us by email, “if you’re starting from a warmer baseline, then any additional warming on top of that — due to foehn winds, or any other phenomenon — will push temperatures higher.”
Additionally, evidence in recent years suggests global climate change is increasing both foehn winds and the influence that warm air over South America has on West Antarctica.
Just as the soaring temperatures attracted international attention, satellite imagery on February 9 showed a 300-square-kilometer iceberg break away from the Pine Island Glacier.
The Pine Island Glacier recently spawned an iceberg over 300 sq km that very quickly shattered into pieces. Photo: Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by European Space Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The glacier, like the nearby Thwaites, prevents the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from flowing into the ocean. It has been deteriorating for decades, but with increasing speed. The giant berg sheared off along cracks scientists first observed close to a year ago, which they attribute to warming oceans.
“Warmer [ocean] waters are pushed more strongly toward Antarctica,” says Eric Rignot, professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, who communicated by email. Rignot has studied Antarctic glaciers for 30 years and ties the warmer waters to changing wind patterns associated in part with a warming atmosphere.
From West to East
As if the news out of West Antarctica isn’t concerning enough, evidence also points to accelerated melting in East Antarctica, home to the planet’s largest bodies of glacial ice. Although temperatures there are still too cold to drive significant surface melting, scientists say warming ocean waters are eroding glaciers much like the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers of West Antarctica.
In late March, as autumn fell on the southern hemisphere, new research added to concerns over East Antarctic ice. Analysis of satellite data found the region’s Denman Glacier has retreated three miles in the past two decades. Researchers warned that the Denman’s unique geography puts it at risk of widespread collapse, increasing concerns that Antarctic melting could spark rapid, global sea-level rise.
On its own the Denman has the potential to raise sea levels by five feet.
“We view the Wilkes Land sector with Denman and other glaciers as the biggest risk for the future,” says Rignot, who participated in the research. He calls the current situation “the premise of a collapse” in that part of East Antarctica. But he says collapse there is not imminent.
“We do not know yet exactly how much time we have,” he says of East Antarctica.
But the advanced state of melting in West Antarctica presents a clearer picture. He says if swift action is not taken on climate change in the next decade, “absolutely nothing will stop these glaciers” from further retreat that jeopardizes the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind?
Antarctica is the world’s remotest continent, with a small and mostly seasonal human population limited to scientists and occasional tourists visiting by cruise boat. Especially amid a global pandemic, events there may seem disconnected from our lives.
But as Gilbert of the British Antarctic Survey explains, changes on the continent have far-reaching consequences for global sea-level rise, changing ocean currents, and even on the pace of climate change itself.
Scientists found that #Greenland’s ice sheet lost an average of 200 gigatons of ice per year and #Antarctica’s ice sheet lost an average of 118 gigatons of ice per year. One gigaton of ice can fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.https://t.co/5nXiHX0JG9
The news from the southern continent adds to a steady stream of warnings about the unfolding climate crisis. But while the current pandemic has sidelined climate concerns for many, it may also offer an opportunity to address the crisis. The $2 trillion stimulus package signed into law in late March demonstrates the availability of massive funding for emergency response. And lawmakers are already discussing a similar-sized bill to come this summer, with early signs that infrastructure may be a focus.
Some climate and renewable energy experts see it as an opportunity to speed U.S. transition to cleaner energy and build resilience into coastal communities vulnerable to sea-level rise.
Whether that occurs will depend on a later debate, and perhaps also on how well the climate news coming out of remote Antarctica and other locations stays in the forefront of the public consciousness.
Diseases can cause animal populations to decline or even go extinct. And they’re often worsened by environmental threats caused by people.
COVID-19 has had the greatest global effect of any disease outbreak in living memory, but in many ways it’s not unique.
Pandemics have emerged and spread through human populations across our history, and the same has happened to wildlife. Disease outbreaks in animals and plants have caused extinctions and currently threaten the survival of vast numbers of species around the world.
And just as the effects of COVID-19 can be exacerbated by air pollution, wildlife epidemics and pandemics — officially known as epizootics and panzootics — are also influenced by environmental factors, most often related to human activity.
That may seem like an obvious answer, but now we have data to back it up. A team of researchers combed through nearly 120 previously published studies about the diets of gray wolves (Canis lupus) and found that in most cases the predators purposefully select wild prey when it’s available — even when livestock is nearby and abundant.
