Changes to regulations about critical habitat and consideration for economic interests threaten to upend more than 45 years of conservation success. But the worst may still be to come.
It took just 30 minutes for Trump administration officials to announce dramatic steps to undermine more than 45 years of successful conservation policy under the Endangered Species Act.
In an abbreviated half-hour press conference on Monday, August 12, officials from the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a series of new regulations critics say will put economic interests before species recovery and threaten the efficiency of all species protections.
Tellingly, many of the regulatory changes appear to have been written specifically to cater to business interests. They will “provide regulatory assurances and protection for both endangered species and the businesses [emphasis added] who rely on the use of federal and private lands,” Karen Budd-Falen, Interior’s deputy solicitor for fish, wildlife and parks, said in her introduction to the press conference.
The rules also appear to be a sneak attack against federal-level protections. Margaret Everson, Fish and Wildlife’s principal director, said in her remarks that the regulations will “return management of recovered species to the states.”
Numerous critics and studies have shown that most states are ill equipped to take over federal responsibility for protecting endangered species. The prospect of state management was not discussed further in the press conference. Prior to joining the Service last year, one of Everson’s last duties as a private consultant was speaking at a legal education course sponsored by Safari Club International, a pro-hunting organization with a record of fights against the Endangered Species Act.
The new regulations, which were discussed in what little detail the press conference would allow, include changes to the way critical habitat is determined, limitations on protecting species based on “speculative” future threats (e.g., climate change), consideration for some economic interests when considering species protections, and changes in the way threatened species (those likely to become endangered) are managed.
Gary Frazer, Fish and Wildlife’s assistant director for endangered species, said during the event that “nothing in here is a radical change from how we have been listing species in the last decade or so,” but conservation experts obviously disagreed — and many groups have already promised lawsuits.
Legal and political resistance aside, these changes are final upon publication in the Federal Register this week. They represent devastating changes to the Endangered Species Act — ones many experts predict will severely undermine protections and push numerous species toward, or even into, extinction — at a time when the threats to biodiversity continue to increase at a seemingly exponential rate.
To date the Endangered Species Act, one of the world’s most effective environmental laws, has managed to preserve an estimated 99 percent of listed species, including the Florida manatee, bald eagle, American alligator and many others. But in the process it’s also earned the ire of a wide range of corporate interests, who have occasionally been blocked from developing profitable projects that would have harmed or wiped out threatened species. Under the Trump administration and Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, a former fossil-fuel industry lobbyist, those corporate interests have now found themselves gleefully back in the driver’s seat. As a result, our nation’s imperiled wildlife may soon be roadkill.
To keep pace with environmental loss, scientists working to restore tropical reefs have turned their attention to coral reproduction and increasing diversity.
Visitors walk slowly through a room of dimmed lights and glowing tanks that bring the mysteries of the sea into plain view. The Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is home to 900 different species — everything from brightly colored reef fish to prickly sea urchins, even an albino alligator named Claude.
But some of the most exciting things to see are out of the public’s view.
In a specially constructed darkroom in one of the labs, scientists are coaxing corals to spawn and studying how to increase the chances of survivorship for baby corals. It’s all part of a larger effort to give threatened reefs — and all the species that depend on them — a fighting chance.
Reefs at Risk
Shallow tropical reefs face a long list of threats including overfishing, disease and pollution, but one of the biggest dangers is climate change, which is contributing to rising sea surface temperatures and increasing ocean acidification. It’s estimated that in the past 30 years half the world’s coral reefs have died and by the end of the century we could lose 90 percent.
That’s bad news for millions of people and marine life.
Coral reefs have important biodiversity and economic values. Reefs are like rainforests, providing food and shelter to thousands of other species. Coral reefs cover just 0.1 percent of the ocean floor, but they host more than 25 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity. “So if we lose them, then we lose a disproportionate amount of biodiversity,” says Rebecca Albright, a coral reef biologist who co-leads the California Academy of Science’s Hope for Reefs initiative that works on researching and restoring coral reefs.
Reefs also provide key ecosystem services, valued at an estimated at $375 billion a year. Coastal communities rely on subsistence and commercial fishing supported by reefs, and their beauty and biodiversity bring in big tourism dollars. Reefs also provide a buffer for shorelines, helping to protect against storms and erosion — increasingly expensive threats with climate change.
Albright spent years studying what was going wrong with reefs. “I’ve done a lot of work looking at impacts of ocean acidification on reproduction and coral settlement and there’s not a lot of good news there,” she says.
So she shifted her focus.
“If we’re losing corals at an unprecedented rate, then the only way we’re going to get them back is if they can reproduce or grow more quickly.”
Corals and algae grow in a lab at the California Academy of Sciences. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
Coral Reproduction
To understand how scientists are hoping to help save corals, you need a quick primer in coral reproduction.
Most corals can reproduce in two ways. There’s asexual reproduction — like a starfish, you can break off a piece of coral and the fragment will regenerate. Many conservation efforts have (and continue to) focus on fragmenting corals and then planting them back out onto reefs. These kinds of efforts work well at the hectare scale, says Albright, but they’re not effective for ecosystem-wide restoration. At this rate we’re a long way from being able to keep pace with the rate of environmental loss.
“You can imagine it’s very laborious and time consuming,” she says. “And when you look at the fact that we’ve lost 50 percent of the Great Barrier Reef, which is 2,300 kilometers long, individual divers going out and physically planting onto the reef is just not scalable.”
Corals, however, can also reproduce sexually. Synchronized reproductive events happen in a rather dramatic fashion — usually just once a year for most corals, and for many it’s at the end of the summer, after sunset and following a full moon, says Albright. Eggs and sperm are “broadcast” into the water column, where they combine and fertilize to produce larvae that eventually fix themselves to the ocean floor or other hard surfaces where they begin to grow from individual polyps into a colony. It will be a few months before the growing coral is even visible to the naked eye.
Understanding these reproductive processes could help solve another natural problem: Some reefs are currently dominated by a single clone and that low genetic variation can lead to disaster in times of environmental change. It’s of special concern now as corals try to adapt to warming waters.
Sexual reproduction is “the only avenue for genetic diversity and so that’s the one that we’re focused on right now,” says Albright.
“So what we’re trying to do is just focus on helping corals sexually reproduce, get as much genetic diversity out there as possible and then let nature pick which ones win and which ones lose, because that’s how it’s supposed to happen,” she says.
Spawning in Captivity
At the California Academy of Sciences darkroom, Albright and her team have built a special environment filled with tanks programmed to simulate the seasonal temperature and light changes of the Palau archipelago, home to the staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) they’re growing.
This complex process, which took a year and a half to develop, provides a unique opportunity to observe not just the reproduction but what happens to the resulting larvae, helping the researchers to better understand what may help more larvae make it to maturity out on the reef.
In nature, that’s not an easy task. Life is tough for a microscopic coral on the ocean floor — there are endless things that could eat or outcompete it. Only about one in a million survive.
“The goal here is just to figure out how to get these corals to produce more offspring that are more viable and then use that knowledge to help field efforts,” says Albright. “If we can increase survivorship by 10- or 100-fold, then that would be hugely helpful.” This is especially true for reefs that are already depleted.
Rebecca Albright examines baby corals spawned in the lab under a microscope. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
One of the things her lab will study over the next several years is whether energetic enhancements, like better nutrition, can help corals like they do in early life stage for humans.
“If you could add things that would make the larvae more energetically replete, would that translate into better post-settlement survivorship?” she asks. “We’ll be looking at that, along with how different [water] flows may make them grow faster and other ways to enhance their survivorship.”
Hope for Corals isn’t the only project out there trying to save corals. Other scientific efforts are studying how to get corals to be more robust against stress or to selectively breed “super corals” that are more resistant to heat or other pressures. Albright says she’s heartened by this broad array of scientific efforts. “I think the solutions that are being explored by working at the intersection of disciplines like biology, engineering and technology are the most exciting as they have high capacity to help us scale results to meaningful levels,” she says. “Most of that work is in early days but is exciting in terms of potential.”
But she admits, there’s still a long way to go, much to learn and no magic bullet for reefs.
Also, the clock is ticking.
“We’re losing things so quickly right now, most conversations are switching towards talking about saving certain things and where we focus our efforts — because we can’t save everything,” she says.
A new report from Global Witness found that three environmental defenders were murdered every week in 2018 and many more were criminalized for working to protect the land, water and other vital resources.
One year ago, on July 31, 2018, just after leaving home in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, Deputy Mayor Kateryna Gandziuk felt a splash of liquid across her head and face. An assailant had thrown a full liter of sulfuric acid on her, leaving her near death with burns across half her body. In the months leading up to the attack, she had accused several local politicians of illegal logging in the nearby Oleshky forest. She spent several painful months in the hospital, finally dying of her wounds on Nov. 4. After protests and international pressure, several suspects were arrested, but Gandziuk’s family and supporters allege a cover-up to protect the organizers of the assault that rises to the highest levels of the Ukrainian political elite.
Kateryna Gandziuk’s brutal attack is just one of 164 murders of environmentalists and land and water defenders that occurred in 2018, cataloged in a new report titled “Enemies of the State? How governments and business silence land and environmental defenders.” Published by Global Witness, an international nonprofit organization that works to protect human rights and the environment by confronting corruption, the report notes that “the real figure is likely to be much higher, because cases are often not recorded and very rarely investigated.”
The report is global in scale. Among the most dangerous places for land defenders in 2018 were the Philippines, Guatemala and Brazil. The pace of violence in Brazil has only accelerated since the right-wing, climate change-denying extremist Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency last January.
(Image from Global Witness, “Enemies of the State”)
“Jair Bolsonaro was elected promising an anti-environmental campaign. Now he’s delivering, unfortunately,” Carlos Rittl, executive secretary of Climate Observatory, a network of Brazilian civil society organizations, said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “The department responsible for combating deforestation, the Ministry of the Environment, was shut down.” Since Bolsonaro took office, the rate of destruction of the Amazon rainforest has increased by almost 40 percent. Known as “the lungs of the planet,” the rainforest plays a vital role in regulating the world’s climate. In May, eight former Brazilian environment ministers warned, “We’re facing the risk of runaway deforestation in the Amazon.” As one put it, Brazil is becoming an “exterminator of the future.”
In late July, Emyra Wajapi, a leader of the indigenous Wajapi tribe in the Amazon, was murdered by a group of 10-15 armed men who were part of an illegal mining operation. The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile, called his murder “tragic and reprehensible in its own right. It is also a disturbing symptom of the growing problem of encroachment on indigenous land — especially forests — by miners, loggers and farmers in Brazil.”
Another country where Global Witness reports numerous murders of activists is Colombia. A 50-year civil war between the Colombian government and the leftist FARC rebel army was settled in 2016 with a historic peace agreement. However, since the FARC laid down arms and its members rejoined Colombian civil society, over 500 social and community leaders have been assassinated. Many blame the right-wing administration of President Ivan Duque for failing to implement key provisions of the peace agreement.
“People are being killed because they are demanding their basic rights, in particular, the rights to access to land and to be free in their territories,” Luis Gilberto Murillo, the former governor of the predominantly Afro-Colombian state of Choco and former minister of environment and sustainable development, said on “Democracy Now!” “The way to avoid these killings is the full implementation of the peace process. There is a national commission to guarantee the protection of social leaders in the country [which] has not been convened regularly by the current government.”
A shocking video surfaced recently, showing the aftermath of the murder of renowned community activist Maria del Pilar Hurtado in Colombia, with her young son wailing next to her corpse. That video prompted a day of protest, with thousands gathering in Bogota, Colombia’s capital city, and at solidarity rallies around the world. Murillo was among those who protested in front of the Washington, D.C., residence of the Colombian ambassador to the United States.
Front-line land and water defenders are doing all they can, risking their freedom, their very lives, to save the planet. It is the least we can do in the United States, the most powerful country on Earth, to demand a world where people engaging in this vital, lifesaving work can do so free from persecution, harm or even death. This epic struggle to avoid climate catastrophe must heat up faster than the planet itself.
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.
But here’s the good news: New research finds it was actually six different species, and five still exist — for now.
In 1887 the Belgian-British zoologist George Albert Boulenger, who famously named more than 2,000 species around the world, scientifically described a slim New Zealand lizard he called Oligosoma infrapunctatum — the speckled skink.
More than 130 years later, a new paper examines the genetics and morphology of speckled skinks from around New Zealand and comes up with a surprising conclusion: They’re actually at least six different species, one of which — ironically enough, the one first identified by Boulenger — may now be extinct.
The research, published in the journal Zootaxa, builds upon work done over the past several years that analyzed and alternately named and renamed various populations of speckled skinks. Now, by examining the lizards’ physical characteristics and mitochondrial DNA, the researchers were able to conclusively determine that the speckled skink represents an entire species complex. Each species lives in a different part of the country and has small but significant variations in genetics, coloration, scale composition and limb structure.
There’s something they all have in common, though: None of them are doing very well, as the five remaining species all face enormous pressures from introduced predators and habitat loss. Using New Zealand’s classification system for endangered species, the paper recommends that two of the skink species should be considered as “nationally critical,” a third as “nationally vulnerable” and the final two as “at risk.”
The most endangered of these newly recognized species, now dubbed the Chesterfield skink (O. salmo), is an amazing reptile with a long, prehensile tail, a unique adaptation among New Zealand skink species. That unusual quality “suggests that this species used to spend a lot of time in shrubs and trees, using the tail to help move around,” says lead researcher Sabine Melzer, a biologist with the Auckland Council. Unfortunately that evolutionary advantage isn’t of much use to it anymore. Agricultural development for dairy cattle and farmed deer along with more recent coastal erosion have chipped away at the Chesterfield’s habitat and it’s now confined to a range of less than 0.004 square miles. That’s about the size of a Manhattan city block.
The newly described Chesterfield skink. Photo by Lynn Adams. Used with permission.
Another species, now named the Alborn skink (O. albornense) due to its only known location near the old Alborn Coal Mine on New Zealand’s South Island, is also quite rare. The paper cites a recent search that only turned up one skink within its 2-hectare range.
As for Boulenger’s original species, the paper describes it as “a complete enigma.” The researchers borrowed the holotype specimen from the British Museum in London and while they weren’t able to extract DNA, they were able to observe that it had physiological characteristics unlike any of the other living or museum specimens they examined. That and the fact that it hasn’t been officially observed since Boulenger’s time leads them to suspect it might be extinct. That’s admittedly hard to prove, though, since Boulenger acquired his specimen from someone else and never documented the location where it was collected.
So what comes next for these skinks? To protect the remaining species within this family, the researchers are calling for immediate conservation action to conserve their habitats from further development. “With these species now officially described, it is vital to protect the remaining populations of these ‘nationally critical’ species,” Melzer says.
The paper also recommends resurveying historic skink locations to determine if currently unknown populations still exist, as well as collecting more morphological data and genetic material for analysis. That’s particularly important since their results suggest that an additional three or more species, and possibly a subspecies, may remain to be identified. The public can help in these efforts by reporting any sightings.
And yes, that includes looking for what the researchers have now renamed Boulenger’s speckled skink, which has now been granted the original taxonomic name.
“It would be great to inspire more field work to find the ‘lost’ skink,” Melzer says, but she adds that looking for and studying what’s left is especially important. “There is definitely more work needed to resolve the rest of the speckled skink species complex.”
Melzer says she hopes the news of this possible extinction and the risks faced by other species will help to raise the profile of these small but important speckled skink species in the country.
“Lizards don’t get much of the limelight unfortunately,” she says, “but they’re such an integral part of New Zealand ecosystems.”
While the Trump administration continued its anti-environmental policies, the planet experienced its hottest month in recorded history. But are the winds starting to shift?
Well folks, we did it. July 2019 was the hottest month in recorded human history, with record-breaking temperatures in many parts of Europe, wildfires raging over tens of thousands of square miles of Arctic Alaska and Russia, and a staggering ice melt in Greenland that dumped 197 billion gallons of water into the ocean — 12.5 billion tons of which melted over a single day.
Europe’s July 2019 heatwave. European Space Agency (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The administration also appointed William Perry Pendley, a staunch foe of America’s public lands, as acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 250 million acres. The appointment could set the stage for the liquidation of public lands and unfettered fossil-fuel development around the country, further driving greenhouse gas emissions fueling the climate crisis.
Oh yeah, and Trump’s reelection campaign also started selling plastic straws to “own the libs.”
And internationally, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro — often referred to as the “Trump of the South” — fired the head of the agency responsible for tracking deforestation in the Amazon, which has increased sharply under that administration. Again, this will have a devastating effect on the climate, not to mention the wildlife and Indigenous peoples who live in these forests.
All of these threats and regressive actions are terrifying and all too real.
But at the same time, there are growing cracks in the anti-environmental shell game.
The climate denial machine, although still quite active and dangerous, has begun to weaken. The Heartland Institute’s annual climate-denial conference was sparsely attended, full of tired retreads of old arguments, and suffered from a dramatic drop in corporate sponsors. Meanwhile, desperate climate deniers are resorting to mocking 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg’s autism, earning them well-deserved derision.
On the other side of the equation, Extinction Rebellion and other activist groups continued to pick up steam.
Extinction Rebellion protestors in Brisbane on August 6, 2019. Photo: Larissa Waters (Public domain)
And with the 2020 election looming, more Democratic presidential candidates have rolled out climate change platforms, putting themselves in stark contrast to the Denier-in-Chief. Most of the plans so far don’t go nearly far enough, but they exist, and candidates actually talked about climate issues at the last presidential debate, so that’s a start.
These Democratic platforms, or what comes out of these initial discussions, are not just necessary for the planet — they’re also wanted by a wide range of people. Republican political strategists recently warned that the party of denial could lose voters over issues related to climate change. That’s a huge shift.
All of these positive changes and trends add up, although there’s still so much further to go. And of course, the power of the Trump administration and other regressive officials around the world still have us all on track to possibly irreversible devastation, so we’re kind of on a tight deadline here.
But every victory, no matter how small or personal, is a chance to save — and preserve — our planet’s future. Those victories matter. They create momentum. They create change. They may seem too few and too far between in the face of the coming storm, but sometimes it pays to do just what I did in this editorial — list them, add them up, and then see the shape of a more positive future starting to emerge from the flames.
More than 1,500 scientific studies on the health and climate impacts of fracking prove its dangerous effect on communities, wildlife and nature.
In 2010 when I first started writing about hydraulic fracturing — the process of blasting a cocktail of water and chemicals into shale to release trapped hydrocarbons — there were more questions than answers about environmental and public-health threats. That same year Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland, which featured tap water bursting into flames, grabbed the public’s attention. Suddenly the term fracking — little known outside the oil and gas industry — became common parlance.
In the following years I visited with people in frontline communities — those living in the gas patches and oilfields, along pipeline paths and beside compressor stations. Many were already woozy from the fumes or worried their drinking water was making them sick. When people asked me if they should leave their homes, it was hard to know what to say; there weren’t many peer-reviewed studies to understand how fracking was affecting public health.
Those days are over.
In June the nonprofits Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York released the sixth edition of a compendium that summarizes more than 1,700 scientific reports, peer-reviewed studies and investigative journalism reports about the threats to the climate and public health from fracking.
The research has been piling up for years, and the verdict is clear, the authors conclude: Fracking isn’t safe, and heaps of regulations won’t help (not that they’re coming, anyway).
“Across a wide range of parameters, from air and water pollution to radioactivity to social disruption to greenhouse gas emissions, the data continue to reveal a plethora of recurring problems and harms that cannot be sufficiently averted through regulatory frameworks,” write the eight public health professionals, mostly doctors and scientists, who compiled the compendium. “There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health directly and without imperiling climate stability upon which public health depends.”
The research collected and summarized is wide-ranging and includes the harms not just from drilling and fracking, but the long tail of the process, including compressor stations and pipelines, silica sand mining, natural-gas storage, natural-gas power plants, and the manufacturing and transport of liquefied natural gas.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a biologist, author and distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College, is one of the compendium’s co-authors. She helped lead an independent investigation into the scientific research on the health risks from fracking that was a precursor to the current compendium. Those efforts drove public engagement on the issue and eventually led to a ban on fracking in her home state of New York in 2014.
She says this latest collection of research reveals some significant and noteworthy trends.
“There’s really definitive evidence now that methane leaks at every stage of the fracking process” from drilling to storage, she says. And that’s contributing to a surge in methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere.
But methane isn’t just a climate danger. It’s also a contributor to smog, otherwise known as ground-level ozone, which is linked to strokes, heart attacks, asthma and preterm births.
“Methane is a source of air pollution that’s deadly — and that’s become clearer and clearer,” says Steingraber.
Gas being flared at a drilling site in Powder River Basin, Wyo. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
Another area where the science is settled is the earthquakes caused by the injection of fracking wastewater underground, she says.
“We know without a doubt that fracking is linked to earthquakes that occur over longer periods of time and wider geographic area than previously thought,” she says. “That’s because these slippery chemicals that they’ve added to fracking fluid decrease friction while fracking, and they don’t lose that property when re-injected down into the earth with wastewater.”
The compendium also includes a section on two new topics not covered in previous editions — environmental justice and wildlife.
First, studies have shown that fracking infrastructure is disproportionately sited in nonwhite, indigenous or low-income communities. “Whether it’s practiced in urban areas like Los Angeles where fracking infrastructure clearly targets poor nonwhite communities or in rural areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania where it’s targeted at poor whites — those patterns hold up over and over again,” she says.
There’s also mounting evidence about harms to wildlife from various elements of the process, including toxic water, habitat destruction, light and noise pollution. For example, infrastructure like compressor stations caused populations of grassland songbirds in Canada to decline. Water fleas, a key part of the aquatic food web, are imperiled by small amounts of fracking fluid in waterways.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: At more than 350 pages with 1,400 footnotes linking to pertinent research, there’s a lot to uncover in the compendium. Here are a few of the findings:
Oil and gas operations in the arid Permian Basin used eight times more water for fracking in 2018 as they did in 2011, threatening groundwater supplies;
A 2018 analysis of methane leaks from the U.S. oil and gas supply chain as a whole found leakage rates were 60 percent higher than reported by the EPA, and a 2019 study in southwestern Pennsylvania found shale gas emissions that were underreported by a factor of five when compared to EPA estimates;
Researchers working in Texas found 19 different fracking-related contaminants — including cancer-causing benzene — in hundreds of drinking water samples collected from the aquifer overlying the heavily drilled Barnett Shale, thereby documenting widespread water contamination;
More than 200 airborne chemical contaminants have been detected near drilling and fracking sites. Of these 61 are classified as hazardous air pollutants, including carcinogens, and 26 are endocrine-disrupting compounds that have been linked to reproductive, developmental and neurological damage;
Studies of mothers living near oil and gas extraction operations consistently find impairments to infant health, including elevated risks for low birth weight and preterm birth;
In 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, 81 oil and gas extraction workers died on the job, accounting for 72 percent of the fatal work injuries in the mining sector, which overall has a fatality rate nearly four times the national average;
Significant pipeline accidents happen roughly 300 times each year in the United States and, between 1998 and 2017, killed 299 people and injured 1,190 others, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
Over the years the compendium has become a critical resource in the fight against fracking and helped to shed some light on an industry that, thanks to regulatory loopholes, has been allowed to operate in secrecy.
Steingraber says there are more than enough scientific findings to conclude that fracking isn’t safe — indeed, that’s what officials in New York determined five years ago. But the industry has significant political clout that science alone can’t counter.
Residents of Dimock, Penn. in the Marcellus Shale took a stand against fracking. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
“It seems to be required now that science be carried by a powerful social movement,” she says. But she’s seen firsthand how strong those movements can be. When fracking came to her doorstep in New York, she and other health professionals translated the science into plain English and brought it to frontline communities so people would know what they were facing.
“When people are informed by science, and then empowered to have an opinion, they’re moved to take part in the public process,” she says. A surge of tens of thousands of public comments helped move New York to ban fracking, and requests for information about health impacts from fracking from all over the world has led Steingraber and her colleagues to keep updating the compendium year after year.
“This is a completely unfunded project — we’re just doing this in the middle of the night and on weekends,” she says. “But I believe there is value in having a group of independent scientists doing this work.”
An operation to discourage poachers by removing a rhino calf’s horn serves as a stark reminder of the protections that need to stay in place for these imperiled species.
The three-lobed footprints in the dirt road ahead of us are unmistakable: the tracks of a large rhinoceros.
Long have I wanted to see a rhino in the wild, and I’m about to get more than I bargained for. Rather than try to spot rhinos from a vehicle on a safari, I had wanted to get some conservation experience in the field, so I joined a project at a reserve in Greater Kruger National Park that accepts volunteers. It turned out that while I was there the reserve took an extreme step to protect the animals in its care.
We’ve spent all morning in a Land Rover tracking not one but two rhinos — a mother and her calf. Our driver, Leonie, a field technician in the reserve, radios our information after some fresh dung on the side of the road confirms her suspicions about the direction the rhinos are heading. They’re among the last rhinos in the reserve that still need to be dehorned.
Dehorned rhino, photo by Bernard DuPont (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Dehorning is seen as a preemptive strike in the ongoing rhino-poaching crisis, a relatively recent assault that has devastated rhino populations. In 2006 and 2007, just one or two rhinos were poached per month in South Africa, but the situation exploded soon after. Between 2013 and 2017 more than 1,000 rhinos were poached each year, an average of three per day. That number dipped slightly to just over two a day in 2018, but some say that’s because there were fewer rhinos left to kill.
This carnage is fueled by the high black market price of rhino horn — greater by weight than that of gold — and high demand in Vietnam and China. In both countries it’s lauded for its purported medicinal value and used to treat anything from hangovers and fevers to rheumatism and gout, often as a sort of cure-all. Tests show rhino horn — made of keratin, the same protein that comprises human hair and fingernails — has no medicinal value, but awareness campaigns to reduce demand have so far had little effect.
Thanks to Leonie’s information, a plane now circles overhead. When they spot the mother rhino or her calf, they will call in the helicopter team to dart the animal with a sedative. Darting from the air allows the animal to fall forward onto its sternum, reducing risk of injury, and then a ground team has three minutes to remove the horn before health complications arise.
In the distance, we see the helicopter swoop in. When its tail end tilts up, I realize the animal has been darted and we’re too far away to be useful. The other ground teams will take care of the dehorning.
We drive through the bush to the rendezvous place, and we’re only there a few minutes when, down the hill, I finally see my first-ever rhino in the wild. It’s the calf of the now-dehorned mother, trying to escape the loud helicopter overhead. It charges awkwardly out of the bush and across the road before plunging back into its protective cover.
But the calf can’t hide from the eyes above it. The helicopter team quickly darts it and we give chase, driving madly off road, careening between trees and axle-crunching boulders. Three ground teams pull up and we grab chainsaws and vet kits and run to the downed calf. The veterinarians apply a blindfold: The calf now looks like a big baby with a toothache. A chainsaw roars into life and the nub of horn, no more than three inches long, is sawed off. A grinder carves away the stub and applies resin, so that it looks somewhat natural.
But it’s still a rhino without its horn.
The operation complete, one of the veterinarians injects a reversal serum and we dash back to our rovers. Once the calf awakes it will cry for its mother, and we hope the two will quickly find each other.
Back again at the rendezvous spot, one of the other teams produces the mother’s horn. I gasp at its size, like a crescent moon, but with a wider base. I can’t quite process seeing the horn without its rhino; momentarily I feel like we’re in collusion with the poachers. The whole operation is upsetting, like taking the laugh out of the hyena or the roar from the lion.
The horn is to be handed off to a government official and kept in a bank vault.
That, to me, sends the wrong message.
Rather than stockpiling chopped-off horns, it seems that a public burning of rhino horn would send a strong signal to consumers that South Africa is serious about protecting its rhinos.
Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. In fact South Africa has recently shifted the other way. Though international trade in rhino horn has been banned since 1977, private rhino breeders in South Africa won the right in 2017 to sell rhino horn within the country, a move criticized by many conservationists. Why would buyers be interested, the argument goes, except to traffic the horn out of the country?
Not only does the high price of rhino horn lure and entrap poachers into becoming pawns for large crime syndicates, rhinos themselves are becoming pawns of rhino breeders who, under the guise of protection, want to cash in on the value of rhino horn. Since the dehorning effort at the reserve I visited, there has been a lull in poaching activity there. But dehorning can only be a temporary strategy — the horns grow back after about eighteen months — and the future of rhinos is hardly secure.
That future could hinge on what happens in August, when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) has its triennial Conference of the Parties in Switzerland. The agenda includes a proposal from eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) to allow trade in its country’s rhino horns and a proposal from Namibia to allow trade in live white rhinos for trophy hunting.
Both of these proposals commodify rhinos and rob them of the very thing that makes them rhinos. Instead of loosening trade restrictions, we need to tighten them. Further, we need to pressure Vietnam and China to enforce their existing bans and crack down on the black market. Demand for rhino horn is simply too great.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prepares to burn confiscated rhino horns. Photo: Joanna Gilkeson/USFWS
I think of that rhino calf and its tiny horn, barely the length of my finger. Is its fate to be perpetually sedated and dehorned, or worse yet, to be permanently dehorned by poachers? Abandoning protections put in place decades ago will keep rhinos like this one perpetually in the crosshairs. It’s my hope, and that of many others in the conservation community, that the CITES parties will not approve the proposals put in front of them this month. Rhinos won’t have a fighting chance until they are treated with the dignity they deserve.
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.
New books this month tackle tough issues related to climate change, extinction, Indigenous sovereignty, ocean conservation and a whole lot more.
Things are heating up — and not just because it’s August. This past July was the hottest month in recorded history. That makes this month’s new books about climate change essential reading, along with other important new titles on pollution, wildlife, oceans and Indigenous peoples.
Our full list — an amazing 16 books, plus an entire series for kids — appears below. They include a deep dive into the world of the Koch brothers, a look at plastic in our food, an examination of the future of bluefin tuna, thoughts from the Standing Rock protests, and a whole lot more.
Leave It in the Ground: The Politics of Coal and Climate by John C. Berg — Want to know why we need to get rid of coal — and how we do it? This book lays out the science in clear, understandable language and reveals the truth about the politics and economics of the coal industry. Berg then provides a roadmap for how activists and governments can dismantle it.
End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World by Bryan Walsh — This isn’t strictly a climate-change book — it also covers apocalyptic volcanos, nuclear war, disease outbreaks and other terrifying scenarios — but it does showcase the people working to understand how the world could end and what they’re doing to prevent it. Which, you know, is kind of an important job.
Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have by Tatiana Schlossberg — How do your fashion sense, your lunch and your taste in Netflix movies contribute to climate change? A former New York Times science writer lays out the hidden effects of our daily lives and shows how informed and empowered consumers can make a difference.
Wildlife & Conservation:
The Future of Bluefin Tunas edited by Barbara A. Block — Dozens of experts from 15 countries contribute to this exhaustive examination of the threats facing all three species of bluefin tuna and what’s being done to save them.
Extinction: A Very Short Introduction by Paul B. Wignall — A slim book about a big topic: Why do species die out? Covering historic mass extinctions and the current biodiversity crisis, this book offers what you need to know about what we’re losing.
Science Comics: Catsby Andy Hirsch — A fun focus on our feline friends, looking at the science of everything from tigers to housecats. As with the rest of the “Science Comics” series, this is perfect for young readers or graphic-novel fans of all ages.
Life Without Animals by Theresa Emminizer — This six-book series for young readers (available individually or as a set) asks what would happen if species such as elephants, sea otters, prairie dogs and tigers disappeared and examines the ecological effects of their extinctions.
The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina — The high seas exist outside of international law, which means they can also be quite lawless. The author spent five years reporting around the world to expose the crime and exploitation that run rampant through the fishing, oil and shipping industries.
Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth — Science and adventure far beneath the sea. This must-read memoir looks back at an amazing career and provides insight into parts of the world that few of us will ever see in person.
Ocean Recovery by Ray Hilborn and Ulrike Hilborn — Which of the world’s fisheries are sustainable, and why? This book offers the scientific context for what we know about the status and ecological impact of global fishing operations.
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth — The Bering Straits are known for their Arctic waters, amazing wildlife and Indigenous peoples, but they’re also the site of a clash between capitalism and communism for control of the natural world’s finite resources.
Indigenous Peoples:
Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover — The subtitle of this book is “Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health,” which pretty much says it all. Noted activist Winona LaDuke provides the foreword.
Standing With Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon — An essential volume to understand the history and significance of the famous resistance action, combining everything from essays and interviews to poems and photography.
That’s our list for this month, but check out dozens of other recent eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.
Have you ever stood in front of a supermarket shelf and wondered if you should buy that product made from bioplastics rather than the conventional kind? Many people assume all bioplastics are made from plants and can break down completely in the environment. But that’s not the case.
The term “bioplastics” is actually used for two separate things: bio-based plastics (plastics made at least partly from biological matter) and biodegradable plastics (plastics that can be completely broken down by microbes in a reasonable timeframe, given specific conditions). Not all bio-based plastics are biodegradable, and not all biodegradable plastics are bio-based. And even biodegradable plastics might not biodegrade in every environment. Sounds confusing? It certainly is.
“There are a lot of bioplastics or materials that are called bioplastics that are not biodegradable,” says Constance Ißbrücker, head of environmental affairs at the industry association European Bioplastics.
For some plastics, the same polymer chains can be made from renewable sources. The resulting bioplastics are chemically identical to their fossil counterparts. PET, for example — short for polyethylene terephthalate, which is the stuff most bottles are made of — can be synthesized from fossil fuel products or plants like sugarcane. The resulting material is the exact same. Such non-biodegradable bioplastics behave in the environment just like conventional plastic and persist for an unknown but long amount of time.
Not only that, but none of the standards for plastics labeled as biodegradable or compostable today makes them suitable for disposal in the open environment. Given that, can bioplastics play a role in tackling environmental problems? Or are they merely greenwashing? The most accurate answer is, it depends.
PLA: Conditionally Compostable
Take polylactic acid (PLA), for example. This bioplastic is used to make shopping bags, transparent cups, 3-D printing material and other products. Because it can be derived from plant material like corn sugar, potato or sugarcane, it can reduce the demand for fossil fuels used to make conventional plastics.
PLA is recyclable, biodegradable and compostable. But that doesn’t mean the ocean — or any other natural environment — can easily handle it.
To Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP), drinking straws made from PLA are “the perfect example for greenwashing.” They are more expensive than other plastic drinking straws, but don’t readily biodegrade on a beach or in the sea.
“You put it on the package [that it] is biodegradable, but at the point where these materials are . . . fear[ed] to end up, they will not biodegrade,” Wurm says.
A corn-based plastic cup. (Photo by ekornblut, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
For biodegradation, PLA needs industrial composting conditions, including temperatures above 58 °C (136 °F). It needs to be properly managed and routed to specialized industrial composting or recycling facilities. Under the right circumstances, microbes can turn the material into carbon dioxide and water within a couple of weeks. However, if it becomes littered or dumped, PLA sticks around for much longer. When pure PLA ends up in seawater, it does not seem to biodegrade at all.
PHA: It’s Complicated
Other kinds of bioplastics are known to better biodegrade in marine environments. However, whether that really happens in a specific case, and how long it will take, is highly unpredictable.
Marine biologist Christian Lott and his colleagues at HYDRA, a private research institute with a research station on the Italian island of Elba, have field-tested different biopolymers in a range of aquatic environments from tropical beaches to the Mediterranean seafloor. They found that materials that had been shown to biodegrade in seawater in lab testing also do so in the environmental conditions they tested.
Among the materials tested at HYDRA are bioplastics called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). Produced by microbes, PHAs currently comprise a tiny slice of the market. However, demand is expected to grow strongly in the next few years.
A thin film of PHA will degrade in a tropical environment on the seafloor in one to two months, Lott says. But in the Mediterranean, it can take 10 times as long. “And imagine, in the Arctic, in the ice or at ice-cold water, or in the deep sea where we have 0 to 4 degrees, hardly any nutrients around, bacteria will have a hard time to digest these materials,” he says.
This is the caveat to PHAs, says Linda Amaral-Zettler, a marine microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). “While they can biodegrade in the marine environment, we still need to appreciate that part of the marine environment is not compatible with biodegradation.”
In some regions of the ocean biodegradation is so slow that even organic material like fish or algae can leave their traces in the fossil record.
“Life is complicated,” Lott puts it, “and it’s about life — because it’s bio-degradation.”
Super-Biodegradable?
Even with the best waste management systems, it’s realistic to assume some plastic will always escape. Think of the abrasion from car or bike tires, from ship paints, sneakers, or synthetic garments. If bits of plastics are small enough to travel through the air, they will be hard to ever contain.
So could we design a plastic that breaks down pretty much anywhere?
Wurm says it would theoretically be possible to build molecular triggers into materials so that they know when to biodegrade. “It sounds fancy, and it is fancy and it’s expensive,” he says. But even if the funding were there, finding and including molecular triggers for each and every material in each and every environment seems to be a nearly impossible task.
A material that has a full functionality but biodegrades immediately at its end of life, is “not going to happen. Never,” Lott says.
Different Chemicals, Different Problems
Moreover, when considering the impacts of plastic products on humans and the environment, looking at just the plastic itself is never enough. A single plastic product can contain dozens of chemicals, some of which might have adverse effects on us humans or other organisms if they are released into the environment and taken up.
Lisa Zimmerman, a Ph.D. student in the Department Aquatic Ecotoxicology at Goethe University in Frankfurt (Main), Germany, has conducted research that suggests that chemical mixtures present in biodegradable or bio-based plastic products can influence the metabolic activity of the bioluminescent bacterium Aliivibrio fischeri. In a number of additional experiments she found that these chemical mixtures can have the potential to cause oxidative stress or influence the hormonal system in living organisms.
“What I can tell from my research is that bioplastics are not necessarily safer than conventional plastics with regard to the toxicity of the chemical mixtures they include,” Zimmermann says.
Plastic litter found on a beach in Norway. (Photo by Bo Eide, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Land Use Issues
Bio-based plastics have other environmental implications as well. One big criticism has been the land needed to grow the plants.
On the basis of a report from the Institute for Bioplastics and Biocomposites (IfBB) in Hanover, European Bioplastics estimates that bio-based plastics currently use less than 0.02 percent of agricultural land. “There is no real competition with food and feed production,” Ißbrücker argues.
But Christoph Lauwigi, who represents the working group on waste and resources with Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) worries about the side effects of a growth in the bioplastic market. In the German Plastic Atlas, he explains that an increase in bio-based plastics could raise the pressure on arable land, potentially leading to water shortages, desertification and the loss of habitats and biodiversity. He also notes that the reliance on industrial agriculture for the production of new plastics might increase monoculture cropping and the use of pesticides.
Ißbrücker says the industry is working toward a smaller land use footprint by using waste materials or algae. At this point however, these sources cannot be processed as effectively yet as the current feedstocks, she adds.
Niche Applications
Plastics that are currently marketed as “biodegradable” will themselves contribute to plastic pollution if they are lost or littered. They do not break down as quickly and completely in the environment as the term might imply and can thus harm wildlife and ecosystems. But there are a few applications where using biodegradable plastics may provide a net benefit to the environment.
In some countries, bags that are compostable under industrial conditions are used to collect organic waste. They can offer a cleaner and more convenient way than nondisposable containers for people to collect food scraps for composting.
Enzo Favoino, a waste management expert at the Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza in Italy and chair of the Scientific Committee of Zero Waste Europe, is convinced this is the way to go. Fewer organics in the trash means less fermentation, allowing waste management operators to come by less often to pick up the trash. This can not only save money but also boost the recycling rates of other materials such as paper, glass, plastic and metal, he says.
Collecting organic waste separately also diverts food scraps from landfills and dumps, where they can produce methane — a powerful greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.
However, not every country has the infrastructure in place to use compostable bags to these ends. In Germany, for example, compostable bags are screened out of the organics by technology that doesn’t distinguish between compostable and conventional plastic.
Biodegradable plastics are currently also marketed as mulching films for agriculture, which farmers can just leave on the fields to plow under. For decades, plastic mulch film has been spread out on fields to support crop growth and save pesticides and water. But with conventional plastics this so-called Plasticulture can cause “white pollution” to accumulate on farmland if it is not removed and discarded.
Is biodegradable film a safe alternative? If they are proven to biodegrade in the soil, they would leave less pollution behind. But wind or animals might carry pieces of broken film into the air, rivers or oceans, to places where they might not be able to biodegrade. There’s also a potential for chemicals to leach from the films to the soil ecosystem, a question that is currently under scrutiny.
Tackling Confusion
There’s no doubt, bioplastics are still plastics. Just because some of them are made from plants or have the potential to biodegrade under limited conditions, they can’t be touted as “planet-safe.” For the ones that claim to biodegrade or compost, the fine print is crucial.
So check the label: What does it say? Where and how is it supposed to biodegrade? How can you safely dispose of the product? 5 Gyres, a California-based nonprofit working on plastic pollution, has published an overview of labels in its Better Alternatives Now B.A.N. List 2.0. Beware, however: According to Ißbrücker, some uses of labels are fake.
Finally, be cautious when you read that a material is oxo-biodegradable. These are conventional plastics like polyethylene mixed with metal compounds that make them fall apart faster. According to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), it hasn’t been proven that they truly biodegrade, and it is feared they might just accelerate microplastic pollution. Similarly, European Bioplastics warn that so-called “enzyme-mediated degradable plastics” aren’t truly biodegradable.
Reduction Remains Key
The plastic industry projects strong growth in production, while many environmentalists are calling to reduce use.
Biodegradable plastics won’t solve the plastic crisis, so tackling consumption remains key. “By just reducing the amounts and the types of different packaging that we have in our supermarkets, we can do a lot, without developing novel materials,” says Wurm.
Even European Bioplastics’ Ißbrücker thinks that might very well happen. “Maybe not in 5 or 10 years, but as the problems keep growing, plastic production might go down one day, because it’s just too much.”
A transcript and more episodes of the Plastisphere podcast are available here. A German version of this article can be found on RiffReporter.
The big cats have increased by 30 percent in India in just four years, but they still face pressures and controversies.
India this week announced some amazing news: The country’s wild tiger populations have increased by 30 percent in just the past four years. Buoyed by intense conservation efforts, India is now reportedly home to an estimated 2,967 Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris).
To put this in context, India’s tiger population was estimated at 2,226 in 2016, when the wild population of all tiger subspecies was placed at 3,890. That was a big increase over 2010’s estimate, which placed the world population at just 3,200 after several years of rampant poaching for the animals’ skins and body parts, which are all too often used in traditional Asian medicine.
India credited increased monitoring and stricter wildlife policies for the population increase, which puts the country four years head of its goal to double its wild tiger populations.
There are a few caveats to these new numbers, though. First, the country calculated its new tiger population numbers, in part, by collecting and analyzing 350,000 images from 26,000 camera traps distributed across 146,000 square miles of tiger habitat. This method has actually garnered some criticism for its accuracy. India used to estimate its tiger population by counting footprints or “pug marks,” but that method was abandoned after it was proven to count tigers that did not still exist. The new method counts photo images as well as tiger tracks, droppings and other signs of their presence, along with estimates of prey abundance and habitat viability. Some experts suggest this may lead to double-counting of some tigers.
Meanwhile tiger poaching is still a big problem, although it has declined in recent years. More than 400 tigers are believed to have been killed by poachers in India between 2008 and 2018, according to a recent investigation.
A tigress in Kanha National Park, March 2019. Photo: Kandukuru Nagarjun (CC BY 2.0)
And it’s not just poaching. At least 100 tigers died in India last year, many of which were killed by poisoning, electrocution and other direct or indirect conflicts with humans. Nearly half of last year’s tiger deaths in India last year occurred outside protected areas, a sign that the big cats have come into increasing pressure from living next to human populations. Just last week, in a crime that went viral on social media, villagers in northern India beat a tiger to death with large sticks after it fatally mauled a local man.
This indicates that tigers may be losing the space they need to roam — about 75 square miles per cat — and that India’s increasing human population continues to encroach upon wild territories. “Unless we have a sound strategy to tackle these conflicts, tiger lynchings will continue,” conservationist Prerna Singh Bindra told The New York Times. “Forests are being fragmented. We are saying yes to about 98 percent of development and other projects in protected areas. If we keep cutting habitats, this tiger utopia is going to come crashing down.”
Finally there’s a question of the genetic health of these tigers. India has long had the world’s biggest remaining tiger population, so the cats in the country are undoubtedly genetically stronger than others, such as Siberian or Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), which face a genetic bottleneck and are at risk of inbreeding.
But India’s Bengal tigers still face some genetic challenges. Research published July 10 in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation found that some populations have poor genetic exchange with neighboring groups as a result of habitat fragmentation. The authors suggest it’s important to manage India’s tigers not on the reserve-by-reserve basis but on a national metapopulation level to ensure all of the country’s tigers maintain their genetic strength. The study also identified several smaller populations that “currently have low tiger numbers, yet harbor unique diversity that is currently under-represented and not prioritized for conservation investments.”
Despite these caveats India’s increasing tiger population is a desperately needed conservation success for these embattled animals. India still has some problems to solve, but more tigers living in the wild is always good news. Now other countries need to follow India’s lead and work on boosting their own tiger populations while there’s still time left to save them.
More than 130 years later, a new paper examines the genetics and morphology of speckled skinks from around New Zealand and comes up with a surprising conclusion: They’re actually at least six different species, one of which — ironically enough, the one first identified by Boulenger — may now be extinct.
