The Post Carbon Institute’s Jason Bradford writes that climate change and the end of cheap fossil fuels will increase the need for local food systems and revitalized rural economies.
Despite the warning signs — climate change, biodiversity loss, depleted soils and a shrinking supply of cheap energy — we continue to push along with an economy fueled by perpetual growth on a finite planet.
We’ll need to reckon with this discrepancy.
Much has been written about when and how that should be done. One of the organizations looking for solutions is the nonprofit Post Carbon Institute, which for years has talked about better, instead of bigger growth, and what a transition to a less carbon-intensive energy system could look like.
The report contains a premise that many may find surprising: New technologies and renewable energy will not be able to fully replace fossil fuels — or not as quickly as we will need them to. While some kinds of energy are more easily substituted by renewables, like solar and wind standing in for fossil-fueled electricity, others are not. Running heavy equipment, tractors and massive cargo ships that have relied on liquid fuels is a much more challenging task. As a result, the reasoning goes, we’ll need to learn how to use less energy and use it differently.
If true this would have major impacts on every facet of our lives, including our food system —which today, in the United States, relies on fossil fuels and long trade networks.
“We must face the prospect that many of us will need to be more responsible for food security,” Bradford writes in the report. “People in highly urbanized and globally integrated countries like the U.S. will need to re-ruralize and re-localize human settlement and subsistence patterns over the coming decades to adapt to both the end of cheaply available fossil fuels and climate change.”
We talked to Bradford, who has worked for years in sustainable agriculture, about what changes he thinks are ahead and what we can do to prepare for them.
You refer to the age you see coming up when there’s less cheap energy available as the “Great Simplification.” Where does that term come from and what does it mean?
The idea for this report first came from a series of guest lectures I did for a class at the University of Minnesota taught by [energy and systems expert] Nate Hagens [a Post Carbon Institute board member]. Great Simplification is the term he was using in his class, but it ties well to anthropological work looking at social complexity in relationship to energy.
Jason Bradford is board president at the Post Carbon Institute. (Photo courtesy of Post Carbon Institute)
Societies that have less energy available organize themselves differently, and so the Great Simplification is this idea that as energy becomes more dear we’ll need to use less of it. And our highly complex and globally integrated societies will begin take on forms that are simpler over time. That means less complex trade networks, less specialization in jobs, less bureaucratic hierarchies.
When I try to envision what this Great Simplification would look like, I think of either preindustrial society or at least pre-World War II. What does it look like to you?
I remember traveling through Europe and seeing the contrast between a modern European city and someplace like a World Heritage site that is still a living city, but it was built centuries ago and there never was a suburban expansion around it. And so you basically see this countryside that you can walk to from the city center.
That’s how people lived prior to the industrial revolution in most parts of the world. And if you go to somewhere such as rural Bolivia, that’s what it still looks like. I think that’s maybe what the long-term consequences of fossil fuel depletion will look like. But what happens in the messy middle is much harder to figure out.
To think about that, the report looks at places that have already started getting abandoned in the upper Midwest because they lost the industrial clout they used to have from the steel industry and the auto industry. So you can sort of see this process unfolding already. You may have a partial abandonment of some areas and then maybe also reclaiming of them partly for food production. Big suburban houses may instead have more people living together to share expenses and share work.
It seems like today in the United States very few people know much about farming or producing food in general. How do we start to close that knowledge gap?
I feel like we have two kinds of threads going right now. On the one hand, there are a lot of school gardens and farms taking off and there’s more being done for horticulture programs, shop programs and home economics. There’s a bit of a skills revival happening. But on the other hand, there’s also a big focus on teaching every kid how to code, or kids being on their personal entertainment devices all the time instead of getting outside in nature.
Part of what I hope the report does is to make people aware of this skills gap and try to prioritize learning not just about self-sufficiency but how communities can work together.
I don’t expect the people reading the report will suddenly perform voluntary simplicity and try to find a commune to live on somewhere. But what I do hope is to inspire people to become change agents — to be ready for when the energy system forces a transition and start setting up systems that are pre-adapted to an energy-scarce world.
What are some of the ways that people can support this kind of transition work and re-localization without being an actual farmer or food producer?
If you’re a rural landowner there’s a big opportunity. Farmers on average own only half the land they use. So, if you own that land, who do you choose to lease to? Are you actively trying to find a farmer who’s oriented towards more regenerative, more organic, more local and regional systems?
If you have money there are also lending clubs that can help support local food systems and entrepreneurs. Then there might be people who are politically connected and know folks on the city council or in the planning department and can push for changes in codes or policies, like for instance, if there’s a local law that doesn’t allow you to capture rainwater or have a front yard garden.
Maybe you can support the local soil and water conservation district or the local conservation group that’s trying put biodiversity back on farmlands. Farms are full of amazing habitats that can be great places to rebuild ecosystem services, protect watersheds, get insect, bat and bird populations back up — that will serve food production in the long run.
It seems like these kinds of changes that you’re talking about could seem scary to a lot of people. What are the parts that inspire you the most or you think will be most exciting about re-localization?
I think that these coming times of great challenge and stress will force people to work together in ways where they have a shared sense of purpose, [like the veterans] at the American Legion Hall who had some experience together 40 years ago when they were in their 20s that bonded them and they know deep down that this person sitting next to them is someone they can trust.
Even though it’s going to be difficult, we will find tremendous meaning in our shared experience that could be wonderful. And that’s something people are missing right now.
To meet ambitious climate goals, L.A. needs more local water. A critical step is battling the ghosts of industry past — polluted groundwater that dates back to World War II.
LOS ANGELES — Can a big city be truly sustainable in the age of climate change? Los Angeles is trying to find out.
The United States’ second-largest city has big green plans. In April Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a goal to get 80 percent of the city’s electricity from renewable sources by 2036 and make sure 80 percent of the vehicles on the road then are carbon-emissions free.
This is part of L.A.’s version of a Green New Deal, the grand plan for decarbonization being kicked around Washington, D.C. and other localities.
But the city’s aspirations don’t stop at clean energy. For L.A. to truly boost its climate resilience it also needs to address its water — 86 percent of which comes from three sources located hundreds of miles away. Climate change, earthquakes and other environmental pressures threaten to disrupt that supply and increase prices. With those threats in mind, the city plans to source 70 percent of its water locally by 2035 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build its water resilience.
L.A. imports most of water via three aqueducts that tap Sierra Nevada runoff and the Colorado River.
“Water is our most precious resource,” says Garcetti. “Creating a more resilient, self-reliant Los Angeles means increasing the amount of water sourced locally so we can better withstand inevitable droughts and record-breaking storms — and that work starts with utilizing more innovative and sustainable water-management strategies.”
To hit its goal L.A. will need to boost captured rainwater, recycled wastewater and conservation. But the lynchpin is groundwater.
“When we talk about climate resilience and water resilience, the groundwater piece is critical,” says Cindy Montañez, chief executive officer of the nonprofit TreePeople, which works on environmental and water issues in the area. “L.A. will not be able to achieve its goal of a more local water supply and we will not be able to be a resilient city unless we look at groundwater cleanup.”
L.A. actually has lots of groundwater, but in many areas it’s simply too polluted to drink — and it has been for decades. A migrating plume of toxins in the groundwater is making more and more of the city’s wells undrinkable. Even years of remediation by Environmental Protection Agency-led Superfund projects haven’t solved the problem.
So, as the specter of climate change looms over the region, L.A. has embarked on a mission to battle the ghosts of industry past and clean up “legacy pollution” in one of the region’s main groundwater basins under the San Fernando Valley — but can it be done safely, affordably and quickly enough to help propel the city to the resilient future it seeks?
A Legacy of Hidden Wartime Pollution
The most well-known piece of L.A.’s water infrastructure is undoubtedly the concrete channel of the L.A. River, which has appeared in countless Hollywood movies and TV shows — the b-roll equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
The paved stream bed of the Los Angeles River. (Photo by KCET Departures, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
But a critical piece of the area’s water system — its groundwater — has no movie credits. For most people, it’s out of sight and out of mind.
Underlying the San Fernando Valley is a large groundwater basin that could provide water for 800,000 Angelenos, but 80 percent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s groundwater wells there have been impacted by contamination.
LADWP has rights to tap five groundwater basins in the region — but the vast majority of that is in the San Fernando Basin.
L.A. isn’t the only one affected. Water agencies for the neighboring cities of Burbank and Glendale also share groundwater rights to the basin, in addition to the impacts of its pollution.
Burbank today is known for its entertainment companies. It’s home to hundreds, including giants like Warner Bros and Walt Disney. Inside the walls of their studios, production companies create imaginary worlds. But back in the 1940s the city itself was a kind of set, although for a much more serious enterprise.
Disguised beneath a giant tarp, camouflaged with painted trees, homes and even fire hydrants hid a Lockheed factory. This massive facility, the size of an airport, manufactured P-38 fighter jets and other aircraft that became potent weapons in World War II. During the war years, when the factory was disguised from potential airborne spies, Lockheed and its subsidiaries in Burbank employed 80,000 people.
The war effort and the continued presence of defense companies, along with other industrial activities in the valley in the following decades, left their mark. In the 1980s volatile organic compounds such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) were found in the groundwater in concentrations that exceeded California’s safety standards.
“We have got a major problem here, and it’s got to be corrected,” Burbank mayor Michael Hastings told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. More than 30 years later, the compounds still pose problems.
Both TCE and PCE can be dangerous to human health. Exposure to TCE can cause kidney or liver cancer and can harm the central nervous system, respiratory and immune systems. It’s been linked to several cancer clusters. PCE has been classified as “likely” to be carcinogenic in humans based on tests on animals, and can also harm the central nervous, renal and digestive systems.
Once the toxins entered the groundwater, they didn’t stay put. Like food coloring dropped into a pool, a chemical plume grew under parts of Burbank, Glendale and North Hollywood.
A plume of contamination from volatile organic compounds TCE and PCE have contaminated the groundwater in the San Fernando Valley.
The EPA stepped in, using the Superfund program to build groundwater-treatment systems, starting with the North Hollywood Operable Unit in Los Angeles in 1989. The Burbank Operable Unit followed in 1996, and then the Glendale Operable Unit in 2000.
Caleb Shaffer, a section chief at the EPA, calls the treatment systems successful. “They’ve treated more than 110 billion gallons of contaminated water and removed more than 175,000 pounds of contaminants from that groundwater,” he says.
But that should come with some caveats. The first is that additional industrial pollutants were detected years later, including 1,4-dioxane and cancer-causing hexavalent chromium (the latter made famous by environmental health advocate Erin Brockovich just 120 miles from L.A.).
The second is that the plume wasn’t fully contained. It’s been slowly migrating in a southeasterly direction in the groundwater basin — and that’s been bad news for LADWP.
“There’s been a number of remediation efforts over the years in the San Fernando Basin and what we found is that it simply wasn’t enough,” says William VanWagoner, who until June served as assistant director of LADWP’s water engineering and technical services division. “We were continuing to lose more and more of our wells.”
The agency started out with 115 reliable groundwater wells in the basin, but that number fell to 23 by 2018. The loss of the wells has reduced groundwater pumping by 30,000 acre-feet (about 9.7 billion gallons) a year — enough water to supply 89,000 homes.
Concerned that the number of reliable wells would continue to fall and pumping would be further diminished, LADWP took matters into its own hands.
A Plan in the Works
Shovels hit the dirt in a celebratory groundbreaking in January 2018 in the first tangible evidence of a plan to address these problems — the construction of a facility called the North Hollywood West Groundwater Treatment Project. A year later, passersby would hardly know something game-changing in the city was afoot here.
Construction at the North Hollywood West treatment facility. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
The facility is set back from the road, sandwiched between ballfields in a working-class neighborhood in North Hollywood, 18 miles from downtown L.A. This was previously known as the North Hollywood West well field, which had been taken offline years ago because of contamination. The wells are now being replumbed and two buildings are under construction that will house equipment to treat the water and manage the wells.
LADWP expects this to be one of four state-of-the-art treatment facilities that will pump contaminated groundwater, clean it up with a combination of treatment technologies and then send it into its water supply system.
North Hollywood West is planned to be operational in early 2020. Two more facilities, North Hollywood Central and Tujunga Central, have been approved by the agency’s board but neither have broken ground yet. A fourth facility, the Pollock treatment project, is still in the planning phases, but all are hoped to be completed by 2022.
“These four projects are so that we can restore our historic ability to use those well fields, while doing massive remediation at the same time,” VanWagoner told The Revelator before leaving LADWP. “We want to put them back in service and not have to wait and potentially lose even more wells in the future.”
It will likely take decades for the amount of contamination in the basin to be fully remediated, but LADWP’s plan would allow it to continue to use the water along the way. And that’s ensured by a multistep treatment process.
After sand and small particles are removed, the water is injected with hydrogen peroxide and then passed through ultraviolet reactors, which remove contaminants like 1,4-dioxane. That’s followed by granular activated carbon, which quenches the remaining hydrogen peroxide and also removes volatile organic compounds. After that, it’s ready to be added directly to the water supply.
Although granular activated carbon and UV advanced oxidation processes are commonly used for water treatment, they’re not often done at the same time.
“This is new and unique,” says Karl Linden, a professor in the environmental engineering program at the University of Colorado, Boulder and an expert in water-treatment technology. “With these two processes in combination, the system will be able to degrade all kinds of organic contaminants, including pharmaceuticals, endocrine-disrupting compounds and volatile organic contaminants,” he says.
By being able to use more of its groundwater again, the remediation facility will help to augment LADWP’s supply of local water while cutting greenhouse gas emissions — the city reports that imported water uses 3 to 4 times the energy of local water sources. It would also reduce some environmental pressure on faraway mountain sources that already face environmental pressures limiting supply and are expected to get worse. Californians rely on the Sierra Nevada’s winter accumulation for most their water supply, Angelenos included. But climate change could reduce average springtime snowpack in the Sierra by up to 64 percent by the end of the century, according to research from UCLA. L.A. also relies on Colorado River water and that basin has been mired in a two-decade-long drought.
But this new treatment technology also serves another important function — the groundwater basin acts as underground storage reservoir. “By doing the remediation and making these basins healthy and usable, that provides storage necessary for future development of stormwater and recycled water projects,” says VanWagoner.
The city has big ambitions to boost both of those sources to meet its local water supply goals, including recycling 100 percent of wastewater by 2035.
Under this new plan recycled water, which currently only amounts to 2 percent of the water supply, would make up a third of the city’s drinkable water supply in the future and some of that would be used to recharge groundwater. L.A. also plans to boost stormwater capture and is expanding the Tujunga Spreading Grounds, which infiltrates water back into the aquifer. This storage capability hinges on the construction of these new groundwater treatment facilities to ensure the water can be clean enough for drinking after being pumped back out.
Finding the Money
Local environmental groups have lent their backing to LADWP’s plan. Charming Evelyn, chair of the water committee for the Sierra Club’s Angeles Chapter, says the organization supports the groundwater cleanup effort and hopes more money can be found to complete the remediation, while local residents continue to work on conservation efforts, too.
LADWP’s groundwater remediation plans won’t come cheaply. If all four projects come to fruition, construction costs are estimated to be $573 million. However, says VanWagoner, the cost of building the new treatment facilities will be less expensive than continuing to rely on imported water from Metropolitan Water District. And the added resiliency it gives the water agency is a hidden value. “There’s a lot of really compelling reasons to do this.”
The agency has been working on different funding streams, but VanWagoner says all of these projects are in LADWP’s budget.
Evelyn isn’t concerned about the burden falling to ratepayers, though. “It’s the ratepayers that are going to benefit in the long run from it,” she says. “Having more local water will be cheaper than bringing in imported water.”
And she’s happy that it would boost local water supply without requiring L.A. to turn to ocean desalination plants, which have large greenhouse gas footprints and other environmental consequences, as other coastal areas of California have already done.
On top of that, she adds, residents are eager to see money spent on new water projects.
In 2014, while California was parched with drought, the state’s voters passed Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond to help fund everything from new water storage projects to water pollution cleanup.
LADWP has tapped into that source. According to VanWagoner, the agency was trying to offset ratepayer fees with state and federal funding. After the first round of allocations from Proposition 1 were distributed, LADWP received $44.5 million to implement the North Hollywood West facility — half the money they needed for that project. Three of the agency’s other projects each received $2 million planning grants.
Water treatment technology at the North Hollywood West Treatment Facility under construction in Los Angeles County. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
Meghan Tosney, an engineer in the financial assistance division of the State Water Resources Control Board, says the allocation for North Hollywood West is the board’s largest so far. “The project is definitely huge for them as far as water supply and it’s a contamination issue the region has been struggling with for a long time,” she says.
The well’s not dry there yet, either. The State Water Resources Control Board will make a decision this summer on the second round of funds allocated through Proposition 1 and a third round could take place in 2020, says Tosney. LADWP is vying for nearly $260 million to help build the Tujunga Central and North Hollywood Central treatment facilities.
The Responsible Parties?
The allocation process for bond money is a bit slow-going, but it’s not nearly as long a process as one of the other avenues LADWP has been following in tandem — using its legal team to chase down “potentially responsible parties” — the initial culprits of pollution.
LADWP’s legal team “has been pursuing potentially responsible parties with the hope that going to court or through legal settlements, we can offset some of the costs from those who were responsible for the contamination in the first place,” says VanWagoner.
The process for finding potentially responsible parties is both complex and frustrating, he says. There are thousands of potential polluters who operated during decades of lax environmental regulations. It can take years of research into historic records, including finding out who purchased and used different chemicals, to begin to identify those responsible.
“There are a few large parties still out there,” he says. “Unfortunately, there were many, many small businesses that have come and gone over the decades. A lot of these places no longer exist — there’s simply no one to go after anymore.”
The EPA has already been at it for decades.
LADWP’s Pollock treatment plant has existing groundwater treatment technology. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
The agency has investigated 4,000 different businesses that operated in the valley and may have been responsible for groundwater pollution — everything from large defense companies and auto mechanics to landfills and small dry cleaners. An initial settlement with 37 parties resulted in the first round of treatment plants through the Superfund program. Last year’s settlements with Lockheed Martin Corporation and Honeywell International, Inc., both also part of the earlier settlement, will fund $21 million to expand groundwater-treatment facilities and conduct additional studies in the parts of the North Hollywood Operable Unit.
A Regional Solution, a Federal Responsibility
The engineering and logistics of L.A.’s vast water system that serves 4 million people — the thousands of miles of aqueducts, canal and pipelines, the hundreds of groundwater wells, the treatment plants, reservoirs and spreading grounds — may not be common knowledge to most local residents, but water consciousness still permeates.
Recurring droughts and a modest 15 inches of rainfall a year help shape those attitudes.
The state’s last drought, from 2012 to 2016, spurred a 20 percent decrease in per capita water consumption in L.A. People care about having enough water, especially clean water, says TreePeople’s Montañez, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and was the former mayor the city of San Fernando.
But when it comes to ensuring a long-term resilient and local supply, the region will need more than just the efforts of local residents — state and federal agencies have a role to play, too, she says.
“The valley contributed so much to the development of the country — the United States was so strong in defense, in agriculture and in other industries that came from here,” she says. “The pollution happened because environmental regulations weren’t that strong and people weren’t holding the polluters accountable. So, now we have a problem, but the technology exists to fix it.”
Cleaning up the groundwater should be one of the region’s biggest priorities, she adds. “Everyone should care about this — the groundwater basin in the valley is one of the most important aquifers in the West.”
This story was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism.
The IUCN just declared an African monkey known as Miss Waldron’s red colobus “possibly extinct.” Other species could be quick to follow, conservationists warn.
Does a rare monkey still roam what’s left of the forests of Côte d’Ivoire?
“We haven’t given up on it,” says Russ Mittermeier, referring to the delightfully named Miss Waldron’s red colobus (Piliocolobus waldronae), a species that hasn’t officially been seen in more than four decades due to pressures from hunting and deforestation. “We’re still carrying out surveys in the hopes of finding it. I mean, it’s down to the last individuals if there are any still left, but we’re not ready to declare it extinct yet.”
The last time a primatologist saw the Miss Waldron’s was back in 1978. Conservationists did consider the species extinct for a short period, but that changed after a hunter turned up with a recently killed monkey in 2002. After that some colobus calls were reportedly heard in 2008, but the creatures haven’t been seen or heard from since.
As a result of this lack of sightings, the International Union for Conservation of Nature last week took the rare step of listing the species as “critically endangered (possibly extinct).”
And unfortunately, other red colobus species could soon join it.
“This is kind of the tip of the iceberg,” says Mittermeier, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group and chief conservation officer of the nonprofit Global Wildlife Conservation. “There are several other species that we’re really concerned about, as they are in very, very low numbers and in critical condition.”
The endangered ashy red colobus (Procolobus tephrosceles). Photo by Gilles Bassière (CC BY 2.0)
The exact number of red colobus species has never been settled upon — it could be as high as 18 or 20 — but the IUCN Red List has assessed the extinction risk for 13 Piliocolobus species. Four are listed as critically endangered, with another seven assessed as endangered. Virtually all have ongoing declines in their populations.
What’s driving this decline? “The red colobus seems to be especially vulnerable to hunting,” says Mittermeier. “They live in large groups and they’re relatively easy to hunt compared to a lot of other primates.”
Each species faces different levels of hunting pressures, but the ones in West and Central Africa where the bushmeat trade is at its strongest face the most risk. “Where bushmeat hunting is a big issue, especially where it reaches commercial levels, they’re really under the gun,” he says.
It’s not just humans hunting red colobus. They’re also a favorite prey of chimpanzees in places where the species’ ranges overlap.
Add habitat loss onto that hunting pressure, and there’s not much opportunity for any red colobus species, in particular the Miss Waldron’s. “There’s not a lot of habitat left,” says Mittermeier of the situation in Côte d’Ivoire, where the most recent deforestation threat has come from the cocoa industry.
For other red colobus species, deforestation and habitat fragmentation have created new risks, including malnutrition and parasites.
Can these declines be reversed? Conservationists hope so. They think red colobus could even be used as a kind of flagship species group that would help to preserve other species. A 2012 paper identified red colobus and several other animals as “Cinderella species” — those animals that are aesthetically appealing but currently overlooked, which could then serve as ways to protect entire habitats and the wide range of species that live within them.
With this in mind, a range of governments and conservation groups, including the recently formed African Primatological Society, are currently working on a red colobus conservation action plan. That will involve a breadth of activities that could help conserve the various species.
“We’ve got to do more survey work to find out where they are — you know, what’s left,” says Mittermeier. “And then we’ve got to put in place protected areas, education campaigns, try to do ecotourism for them. I’m a big fan of primate ecotourism and given the rarity of some of these animals, maybe we could use ecotourism as a mechanism to conserve them and try to get the attitudes changed toward these animals in general. It’s the usual range of activities that we undertake when we’re doing any kind of a primate conservation project.”
What’s different here is that the efforts will take place on a genus level. “We’ve done it for individual species, but now we’re looking at a certain genera that are particularly vulnerable,” he says.
Is there still hope of finding the Miss Waldron’s red colobus? Global Wildlife Conservation is looking for it right now, as part of its Search for Lost Series projects. “We’re going to give it another two or three years of intense surveying, at least,” says Mittermeier.
And there’s actually a good reason not to give up: Another lost species, the Bouvier’s red colobus (P. bouvieri), was rediscovered just four years ago when researchers found a small group of monkeys — including a female and infant — in the Republic of Congo. Before that no one had seen the species in more than 50 years.
The first photograph every taken of the critically endangered Bouvier’s red colobus. Photo: Lieven Devreese
That’s why Mittermeier isn’t ready to give up on the Miss Waldron’s.
“These African primates that have been hunted, they can be pretty sneaky,” he says. “They can hide pretty well.”
Now it’s up to scientists to seek them out, while there’s still time to save what might be left.
Photographer Marc Schlossman explores the collection of the Field Museum to showcase endangered and extinct species and tell their fascinating stories.
Photographer Marc Schlossman documents what we’ve lost — and what we’re in danger of losing.
For more than a decade he’s been creating a powerful series of images of endangered and extinct species from the collection of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. So far his Extinction photo project has documented more than 130 different plants and animals from around the world. The images include a drawer full of extinct passenger pigeons, a close-up of the claws of a Komodo dragon, the furry tail of a red panda, a sample of a moss species that hasn’t been seen in the wild since 1860, a curled-up pangolin, and an entire collection of shells from extinct Hawaiian tree snails.
The photos offer a more intimate experience than visitors to the museum could expect to have on their own, even if these specimens were on exhibit.
“I was able to get as close as I wanted to see these species, these animals and these plants,” Schlossman says. “I’m really, really fortunate. I got to just sit there and kind of live with them and let their visual sequences reveal themselves to me.”
The project may seem macabre, but it’s also filled with hope.
“There’s a lot of really interesting stories about conservation successes in there,” Schlossman says. Take the Coontie hairstreak butterfly, for example. Once believed extinct, this Florida species was rediscovered in 1979 and is now considered to be thriving. Schlossman’s photograph captures the butterfly’s luminescent green-and-blue wings, a rare example of an animal keeping much of its natural coloration after death.
All of this came about because Schlossman, a 58-year-old Chicago-area native who now lives in London, had unique access to the Field Museum’s curators. He worked at the museum as a volunteer for several summers as a young man, while he was earning his bachelor’s in biology. “If you volunteered at the Field, you’re family forever,” he says.
That history later gave him the opportunity to take his twin sons on a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum about 12 years ago, which was when one of the curators put a preserved specimen of an extinct ivory-billed woodpecker in his hands.
The moment stunned him. “It’s this big bird, and I’m going, man, this is the only place you can see this anymore,” he recalls. “I just thought, wow, what if I could do something with this?”
That’s when the photography project began. Field Museum curator John Bates provided access to the museum’s collection of extinct and endangered birds. Schlossman returned to Chicago for a few weeks every year to photograph more species, and the project expanded as he met other curators who invited him to explore their collections of amphibians, fish, insects, plants and invertebrates.
The curators also gave him access the species’ fascinating stories, which writer Lauren Heinz recounts on the project’s website. Each species has its own page on the site, where viewers can zoom into the see every detail of the photo and read about the plant or animal’s conservation status and the causes of its decline.
The museum staff also gave him something else: their determination not to give up.
“While I was working at the museum, the curators weren’t waving around any signs of doom and gloom,” Schlossman recalls. “They were saying, ‘Well, we’ve done a lot of damage, but if we work hard starting right now, there’s still time.’ ”
Schlossman says that attitude informed the project. “It’s not just about extinction,” he says. “I’m trying to show you enough handpicked kinds of animals and plants with really interesting stories, hopefully stories that will make you think, ‘Oh, is that how an invasive species process works?’ or ‘You mean a hurricane could wipe out all the rest of that species?’ That’s really what this whole thing’s about.”
Poverty and hunger drive wild meat consumption in some regions of Madagascar, but wealthier citizens also drive illegal trade in lemurs. Will emerging solutions help?
For years now conservationists have warned that many of Madagascar’s iconic lemur species face the risk of extinction due to rampant deforestation, the illegal pet trade and the emerging market for the primates’ meat.
Yes, people eat lemurs, and the reasons they do aren’t exactly what we might expect.
One 2016 study found — perhaps not surprisingly — that Madagascar’s extreme poverty drives the poorest families to hunt and eat lemurs and other wildlife. The study was conducted in Masoala National Park, home to ten of Madagascar’s 110-plus lemur species, including several critically endangered species.
Local hunters know that killing lemurs is against the law, but there’s a reason that doesn’t stop them. The study, published in Biological Conservation, found that “almost all children in lemur-hunting households were malnourished.” Wild-caught meat, tragically, is the only readily available solution for hungry families. The authors concluded that “unless lemur conservation efforts on the Masoala [peninsula] prioritize child health, they are unlikely to reduce lemur hunting or improve lemur conservation.”
Although poverty is endemic in Madagascar, it’s not the only factor driving lemur consumption. Two additional studies published that year in PLOS One and in Environmental Conservation revealed that Madagascar’s wealthier and middle-class citizens are equal participants. The studies uncovered a massive supply chain that transports meat from lemurs and other endangered species into urban and semi-urban areas, where it is sold in restaurants, open-air markets and even supermarkets.
The studies, the result of almost 2,000 interviews throughout the northern half of Madagascar, found that the meat trade in these more urban areas is not about poverty. Instead, it’s because people have a preference for wild-caught meat over more commercially grown livestock.
Combined with the first study, the two supply-chain papers reveal a complex answer as to who is eating lemurs and why.
“It’s not just poor, rural people and it’s not just rich, urban people,” said Temple University researcher Kim Reuter, the lead author of the PLOS One and Environmental Conservation papers and a co-founder of the Lemur Conservation Network. “There are a lot of people in the middle, your average Malagasy person living in semi-urban areas for example, who eat bushmeat.” In fact, Reuter and her colleagues found, these urban consumers eat twice the amount of wild-caught meat as people living in rural areas, and they’re willing to pay more for it.
Reuter’s studies concluded that this trade could be enough to push several species closer toward extinction.
She also pointed out that it’s important to study what happens to lemurs outside of natural habitats and protected areas, and that conservation programs need to address the meat trade in addition to other efforts such as forest preservation.
Three years after those studies were published, some progress is being made on the bushmeat front. Again, it’s probably not what you expect. According to a report in Mongabay, several ongoing projects aim to produce a new protein-heavy cash crop to help wean people off of lemur meat.
Insects, it turns out, may fit that bill.
Insect consumption in Madagascar is already fairly common, with locusts and beetles being among the most popular choices. Anthropologist Cortni Borgerson from Montclair State University hopes to take that further and has embarked on a three-year study to see if insect farming can provide enough food to reduce both malnutrition and the need to hunt wild meat.
“You can see that there is a clear correlation between malnourishment, food insecurity and lemur hunting,” Borgerson told Mongabay. “But that also makes it very solvable: We just need to solve what you put on top of your rice. If we can fix this, people will shift off.”
Another thing that may help: tourism. Recreational travel to Madagascar, which plunged during the country’s recent political unrest, has soared in recent months, and vacation bookings for this summer at more than a third higher than they were at this time last year. This could bring much-needed income to the Malagasy people and provide an incentive to protect wild lemur populations for viewing by eco-tourists. (On the other hand, it also has the potential to further incentivize the lemur pet trade. Many hotels and restaurants have been known to display “cute” lemur in cages or on chains in order to attract tourists, who are unaware that the animals have been snatched from the wild and may not live long in captivity.)
Lemur at a hotel by Leonora Enking (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The tourism boom and the insect research remains in their early phases, but still, they represent progress for the world’s eighth-poorest country, a land where at least 95 percent of lemur species are threatened with extinction and far too many people suffer in poverty. With those threats continuing to weigh heavily on both wildlife and people, every step forward is critical — both for humans and wildlife.
(An earlier version of this article was published by Scientific American.)
The University of California at San Francisco’s new fossil fuel industry documents library offers a tool to help the legal, political and public education fight against climate change and the companies responsible.
On every front, academics, journalists and policymakers compare the fossil fuel industry to the tobacco industry. The two industries share the same playbook: strategies of delay, exculpating blame by making the consumer responsible, denying scientific consensus, publishing industry-funded science and fostering public confusion over the real impacts of their products.
A major difference between the two industries, however, is the timescale and scope of the harms caused. While public health professionals are executing coordinated efforts for a “tobacco endgame” to reduce smoking and tobacco prevalence to five percent of the population or less, with the possibility of ending the tobacco epidemic in certain areas within a couple decades — we’re far from making similar progress when it comes to climate change.
Even if all fossil fuel production and consumption ended today, the fallout from 50 years of delay caused by industry obfuscation will have ramifications for humans and other species for centuries or even millennia. If disruptive climate change continues unabated, the impacts on the planet may be essentially irreversible, at least as far as any humanly relevant scale.
That’s why it’s important to know what we’re up against with the fossil fuel industry — and that’s why the University of California at San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library now houses a trove of information on the fossil fuel industry, providing an essential complement to the already nearly 15 million and growing internal industry documents from the tobacco, food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
These documents come from diverse sources, including the Climate Investigations Center, discovery processes in litigation and documents published on Climate Files. They provide key evidence regarding what the fossil fuel industry knew regarding the catastrophic impacts of climate change, when they knew, and how these companies used every means possible to protect themselves and their shareholders at the expense of everyone else.
Photo: Glenn Beltz (CC BY 2.0)
UCSF’s collection of Fossil Fuel Industry documents — which are freely available to all researchers and the public — highlight the mechanisms that have been used to thwart concerted action. A key aspect of this was the early knowledge the fossil fuel industry had about the ramifying consequences of unabated anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and the contrast between this and their public stance. For example, Exxon and other fossil fuel companies’ own research showed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s that a doubling of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 would likely cause “major shifts in rainfall/agriculture,” polar ice melt, coupled with “3°C global average temperature rise and 10°C at poles.”
Yet they doubled down on business-as-usual policies of continued — and even intensified — extraction of oil, gas and coal, and spent significant amounts of money to create the impression in public that climate science was highly uncertain.
Why is this collection being housed at UCSF — a university known for its health and medical programs?
One reason is the parallels between the misrepresentation and denial of climate science and the misrepresentation and denial of the harms of tobacco use. Just as the tobacco industry promoted smoking not as a threat to public health but rather a “personal choice,” this same refrain is now being used by the fossil fuel industry urging people to make lifestyle choices as the solution to climate change. Such industry-sponsored “solutions” shift the blame from the industry to consumers.
This parallel is not just analogical: Documents show that many of the same individuals, PR and advertising companies, and think tanks have been involved in both. For example, the American Petroleum Institute attempted to recruit the president and affiliates of the Tobacco Institute in 1997 for its own president and CEO position.
Cigarette butt litter. (Photo by Tavallai, CC BY-ND 2.0)
The other reason is that climate change is a major global health threat. From the Lancet Countdown to the World Health Organization’s Climate Health Country Profile Project, the public health and medical communities worldwide are in agreement that climate change affects every aspect of health, often disproportionately harming those with the least resources for resilience. The World Health Organization estimates that children five years or younger bear 88 percent of the health burdens of climate change.
Anthropogenic climate change will define the future of health for humans and life on this planet. It has already fundamentally shifted the geography of disease and increase in prevalence of both chronic and infectious disease.
Documents like those in this collection will be crucial in helping the public come to terms with the implications of these harms.
Mark Fisher (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Consider the current climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States, filed by 21 youth plaintiffs against the U.S. government on behalf of youth and future generations for actions that jeopardize the constitutional rights of children to life, liberty and property threatened by climate change. The fossil fuel industry initially intervened in a failed attempt to dismiss the case; now they face numerous lawsuits themselves, both in the United States and across the globe. More than 80 prominent scientists and physicians, as well as health organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have submitted amicus briefs. As U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken wrote in her 2016 decision denying motions to dismiss Juliana v. United States, “Exercising my ‘reasoned judgment,’ I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.”
These documents also highlight the relationships between industry and government and the conflicts of interest that develop when government and industry are intertwined. One notices, for example, a persistent revolving door between government and the fossil fuel industry, of which ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s brief tenure as the U.S. secretary of State is but one instance.
As we increasingly face the costs of climate change, this information can play a critical role for researchers, journalists, litigators, legislators and many others. It can provide documentary evidence for legal action and historical record. And it can also serve a political, scientific and moral purpose: helping to make people aware of the long and complex history of industry disinformation and malfeasance, and, at least in part, inoculate the public against further disinformation.
A version of this story first appeared in the University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library blog.
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.
Journalist Christopher Ketcham explains why we’re running out of time to save the West’s public lands and wildlife.
If you’re a lover of wilderness, wildlife, the American West and the public lands on which they all depend, then journalist Christopher Ketcham’s new book is required — if depressing — reading.
“It is still possible in this country to find wild, clean, open spaces, where the rhythms of the natural world go on as they should, relatively undisturbed by industrial man,” he writes. “I fear the opportunity, though, could disappear in our lifetime.”
And the reason is pretty simple: Government agencies tasked with protecting our lands have failed. But how this happened is complex and has taken decades to unfold, as he explains. “The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government,” he writes. “The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only.”
This is clear in Escalante, Utah — home to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — a crucial battleground in the fight over public lands. Ketcham writes about the biggest scourge on public lands there and across the West: cattle.
“Grazing is today the most widespread single use of the public domain, occurring on 270 million acres of national forest and BLM land,” he writes. The grazing of privately owned cattle on public lands has polluted streams, decimated native plants, and turned a biologically diverse ecosystem into a monoculture of grassland.
But in areas where cows have been removed, wildlife has returned with great abundance. Raptors and songbird populations jumped 350 percent after eight years without cattle, according to one study he cites.
That’s only possible if we take drastic steps. “How can you preserve a wild and unspoiled landscape with a ruinous alien bovine on it?” he asks. “You can’t. It’s an impossibility, an absurdity.”
And this gets at one of the book’s key points: Government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service manage for “multiple uses,” which includes logging, mining, grazing and drilling — activities that are at their core incompatible with conservation and wildlife protection. “The BLM and Forest Service are schizoid,” Ketcham writes. “With one hand they protect; with the other they ravage.”
While grazing gets a lot of ink and ire from Ketcham, he also writes about the harm from roadbuilding. We now have 400,000 miles of roads through our national forests, facilitating the profits of private companies from oil and gas drilling, timber sales and other extractions. “Roading was the means by which all other industrial development could proceed, the crucial first step in the domination of the wild,” he writes.
Ketcham also explores the role of Wildlife Services, the USDA program that uses “an arsenal of poisons, traps, and aerial gunships at a cost of tens of millions of dollars annually” to kill wildlife perceived as a threat to ranchers. “During the twentieth century, the agency was probably responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of animals,” he writes, “…including twenty species of carnivores and twelve taxa of mammals listed as endangered, threatened, or as candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act.”
It’s not just Wildlife Services failing endangered species, of course: Ketcham writes about the government-industry collusion that has betrayed the grizzly bear and sage grouse, among other species.
While the Trump administration’s anti-environment agenda has ramped up some threats, including slashing vast amounts of protected public lands, the wheels of this machine were set in motion long ago and supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations. It was Obama’s administration, he writes, that “perpetrated the worst offenses, removing protections for some of the most charismatic species in the West, the veritable last vestiges of the wild West. In so doing, it was Democrats who set up for evisceration the Endangered Species Act, a law crucially important for the future of biodiversity on the public lands.”
So-called “Big Green” groups, those large national environmental nonprofits that get most of the money and media, also take considerable fire from Ketcham for their willingness to compromise away environmental protections and countless acres of wilderness, like with the 2014 Rocky Mountain Front legislation, which was celebrated for creating 67,000 acres of new wilderness south of Glacier National Park, but opened up 200,000 acres of roadless areas to industry.
If there’s any failure in Ketcham’s well-researched and engaging prose, it’s that it’s 400 pages of brutally bad news. And it’s hard to know what to do with it all, which he readily admits.
“Sometimes I’m glad my job as an investigative reporter is mainly to lay demolitions under corrupt structures, blow them up, walk away, and let you people deal with the rubble,” he writes. “I’m no policy wonk. Frankly I have no idea how to save the public lands from a system that marches on inexorably, not in a way that’s politically doable in the near term.”
He does have a few thoughts, though, and calls for ending the federal timber sale program, beginning a vast decommissioning of roads, and what he calls the “single most important action we could take for the public lands, for wild plants and wild animals” — evicting cattle.
And while there’s no grand plan for how we save our public lands, he does present a clear case for why they’re under assault, who’s responsible and what’s at stake. And there’s a rousing call to action.
“What’s needed is a campaign for the public lands that is vital, fierce, impassioned, sometimes dangerous, without hypocrisy, that stands against the tyranny of money, coupled with a campaign of public education that explains in the simplest terms what the lands are, the glorious extent of them, the ecosystems they encompass, the wild things that live in them,” Ketcham writes. “We need to bring the good news to every citizen, the news that he or she has a say in what happens on the public lands. This land is our land.”
How does reporting on the environment promote democracy? A journalism professor describes conditions in the Republic of Georgia, where the media isn’t equipped to cover issues like pollution.
What happens when an illegally logged tree falls or poachers kill endangered brown bears in the forest, but there’s no journalist to report it?
That’s the situation in the Republic of Georgia, which faces challenges that include poaching, deteriorating air quality, habitat disruption from new hydropower dams, illegal logging and climate change. The effects cross national borders and affect economic and political relationships in the Caucasus and beyond.
I researched environmental journalism in the Republic of Georgia as a Fulbright Scholar there in the fall of 2018. I chose Georgia because many of its environmental and media problems are similar to those confronting other post-Soviet countries nearly 30 years after independence. As I have found in my research on mass media in other post-Soviet nations, journalists risk provoking powerful public and corporate interests when they investigate sensitive environmental issues.
But when the media don’t cover these problems, Georgians go uninformed about issues relevant to their daily lives. Eco-violators operate with impunity, and the government and Georgia’s influential private sector remain opaque to the public. At a time when government hostility to journalists is rising in many countries, Georgia illustrates how environmental damage, pollution and ill health can spread, and go unpunished, when powerful interests are unaccountable to the public.
Georgia’s habitats range from alpine peaks to river floodplains and the Black Sea coast. Giorgi Balakhadze/Wikimedia, CC BY
An Unstable Mediascape
Levels of press freedom, autonomy and media sustainability have fluctuated since Georgia became independent in 1991. The latest constitutional change greatly strengthened Parliament and eliminated direct election of the president, whose office is primarily ceremonial.
The governing Georgian Dream coalition has become increasingly anti-press over the past two years. Georgia’s mediascape is fairly diverse but dominated by its two largest television channels. The 2019 World Press Freedom Index ranks Georgia 60th out of 180 countries, a substantial improvement from 100th in 2013. However, it notes that media owners still often control editorial content, and threats against journalists are not uncommon.
Shallow, uninformed coverage
In addition to my own observations during 3 ½ months based in Tbilisi with visits to other cities, my findings draw on input from 16 journalists, media trainers, scientists and representatives of advocacy groups and multinational agencies whom I interviewed or who spoke to my media and society class at Caucasus University.
Source after source bemoaned what they saw as generally shallow, sparse, misleading and inaccurate coverage of environmental topics. In their view, the legacy of Soviet journalism as a willing propaganda tool of the state lingered. Tamara Chergoleishvili, director general of the magazine and news website Tabula, put it bluntly: “There is no environmental journalism… There is no professionalism.”
One major complaint was that journalists lacked knowledge about science and the environment. “If you don’t understand the issue, you can’t convey it to the public,” said Irakli Shavgulidze, chair of the governing board of the nonprofit Center for Biodiversity Conservation & Research.
Another concern was that journalists often failed to connect environmental topics with other issues such as the economy, foreign relations, energy and health. Sophie Tchitchinadze, a United Nations Development Programme communications analyst and former journalist, said the Georgian media was just starting to view itself as “an essential part of economic development and equally important to social issues.”
Tourists swim and sunbathe in the Black Sea resort town of Batumi. Georgia’s government has attracted top foreign investors to build hotels and develop tourist sites. AP Photo/Maria Danilova, File
Transparent in Principle, Not in Practice
Lack of access to information was also a common complaint, despite transparency laws entitling the public and press to government documents.
For example, when Tsira Gvasalia, Georgia’s leading environmental investigative journalist, reported on the nation’s only gold mining company, she was unable to obtain full information on possible government actions from the local prosecutor, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture or the courts. “The company has a close connection with the government,” she noted.
Georgian citizens weren’t much help either. In the small mining town of Kazreti, Gvasalia saw thick layers of dust on roads and bus stops from uncovered trucks transporting ore to the company’s processing facility. When she asked residents how pollution affected their everyday lives, people were “very careful. Once I mentioned the name of the company, everybody went silent. … Everyone worked for the company,” she said.
Who Sets the Priorities?
In my sources’ view, environmental coverage was not a priority for Georgian journalists and media owners, especially at the national level. Lia Chakhunashvili, a former environmental journalist now associated with the nonprofit International Research & Exchanges Board, observed that covering the environment “is not as glamorous as being a political reporter or on TV all the time or having parliamentary credentials.”
“If the environmental sector becomes a priority for the government, journalists will try to cover it better,” Melano Tkabladze, an environmental economist with the Caucasus Environmental NGO Network, predicted.
What coverage exists is weakened by misinformation, disinformation and “fake news.” Much of it originates from Russia, which briefly invaded Georgia in 2008 to support two breakaway provinces seeking independence, and vehemently opposes Georgia’s efforts to join NATO and the European Union.
Tabula’s Chergoleishvili asserted that Georgian journalists could not distinguish fake news from legitimate sources. As an example, Gvasalia described planted reports on Facebook that claimed a hydroelectric project would “elevate local people” and provide “great social benefit.” “Seventy percent of this needs to be double-checked,” she warned.
Cultivating Better Reporting
Although Georgia’s media sector remains politically and economically vulnerable, I see two encouraging signs. First, young journalists are increasingly interested in covering the environment. Second, Georgian leaders strongly desire to join the European Union, where multinational eco-issues such as curbing climate change and building a pan-European energy market are priorities. This step would be significant for Georgia, given the trans-border nature of environmental problems, the country’s progress toward energy self-sufficiency and its strategic location.
In the meantime, more support for independent fact-checking could improve Georgian environmental coverage. Some already occurs: For example, FactCheck.ge, a nonpartisan news website based in Tbilisi, critiqued a claim in 2016 by Tbilisi’s then-mayor, who had campaigned on a promise of bolstering the city’s green spaces, that the city had planted a half-million trees.The larger truth, it reported, was that many planted saplings were extremely small and closely packed. A large fraction had already dried up and were unlikely to survive.
Another partial solution would be for environmental nonprofits to offer the Georgian media more press tours, trainings and access to experts. However, eco-NGOs also have agendas and constituencies, so this type of outreach can’t substitute for informed professional journalism.
Covering the environment is challenging and can be dangerous in any country. But fostering environmental journalism in emerging democracies like Georgia is one way to hold government officials and powerful businesses accountable.
For 12 years, Janet Kessler has chronicled the behavior and family life of San Francisco’s growing population of coyotes as the city itself undergoes big changes.
San Francisco is changing, and not everyone is happy about it. Many long-term residents feel pushed out by the city’s flood of high-tech jobs and start-up cash, a situation that caused The Washington Post to proclaim that the “city of love” had broken America’s heart.
It’s not the first such story. Locals have penned their own defenses, but no one doubts the cultural bedrock — not to mention the actual landscape — beneath San Francisco is shifting.
Does this affect more than just the city’s human residents? Amateur naturalist Janet Kessler has kept a close eye on one slice of the city’s wildlife — its coyotes, which returned to the area in 2002 after being wiped out in the mid-1900s.
It hasn’t always been a happy reunion. Coyotes have been blamed for the deaths of a handful of dogs and cats, prompting concern from some residents.
Can that situation turn around? Kessler thinks it can. For the past 12 years she’s been photo-documenting coyote behavior and family life — building a case for the coexistence of the city’s growing populations of both urban residents and wild canids.
She admits she’s drawn in by the drama of it — getting to know the coyote families, watching the youngsters set off for new territories, seeing rivalries and partnerships develop. It’s something akin to a wildlife soap opera. And she tunes in day after day.
Coyotes in San Francisco having a playful tussle. (Photo by Janet Kessler)
Coyotes, she’s found, don’t have much trouble figuring out how to navigate a changing urban landscape. In San Francisco, despite the high-rises looming ever taller and new condos filling empty lots, coyotes are finding space.
And that’s true across the country. These days you can find coyotes in most cities in the United States, according to the Urban Coyote Initiative.
Kessler says public opinion of coyotes has improved in recent years, but that’s come with another set of problems. We talked with her about what she’s learned, how San Francisco’s coyotes are coping with a changing city, and the value of making space for wildlife in urban areas.
What’s captivated you about coyotes to devote so much time to getting to know them?
Janet Kessler has been photo-documenting coyotes in San Francisco since 2007. (Photo courtesy of Janet Kessler)
I met my first coyote up on Twin Peaks 12 years ago. I didn’t know about coyotes and I was overwhelmed by what I saw in a wild animal. This little coyote got up and danced and was curious, intelligent, had emotions and personality. That’s what pulled me in. I went away needing to find out more.
From then on I always carried a camera. I would watch whenever I saw that coyote appear. After that I started expanding more. Every day, I’ll spend anywhere from 2 to 4 or more hours watching. If they’re there, I’ll stay, get myself in the distance and I just watch to see what happens.
If it’s not immediately obvious what they’re doing, I’ll keep watching to understand; it’s a saga, a thrilling story with cliffhangers and all. By slowly getting to know more and more, you get into it and you become part of what it is.
What have you learned about them?
All my initial impressions have been confirmed repeatedly during my observations. These animals are social: they communicate and interact with each other all the time. They are always doing something and always aware of what the others are doing and each other’s moods. They communicate in various ways — using body language, facial expressions, their eyes, their vocalizations.
Two young coyotes in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo by Janet Kessler)
They are known to live in nuclear families that sometimes check on family members over distances. They mate for life and both parents help raise the young. But every coyote situation, just like every coyote, is different, and they actually live in a variety of situations. I’ve seen some that live as loners and even siblings that formed a “family” on a territory.
I feel like I can relate to them — their jealousies, their angers, their curiosities — and it helps me connect with them, but I also want other people to see these things so that they will connect and not be so fearful and negative toward them.
What’s the biggest threat to urban coyotes?
I think human fears, because of what that can lead to. If people don’t know about coyote behavior they will report [what appears to be] aggressive behavior when that’s not really what’s going on. Often people confuse defensive or even playful behavior with aggressive behavior.
Both misunderstanding and misinformation are threats to coyotes.
And the opposite is true. Loving them too much is also dangerous. We’ve had people feeding them from cars, which leads to them chasing cars and getting killed.
I was asked to help at one park where people were leaving food for a coyote — I found 4-pound bags of meat and whole chickens. One woman was releasing live mice. It took two years to get that coyote to stop chasing cars. Cars are the biggest coyote killers in the city.
San Francisco has changed a lot in the past decade — the number of people and number of cars has grown. Are changing demographics affecting urban wildlife like coyotes?
Yes, 15 years ago I could go to bigger parks and not see anyone — that’s not true anymore. There’s just more people. Also our parks used to have wild areas that were not very manicured and now they are more and more manicured and that means that coyotes are more visible.
Most importantly is that our dog population has grown, and dogs are coyotes’ biggest nemesis. Dogs chase coyotes, and coyotes may see a small pet as prey or feel territorially competitive with any size dog. If you’re walking your dog and you see a coyote you need to leash your dog and walk in the opposite direction. Always keep your distance. It’s so easy but some people don’t know this.
A coyote in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo by Janet Kessler)
But also the population of coyotes has grown since 2002. They used to be in only the biggest parks, but those territories are now all taken, so you have coyotes owning fragmented territories made of small parks and pockets of green space and they move between them usually during the darker hours.
The big thing I’ve noticed is more territorial fights. Does this mean the area has reached a coyote population saturation point and they have to fight for their territories? An ecologist at the Presidio has found that when radio-collared coyotes from the Presidio disperse they move south and out of the city. Maybe coyotes from other parts of the city do the same. The Presidio, which is part of the federally run national parks program, puts tracking collars on coyotes that live there and those that pass through the park.
What is the value of having wildlife like coyotes in our urban parks?
Without them, you’re missing a lot. The people I know who have met coyotes and even those who see them regularly are thrilled — there is something that is fulfilled that they’re not getting from living in a concrete building.
When people ask me where they can see coyotes in San Francisco I tell them that I don’t reveal locations, but they should take a walk, enjoy nature and they might come across a coyote. It’s thrilling.
Releasing captive-bred monarchs doesn’t benefit wild butterflies — in fact, it may make the problem worse.
Monarch butterflies haven’t had it easy lately. Populations of these beloved insects have crashed 80 percent or more in most parts of their range as a result of pesticides, habitat loss, climate change and other environmental threats. As a result, monarchs are now being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
A lot of people are working hard to protect monarchs, but one all-too-common activity intended to help may actually do more harm than good: mass releases of captive-raised butterflies.
Why is that a problem? Check out our video.
The most common danger to larvae at these mass-rearing operations is a pathogen called Ophyrocystis elektroscirrha, a protozoan parasite that can harm a butterfly’s ability to emerge from chrysalis or deform its wings so they can’t extend or flatten. Although the threat posed this pathogen is well-known there are currently no requirements for breeders to test for its presence, according to a recent joint letter from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and other experts.
This isn’t the only problem. Mass captive breeding also has the potential to reduce monarchs’ genetic diversity — ironically, making them even more susceptible to disease and other dangers. Shipping insects around the country can also result in geographically adapted monarchs being released into areas where they’re less likely to survive.
Released monarchs that live and make their way into the wild pose a different kind of problem, as their presence interferes with scientists’ ability to track and understand monarch declines. “When we see a butterfly, we don’t know if it’s gotten there because somebody has released it or if it got there naturally,” monarch researcher Karen Oberhauser told NPR.
Even if these threats were mitigated, new research finds that captive-raised monarchs wouldn’t necessarily help wild populations because they sometimes lose their ability to migrate. Instead of flying south, second-generation butterflies (those born from captive stock) just flutter in random directions. Researchers suspect a genomic anomaly from the captive-breeding process.
So what’s the best way to help monarchs? As we show in our video, wild monarchs need a steady supply of milkweed plants, the host plant for their eggs. Planting milkweed — especially on a community level — will help to provide a steady supply of food for emerging caterpillars. Monarchs in each area of the country need different types of monarch plants, and you can find the best ones to plant here.
Adult monarchs, meanwhile, require various kinds of nectar-producing plants. The Xerces Society has a good resource for the best varieties here.
Still feel the need to do more? The best option, according to experts, is to ask your community to use fewer pesticides. Individuals and groups can also help gather information about wild butterflies to assist broader conservation efforts. Monarch Joint Venture has a list of citizen science opportunities for tracking migration and population sizes. You can even download an app to report monarch sightings in your neighborhood.
The last time a primatologist saw the Miss Waldron’s was back in 1978. Conservationists did consider the species extinct for a short period, but that changed after a hunter turned up with a recently killed monkey in 2002. After that some colobus calls were reportedly heard in 2008, but the creatures haven’t been seen or heard from since.
