Squid Management for Peace

A collaborative fisheries-management plan could decrease illegal fishing and help a decades-old impasse between Argentina, the United Kingdom and the Malvinas/Falkland Islands.

In the Southern Atlantic, approximately 200 miles off the coast of Argentina, so many fishing vessels gather in one place that they can be seen from space. They’re engaged in intense competition for the valuable illex squid (Illex argentinus), which themselves are drawn to the nutrient-rich shelf break beneath the surface.

illegal fishing lights — Fishing vessels at night — what NASA describes as “a city of light” in the middle of the South Atlantic. NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA National Geophysical Data Center

While many of these vessels operate legally, many others do not. As many as 300,000 tons of squid are taken illegally from the region each year — much more than the 50 to 150 tons that are allowed to be harvested legally.

In part this massive illegal fishing operation is the result of the distant and remote nature of the fishery itself. But it’s also inspired by longstanding political angst that impedes cooperation between Argentina and the United Kingdom territory known to some as the Falkland Islands and others as the Islas Malvinas.

The question of sovereignty over these islands has been festering for nearly two centuries. Argentina argues that the British have illegally occupied the Islas Malvinas since 1833, a matter it first raised with the United Nations and other international bodies in the 1940s. This dispute later erupted in the brief but brutal 1982 Falkland/Malvinas’ War, in which Argentina tried (but failed) to retake the islands by force.

Decades later the sovereignty struggle continues. Currently Argentina has the backing of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice to negotiate with the UK over the Malvinas. But the UK refuses to negotiate the sensitive issue of sovereignty, stating the self-determination of the Islands’ residents — who voted in 2013 to remain a British Overseas Territory — should be respected.

Regardless of conflicting interpretations of sovereignty, the fate of the Islands lies in the oceans around them.

Economically 52.4 percent of the Islands’ GDP — approximately $86.3 million — depends on fisheries, with squid being the most valuable resource. In a good year, the Islands can provide nearly 10 percent of the world’s illex squid supply. By comparison Argentina is less dependent on fisheries — which only account for 3.4 percent of its GDP — but their value still amounts to approximately $20.2 billion, more than 230 times the value of the Falklands’ fisheries.

Illegal fishing threatens both Argentina and the Islands with significant financial and ecological losses, but the issue remains difficult to resolve. Legal fishing vessels purchase permits from either the Argentinean or the Falkland Island government for access to fish in their respective exclusive economic zones (EEZs). As part of obtaining the permit, the vessel must adhere to certain standards for vessel safety and catch documentation. Additionally, depending on who issued the permit, vessels must adhere to different fishing regulations, seasons, and allowable gear type for squid. This can cause some problems, as Argentinean permit holders may unlawfully fish in Falkland Islander waters and vice versa.

However, the major of vessels committing illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing don’t hold any type of permit. These vessels, usually from Asia, often operate at “mile 201,” meaning that they linger in the high seas or areas beyond national jurisdiction, which under international law have no fishing regulations. They then dip into the Argentinean or Falkland Island EEZ, an illegal act. Because these boats do not have permits from a government that requires certain safety requirements to be licensed, many of these IUU vessels are associated with poor working conditions and even forced labor.

Falklands concern with vast fishing fleet gathering on high seas #Falklands @FalklandsGov @MercoPressNews A vast fleet of fishing vessels assembling to catch Illex squid on the high seas, some 400 miles north of the Falkland Islandshttps://t.co/MgXyPUXTwu pic.twitter.com/6AhNmfu8Ii

— crown dependency pol (@CROWNDPN) January 12, 2018

While Argentina’s military, the UK’s Fisheries Protection Squadron, and the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department make patrols in their respective areas, it’s still too difficult to maintain enforcement over such a large area.

There was some promising progress on all of these issues, but it didn’t last. Between 1990 and 2005, a collaborative regional fisheries management organization called the South Atlantic Fisheries Commission facilitated the exchange of fisheries data, joint research cruises and joint scientific analysis, and recommended coordinated conservation advice, including illegal fishing, between the Falkland Islands, Argentina and the UK. But in 2005 Argentina pulled out of this commission in an effort to diminish any type of recognition other than Argentinian related to the Islands. Since then the illegal fishing has increased, as have illegal transshipments (transferring cargo secretly at sea rather than officially at port) and incidents at sea such as fires, collisions and jumping ship.

Meanwhile the cost of these disputes and the resulting illegal activity continue to pile up.

Ecologically, illegal fishing undermines conservation plans for multiple species in the area. These squid have rapid lifecycles; in just 1 to 2 years they grow to nearly a foot in length, reproduce, and then die. Throughout that process they serve as an abundant source of prey items for whales, seals, marine birds and fish species. Scientists have expressed concern that taking too many squid, especially premature squid, will affect future stock populations and disrupt the food chain. This past year Argentina closed its squid season early due to low stocks. Given the massive scale of the fishing occurring in the South Atlantic, there’s a need for monitoring these squid populations, their harvest and the possible cascading effects on other species — especially endangered species in the area like the grey-headed albatross.

albatross penguins — Albatrosses and penguins West Point Island in the Falkland Islands. Both species eat squid. Photo: Liam Quinn (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The good news is that talks on fisheries cooperation between Argentina and the UK have resumed. It is possible that another collaborative fisheries-management arrangement could be negotiated in the future. But talks could also fail if the sovereignty issue overshadows the needs for fisheries coordination. As decision-makers come together, it will be necessary to keep in mind that a strong and collaborative squid fishery-management plan will mean higher profits for national economies, better working conditions for fishing crews, and safeguarded ocean ecosystems for all those involved. Even though the issue of sovereignty remains to be resolved, an agreement of this nature could be a significant milestone in Argentina-UK relations surrounding the Malvinas/Falkland Islands and could serve as a positive stepping-stone in advancing peace and resolving the political stalemate that remains.

And in the long run, all of those positive outcomes — for people and for nature — could come about because of squid.

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.

Let Rivers Flood: Communities Adopt New Strategies for Resilience

New kinds of flood plans put nature back in charge, help populations adapt to a changing climate, reduce risk — and more.

In 2016 California’s rainy season kicked off right on schedule, at the beginning of October. The rains came — and then just kept on coming. By February there was so much water filling Northern California’s rivers that Oroville Dam, the tallest in the country, threatened to break after its spillway and emergency spillways both failed.

Water managers averted a crisis at the dam, but not before 180,000 people living downstream were evacuated.

It was a wake-up call. In just a few months California had gone from five-year-drought to deluge, ending up with the second wettest year on record for the state. It served as a warning of things to come. With rising temperatures from climate change and an increase in the number of extreme storms predicted, scientists have warned of “climate whiplash” — more pronounced swings between wet and dry that could make floods even more dangerous and costly.

It’s an issue that’s top of mind not just in California, but across the country. The United States just endured the wettest 12 months on record, and flooding this spring resulted in federal disaster declarations in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. Dozens of other states and counties declared emergencies, and at the time of this writing, floods had already claimed 67 lives nationwide. They’ve also caused billions of dollars in property damage and swamped farmers have experienced billions more in economic losses.

In all of these cases, we see a common thread: It’s not just the direct blows from nature that are the problem. We’ve made things worse by paving over floodplains, channelizing rivers, and draining wetlands.

But change could be on the horizon. Today more and more communities are beginning to realize that 20th century development practices are harmful. It’s ushering in a new era of thinking about floodplain management — one that involves letting rivers behave like rivers.

Making Room for the River

In February 2017, when managers released water out of Lake Oroville to prevent the dam from failing, it went raging down the Feather River, a tributary of the Sacramento River. Another disaster could have occurred downstream where the Feather River’s channel narrows and the levee has failed before.

But the Three Rivers Levee Improvement Authority completed a project in 2010 to set the levee back along six miles of this dangerous stretch of river, which gave more room for high flows to pass through without the risk of levee damage or failure, while also creating 1,500 more acres of riparian habitat.

That plan paid off. “After that huge Oroville dam incident, this area and this new levee were just unscathed by the big flood,” says John Cain, director of conservation for California flood management at the nonprofit American Rivers. “So by setting back the levees, you create room for the river, decrease the flood risk and decrease wear and tear on the system to ensure the levee system’s integrity.”

This idea of setting back levees is one part of the implementation of the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, first adopted in 2012 and updated in 2017. The plan, Cain says, is groundbreaking in several ways.

levee setback — A setback levee constructed along the Bear River in Northern California. (Photo by Paul Hames / California Department of Water Resources)

The first is that it’s not a flood-control plan, it’s a flood-risk management plan — and the difference on the ground is much more than semantics.

“When you think about the challenge of managing the risk associated with flooding as opposed to trying to control floods, it dramatically changes the tools you use,” says Cain. “Flood control is really a fool’s errand, particularly in an era of climate change. Flooding is going to happen. The question is, how do we manage it so we limit the consequences for property and people?”

Previous flood plans have been mostly about building infrastructure — levees, dams and flood walls, he says. This new plan still allows for strengthening levees in some places, such as around the cities of Sacramento and Stockton, but there’s also more focus on restoring floodplains and setting levees further back from the river.

That’s not always as easy as it sounds when much of the area you want to allow to flood already contains housing developments, shopping malls or prime agricultural land.

“Private landowners can be reluctant, so coming up with some incentive package is a hurdle,” says Cain. “You’ve got to find the funding and the political will to do that. That’s a very big challenge.”

The plan also prioritizes projects with multiple benefits. So instead of funding efforts that are just about controlling extreme flood events, the plan helps to develop projects that provide a variety of additional outcomes, such as groundwater recharge, open space and recreation opportunities, and clean water amenities and wildlife habitat.

One project in West Sacramento about a mile from the state capitol moved the levee back 200 to 800 feet along a six-mile stretch of the Sacramento River. It’s an area that gets walloped by water in the winter, and now this added levee width decreases the flood risk and creates crucial habitat for endangered salmon that migrate down the river. It also provides habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife.

Tools for a Climate Change Century

On the other side of the country, residents of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, home to the growing city of Charlotte, know a thing or two about flooding. The area got engulfed in 1995 and then again in 1997. Some residents hadn’t finished paying for the furniture and cars they’d lost in the first flood before the second one washed them out again, remembers Dave Canaan, the county’s storm water services director.

And worse, some of the flooding in 1997 wasn’t even in the areas that county officials thought would flood, based on their Federal Emergency Management Agency maps.

Locals weren’t happy, and that spurred the county to re-evaluate its strategy.

“We decided, let’s have a policy where floodplains are meant to flood,” says Canaan.

It seems like a simple idea, but it’s actually groundbreaking in practice and is already offering a brighter future for flood resilience.

“We thought, maybe we’re not doing this as best as we can, maybe we need to take the playbook and throw it out and come up with a whole new playbook on how we’re managing our floodplains,” says Canaan.

By 1999 the board of commissioners had adopted a new floodplain-guidance document. That’s meant big changes for the county.

For one thing, residents now receive better communication about their floodplain risk, including a new notification system to warn homeowners and businesses ahead of a storm, says Canaan.

The county also made a major policy change: It stopped relying on FEMA’s floodplain maps because they weren’t updated frequently enough and didn’t take into account how future land use would affect floods.

When Canaan and his colleagues designed new maps that took into account future development conditions, they projected the community’s flood line would increase dramatically compared to their out-of-date FEMA maps from 1985. “We realized we could literally be permitting a single-family residence that within 10-20 years could have four feet of water,” he says.

So when they rolled out their new maps that showed more homes in the floodplain, they also began a buyout program. Over the past 19 years it’s moved 700 families and 450 buildings from the floodplain. That’s reduced liability in the community and it’s also provided a public benefit — they’ve turned that cleared land into 180 acres of new open-space greenway.“It’s really a quality of life investment that we’re making,” he says.

Restoration project — A floodplain restoration project was completed after flood-prone apartments were removed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. (Photo by Mecklenburg County)

Since the buyout program started, they’ve spent a combined $60 million in federal, state and local money and have avoided $25 million in losses so far — a number that will grow with each passing storm.

The program is now 100 percent locally funded, and the county keeps cash on hand to use for buyouts so it can step in immediately after a flood and make an offer, instead of waiting several years for federal funding post-disaster. There’s also a retrofit program that helps homeowners stay in homes by making improvements to limit the possible flood damage. Typically homeowners chip in 25 percent of the cost, and the county’s stormwater utility pays the rest, says Canaan. The program has also helped homeowners significantly reduce their flood insurance rates.

In 2012 the county launched a comprehensive tool to help it evaluate risk and determine which areas should be prioritized for taking out of the floodplain. The tool looks at much more than the cost to rebuild a flood-damaged home; it also takes into consideration things like the cost of putting a swift-water rescue team in harm’s way and the benefit of having public land to use for recreation or to build features that will filter pollutants and improve water quality.

“We run the risk scores and that score translates into what the mitigation option ought to be,” says Canaan. Participation by homeowners is totally voluntary, he adds, and the county doesn’t condemn any properties.

He says they’re working now with the Department of Homeland Security to update and improve the tool so it can be of use to other communities. Different regions will have vastly different factors to asses, but he says the methodology that Mecklenburg County used in its approach to floodplain management can be applied anywhere.

Common tools are one thing, but the most crucial part of the development of the new plan actually came from the input of local groups and experts. “Public engagement helps to make sure we keep things in perspective,” he says.

And in the face of unknown risks from climate change, stakeholder groups have also helped county staff add an extra layer of precaution to their risk assessment and planning.

“The more and more I see of more frequent events — not just rainfall, but droughts — I think we need to say we don’t know as much as we think we know and therefore we’re going to put in additional safety factor on top of what we just calculated,” says Canaan.

New thinking about floodplain management allows us to re-evaluate how we determine risk — something that’s crucial today, says American Rivers’ Cain.

“Risk is really the probability of flooding multiplied by the consequences of flooding,” he says. “And what we tried to do in the 20th century was control the probability of flooding. That was generally not a winning strategy and it’s definitely a losing strategy as the climate changes.”

Critically Endangered Right Whales Are Dying in Record Numbers. High-tech Fishing Gear Could Help Save Them

Time is running out to save North Atlantic right whales, but the use of ropeless fishing gear could be a lifeline.

Editor’s note: Six North Atlantic right whales died last month — about one percent of the species’ entire population. Two new papers link the rising death toll for these endangered whales to human activity — and things are going to get worse. Additional research published in May finds that climate change is causing right whales to turn up in places they haven’t traditionally swum, putting them in harm’s way. Below, two researchers talk about how to solve this deadly problem.

Many fish, marine mammals and seabirds that inhabit the world’s oceans are critically endangered, but few are as close to the brink as the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis). Only about 411 of these whales exist today, and at their current rate of decline, they could become extinct within our lifetimes.

From 1980 through about 2010, conservation efforts focused mainly on protecting whales from being struck by ships. Federal regulations helped reduce vessel collisions and supported a slight rebound in right whale numbers.

But at the same time, growing numbers of right whales died after becoming entangled in lobster and crab fishing gear, and the population has taken a significant downward turn. This may have happened because fishing ropes became stronger, and both whales and fishermen shifted their ranges so that areas of overlap increased. In research that is currently in press, we show that 72 percent of diagnosed mortalities between 2010-2018 occurred due to entanglements.

This comes after a millennium of whaling that decimated the right whale population, reducing it from perhaps between 10,000 to 20,000 to a few hundred animals today. And entanglement deaths are much more inhumane than harpoons. A whaler’s explosive harpoon kills quickly, compared to months of drawn-out pain and debilitation caused by seemingly harmless fishing lines. We believe these deaths can be prevented by working with the trap fishing industries to adopt ropeless fishing gear – but North Atlantic right whales are running out of time.

Deadly Encounters

Whalers pursued right whales for centuries because this species swam relatively slowly and floated when dead, so it was easier to kill and retrieve than other whales. By the mid-20th century, scientists assumed they had been hunted to extinction. But in 1980, researchers from the New England Aquarium who were studying marine mammal distribution in the Bay of Fundy off eastern Canada were stunned when they sighted 26 right whales.

Conservation efforts led to the enactment of regulations that required commercial ships to slow down in zones along the U.S. Atlantic coast where they were highly likely to encounter whales, reducing boat strikes. But this victory has been offset by rising numbers of entanglements.

Adult right whales can produce up to an estimated 8,000 pounds of force with a single stroke of their flukes. When they become tangled in fishing gear, they often break it and swim off trailing ropes and sometimes crab or lobster traps.

Lines and gear can wrap around a whale’s body, flukes, flippers and mouth. They impede swimming and feeding, and cause chronic infection, emaciation and damage to blubber, muscle and bone. Ultimately these injuries weaken the animal until it dies, which can take months to years.

One of us, Michael Moore, is trained as a veterinarian and has examined many entangled dead whales. Moore has seen fishing rope embedded inches deep into a whale’s lip, and a juvenile whale whose spine had been deformed by the strain of dragging fishing gear. Other animals had flippers nearly severed by swimming wrapped in inexorably constricting ropes. Entanglement injuries to right whales are the worst animal trauma Moore has seen in his career.

Fishing rope in whale — Fishing rope furrowed into the lip of Bayla, right whale #3911. (Photo by Michael Moore, NMFS Permit 932-1905-00/MA-009526, CC BY-ND)

Even if whales are able to wriggle free and live, the extreme stress and energy demands of entanglement, along with inadequate nutrition, are thought to be preventing females from getting pregnant and contributing to record low calving rates in recent years.

Solutions for Whales and Fishermen

The greatest entanglement risk is from ropes that lobster and crab fishermen use to attach buoys to traps they set on the ocean floor. Humpback and minke whales and leatherback sea turtles, all of which are federally protected, also become entangled.

Conservationists are looking for ways to modify or eliminate these ropes.
Rock lobster fishermen in Australia already use pop-up buoys that ascend when they receive sound signals from fishing boats. The buoys trail out ropes as they rise, which fishermen retrieve and use to pull up their traps.

Other technologies are in development, including systems that acoustically identify traps on the seafloor and mark them with “virtual buoys” on fishermen’s chart plotters, eliminating the need for surface buoys. Fishermen also routinely use a customized hook on the end of a rope to catch the line between traps and haul them to the surface when the buoy line goes missing.

Transitioning to ropeless technology will require a sea change in some of North America’s most valuable fisheries. The 2016 U.S. lobster catch was worth US$670 million. Canadian fishermen landed CA$1.3 billion worth of lobster and CA$590 million worth of snow crab.

Just as no fisherman wants to catch a whale, researchers and conservationists don’t want to put fishermen out of business. In our view, ropeless technologies offer a genuine opportunity for whales and the fishing industry to co-exist if they can be made functional, affordable and safe to use.

Switching to ropeless gear is unlikely to be cheap. But as systems evolve and simplify, and production scales up, they will become more affordable. And government support could help fishermen make the shift. In Canada, the federal and New Brunswick provincial governments recently awarded CA$2 million to Canadian snow crab fishermen to test two ropeless trap designs.

Converting could save fishermen money in the long run. For example, California Dungeness crab fishermen closed their 2019 season three months ahead of schedule on April 15 to settle a lawsuit over whale entanglements, leaving crab they could have caught still in the water. Under the agreement, fishermen using ropeless gear will be exempt from future early closures.

A Rebound Is Possible

The Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act require the U.S. government to conserve endangered species. In Congress, the pending SAVE Right Whales Act of 2019 would provide $5 million annually for collaborative research into preventing mortalities caused by the fishing and shipping industries. And an advisory committee to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently recommended significant fishing protections, focused primarily on reducing the number of ropes in the water column and the strength of the remaining lines.

Consumers can also help. Public outcry over dolphin bycatch in tuna fisheries spurred passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and led to dolphin-safe tuna labeling, which ultimately reduced dolphin mortalities from half a million to about 1,000 animals annually. Choosing lobster and crab products caught without endangering whales could accelerate a similar transition.

North Atlantic right whales can still thrive if humans make it possible. The closely related southern right whale (Eubalaena australis), which has faced few human threats since the end of commercial whaling, has rebounded from just 300 animals in the early 20th century to an estimated 15,000 in 2010.

There are real ways to save North Atlantic right whales. If they go extinct, it will be on this generation’s watch.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Koalas on the Decline — Dangerous New Threats, Emerging Solutions

The Australian icon could lose its fight against climate change, disease, habitat destruction and cars — but not if dedicated conservationists get the tools they need to protect the species.

Ten years ago the shaky video of a dehydrated, wildfire-damaged koala captured headlines and the world’s attention.

Crouched next to a charred tree trunk, a volunteer firefighter named David Tree gingerly poured bottled water into the open mouth of the burned koala. A tiny gray paw rested in his own large, calloused hand, allowing the animal to remain upright as she drank.

The young koala, later nicknamed “Sam,” quickly became the iconic emblem of the fires — the first stages of what would be known as the Black Saturday bushfires that burned through the forests of southeastern Australia in February 2009. The fires occurred during a massive heatwave. They burned more than 1.1 million acres, killed 180 people, and caused more than 1 million animal fatalities.

Sam, who was lucky to survive, received treatment at a nearby wildlife center for second-degree burns.

Unfortunately she didn’t last long. Veterinarians soon discovered she was also suffering from severe cysts caused by inoperable chlamydia, one of a few diseases plaguing wild koalas. With no other options, Sam was euthanized that August.

Today her remains reside at the Melbourne Museum, where she serves as a symbol of not only the bushfires but the multitude of threats facing Australia’s wild koalas.

Those threats have taken a terrible toll on koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), which once numbered in the millions. This May the nonprofit Australian Koala Foundation announced that the marsupials’ wild populations have fallen below 80,000 individuals and the species may now be “functionally extinct.”

In this case “functionally extinct” means that populations have been reduced so drastically that the animals no longer play a significant role in the ecosystem.

The news made headlines, but other biologists countered that while koalas have declined tremendously, the Australian endemics have not yet reached functional extinction. Regardless, koalas are indeed facing a whammy of threats in the country, and without serious and timely intervention it might not be long before the marsupial goes the way of another famous Australian animal, the extinct Tasmanian tiger.

But even as the koala’s decline continues, many people are stepping up to help — and what they’re learning may help the species survive the newest threat from climate change.

A History of Decline, an Uncertain Future

The koala was once ubiquitous in eastern Australia, ranging from tall eucalyptus forests to low woodlands and coastal islands.

Even today “they cover a huge geographic range,” says Christine Hosking, a koala biologist at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute. Indeed koalas can still be found in all four of the country’s six eastern states, although their remaining habitats have shrunk and become fragmented from each other, and many sites hold increasingly few animals.

“Population sizes vary from place to place,” Hosking says. “That’s why you can’t come up with a statement saying they’re all functionally extinct. However, some pockets aren’t doing so well.”

The decline was a long time coming. The fur trade was the first to decimate the koala population. Between 1890 and 1927, more than 8 million pelts were exported to England, according to research compiled by the Australian Koala Foundation.

Habitat loss followed. Eucalyptus groves were bulldozed for suburbs. People moved in. If the koalas weren’t killed by cars when crossing roads, they’d be found dangling in the jaws of pet dogs.

injured koala — A koala injured by powerlines. Photo: Ausgrid (CC BY 2.0)

Then came chlamydia, thought to have crossed over to koalas from imported sheep and cattle. The marsupials are keenly susceptible to the sexually transmitted disease, especially when stressed by other factors. In some areas more than 50 percent of koalas exhibit symptoms, which can often prove fatal in its late stages. Climate change and heat stress, therefore, are only the latest in a series of unfortunate events for the vulnerable koala.

Hosking conducts scientific models to understand how climate change has and will affect the koala’s range. She’s found that koalas, already facing reduced and fragmented habitats, will likely now move eastward to the coast, which has a more moderate climate compared to the inland areas increasingly experiencing extreme heat and drought.

“The farther you go inland, there’s already evidence of koala populations crashing by as much as 80 percent,” she explains.

Koalas, it turns out, can’t handle the heat. “We did some modeling on the thermoregulation of koalas and found that over 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) seems to be about their threshold.” As the climate changes, Australia frequently experiences 10 days in a row of 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). “They’re not coping with that at all. There’s heat stress, lack of water, and their food trees are drying out,” says Hosking.

But moving east also means moving into more urbanized areas. That’s why scientists are hoping to mitigate this migration, using new tools to save the species.

Drink Up

Koalas get most of their moisture from eating juicy eucalyptus leaves, but they’re limited by how much they can eat.

“Not only are these leaves not particularly nutritious, they’re full of toxins,” explains Valentina Mella, a researcher at the University of Sydney. Koalas have developed a specialized intestinal tract to deal with the toxins, but, they have to wait until they’ve digested the toxins before eating more. “If you’re thirsty and there’s no water, it’s not as simple as, ‘I’ll just have another bunch of leaves.’ ”

Can human assistance help koalas get past that biological limitation? In 2016 Mella and her team placed 10 pairs of drinking stations across the Liverpool Plains in New South Wales, an area where koalas hadn’t been doing well. They wanted to see if the marsupials would supplement their all-leaf-diet with water found in tanks on the ground and in trees. To her surprise, when presented with the opportunity, the koalas were enthusiastic drinkers. Mella documented more than 600 visits by koalas during the course of a year. Other species such as sugar gliders, brushtail possums, kangaroos and echidnas also took advantage of the tanks. During hot and dry periods, the koalas chugged down even more.

koala drinking station — Photo: University of Sydney

This gives Mella hope that conservationists might be able to help the species by maintaining water stations in the wild for koalas — something that’s already done in rangeland for domestic cattle. Based on this research, the New South Wales government has already adopted water stations as a strategy to assist koalas during heatwaves and droughts.

Mella with koala — Dr. Valentina Mella with a koala joey during research fieldwork Gunnedah, NSW. Photo: University of Sydney

The next step, Mella says, will be to assess exactly how the water stations affect the overall health and survival of koalas.

“On the properties where we have these stations, we check on the ‘regular drinkers’ every six months. So far, they seem to be okay,” she says. But that’s just in terms of heat and dehydration. “When you add in the disease situation, then it’s a whole different story. Water is not a medicine. It can’t cure. But it probably helps in terms of making the animal more healthy to fight the infection.”

Medicine for Marsupials

To help koalas battling disease, dog bites, and automobile collisions, koala hospitals still play an essential role.

At the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital in New South Wales, about 200 koalas pass through the facility every year. That’s down from around 300 in previous years. “There are just fewer koalas now,” says Cheyne Flanagan, clinical director at the hospital.

Of the koalas that come in with chlamydia, about 40 percent are euthanized due to severe damage to their urogenital tracts. The other 60 percent can be treated with antibiotics or surgery. In addition to affecting internal organs, chlamydia also affects koalas’ eyes, causing infections or an overgrowth of tissue.

koala recovering — Recovering in a koala hospital. Photo: Tobias Spaltenberger (CC BY-SA 2.0)

“We’ve made progress,” says Flanagan. “It’s definitely better than it used to be because a lot of research is going on. We’ve learned what drugs are knocking chlamydia down. You can never cure chlamydia… but you can put it in remission and sometimes, if the koalas are healthy enough, their own immune system kicks in and keeps it under control.”

Antibiotic treatment has been problematic in the past because it often kills the gut microbes that allow koalas to eat eucalyptus leaves. But scientists have recently discovered one particular protective microbe that, if kept alive, allows the koala to survive the course of antibiotics. Researchers are also working on alternative treatments, such as fecal transplants, probiotics and a chlamydia vaccine.

Yet pressure on state and federal government from the international community, Flanagan says, is still critical. “Some of the laws for biodiversity in this country are disgusting.”

Australia’s Federal Failure, a Local Opportunity

Before the federal election in May, koala conservationists had hoped to turn the tide after decades of apparent governmental neglect.

In its press release ahead of the vote, the Australian Koala Foundation wrote that it had spent 31 years working with “13 environment ministers, many of which could be described as the ‘Who’s Who’ of the political elite and nothing has happened except dead koalas in the wild… No one has written anything to protect the koala in the last six years of government.” A national recovery plan, mandated by law, has never been established. Notably, Australia’s Department of Environment and Energy web page for koalas still says, as of this writing, that the planned publication date of a recovery plan for the species “is expected to be late 2014.”

Further federal progress seems unlikely. On May 18 Australian citizens re-elected the Liberal-National Coalition, notorious for its refusal to sharply reduce carbon emissions and coal. Opposing parties had made far bolder promises on addressing climate change.

Though the federal election was a disappointment to most environmentalists, Hosking notes it’s now up to local and state governments to play the bigger roles in koala conservation.

“There’s a lot of lobbying going on with local government,” she says. “And we’re trying to engage more with state-level governments right now to come up with strategies to protect the koalas. It’s a matter of keeping populations viable, allowing them to move safely and stay healthy. It’s really difficult. It’s gloomy. But it’s certainly not over.”

Plastic, Insects, Salmon and Climate Change: The 13 Best Environmental Books of July

New books this month also examine environmental racism, wildlife coexistence and the history lessons of acid rain.

Summer is officially upon us, which means it’s time to pick the season’s best beach reads. And there’s no rule that says beach reads have to be frothy and lightweight. Why not choose compelling and informative instead? We’ve picked the best new environmentally themed books coming out this July, with titles covering everything from insects and salmon to climate change and plastic pollution. There are even a few eco-poetry collections for those of you who’d like a little art with your inspiration.

Our full list — an amazing 13 titles — appears below. Links are to publishers’ websites, but you can also buy many of these titles at your favorite bookstore. We hope you find one near a beach.

Wildlife & Conservation:

Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson — An ecologist provides an entertaining look at “the little creatures that make the world go round,” something that’s severely needed in this era of worryingly dangerous insect declines.

Stronghold: One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon by Tucker Malarkey — The true and inspirational story of Guido Rahr, who fought everyone from fossil fuel developers to Russian oligarchs to help save Pacific salmon from extinction.

Humans and Lions: Conflict, Conservation and Coexistence by Keith Somerville — Cecil the lion wasn’t an isolated occurrence. Humans and lions have been living together (and clashing) for millennia, and the existence of these two species will forever be intertwined — unless lions get crowded off the planet. Somerville looks at history and the state of Africa today to explore how they can be saved from extinction.

In Oceans Deep: Courage, Innovation and Adventure Beneath the Waves by Bill Streever — A vivid portrait of the pioneering explorers and scientists who broadened our understanding of the oceans’ depths. Along the way, the book also shows how humans threaten these remote and important parts of the world.

Pollution:

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind by Harriet A. Washington — This book will open your eyes, make you angry, and then point you toward solutions for ending the plague of pollution-related health problems in marginalized communities of color.

Poisonous Skies: Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution by Rachel Emma Rothschild — You know, it almost feels quaint to be talking about acid rain these days, but sometimes you need to pay attention to history in order to better understand the present. Rothschild looks at the history of acid rain to explore what happened, how countries fought about it, how scientists led the charge against it, and how all of that offers lessons for the modern world of climate change. Essential reading, and not quaint at all.

How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time by Will McCallum — Do you know how to capture the microfiber plastic particles your clothes shed in the washing machine and stop them from ending up in the ocean? If not, this book offers info on how to do just that — and plenty of other tips for leading a plastic-free life.

Every Breath You Take: A User’s Guide to the Atmosphere by Mark Broomfield — Why read a romance or thriller that will leave you breathless when you could learn more about what you’re actually breathing? And how to improve air quality?

Purrmaids: Quest for Clean Water by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen — An ecological fable about cleaning up the ocean, for the kids in the audience. (But seriously, someone explain that mermaid cat to me.)

Public Lands:

This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West by Christopher Ketcham — A full-force, book-length investigation of the forces destroying protections for public lands and wildlife, not just in the West but throughout the entire country. Illuminating and disturbing.

Eco-Culture:

My Ancestors Are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction by Ron Riekki — This collection of nonfiction, fiction and poetry explores the American landscape and disappearing wildlife from a nomadic Saami-American perspective.

One Less River by Terry Blackhawk — A poetry collection about the Detroit River and its surroundings, written by an award-winning educator and activist.

Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-poetry from China and the U.S. edited by Frank Stewart — Nearly 100 poets turn their pens toward looking for answers to the environmental destruction committed by their home countries: the planet’s two most carbon-heavy nations.

That’s our list for this month, but if you need more, check out dozens of other recent eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.

Killing as a Government Service

The USDA’s Wildlife Services program slaughters millions of wild animals every year — including endangered species. It doesn’t have to.

The U.S. government has the blood of many millions of wild creatures on its hands.

Every year a little-known program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, known as Wildlife Services, kills an astonishing number of animals. Last year it slaughtered 1.5 million native wild creatures and 1.1 million invasive animals — everything from armadillos to hawks to wolves. This follows 2.3 million animals killed in 2017, 2.7 million in 2016, and tens of millions more in the years prior.

Why is the federal government in the animal-killing business? These deaths illustrate a longstanding choice to provide a protective stance for agriculture and aquaculture at the expense of wild creatures.

In the process Wildlife Services agents kill animals from hundreds of ecologically important native species, using a variety of cruel methods, including poisoning, shooting with firearms and bolt guns, snapping necks, lethally trapping with neck snares and leg-hold traps, and euthanizing with drugs.

Firearms are one of Wildlife Services’ favorite execution tools. In 2018 the program shot about 291,500 wild animals using a mix of shotguns, rifles and handguns. And the program is open, and perhaps even proud, about its prodigious use of weaponry. “Each year, Wildlife Services employees fire tens of thousands of rounds while conducting wildlife damage management activities,” the program stated in an internal firearms Safety Review document in 2008. “Other than the military, this is more than any other state or federal organization, including law enforcement agencies.”

A few years ago I met a Wildlife Services officer in the Midwest who bragged about the size of the feral hogs he’d recently shot. “They were big!” he exclaimed, showing me smartphone photos depicting him along with a series of large, dead pigs. Feral hogs really do damage crops, and can injure livestock and native wildlife. But there’s a difference between killing an invasive species to prevent it from damaging an ecosystem and turning that animal’s death into a glorified first-person shooter.

The U.S. government considers any animal that preys on livestock or destroys crops a nuisance that needs “controlling.” This includes native species, particularly predators, like bears, cougars, coyotes and foxes, as well as crop- and fish-eating birds — despite the fact science shows that killing predators contributes to an increase in livestock deaths.

The USDA created what would become the present-day Wildlife Services in 1885. It began as a wildlife research unit but would eventually develop into a task force to kill or disperse wild creatures in order to aid agriculture, and it’s kept up on doing just that ever since. Last year Wildlife Services slaughtered 515,935 red-winged blackbirds because they like to snack on farmers’ grain crops; 10,203 cormorants because they hover around fish farms; as well as 68,292 coyotes, 361 black bears and 384 cougars because they sometimes attack livestock.

Understanding the plight of America’s native species — particularly wolves — allows us to better grasp the U.S. government’s priorities. Last year Wildlife Services killed 357 gray wolves for killing (or being suspected of killing) ranchers’ livestock, and to boost elk numbers for hunting. Today gray wolves occupy less than 20 percent of their historic range across two-thirds of the lower 48 U.S. states. Meanwhile pastureland, especially occupied by cattle, and cropland used to grow their food take up more than 41 percent of all land in the lower 48. The federal government is now deciding whether or not gray wolves need continued endangered species status in the lower 48, despite contradictory efforts of both recovering and exterminating wolves since they were put on the endangered species list in 1978.

That’s bad enough, but to truly understand the effect of these wildlife-killing policies, it’s important to look at another predator, one they nearly drove into extinction: the gray wolf’s southern cousin, the critically endangered Mexican gray wolf.

In June 2016 I hiked with a guide across two significant parts of Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico: Black Canyon, where a severely overgrazed landscape was recovering two decades after prohibiting cattle from entering; and Rainy Mesa, where wolves from the Prieto Pack have been targeted for removal after a string of cattle kills.

My companion, whose identify I cannot reveal, had tipped me off about how the government was failing to replenish the population of the Mexican gray wolf, which once roamed the Southwest by the thousands but was killed off in the wild during the Twentieth Century by disgruntled ranchers and well-armed government officials, who engaged in an eradication campaign at the request of the livestock industry. By the 1940s, the subspecies had been wiped out in the United States, and only a few remained across the border in Mexico. In 1976 the wolves were added to the endangered species list and soon after the last seven remaining animals were brought into captivity in a last-ditch attempt to save them.

The government started reintroducing healthy captive-bred individuals to the wild in 1998, but my guide claimed the effort had been slowed due to western states’ political disagreements over releasing more wolves near livestock grazing on some of the most remote and least developed lands in the lower 48. It was hampered further, he said, by continued illegal wolf killings — which rarely end up with any convictions — and also at the hands of officials, who have historically resorted to killing predators when livestock owners complain about them.

Mexcian gray wolf — A critically endangered Mexican gray wolf. Photo: Larry Lamsa (CC BY 2.0)

The effects of that government-sponsored predator killing were evident wherever we walked in Gila. Over the course of our two day-long hikes crossing wide-open forest, we didn’t find a single one of the 114-or-so Mexican gray wolves living on U.S. soil at that time. Nor were there signs of the other predator species that live in the area, including bears, bobcats, cougars and coyotes. Instead, we came across dozens and dozens of free-grazing ear-tagged domestic cows and steers, owned by ranchers who had been granted rights to let their animals feed in the Gila.

Gila is not alone, but it’s typical. The U.S. government, driven by profits from grazing permits and beef exports, prioritizes cattle ranchers over preserving endangered wolves across this part of the American West. The result is a landscape transformed by overgrazing of cattle and a severe depletion of a whole mix of important predators. Instead of pure wilderness, I noticed a serious loss of large trees and high grasses, parched soils packed down by hooves, trampled, dewatered streams, and a seriously diminished level of biodiversity. At times, it felt like we were on a farm, not a national forest.

The story of the Mexican gray wolf is even more complex than its more northerly cousin. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began releasing captive-bred Mexican gray wolves in Arizona and New Mexico in 1998 after years of planning on how best to reintroduce the species to parts of its original range. USDA Wildlife Services also participated in the recovery effort by trapping, relocating and radio-collaring individual wolves.

But it seems that Wildlife Services’ involvement is grounded in serving livestock interests — not the recovery of a wolf species the government’s earlier actions helped push to extinction. Since the reintroduction program began in 1998, Wildlife Services officials have been given orders by Fish and Wildlife to shoot 13 of these endangered wolves, while FWS shot another wolf directly, and a Wildlife Services official killed another without authorization after mistaking the wolf for a coyote. The most recent of which was gunned down in 2017, after the government found cattle that appeared to have been attacked by four-legged predators —although some investigations have shown Mexican gray wolves don’t always attack, and in fact often appear to scavenge on cattle that die from other causes.

This March federal trappers captured two wolves thought to be behind attacks on a dozen cattle grazing in Gila National Forest — the wolves’ natural habitat — during the winter months. They currently wait in captivity, as their fate, and that of a third wolf suspected of killing cattle, is decided by Fish and Wildlife and Wildlife Services officials. Killing the wolves is not off the table.

How can the Mexican gray wolf ever recover if the U.S. government agencies tasked with ensuring its survival continue to gun it down to protect the interests of livestock operators?

This government-driven loss of biodiversity, and its consequent destruction of the environment, occurs far beyond the Gila. In fact it happens all across the country, every day.

It shouldn’t be this way.

Healthy ecosystems depend on a rich mixture of native species, including predators. The U.S. government’s priorities evidently do not lie in long-term preservation of the planet and the species it supports — like humans.

Instead the government does all it can to safeguard the profitability of an economic industry that produces profits for itself and big companies, at the expense of all other life. The nation raises the world’s most cattle, and records show the country exported 1.35 million metric tons of processed beef at a profit of $8.3 billion last year. This despite the urgent advice of scientists for people to stop consuming so much animal protein in order to keep our home, planet Earth, livable for humans for as long as possible.

“The agricultural human’s pull historically has been toward the monoculture of annuals,” Wes Jackson, cofounder of agriculture research organization Land Institute, writes in his book New Roots for Agriculture. “Nature’s pull is toward a polyculture of perennials.”

Efforts to reforest agricultural land and small-scale polyculture farming to help agriculture better mirror the natural state of the planet are cropping up across parts of Europe. More natural agriculture operations are not only kinder to wildlife but are driven by a scientific understanding that smaller-scale, more natural agriculture are more sustainable and slow humanity’s drive of wild species toward extinction.

That’s not evident very often in this country. At one point on Rainy Mesa, my companion pulled me behind a scrubby bush and sharply whispered, “Get down!” as we approached the outskirts of a private ranch abutting the public forest. The loud rumble of a single-engine plane suddenly exploded overhead. I snuck a glance toward the sky and saw a yellow plane, a Wildlife Services plane, patrolling the ranch’s border, probably for coyotes — which they shoot from the sky by the thousands each year in New Mexico. As I lay belly-down on the dusty, dry earth waiting for the plane to fly off, a friendly cow approached and flicked her floppy black ears at me.

I found nary a trace of a wolf, nor a bear, nor a bobcat, nor a cougar, nor a coyote. What were plentiful were cattle, roaming a section of highly degraded landscape that had lost the wildness and vitality for which the Gila is known. Before long, when these cows and steers would reach maturity, they’d be brought to slaughter, calves put in their place. And that process would repeat itself over and over again.

Wildlife Services also runs the National Wildlife Research Center, which it touts as an effort to use the best available science to help humans and nonhumans coexist, and to boost biodiversity. However the program does not follow the advice of independent scientists who have made it clear that nonlethal means of predator deterrence are much more effective in preventing livestock deaths than are lethal means of predator control. Instead of sticking with the best scientific advice, like it says it does, Wildlife Services continues to practice cruel, centuries-past wildlife eradication techniques, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. It’s long past time for USDA’s most notorious program to update its practices to step into line with modern science.

Who’s the nuisance to whom? In killing off ecologically important nonhuman animals, Wildlife Services contributes significantly to an extreme loss of biodiversity, wildlife cruelty, and ultimately, Big Ag’s takeover of wild places across the nation. The program’s practices, goals and existence are extremely problematic, especially in a world where we face rapidly diminishing biodiversity. Ethically and ecologically, the U.S. government — and all of us — must rethink our relationship to wild beings and wild places, or we risk accelerating the loss of our nonhuman kin.

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.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Big Picture: Cyanide Killers

A Gray Whale Washed Ashore in Alaska May Hold Clues to This Year’s Deadly Migration

Many of the gray whales found dead this year have suffered from malnutrition. Researchers are rushing to find the cause.

Most years the annual gray whale migration along North America’s West Coast is a sure sign of spring. But this year something has gone wrong. Since January at least 167 dead whales have washed ashore from Mexico to Alaska. Scientists expect more in the weeks ahead.

One of the dead whales came to rest at the mouth of a river near my home. This was in May, in south-central Alaska. On a sunny evening my wife and I and our four-year-old daughter went out to see it.

A dead whale has a powerful stink to it, so we approached from the massive animal’s upwind side. It lay on its side in the sun, eyes closed and flukes resting flat on the silty beach. With ravens squawking from nearby cottonwoods and a bald eagle looking on from a riverside snag, we showed our daughter its blowhole, flippers, and the feathery baleen visible along the edges of its open mouth.

With the whale visible from a busy nearby road, a mix of residents and tourists came and went during our hour-long visit. Most stayed just long enough to snap a few photos. But others lingered to peer at the animal’s features or the square incisions biologists had made during their necropsy.

Scenes like this have unfolded up and down the West Coast in recent months. From Baja, Mexico, to Puget Sound to the remote shores of British Columbia, curious humans have strolled out to the continent’s edge to marvel at dead whales. Many brought their children. Some left behind flowers. And nearly everyone asked the same question my young daughter asked: “Why did the whale die?”

Why, indeed? We weren’t the only ones asking. Just a week earlier, the sudden spike led federal scientists to declare an “unusual mortality event,” triggering a special investigation.

gray whale breaching — Steven Swartz/NOAA

Teasing out a common cause amidst all of these widely dispersed deaths can be daunting. Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) have one of the longest migrations of any mammal, spanning 5,000 miles between Mexico’s Baja Peninsula and northern Alaska. This year’s dead whales have been found along nearly the whole length of their migratory route. At least 37 washed ashore in California, including twelve in San Francisco Bay. Thirty have been found in Washington. During the week of June 17 three whales discovered in Alaska brought that state’s total to ten.

Scientists say the whales on shore represent only a small portion of those that have died.

“It’s a rough calculation, but only about 10 percent of the mortalities are documented,” says John Calambokidis, a research biologist with the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington. The remaining 90 percent, he says, either “sink, float out to sea, or otherwise go undocumented.” That means the death toll so far this year could actually be more than 1,000 individuals.

And we’re probably not done yet. Scientists expect more whales will wash ashore in the coming weeks as they continue north toward the Arctic, where they normally spend summers feasting in the rich waters of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Seeking Answers

Dave Weller, a research wildlife biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in La Jolla, California, says the investigation begins with examining as many of the dead whales as possible before they begin decomposing.

“If we can access a dead whale in time, we can look for evidence of disease, viruses, malnutrition, or human causes such as collisions with ships,” he says.

Scientists along the West Coast have been busy performing necropsies on the dead whales, as described in a recent video from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. They measure the body, identify the sex, and take samples of the organs, blubber and feces. Each sample is a puzzle piece, helping assemble a picture of what’s occurring along the migration route.

Weller says many of the whales show signs of malnourishment. Examinations of a female gray whale found north of Seattle in early May revealed that she had starved to death. Another dead whale in Washington had eel grass in its stomach, evidence of “desperation eating,” according to one observer.

gray whale and calf — Gray whale and calf. Steven Swartz/NOAA

So far no results have been released for the gray whale I visited near my home in Alaska.

It’s not just the dead. Observers have also reported many “extremely malnourished” gray whales swimming off the West Coast this year, according to Calambokidis. Some have detoured into inland waters such as Los Angeles Harbor or San Francisco Bay, where several have been struck and killed by vessels.

Malnourishment makes scientists look north for answers. Gray whales do almost all of their feeding in Alaska, primarily by scooping tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called amphipods from muddy sediments on the ocean floor. They then rely on the fat reserves gained in Alaskan waters to survive their southward migration and the winter mating and breeding season in Mexico.

In one theory, malnourished whales may indicate the animals have reached the natural population level for their Arctic food supply. Population surveys show a steady increase in recent decades, with estimates now at 27,000 animals. It’s a successful recovery from the early 20th century, when commercial whaling reduced numbers to less than 2,000. Some researchers speculate that this year’s mortalities simply reflect the population has outpaced its Arctic food supply, leaving some whales without the reserves needed to return to Alaska.

Another theory is that dramatic warming in the Arctic in recent years has affected the gray whales’ food source. Since 2014 sustained heating in the Bering Sea has triggered an unprecedented loss of sea ice, which may have decreased the productivity of amphipods.

It’s also possible the two theories could be working in concert with each other. When a population reaches its carrying capacity, Calambokidis explains, it can become more vulnerable to environmental fluctuations such as the sudden loss of Bering Sea ice.

If rapidly changing Arctic conditions do play a role, this year’s gray whale deaths will join a growing list of wildlife mortality events connected to warming in the north. They include a massive collapse of West Coast sea star populations, a dramatic decrease in Alaskan cod harvests, and the starvation of thousands of puffins and murres in Alaska, all related to an extreme marine heat wave that began in 2013 in the northern Gulf of Alaska and lasted more than two years. Federal scientists also suspect warming contributed to unusually high mortality among fin and humpback whales in northern waters between 2015 and 2016.

Adding to questions about food web conditions in the Arctic, scores of dead ice seals have washed ashore in recent weeks in northern and western Alaska. Federal scientists have not identified a cause, but a NOAA spokesperson said reports indicate possible malnourishment or abnormal molting among some of the seals.

bearded seal — Bearded seal. Photo: NOAA News

It’s worth noting that this year’s gray whale deaths are unusual but not unprecedented. In 2000, 131 dead gray whales washed ashore on the U.S. coast during spring migration. Scientists did not conclusively determine the cause, but at least some of the whales were malnourished. Warming from a strong El Niño weather pattern was identified as a possible factor.

While scientists seek answers to the current mass mortality, the gray whale I visited with my family a few weeks ago remains stranded at the mouth of the river. Like the ones found on shores in other states, scientists may let it decompose naturally, a process that could take all summer for this 41-foot-long male.

Before his death this whale likely spent his final months swimming north toward the promise of his Bering Sea feeding grounds. What conditions he would have found there, and how they may affect other arriving whales, for now remains a mystery.

Up in Arms: New Book Explores the Bundys, Militias and the Battle Over Public Lands

Author John Temple takes a deep dive into the world of range wars and ‘patriot’ militia groups in the West, including the infamous Bundy clan.

When armed militants with a grudge against the federal government seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon back in the winter of 2016, I remember avoiding the news coverage. Part of me wanted to know what was happening, but each report I read — as the occupation stretched from days to weeks and the destruction grew — made me so angry it was hard to keep reading.

That’s why I picked up John Temple’s new book Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America’s Patriot Militia Movement.

I wanted to see what I’d missed. And I wanted to understand the extremist ideologies that continue to dominate many discussions in the American West.

Temple, an author and journalism professor at West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media, provides a page-turning account of both the 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, that launched scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and his family into the national spotlight and the 2016 occupation of Malheur, led by Bundy’s sons Ammon and Ryan.

“It’s obviously an exciting story with cowboys and guns and takeovers and standoffs,” Temple tells me about the book. “But it sheds light on public lands issues, environmental issues, on questions about how the government should handle these situations and the urban-rural divide in this country.”

The book also delves into the history of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a western U.S. movement against federal ownership of public lands that ignited in the late 1970s and has continued to smolder in the decades since.

The Bundys, who still subscribe to this line of thinking, refused to recognize the Bureau of Land Management’s authority over the public land where they graze their cattle (or the federal government in general). That ultimately led — after 20 years of federal agencies looking the other way — to an armed standoff in which the FBI attempted to seize the rancher’s cattle after years of unpaid grazing fees and mounting fines.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t end well for the government.

Temple then chronicles the play’s second act, during which the Bundy sons engineered the takeover of the federally run Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for more than a month. The pretense was defending local Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were sentenced to jail for federal land arson, but who actually eschewed the Bundys’ help. The occupation turned out to be more of a publicity stunt than anything — one that ended in spectacular failure (although the Bundys insist it was a success). In the process they also trashed the refuge headquarters and racked up a $9 million tab for taxpayers.

While Up in Arms gives a detailed view of the ideology that motivates the Bundys, the story is much bigger than them. It’s also an exploration of the motivations of some of the most hardline anti-federal militants in the country — not just the Bundys, but the ragbag collection of so-called Patriot movement followers that flocked to their ranch, even when most of them lacked understanding of public-lands issues and the cause they were backing.

In fact, Temple says, he first came to the story of the Bundys researching an unrelated project about militias. As a result there’s not much in the book about the underlying environmental issues at the heart of the Bundy actions, including the impact of renegade ranching on public lands.

But Temple writes about the personal histories of many of the supporters who turned up for the initial showdown in Bunkerville and others who joined the occupation at Malheur. He reveals the power dynamics among different Patriot militia groups as they jockeyed for media attention and acolytes.

While the Bundys honed their talking points in scores of interviews about their anti-government rhetoric and their calling from God to act on it, Temple says that most of the other Bundy supporters didn’t have much political inspiration or well-formed ideologies.

“I think some of these folks were motivated on a very personal level where they have trouble with authority and that kind of thing,” he says. “Every individual seemed to have a different set of grievances or issues that were driving them, but it coalesced around a few things: Distrust of the federal government and the feeling that the federal government was overreaching in its authority, and the Second Amendment.”

What could go wrong?

As Temple writes, a lot went wrong on both sides of the confrontation between the government and the militias. This was on full view when the Bundys and their compatriots eventually faced their day in court.

If you’ve ever wondered, as I did, how the leaders of an armed insurrection that occupied federal property, degraded public lands, and terrorized government workers escaped punishment, it’s explained here in great detail. Temple writes about not just the court proceedings that followed the standoffs but the main players on the federal government’s team, including FBI leadership involved in Bunkerville. A series of bumbles and missteps ultimately led to the prosecution’s ultimate failure.

There’s no happy ending, unless you believe divine providence is shining down on the Bundy clan. But Temple’s book paints a useful picture of the simmering, ongoing range war in the West and the havoc an unlikely alliance of right-wing groups can wreak when they converge.

That’s the most sobering part of the book: It’s likely a preview of things to come.

Cigarette Waste: New Solutions for the World’s Most-littered Trash

A range of new tactics aim to curb cigarette butt pollution, including groundbreaking legislation that could hold tobacco companies accountable for their products’ waste.

By now it’s no secret that plastic waste in our oceans is a global epidemic. When some of it washes ashore — plastic bottles, plastic bags, food wrappers — we get a stark reminder. And lately one part of this problem has been most glaring to volunteers who comb beaches picking up trash: cigarette butts.

Last year the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy reported that cigarette butts, which contain plastic and toxic chemicals, were the most-littered item at their global beach cleanups.

Trillions of butts are tossed each year. So what’s being done about it?

Cigarette butts collected at a beach clean up. (Photo by Surfrider Foundation)

Environmental advocacy groups have spurred increased public education about the environmental impacts and pushed for the installation of more bins to safely dispose of butts. Some cities have put restrictions on where people can smoke or instituted additional fees on cigarettes to fund clean-up costs. Butt pollution continues.

Now legislators are trying a different approach — producer responsibility. New legislation in several states, including a bill in California to ban products with single-use filters, could force cigarette manufacturers to take responsibility for the environmental impacts of their products.

Information and Infrastructure

It’s not news to California volunteers at Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit helping to protect oceans and beaches, that cigarette butts are the most-littered item in the world. They knew two decades ago, when the organization’s San Diego chapter started a Hold Onto Your Butt campaign to educate the public about cigarette butt pollution after finding scores on local beaches.

The campaign, which has since spread to other localities on the East and West coasts, has created PSAs, posters and videos to educate people about the environmental impacts of cigarette-butt litter. The biggest problem is the filters, most of which are made of cellulose acetate, a kind of plastic. That means the filters don’t readily biodegrade, although they do break down — and send thousands of tiny plastic fibers into the environment, waterways and wildlife. Along with the fibers come chemicals like arsenic, benzene and lead.

“They can trap toxins and pass that onto the aquatic environment,” says Bill Hickman, the Southern California regional manager for Surfrider. Studies have shown that these chemicals can be toxic to fish.

Along with public education, Surfrider’s campaign has also helped cities install hundreds of new receptacles in high-volume areas like outside bars or near beach walkways, to make safely disposing of butts easier.

cigarette butt can — Surfrider volunteers have helped install hundreds of bins to keep cigarette butts off city streets. (Photo by Surfrider Foundation)

Surfrider’s San Francisco chapter, for example, has installed 100 cans in select neighborhoods in the city. “In the areas where we’re installing the cans and educating people to use them, we see reductions in cigarette litter of more than 60 percent,” says Shelly Ericksen, a Surfrider volunteer who’s leading the effort in San Francisco. Since indoor smoking bans have pushed smokers outdoors, they need better infrastructure to collect the waste and keep butts off the street, she says.

The campaign sends much of the collected waste to TerraCycle, a company that is able to recycle the butts, turning the plastic into industrial-grade products like plastic pallets. Vancouver, where people litter a million cigarette butts a day, was the first city to pioneer this partnership with TerraCycle, installing 110 cigarette butt recycling bins in its downtown area in 2013.

Mike Roylos, a former café owner from Portland, Maine, has also partnered with the company. In 2013 he launched Sidewalk Buttler to manufacture aluminum containers to collect butts for recycling and track waste collection. His bins are now in 49 states, and he says they’ve kept 1.2 million butts off the streets.

“Cigarette butt litter is the last socially acceptable form of litter and we’re trying to change that mentality,” he says. “It’s all about clean water — cigarette butts that get tossed on the ground will sooner or later make their way to water, whether the chemicals are released when it rains or it ends up down the sewer and washed out into rivers and lakes.”

Collection efforts like these help keep more butts off the streets, but they’re still a long way from stemming the tide.

Some cities in California have tried a different tactic: instituting smoking bans at beaches and parks. Assembly Bill 1718, introduced in the California Assembly and now in the state’s Senate, would make that a statewide law.

Beverly Hills took things a step farther in June, passing the most restrictive tobacco law in the country, outlawing the sale of cigarettes, chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes in gas stations and convenience stores.

But it may not be enough to make a difference if it can’t be enforced.

Hickman lives in Ventura, one of the cities that’s already enacted a ban at beaches and parks, and he says the rule is rarely enforced and discarded butts still abound.

Despite local bans and clean-up efforts, Hickman says, “We’re still finding huge amounts of cigarette butts.”

That’s why Surfrider is backing another piece of California legislation — one that tackles producer responsibility. California’s S.B. 424 would ban any tobacco products with single-use filters and require that manufacturers of products like vaporizers and e-cigarettes ensure that they can be recycled or properly disposed of through take-back programs. Hickman says the bill would be “monumental in the fight against cigarette butt pollution.”

It would be the most sweeping statewide restriction on tobacco in the United States and effectively ban cigarettes as they are currently made and packaged now, since virtually all have filters — which don’t provide the benefits most smokers think they do.

Smoke Screen

The tobacco industry has pushed filters as a health improvement in cigarettes, but studies are finding the opposite.

“Evidence suggests that ventilated filters may have contributed to higher risks of lung cancer by enabling smokers to inhale more vigorously, thereby drawing carcinogens contained in cigarette smoke more deeply into lung tissue,” according to a report from the office of the Surgeon General issued in 2014.

Today virtually all factory-made cigarettes sold contain filters. The industry started using them — and advertising their supposed benefits — in the 1950s after published studies began to reveal the health threats from tobacco. “The advertised benefits of filters were illusory, however, given that smokers of filtered brands often inhaled as much or more tar, nicotine, and noxious gases as smokers of unfiltered cigarettes,” a 2015 study found. “Filters were not really even filters in any meaningful sense, since there was no such thing as ‘clean smoke.’ The industry had recognized this as early as the 1930s, but smokers were led to believe they were safer.”

A 2017 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute reviewing recent medical literature on the topic concluded that “filter ventilation has contributed to the rise in lung adenocarcinomas among smokers,” one of the most dangerous forms of lung cancer, and therefore, “the FDA should consider regulating its use, up to and including a ban.”

A Tide Change

Legislation like S.B. 424 has been attempted before in California starting in 2014, but never gained enough traction to even clear the first committee.

Heidi Sanborn, senior advisor with the California Product Stewardship Council, thinks this year’s legislation has a better shot. The bill, which her organization is supporting, has already passed the policy and appropriations committees in the Senate before clearing the floor vote. It’s now in the Assembly where it will go before the health and governmental organization committees.

The deep pockets of the tobacco industry are a formidable foe, though, and are what stymied earlier efforts, she says.

But she believes growing public concern about pollution could boost the legislation’s chances.

“Whales are barfing up plastic bags and dying all over the beaches and everyone is realizing we have a huge plastic problem and cigarettes are a big part of it,” she says. “Most people hate all the cigarette waste — even the smokers — and I think the public needs to provide good cover for the legislators to take a hard vote and know that tobacco is going to pull out every stop and hire every lobbyist they can to stop the bill.”

There’s also another sea change that could help the bill’s chances — the growing list of studies documenting negative health outcomes from filters in cigarettes.

That’s why another change in the tides is occurring, with efforts making the push to hold someone other than smokers themselves accountable.

“While we’re working hard on campaigns to install more receptacles and institute a lot of messaging targeted at smokers that will help to bring about behavior changes, we also realized that it’s really the fault of the cigarette manufacturers for putting a plastic filter onto the cigarette that is being littered everywhere,” says Ericksen. “At the end of the day, even though our efforts are great to raise awareness and are helping to curb the problem in some of our coastal areas, it’s really going to come down to policy, legislation and extended producer responsibility.”

Producer Responsibility

As nonprofit organizations concerned with plastic pollution band together across the globe, a concerted strategy is emerging. No amount of consumer behavioral changes or improved recycling programs can deal with the sheer volume of low-value plastics, like single-use products such as straws and bags, without the producers changing their products to create less waste.

The European Union recently passed a “circular economy” law that includes extended producer responsibility language, which shifts the responsibility for the environmental costs of a product back on the producer and encourages manufacturers think about the full lifecycle of a product.

California is hoping to pass a similar law.

This concept of producer responsibility, or product stewardship, is also at the heart of S.B. 424.

“There’s not much we can do when they’ve designed a product that contains plastic and is meant to be burned,” says Sanborn. “It’s a horrible design. It needs to change and the people who should pay to change it are the people who make them. Not the rest of us.”

Local governments and the environment have already been paying the externalized costs, she says. “We’re done — it’s time for them to pick it up and start paying the bill.”

San Francisco has calculated that more than half the litter cleaned up from its streets is from tobacco products, including butts and packaging. The city now charges a 60 cent fee on packs of cigarettes to cover clean-up costs and was the first in the city, back in 2009, to assess a cigarette litter abatement fee.

Other localities have tried different approaches, but with little success yet.

Maine considered legislation in 2001 for a deposit and refund program, where cigarettes packs had a $1 fee and a five-cent refund was given for butts returned to redemption centers. The legislation didn’t pass. New York tried to pass something similar in 2010 and 2013.

Pennsylvania may take up the issue this summer. State Representative Chris Rabb is hoping to introduce a cigarette filter upcycling bill, which would add 20 cents to a pack of cigarettes to fund collection centers and find safe ways to reuse the waste.

TerraCycle butt recycling — TerraCycle turns cigarette butts into industrial plastic items. (Image by TerraCycle)

Legislators in Maine are also closely watching what happens with S.B. 424 in California this summer. A similar piece of legislation to create extender producer responsibility regulations for tobacco products, L.D. 544, was introduced this year in Maine but it’s being held over until next year’s session starts in January while proponents hope to work with industry groups on crafting a solution.

One of the groups championing the effort is the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “We don’t think that communities, taxpayers and future generations should have to deal with a problem they didn’t create,” says Sarah Lakeman, the project director for the organization’s Sustainable Maine program. “There needs to be more education and outreach, and options to recover the waste created from smoking — and it should be the responsibility of the tobacco industry to provide that.”

Sanborn says she hasn’t seen any other places in the world successfully address the cigarette butt pollution issue. “Unless you’ve changed the package and gotten rid of the plastic filter, I don’t see how you could,” she says. “It’s hard to do though, because they lobby up — it’s going to be a fight.”

Another Reason to Protect Elephants: Frogs Love Their Feet

Well, more specifically their footprints. New research finds that elephants create foot-shaped habitats for breeding frogs as they travel through the forest in Myanmar.

Some of the tiniest creatures in Myanmar benefit from living near the largest species in the area.

Newly published research reveals that frogs are laying their eggs in the rain-filled footprints of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), which then provide a safe home for growing tadpoles. The footprints eventually fade away, but they last for a year or more on the forest floor and can serve as important habitats during dry seasons and even as “stepping stones” between frog populations.

Talk about having an environmental footprint.

Rain-filled elephant footprints supporting tadpoles and egg masses. Photo: Steven Platt/WCS Myanmar

No adult frogs were observed taking advantage of these foot-shaped puddles, although those eggs obviously came from somewhere.

This represents an important step in understanding the role of Asian elephants as “ecosystem engineers.” African elephants have long been recognized for the way they affect the natural systems around them — a similar study published in 2016 found tadpoles and dozens of insect species living in elephant footprints in Uganda — but Asian elephants have not benefitted from the same level of scientific study.

“There is surprisingly little known about Asian elephants as ecosystem engineers, at least in comparison to African elephants,” says lead research Steven Platt, a herpetologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Myanmar program. “That said, I think our study and several others indicate that Asian elephants play an important role as ecosystem engineers. Not only do elephants modify vegetation — knocking down trees, removing bamboo, dispersing seeds, etc. — but they also affect the ecosystem in ways that might not be readily obvious, such as creating temporary ponds and dung piles used as food and cover by invertebrates and small vertebrates.”

Rain-filled elephant footprints supporting egg masses. Photo: Steven Platt/WCS Myanmar

Platt (no relation) says this underscores the vast interplay between species and illustrates why it’s important to protect entire ecosystems and their full range of biodiversity.

And of course, the study further illustrates the need to protect elephants and the species that live around them, much like the previous study in Uganda. “I surely hope this aspect of interconnectedness has been or will be used as an argument for conservation of elephants,” says the lead author of 2016 study, Wolfram Remmers with the University of Koblenz‐Landau.

Perhaps more importantly, Platt says the study in Myanmar also reveals the need to look for similar relationships in other nations where endangered Asian elephants still roam. No one knows exactly how many Asian elephants remain in the world, but all indications suggest their populations continue to shrink throughout their range. The paper concludes with a call for action: “studies are still urgently needed on the role of E. maximus as ecosystem drivers, especially in light of the rapid decline of these large fauna.”

That decline, obviously, is caused by a creature with a much bigger footprint: humans.

Examining elephant tracks: Photo: Steven Platt/WCS Myanmar

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

Asian Elephants Help Seed the Forest