While the Trump administration continued its anti-environmental policies, the planet experienced its hottest month in recorded history. But are the winds starting to shift?
Well folks, we did it. July 2019 was the hottest month in recorded human history, with record-breaking temperatures in many parts of Europe, wildfires raging over tens of thousands of square miles of Arctic Alaska and Russia, and a staggering ice melt in Greenland that dumped 197 billion gallons of water into the ocean — 12.5 billion tons of which melted over a single day.
Europe’s July 2019 heatwave. European Space Agency (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The administration also appointed William Perry Pendley, a staunch foe of America’s public lands, as acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 250 million acres. The appointment could set the stage for the liquidation of public lands and unfettered fossil-fuel development around the country, further driving greenhouse gas emissions fueling the climate crisis.
Oh yeah, and Trump’s reelection campaign also started selling plastic straws to “own the libs.”
And internationally, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro — often referred to as the “Trump of the South” — fired the head of the agency responsible for tracking deforestation in the Amazon, which has increased sharply under that administration. Again, this will have a devastating effect on the climate, not to mention the wildlife and Indigenous peoples who live in these forests.
All of these threats and regressive actions are terrifying and all too real.
But at the same time, there are growing cracks in the anti-environmental shell game.
The climate denial machine, although still quite active and dangerous, has begun to weaken. The Heartland Institute’s annual climate-denial conference was sparsely attended, full of tired retreads of old arguments, and suffered from a dramatic drop in corporate sponsors. Meanwhile, desperate climate deniers are resorting to mocking 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg’s autism, earning them well-deserved derision.
On the other side of the equation, Extinction Rebellion and other activist groups continued to pick up steam.
Extinction Rebellion protestors in Brisbane on August 6, 2019. Photo: Larissa Waters (Public domain)
And with the 2020 election looming, more Democratic presidential candidates have rolled out climate change platforms, putting themselves in stark contrast to the Denier-in-Chief. Most of the plans so far don’t go nearly far enough, but they exist, and candidates actually talked about climate issues at the last presidential debate, so that’s a start.
These Democratic platforms, or what comes out of these initial discussions, are not just necessary for the planet — they’re also wanted by a wide range of people. Republican political strategists recently warned that the party of denial could lose voters over issues related to climate change. That’s a huge shift.
All of these positive changes and trends add up, although there’s still so much further to go. And of course, the power of the Trump administration and other regressive officials around the world still have us all on track to possibly irreversible devastation, so we’re kind of on a tight deadline here.
But every victory, no matter how small or personal, is a chance to save — and preserve — our planet’s future. Those victories matter. They create momentum. They create change. They may seem too few and too far between in the face of the coming storm, but sometimes it pays to do just what I did in this editorial — list them, add them up, and then see the shape of a more positive future starting to emerge from the flames.
More than 1,500 scientific studies on the health and climate impacts of fracking prove its dangerous effect on communities, wildlife and nature.
In 2010 when I first started writing about hydraulic fracturing — the process of blasting a cocktail of water and chemicals into shale to release trapped hydrocarbons — there were more questions than answers about environmental and public-health threats. That same year Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland, which featured tap water bursting into flames, grabbed the public’s attention. Suddenly the term fracking — little known outside the oil and gas industry — became common parlance.
In the following years I visited with people in frontline communities — those living in the gas patches and oilfields, along pipeline paths and beside compressor stations. Many were already woozy from the fumes or worried their drinking water was making them sick. When people asked me if they should leave their homes, it was hard to know what to say; there weren’t many peer-reviewed studies to understand how fracking was affecting public health.
Those days are over.
In June the nonprofits Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York released the sixth edition of a compendium that summarizes more than 1,700 scientific reports, peer-reviewed studies and investigative journalism reports about the threats to the climate and public health from fracking.
The research has been piling up for years, and the verdict is clear, the authors conclude: Fracking isn’t safe, and heaps of regulations won’t help (not that they’re coming, anyway).
“Across a wide range of parameters, from air and water pollution to radioactivity to social disruption to greenhouse gas emissions, the data continue to reveal a plethora of recurring problems and harms that cannot be sufficiently averted through regulatory frameworks,” write the eight public health professionals, mostly doctors and scientists, who compiled the compendium. “There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health directly and without imperiling climate stability upon which public health depends.”
The research collected and summarized is wide-ranging and includes the harms not just from drilling and fracking, but the long tail of the process, including compressor stations and pipelines, silica sand mining, natural-gas storage, natural-gas power plants, and the manufacturing and transport of liquefied natural gas.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a biologist, author and distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College, is one of the compendium’s co-authors. She helped lead an independent investigation into the scientific research on the health risks from fracking that was a precursor to the current compendium. Those efforts drove public engagement on the issue and eventually led to a ban on fracking in her home state of New York in 2014.
She says this latest collection of research reveals some significant and noteworthy trends.
“There’s really definitive evidence now that methane leaks at every stage of the fracking process” from drilling to storage, she says. And that’s contributing to a surge in methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere.
But methane isn’t just a climate danger. It’s also a contributor to smog, otherwise known as ground-level ozone, which is linked to strokes, heart attacks, asthma and preterm births.
“Methane is a source of air pollution that’s deadly — and that’s become clearer and clearer,” says Steingraber.
Gas being flared at a drilling site in Powder River Basin, Wyo. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
Another area where the science is settled is the earthquakes caused by the injection of fracking wastewater underground, she says.
“We know without a doubt that fracking is linked to earthquakes that occur over longer periods of time and wider geographic area than previously thought,” she says. “That’s because these slippery chemicals that they’ve added to fracking fluid decrease friction while fracking, and they don’t lose that property when re-injected down into the earth with wastewater.”
The compendium also includes a section on two new topics not covered in previous editions — environmental justice and wildlife.
First, studies have shown that fracking infrastructure is disproportionately sited in nonwhite, indigenous or low-income communities. “Whether it’s practiced in urban areas like Los Angeles where fracking infrastructure clearly targets poor nonwhite communities or in rural areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania where it’s targeted at poor whites — those patterns hold up over and over again,” she says.
There’s also mounting evidence about harms to wildlife from various elements of the process, including toxic water, habitat destruction, light and noise pollution. For example, infrastructure like compressor stations caused populations of grassland songbirds in Canada to decline. Water fleas, a key part of the aquatic food web, are imperiled by small amounts of fracking fluid in waterways.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: At more than 350 pages with 1,400 footnotes linking to pertinent research, there’s a lot to uncover in the compendium. Here are a few of the findings:
Oil and gas operations in the arid Permian Basin used eight times more water for fracking in 2018 as they did in 2011, threatening groundwater supplies;
A 2018 analysis of methane leaks from the U.S. oil and gas supply chain as a whole found leakage rates were 60 percent higher than reported by the EPA, and a 2019 study in southwestern Pennsylvania found shale gas emissions that were underreported by a factor of five when compared to EPA estimates;
Researchers working in Texas found 19 different fracking-related contaminants — including cancer-causing benzene — in hundreds of drinking water samples collected from the aquifer overlying the heavily drilled Barnett Shale, thereby documenting widespread water contamination;
More than 200 airborne chemical contaminants have been detected near drilling and fracking sites. Of these 61 are classified as hazardous air pollutants, including carcinogens, and 26 are endocrine-disrupting compounds that have been linked to reproductive, developmental and neurological damage;
Studies of mothers living near oil and gas extraction operations consistently find impairments to infant health, including elevated risks for low birth weight and preterm birth;
In 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, 81 oil and gas extraction workers died on the job, accounting for 72 percent of the fatal work injuries in the mining sector, which overall has a fatality rate nearly four times the national average;
Significant pipeline accidents happen roughly 300 times each year in the United States and, between 1998 and 2017, killed 299 people and injured 1,190 others, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
Over the years the compendium has become a critical resource in the fight against fracking and helped to shed some light on an industry that, thanks to regulatory loopholes, has been allowed to operate in secrecy.
Steingraber says there are more than enough scientific findings to conclude that fracking isn’t safe — indeed, that’s what officials in New York determined five years ago. But the industry has significant political clout that science alone can’t counter.
Residents of Dimock, Penn. in the Marcellus Shale took a stand against fracking. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
“It seems to be required now that science be carried by a powerful social movement,” she says. But she’s seen firsthand how strong those movements can be. When fracking came to her doorstep in New York, she and other health professionals translated the science into plain English and brought it to frontline communities so people would know what they were facing.
“When people are informed by science, and then empowered to have an opinion, they’re moved to take part in the public process,” she says. A surge of tens of thousands of public comments helped move New York to ban fracking, and requests for information about health impacts from fracking from all over the world has led Steingraber and her colleagues to keep updating the compendium year after year.
“This is a completely unfunded project — we’re just doing this in the middle of the night and on weekends,” she says. “But I believe there is value in having a group of independent scientists doing this work.”
An operation to discourage poachers by removing a rhino calf’s horn serves as a stark reminder of the protections that need to stay in place for these imperiled species.
The three-lobed footprints in the dirt road ahead of us are unmistakable: the tracks of a large rhinoceros.
Long have I wanted to see a rhino in the wild, and I’m about to get more than I bargained for. Rather than try to spot rhinos from a vehicle on a safari, I had wanted to get some conservation experience in the field, so I joined a project at a reserve in Greater Kruger National Park that accepts volunteers. It turned out that while I was there the reserve took an extreme step to protect the animals in its care.
We’ve spent all morning in a Land Rover tracking not one but two rhinos — a mother and her calf. Our driver, Leonie, a field technician in the reserve, radios our information after some fresh dung on the side of the road confirms her suspicions about the direction the rhinos are heading. They’re among the last rhinos in the reserve that still need to be dehorned.
Dehorned rhino, photo by Bernard DuPont (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Dehorning is seen as a preemptive strike in the ongoing rhino-poaching crisis, a relatively recent assault that has devastated rhino populations. In 2006 and 2007, just one or two rhinos were poached per month in South Africa, but the situation exploded soon after. Between 2013 and 2017 more than 1,000 rhinos were poached each year, an average of three per day. That number dipped slightly to just over two a day in 2018, but some say that’s because there were fewer rhinos left to kill.
This carnage is fueled by the high black market price of rhino horn — greater by weight than that of gold — and high demand in Vietnam and China. In both countries it’s lauded for its purported medicinal value and used to treat anything from hangovers and fevers to rheumatism and gout, often as a sort of cure-all. Tests show rhino horn — made of keratin, the same protein that comprises human hair and fingernails — has no medicinal value, but awareness campaigns to reduce demand have so far had little effect.
Thanks to Leonie’s information, a plane now circles overhead. When they spot the mother rhino or her calf, they will call in the helicopter team to dart the animal with a sedative. Darting from the air allows the animal to fall forward onto its sternum, reducing risk of injury, and then a ground team has three minutes to remove the horn before health complications arise.
In the distance, we see the helicopter swoop in. When its tail end tilts up, I realize the animal has been darted and we’re too far away to be useful. The other ground teams will take care of the dehorning.
We drive through the bush to the rendezvous place, and we’re only there a few minutes when, down the hill, I finally see my first-ever rhino in the wild. It’s the calf of the now-dehorned mother, trying to escape the loud helicopter overhead. It charges awkwardly out of the bush and across the road before plunging back into its protective cover.
But the calf can’t hide from the eyes above it. The helicopter team quickly darts it and we give chase, driving madly off road, careening between trees and axle-crunching boulders. Three ground teams pull up and we grab chainsaws and vet kits and run to the downed calf. The veterinarians apply a blindfold: The calf now looks like a big baby with a toothache. A chainsaw roars into life and the nub of horn, no more than three inches long, is sawed off. A grinder carves away the stub and applies resin, so that it looks somewhat natural.
But it’s still a rhino without its horn.
The operation complete, one of the veterinarians injects a reversal serum and we dash back to our rovers. Once the calf awakes it will cry for its mother, and we hope the two will quickly find each other.
Back again at the rendezvous spot, one of the other teams produces the mother’s horn. I gasp at its size, like a crescent moon, but with a wider base. I can’t quite process seeing the horn without its rhino; momentarily I feel like we’re in collusion with the poachers. The whole operation is upsetting, like taking the laugh out of the hyena or the roar from the lion.
The horn is to be handed off to a government official and kept in a bank vault.
That, to me, sends the wrong message.
Rather than stockpiling chopped-off horns, it seems that a public burning of rhino horn would send a strong signal to consumers that South Africa is serious about protecting its rhinos.
Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. In fact South Africa has recently shifted the other way. Though international trade in rhino horn has been banned since 1977, private rhino breeders in South Africa won the right in 2017 to sell rhino horn within the country, a move criticized by many conservationists. Why would buyers be interested, the argument goes, except to traffic the horn out of the country?
Not only does the high price of rhino horn lure and entrap poachers into becoming pawns for large crime syndicates, rhinos themselves are becoming pawns of rhino breeders who, under the guise of protection, want to cash in on the value of rhino horn. Since the dehorning effort at the reserve I visited, there has been a lull in poaching activity there. But dehorning can only be a temporary strategy — the horns grow back after about eighteen months — and the future of rhinos is hardly secure.
That future could hinge on what happens in August, when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) has its triennial Conference of the Parties in Switzerland. The agenda includes a proposal from eSwatini (formerly Swaziland) to allow trade in its country’s rhino horns and a proposal from Namibia to allow trade in live white rhinos for trophy hunting.
Both of these proposals commodify rhinos and rob them of the very thing that makes them rhinos. Instead of loosening trade restrictions, we need to tighten them. Further, we need to pressure Vietnam and China to enforce their existing bans and crack down on the black market. Demand for rhino horn is simply too great.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prepares to burn confiscated rhino horns. Photo: Joanna Gilkeson/USFWS
I think of that rhino calf and its tiny horn, barely the length of my finger. Is its fate to be perpetually sedated and dehorned, or worse yet, to be permanently dehorned by poachers? Abandoning protections put in place decades ago will keep rhinos like this one perpetually in the crosshairs. It’s my hope, and that of many others in the conservation community, that the CITES parties will not approve the proposals put in front of them this month. Rhinos won’t have a fighting chance until they are treated with the dignity they deserve.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
New books this month tackle tough issues related to climate change, extinction, Indigenous sovereignty, ocean conservation and a whole lot more.
Things are heating up — and not just because it’s August. This past July was the hottest month in recorded history. That makes this month’s new books about climate change essential reading, along with other important new titles on pollution, wildlife, oceans and Indigenous peoples.
Our full list — an amazing 16 books, plus an entire series for kids — appears below. They include a deep dive into the world of the Koch brothers, a look at plastic in our food, an examination of the future of bluefin tuna, thoughts from the Standing Rock protests, and a whole lot more.
Leave It in the Ground: The Politics of Coal and Climate by John C. Berg — Want to know why we need to get rid of coal — and how we do it? This book lays out the science in clear, understandable language and reveals the truth about the politics and economics of the coal industry. Berg then provides a roadmap for how activists and governments can dismantle it.
End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World by Bryan Walsh — This isn’t strictly a climate-change book — it also covers apocalyptic volcanos, nuclear war, disease outbreaks and other terrifying scenarios — but it does showcase the people working to understand how the world could end and what they’re doing to prevent it. Which, you know, is kind of an important job.
Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have by Tatiana Schlossberg — How do your fashion sense, your lunch and your taste in Netflix movies contribute to climate change? A former New York Times science writer lays out the hidden effects of our daily lives and shows how informed and empowered consumers can make a difference.
Wildlife & Conservation:
The Future of Bluefin Tunas edited by Barbara A. Block — Dozens of experts from 15 countries contribute to this exhaustive examination of the threats facing all three species of bluefin tuna and what’s being done to save them.
Extinction: A Very Short Introduction by Paul B. Wignall — A slim book about a big topic: Why do species die out? Covering historic mass extinctions and the current biodiversity crisis, this book offers what you need to know about what we’re losing.
Science Comics: Catsby Andy Hirsch — A fun focus on our feline friends, looking at the science of everything from tigers to housecats. As with the rest of the “Science Comics” series, this is perfect for young readers or graphic-novel fans of all ages.
Life Without Animals by Theresa Emminizer — This six-book series for young readers (available individually or as a set) asks what would happen if species such as elephants, sea otters, prairie dogs and tigers disappeared and examines the ecological effects of their extinctions.
The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina — The high seas exist outside of international law, which means they can also be quite lawless. The author spent five years reporting around the world to expose the crime and exploitation that run rampant through the fishing, oil and shipping industries.
Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth — Science and adventure far beneath the sea. This must-read memoir looks back at an amazing career and provides insight into parts of the world that few of us will ever see in person.
Ocean Recovery by Ray Hilborn and Ulrike Hilborn — Which of the world’s fisheries are sustainable, and why? This book offers the scientific context for what we know about the status and ecological impact of global fishing operations.
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth — The Bering Straits are known for their Arctic waters, amazing wildlife and Indigenous peoples, but they’re also the site of a clash between capitalism and communism for control of the natural world’s finite resources.
Indigenous Peoples:
Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover — The subtitle of this book is “Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health,” which pretty much says it all. Noted activist Winona LaDuke provides the foreword.
Standing With Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon — An essential volume to understand the history and significance of the famous resistance action, combining everything from essays and interviews to poems and photography.
That’s our list for this month, but check out dozens of other recent eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.
Have you ever stood in front of a supermarket shelf and wondered if you should buy that product made from bioplastics rather than the conventional kind? Many people assume all bioplastics are made from plants and can break down completely in the environment. But that’s not the case.
The term “bioplastics” is actually used for two separate things: bio-based plastics (plastics made at least partly from biological matter) and biodegradable plastics (plastics that can be completely broken down by microbes in a reasonable timeframe, given specific conditions). Not all bio-based plastics are biodegradable, and not all biodegradable plastics are bio-based. And even biodegradable plastics might not biodegrade in every environment. Sounds confusing? It certainly is.
“There are a lot of bioplastics or materials that are called bioplastics that are not biodegradable,” says Constance Ißbrücker, head of environmental affairs at the industry association European Bioplastics.
For some plastics, the same polymer chains can be made from renewable sources. The resulting bioplastics are chemically identical to their fossil counterparts. PET, for example — short for polyethylene terephthalate, which is the stuff most bottles are made of — can be synthesized from fossil fuel products or plants like sugarcane. The resulting material is the exact same. Such non-biodegradable bioplastics behave in the environment just like conventional plastic and persist for an unknown but long amount of time.
Not only that, but none of the standards for plastics labeled as biodegradable or compostable today makes them suitable for disposal in the open environment. Given that, can bioplastics play a role in tackling environmental problems? Or are they merely greenwashing? The most accurate answer is, it depends.
PLA: Conditionally Compostable
Take polylactic acid (PLA), for example. This bioplastic is used to make shopping bags, transparent cups, 3-D printing material and other products. Because it can be derived from plant material like corn sugar, potato or sugarcane, it can reduce the demand for fossil fuels used to make conventional plastics.
PLA is recyclable, biodegradable and compostable. But that doesn’t mean the ocean — or any other natural environment — can easily handle it.
To Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP), drinking straws made from PLA are “the perfect example for greenwashing.” They are more expensive than other plastic drinking straws, but don’t readily biodegrade on a beach or in the sea.
“You put it on the package [that it] is biodegradable, but at the point where these materials are . . . fear[ed] to end up, they will not biodegrade,” Wurm says.
A corn-based plastic cup. (Photo by ekornblut, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
For biodegradation, PLA needs industrial composting conditions, including temperatures above 58 °C (136 °F). It needs to be properly managed and routed to specialized industrial composting or recycling facilities. Under the right circumstances, microbes can turn the material into carbon dioxide and water within a couple of weeks. However, if it becomes littered or dumped, PLA sticks around for much longer. When pure PLA ends up in seawater, it does not seem to biodegrade at all.
PHA: It’s Complicated
Other kinds of bioplastics are known to better biodegrade in marine environments. However, whether that really happens in a specific case, and how long it will take, is highly unpredictable.
Marine biologist Christian Lott and his colleagues at HYDRA, a private research institute with a research station on the Italian island of Elba, have field-tested different biopolymers in a range of aquatic environments from tropical beaches to the Mediterranean seafloor. They found that materials that had been shown to biodegrade in seawater in lab testing also do so in the environmental conditions they tested.
Among the materials tested at HYDRA are bioplastics called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). Produced by microbes, PHAs currently comprise a tiny slice of the market. However, demand is expected to grow strongly in the next few years.
A thin film of PHA will degrade in a tropical environment on the seafloor in one to two months, Lott says. But in the Mediterranean, it can take 10 times as long. “And imagine, in the Arctic, in the ice or at ice-cold water, or in the deep sea where we have 0 to 4 degrees, hardly any nutrients around, bacteria will have a hard time to digest these materials,” he says.
This is the caveat to PHAs, says Linda Amaral-Zettler, a marine microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). “While they can biodegrade in the marine environment, we still need to appreciate that part of the marine environment is not compatible with biodegradation.”
In some regions of the ocean biodegradation is so slow that even organic material like fish or algae can leave their traces in the fossil record.
“Life is complicated,” Lott puts it, “and it’s about life — because it’s bio-degradation.”
Super-Biodegradable?
Even with the best waste management systems, it’s realistic to assume some plastic will always escape. Think of the abrasion from car or bike tires, from ship paints, sneakers, or synthetic garments. If bits of plastics are small enough to travel through the air, they will be hard to ever contain.
So could we design a plastic that breaks down pretty much anywhere?
Wurm says it would theoretically be possible to build molecular triggers into materials so that they know when to biodegrade. “It sounds fancy, and it is fancy and it’s expensive,” he says. But even if the funding were there, finding and including molecular triggers for each and every material in each and every environment seems to be a nearly impossible task.
A material that has a full functionality but biodegrades immediately at its end of life, is “not going to happen. Never,” Lott says.
Different Chemicals, Different Problems
Moreover, when considering the impacts of plastic products on humans and the environment, looking at just the plastic itself is never enough. A single plastic product can contain dozens of chemicals, some of which might have adverse effects on us humans or other organisms if they are released into the environment and taken up.
Lisa Zimmerman, a Ph.D. student in the Department Aquatic Ecotoxicology at Goethe University in Frankfurt (Main), Germany, has conducted research that suggests that chemical mixtures present in biodegradable or bio-based plastic products can influence the metabolic activity of the bioluminescent bacterium Aliivibrio fischeri. In a number of additional experiments she found that these chemical mixtures can have the potential to cause oxidative stress or influence the hormonal system in living organisms.
“What I can tell from my research is that bioplastics are not necessarily safer than conventional plastics with regard to the toxicity of the chemical mixtures they include,” Zimmermann says.
Plastic litter found on a beach in Norway. (Photo by Bo Eide, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Land Use Issues
Bio-based plastics have other environmental implications as well. One big criticism has been the land needed to grow the plants.
On the basis of a report from the Institute for Bioplastics and Biocomposites (IfBB) in Hanover, European Bioplastics estimates that bio-based plastics currently use less than 0.02 percent of agricultural land. “There is no real competition with food and feed production,” Ißbrücker argues.
But Christoph Lauwigi, who represents the working group on waste and resources with Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) worries about the side effects of a growth in the bioplastic market. In the German Plastic Atlas, he explains that an increase in bio-based plastics could raise the pressure on arable land, potentially leading to water shortages, desertification and the loss of habitats and biodiversity. He also notes that the reliance on industrial agriculture for the production of new plastics might increase monoculture cropping and the use of pesticides.
Ißbrücker says the industry is working toward a smaller land use footprint by using waste materials or algae. At this point however, these sources cannot be processed as effectively yet as the current feedstocks, she adds.
Niche Applications
Plastics that are currently marketed as “biodegradable” will themselves contribute to plastic pollution if they are lost or littered. They do not break down as quickly and completely in the environment as the term might imply and can thus harm wildlife and ecosystems. But there are a few applications where using biodegradable plastics may provide a net benefit to the environment.
In some countries, bags that are compostable under industrial conditions are used to collect organic waste. They can offer a cleaner and more convenient way than nondisposable containers for people to collect food scraps for composting.
Enzo Favoino, a waste management expert at the Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza in Italy and chair of the Scientific Committee of Zero Waste Europe, is convinced this is the way to go. Fewer organics in the trash means less fermentation, allowing waste management operators to come by less often to pick up the trash. This can not only save money but also boost the recycling rates of other materials such as paper, glass, plastic and metal, he says.
Collecting organic waste separately also diverts food scraps from landfills and dumps, where they can produce methane — a powerful greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.
However, not every country has the infrastructure in place to use compostable bags to these ends. In Germany, for example, compostable bags are screened out of the organics by technology that doesn’t distinguish between compostable and conventional plastic.
Biodegradable plastics are currently also marketed as mulching films for agriculture, which farmers can just leave on the fields to plow under. For decades, plastic mulch film has been spread out on fields to support crop growth and save pesticides and water. But with conventional plastics this so-called Plasticulture can cause “white pollution” to accumulate on farmland if it is not removed and discarded.
Is biodegradable film a safe alternative? If they are proven to biodegrade in the soil, they would leave less pollution behind. But wind or animals might carry pieces of broken film into the air, rivers or oceans, to places where they might not be able to biodegrade. There’s also a potential for chemicals to leach from the films to the soil ecosystem, a question that is currently under scrutiny.
Tackling Confusion
There’s no doubt, bioplastics are still plastics. Just because some of them are made from plants or have the potential to biodegrade under limited conditions, they can’t be touted as “planet-safe.” For the ones that claim to biodegrade or compost, the fine print is crucial.
So check the label: What does it say? Where and how is it supposed to biodegrade? How can you safely dispose of the product? 5 Gyres, a California-based nonprofit working on plastic pollution, has published an overview of labels in its Better Alternatives Now B.A.N. List 2.0. Beware, however: According to Ißbrücker, some uses of labels are fake.
Finally, be cautious when you read that a material is oxo-biodegradable. These are conventional plastics like polyethylene mixed with metal compounds that make them fall apart faster. According to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), it hasn’t been proven that they truly biodegrade, and it is feared they might just accelerate microplastic pollution. Similarly, European Bioplastics warn that so-called “enzyme-mediated degradable plastics” aren’t truly biodegradable.
Reduction Remains Key
The plastic industry projects strong growth in production, while many environmentalists are calling to reduce use.
Biodegradable plastics won’t solve the plastic crisis, so tackling consumption remains key. “By just reducing the amounts and the types of different packaging that we have in our supermarkets, we can do a lot, without developing novel materials,” says Wurm.
Even European Bioplastics’ Ißbrücker thinks that might very well happen. “Maybe not in 5 or 10 years, but as the problems keep growing, plastic production might go down one day, because it’s just too much.”
A transcript and more episodes of the Plastisphere podcast are available here. A German version of this article can be found on RiffReporter.
The big cats have increased by 30 percent in India in just four years, but they still face pressures and controversies.
India this week announced some amazing news: The country’s wild tiger populations have increased by 30 percent in just the past four years. Buoyed by intense conservation efforts, India is now reportedly home to an estimated 2,967 Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris).
To put this in context, India’s tiger population was estimated at 2,226 in 2016, when the wild population of all tiger subspecies was placed at 3,890. That was a big increase over 2010’s estimate, which placed the world population at just 3,200 after several years of rampant poaching for the animals’ skins and body parts, which are all too often used in traditional Asian medicine.
India credited increased monitoring and stricter wildlife policies for the population increase, which puts the country four years head of its goal to double its wild tiger populations.
There are a few caveats to these new numbers, though. First, the country calculated its new tiger population numbers, in part, by collecting and analyzing 350,000 images from 26,000 camera traps distributed across 146,000 square miles of tiger habitat. This method has actually garnered some criticism for its accuracy. India used to estimate its tiger population by counting footprints or “pug marks,” but that method was abandoned after it was proven to count tigers that did not still exist. The new method counts photo images as well as tiger tracks, droppings and other signs of their presence, along with estimates of prey abundance and habitat viability. Some experts suggest this may lead to double-counting of some tigers.
Meanwhile tiger poaching is still a big problem, although it has declined in recent years. More than 400 tigers are believed to have been killed by poachers in India between 2008 and 2018, according to a recent investigation.
A tigress in Kanha National Park, March 2019. Photo: Kandukuru Nagarjun (CC BY 2.0)
And it’s not just poaching. At least 100 tigers died in India last year, many of which were killed by poisoning, electrocution and other direct or indirect conflicts with humans. Nearly half of last year’s tiger deaths in India last year occurred outside protected areas, a sign that the big cats have come into increasing pressure from living next to human populations. Just last week, in a crime that went viral on social media, villagers in northern India beat a tiger to death with large sticks after it fatally mauled a local man.
This indicates that tigers may be losing the space they need to roam — about 75 square miles per cat — and that India’s increasing human population continues to encroach upon wild territories. “Unless we have a sound strategy to tackle these conflicts, tiger lynchings will continue,” conservationist Prerna Singh Bindra told The New York Times. “Forests are being fragmented. We are saying yes to about 98 percent of development and other projects in protected areas. If we keep cutting habitats, this tiger utopia is going to come crashing down.”
Finally there’s a question of the genetic health of these tigers. India has long had the world’s biggest remaining tiger population, so the cats in the country are undoubtedly genetically stronger than others, such as Siberian or Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), which face a genetic bottleneck and are at risk of inbreeding.
But India’s Bengal tigers still face some genetic challenges. Research published July 10 in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation found that some populations have poor genetic exchange with neighboring groups as a result of habitat fragmentation. The authors suggest it’s important to manage India’s tigers not on the reserve-by-reserve basis but on a national metapopulation level to ensure all of the country’s tigers maintain their genetic strength. The study also identified several smaller populations that “currently have low tiger numbers, yet harbor unique diversity that is currently under-represented and not prioritized for conservation investments.”
Despite these caveats India’s increasing tiger population is a desperately needed conservation success for these embattled animals. India still has some problems to solve, but more tigers living in the wild is always good news. Now other countries need to follow India’s lead and work on boosting their own tiger populations while there’s still time left to save them.
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.”
To put this in context, India’s tiger population was estimated at 
