States that share the river’s water finalized a big agreement last month, but an even larger challenge determining the river’s future is just around the bend, expert John Fleck explains.
It’s been a big year for the Colorado River — and one that may set the stage for decades to come.
For years it’s been apparent that the Colorado, which supplies water to 40 million people in the West — including major cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Denver — is in “structural deficit.” There’s more demand for water than the river can provide.
Rights to the river’s water were first divvied up in the 1922 compact between seven states, separated into the upper basin of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, and the lower basin of Nevada, Arizona and California. A share for Mexico was also established decades later. Starting the early 2000s, water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropped sharply following years of prolonged drought. They’ve never fully recovered.
The states started thinking about how to manage the river during times of shortage. After much negotiation, Congress approved a Drought Contingency Plan which President Trump signed in April. One of the key components of the plan involves how the lower basin states will share voluntary water cuts to prevent Lake Mead from slipping too low and triggering even more severe cutbacks.
The boundaries of the Colorado River basin. (Map by USGS)
The agreement is a testament to the fact that water can be an area of compromise and not just conflict, but the hard work isn’t done. The plan essentially just buys some time until the next big challenge. Beginning in 2020, the states will return to the negotiating table where they’ll have until the end of 2026 to come up with a new long-term plan for managing the Colorado River given the current hydrologic realities of climate change and overallocation.
Those realities pose a significant threat to the region: Scientists Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck recently found that warming temperatures have already had a hand in reducing the Colorado River. Their research showed that flows could be curtailed by 20 percent or more below the 20th-century average by 2050 and 40 percent by 2100.
States will need to find a way to live with less water, but how those cuts will be distributed and how deep they’ll go will be the next area of contention. As the stage is being set for this showdown, we talked to Colorado River expert John Fleck, director of the water resources program at the University of New Mexico and author of the book Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West.
How significant was the agreement reached with Drought Contingency Plan?
The actual accomplishment of the plan, which is an agreement among water users to voluntarily reduce their use in the lower basin, is amazing — especially Arizona agreeing to some really deep cuts. One could wish perhaps that California had agreed to give up more, but California had no legal obligation to cut its water and is now in [the agreement].
If the upper basin meets its delivery obligations under the compact to deliver seven and a half million acre-feet a year [approximately 2.44 trillion gallons] plus half its share of the Mexican treaty obligation, then we stabilize Lake Mead. It will drop to some uncomfortably low levels, but then it will stabilize.
That also comes with some big caveats. It presumes the upper basin meets its obligations and we aren’t on the pessimistic side of the hydrology that researchers like Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck have modeled.
The problem isn’t solved, but we’ve just taken a really big step toward solving it.
What do you think was learned from this round of negotiations?
We learned how hard it was and how long it took. Back in 2015, when I was finishing up my last book, this seemed like the simple, obvious thing that they had to do. Why did it take so long? Why was it so hard? And the answers to that are really complicated. But that’s part of the learning that went on.
John Fleck at Morelos Dam on the Colorado River. (Courtesy of John Fleck)
You have people within the Colorado River management community — the seven states, the big water agencies, all the major players in the environmental groups — and they all understand big cutbacks are needed. But then it is much harder to sell that idea to water agencies back home who hang on to previous rules about how much water they’re supposed to get.
The interface between working at the basin scale and the politics back home is a really hard spot. With the Drought Contingency Plan, this manifested both in the agricultural fight in Arizona with Pinal County farmers and in what finally played out on the Salton Sea in California’s Imperial Valley. It’s a sort of a rejuvenation of the rural–urban conflict. And that will be a critical challenge in figuring out how to do the next steps, which involves using less water.
In 2020 the states will embark on talks to finally replace interim guidelines on river management that were written in 2007. This is a huge deal. What are some of the biggest challenges for the next round of negotiations?
One of the biggest difficulties is figuring out who gets to participate — who’s in the room when these deals are negotiated. And it’s just not at all clear what the process is going to look like for renegotiating guidelines.
We’ve clearly reached a point where we need to expand the notion of who gets to be a stakeholder. There’s this sort of rigid hierarchy where states get to be at the table and states then get to sometimes be represented by — or inclusive of — their big water users. But who is the person at the table representing air quality and poor people in Imperial Valley? Or who gets to be at the table representing tribes, especially tribes that have a lot of water rights, have a lot of legal and moral entitlement, but don’t have a lot of financial capacity for participation?
I don’t know the answer to this, but this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. We don’t really know what the process is going to look like.
In Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, your forthcoming book with Eric Kuhn, you write about how political expediency has come before scientific integrity in Colorado River management. For nearly a century, your research found, science was selectively used by people who wanted a rosier view of how much water was in the river. Do you think those making the decisions this time around are starting from an agreed-upon scientific framework of how much water we have and how climate change could impact that?
I am optimistic that we’re making progress on that, but I’m not sure. Confirmation bias naturally leads people to want to find a set of numbers that supports the thing they really want to do. That’s just human nature.
Lee Ferry, Ariz. is the dividing line between the upper and lower basin states that share the Colorado River. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
The other issue of concern is holding on to the idea of one number — of wanting to know what the flow of the Colorado River is going to be, rather than planning for different scenarios.
I’m heartened to see a shift toward this scenario analysis instead of the focus on just trying to make a better climate model to give us that one number, because climate models can’t do that for us. Let’s instead focus on “what if” scenarios for a range of possibilities and be ready for each.
What should we be looking for during this next negotiation process?
There are a bunch of unresolved legal questions from the 1922 compact, so whatever happens has to happen in the context of those questions being addressed. Without a compromise any one of them could end up in the Supreme Court with uncertain outcomes and really bad problems for whoever loses.
Behind the scenes each side has their lawyers ready to argue why they should not be the ones who take the hit in water allocations. But somebody is going to take a hit unless we compromise somehow.
That’s the big thing, but then there are other issues that need to be considered like the value of environmental flows and the recognized integrity of indigenous communities and their rights around both quantity of water but also healthy flows of rivers. So how do you then incorporate all that stuff? Those are the interesting questions to watch.
The extinction crisis threatens life all over the planet, but scientists are cautious about declaring a species extinct too quickly.
We’ve been hearing it for years: The world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, with species going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster because of human impact on the environment.
Most recently a report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimated that as many as a million species risk extinction in the coming decades due to human-related activities.
All of which raises the question: If so many species are going extinct, why don’t we hear about new extinctions every day?
The answer to that question is more complex than you might think.
1. It Takes Time
Once in a while, the last known individual of a species dies while on display in a zoo or other institution — for example, Martha the passenger pigeon or Toughie the last Rabbs’ tree frog. But in the vast majority of cases, the existence of the final representative of a species — the “endling” — is unknown. The norm is a species disappearing in the wild, one by one, far from human eyes. No one witnesses it die out. It declines silently until one day it’s just…gone.
And when that happens, it’s not easy for researchers to show that a species has vanished forever.
“Proving the negative is always impossible. Getting close to the demonstration that something must not exist anymore requires a lot of effort,” says H. Resit Akçakaya, professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University. “It’s not sufficient to say that we didn’t see it. You need to have searched for it. Because that takes a lot of time and effort, usually species are not listed as extinct until long after they have actually gone extinct, or we think they were extinct, because we can never know, except for a very few exceptions.”
You’ll find examples of this when searching through the listings on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which details the extinction risk for about 98,500 species. Many listings for rare species include the last time that particular plant or animal was observed by scientists, and that date is often decades in the past.
Take, for example, a Hawaiian bird known as the poʻouli (Melamprosops phaeosoma). The IUCN lists the species as “critically endangered (possibly extinct).” The bird hasn’t been seen in the wild since 2004, but it still hasn’t been moved into the “extinct” category. Right now there are 68 other species in that “possibly extinct” category. Hundreds more are still listed as “critically endangered” despite a lack of recent sightings.
The Endangered Species Act takes its time, too. For example, the Eastern cougar (Puma concolor couguar) was removed from the endangered species list last year, 80 years after its last confirmed sighting. Biologists spent decades looking for signs of the animal before confirming its extinction.
Biologist Bruce Wright poses with the body of the last known eastern cougar in 1938. USFWS
“We in the conservation field never want to wipe a species off the books until it’s really absolutely solidly, solidly positively dead, dead, dead,” explains Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke professor of conservation ecology at Duke University and the founder of SavingSpecies. That’s a slow process. “For a long time, there was a rule that said it has to have been unseen for 50 years before you could declare it extinct.”
There are other criteria for declaring a species extinct. For example, a 2005 paper by Stuart Butchart and other conservation experts identified several types of evidence to be used before a species could be considered “possibly extinct.” From the paper:
The species’ population decline must be well documented.
It must face “severe threatening processes” such as habitat loss or intensive hunting.
It must possess attributes known to predispose similar species to extinction, such as a small range or inability to migrate.
And surveys have failed to detect it, with due consideration given to how easy or hard it is to observe the species.
Similarly, the paper considers four types of evidence against extinction:
Surveys to find the species have been inadequate, perhaps because they were at the wrong time of year or the species lives in hard-to-reach areas.
The species is difficult to see, hear or otherwise detect.
It’s been reasonably sighted by locals, even if those sightings are unconfirmed.
And suitable habitat still exists.
With all of this in mind, it’s likely we’ve lost a lot of species over the past few decades, but scientists are hesitant to formally shift them into the “extinct” category quite yet.
There’s an important reason for that.
2. Mistakes are Costly
“There are costs associated with listing a species as extinct, so biologists, understandably, don’t want to declare a species extinct before they are pretty certain,” says Akçakaya.
The biggest cost: Declaring a species extinct too early can actually lead to its extinction.
That’s called the “Romeo Error,” named after Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” In the play, lovestruck Romeo mistakenly thinks his beloved Juliet is dead, so he takes his own life. That’s not exactly how it would play out in the wild, but when humans incorrectly think a species is extinct when it’s not, the error can lead to the removal of any legal protections for the species or its habitat. That means if the species is later rediscovered, protective measures have to start over at step one — assuming there’s anything left to save at that point.
One of the most well-known cases of the Romeo Error took place in the Philippines, where the island of Cebu experienced so much deforestation that several of its native species were declared extinct early in the 20th century. That included a bird called the Cebu flowerpecker (Dicaeum quadricolor), which was later rediscovered in 1992 in a tiny fragment of remaining forest. Today the bird is still critically endangered, but its populations could have been much healthier if efforts to protect it had not been abandoned decades earlier.
Of course, to experience the Romeo Error, you need a Romeo (or a Juliet) in the first place.
In other words, you need a name.
3. You Can’t Declare Extinct What You Don’t Know
The world has about 1.7 million described species. Many scientists estimate the total level of biodiversity on the planet at about 8 million, while others say it’s much higher. That means there are a lot of species yet to be identified, named, studied or assessed for their extinction risk.
“Most of the species we know must exist are not yet described,” says Akçakaya. “Since we don’t know most of the species that exist, we don’t know most of the species that are going extinct.”
We find out about some of these unnamed extinctions after the fact — sometimes long after. Two of the four extinctions I’ve reported on so far this year were species that disappeared decades ago but have only just been scientifically identified and named.
But those species were only identified because museums had samples in their collections. Otherwise no one might have noticed that they were gone, let alone known if they had lived at all. We find out about dinosaurs and other extinct prehistoric species through fossil evidence, but most plants and animals degrade and decompose pretty quickly after they die, leaving few signs that they ever existed.
It’s difficult to estimate the numbers of these unknown species, but we do know how many can exist inside intact habitats, and how many rely upon incredibly small, specific microhabitats. And we know that when those habitats disappear, so does what lived in them.
Even for species we’ve identified, we can’t assess their extinction risk if we don’t know much about them. The IUCN Red List includes about 15,000 species in a category called “data deficient” — in other words, we don’t know if they’re at risk or not, or even if they still exist. A 2016 paper by biologist Chris Parsons argued that all of these “data-deficient” species, which are often hard to find and study, should be considered “assumed threatened,” a step that would encourage policymakers to treat them as at risk rather than just “out of sight, out of mind.”
The same could probably be said for the hundreds of thousands of identified species that haven’t even made it to the IUCN Red List.
4. The Last Reason We Don’t Announce Many Extinctions: Successes
The Cebu flowerpecker, like so many other critically endangered species, continues to survive. Much as humans are to blame for so many extinctions, we’re also to be credited for helping to prevent some of these species from disappearing altogether.
For examples, look at the California condor, black-footed ferret and Mexican gray wolf. These are just a few of the species that humans nearly drove extinct that have since been saved due to modern and ever-improving conservation techniques.
California condor 87. Photo: Michael Quinn/National Park Service
“When we do find species that are hanging on by their toenails, we are in a better position to save those species from the brink of extinction,” says Pimm. “People find them and they can begin to bring them back.”
These species don’t always bounce back to safe levels, but avoiding extinction is still an achievement. “If a species is critically endangered, and has been critically endangered for the last 20 years, is that a conservation success?” asks Akçakaya. “Perhaps it is, if we can demonstrate that without conservation it would have gone extinct 10 years ago.”
Of course, saving a species requires finding out that it’s endangered early enough to do something about it — not to mention finding the last individuals. “Finding three individuals is not going to get you much,” says Pimm. “The best you can hope for is a male and a female, and there’s a possibility you’ll find that all three are male.”
That, it turns out, is another reason why some species haven’t been declared extinct yet — they’re alive, but unlikely to persist. The most notable example is the northern white rhino, which has just two females left in the world. The species still exists, but for all intents and purposes, it’s a walking case of extinction.
Given all of this, we know that many more species are going extinct than get reported. But how do we know how many are going extinct? We’ll address that question in part II of this article, coming soon.
The United Nations recently identified overfishing as one of the major threats to the world’s biodiversity. But there’s a solution to help both fish and people.
Conservation icon David Attenborough’s familiar, soothing narration has accompanied nature documentaries for decades, but he brings a new and urgent tone to his latest project, Netflix’s new series Our Planet.
While Attenborough’s previous projects, Planet Earth and Blue Planet, were windows into the wonders of nature, Our Planet is an alarm bell. If we don’t change our ways, human-driven problems like climate change will leave behind bleached coral and barren oceans.
Our Planet carries a particularly urgent warning about the threats facing our coastal seas and the possible consequences for people and nature. An episode of the series focusing on coastal seas illuminates a challenge not often talked about: overfishing.
Driven in part by a growing global demand for seafood, overfishing harms marine ecosystems and the communities they support. The constant barrage of discarded fishing nets, plastic and other debris, and chemical pollutants wreak havoc on these critical habitats. Meanwhile, destructive fishing practices like dynamite fishing destroy some of our most effective nature-based tools for fighting climate change. Just this month, the United Nations’ global assessment on biodiversity cited overfishing as one of the main ways people are reducing biodiversity.
Bluestripe snapper. Photo courtesy Rare
The fallout is felt most by those who can least afford it: the two hundred million people worldwide who depend on coastal fisheries for their livelihoods. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, approximately one in five people globally depend on fish for a significant part of their animal protein, while in many of the least developed countries of Africa and Asia, that number is closer to fifty percent. A sick ocean puts the food and economic security of coastal communities around the world at risk — in particular, those in the developing tropical nations.
To save the oceans and the communities that depend on them, we must find a balance between use and conservation, between fishers’ needs today and their fate tomorrow. So how do we do it? How do we incentivize fishers to change their behavior?
We can begin by empowering coastal communities with control over their coastal waters. Today, most small-scale fisheries around the developing world operate under a system of “open access,” where there are few, if any, rules. Anyone can fish and it’s a race to catch as much as you can before someone else does. A classic tragedy of the commons.
Instead, we should move toward a system of what we at Rare call “managed access with reserves” (also referred to as Territorial Use Rights for Fishing, or TURF, plus reserves), where local fishers receive exclusive rights to fish local waters in exchange for establishing “no-take zones” within the fishing grounds. These reserves are off-limits to fishing, allowing fish populations, coral reefs and other marine life to regenerate.
In Our Planet, we see the benefits of marine reserves, a growing number of which are established or in development around the world. As the documentary shows, a sanctuary in Raja Ampat, Indonesia, has led to an increase in marine biodiversity and three times the amount of fish in just 10 years. Fishers benefitted as well, as fish spilled over from the reserve, allowing them to catch more with less effort.
These results are similar to what we found in our own work in Indonesia. Between 2012 and 2017, we deployed the managed access with reserves approach in 15 sites across the country. In virtually every one of these areas, fish biomass either remained steady or increased both inside and outside of the no-take reserves.
The benefits of this approach aren’t confined beneath the waves. We also saw evidence of positive social results. The development of managed access areas is an inclusive, participatory process. Fishers and community members design, implement and enforce fishery management plans. This approach fuels a sense of fairness, spreads trust across the community and builds hope and optimism among fishers.
A man fishing with his family. Photo courtesy Rare
Empowering communities with control over their fisheries and inspiring them to manage them sustainably can put us on the path toward healthier oceans and coastal communities. And this strategy is catching on. Some nations, like the Philippines and Indonesia, are incorporating managed access with reserves into their national development plans in order to meet global goals — for protecting the ocean, achieving food security, promoting economic growth, combating climate change, ending poverty and achieving gender equality. We hope that more nations can take on this model.
Our Planet’s “Coastal Seas” episode ends on an optimistic note, and with good reason. A workable solution — marine reserves — is delivering proven results. As Attenborough remarks, when given the chance, these areas can recover surprisingly quickly. And to give our oceans that chance, we should give communities ownership — and the incentive — to protect their waters and bring human need into balance with the long-term health of the ocean.
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.
Flawed laws, vested interests and problematic enforcement have allowed the captive-lion industry in South Africa to boom. Change, one expert writes, may need to come from outside.
A few weeks ago, inspectors made a gruesome discovery at a farm in the northwest corner of South Africa. More than 100 lions and other big cats were found suffering from neglect, parasites, mange and other health problems. Two lion cubs were too sick to walk; a third had to be euthanized.
Despite their illnesses, all of the lions on the farm were intended for use in “canned hunts” or to be slaughtered and sold for their bones.
In the wake of the investigation, the National Council for the Societies of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals charged the farm owner with animal cruelty. The criminal charge is unusual in South Africa, although the situation that produced it is not.
Indeed, humanity’s hot pursuit of the commercialization of nature is rarely more evident than in South Africa’s intensive breeding of lions. Despite years of local and international outcry, it’s still legal to use these former kings of the jungle in a range of lucrative commercial activities, including trophy hunting and exporting their bones.
It might seem strange that this commercial exploitation exists, given that South Africa is a self-proclaimed global leader in conservation. The country boasts some of the highest populations of charismatic megafauna in the world, including rhinos, elephants and lions. Yet for these and many other wildlife species in South Africa, high populations are largely due to the practice of “wildlife ranching,” which is not just allowed but even encouraged by the legal system.
Today only about 3,000 lions truly remain in the wild in South Africa. The majority of the country’s Panthera leo populations are confined in more than 300 captive-breeding facilities that house an estimated 9,000 to 12,000 animals. Many of these lions — like the ones found at the farm last month — suffer from physical defects, diseases and psychological disorders.
This intensive confinement, breeding and use are permitted because, as with most countries and other jurisdictions, South African law classifies animals as mere property. What sets South Africa apart, however, is the fact that it has also solidified the private ownership of wildlife through laws passed during apartheid. These laws and current policies appear to further reinforce historical racial, economic, political and social issues, most notably for people who live and work on farms, as well as communities near wildlife operations.
In addition, the “right to environment” enshrined in South Africa’s supreme Constitution has been interpreted by the relevant executive department to focus on just one provision: the “sustainable use” of “resources.” This interpretation forms the basis of the country’s environmental and biodiversity laws. It has effectively ensured, and even promoted, the commodification of wildlife and is used to justify practices that most would consider abhorrent and repulsive.
Despite this interpretation, South Africa’s Constitutional (supreme) Court recently stated that the human right to environmental protection is connected to animal welfare. This ruling was based on the so-called integrative approach, which the court said “correctly links the suffering of individual animals to conservation and illustrates the extent to which showing respect and concern for individual animals reinforces broader environmental protection efforts.”
The sentiments of the judiciary, however, have not been reflected meaningfully in legislation or policy and additional legal loopholes, inconsistencies, uncertainty and enforcement challenges have had detrimental impacts on wildlife, ethics and values of true conservation.
The Industry
The intensive breeding of wildlife is not limited to lions, nor is it new for the country.
In 1997 a television show called TheCook Report first drew global attention to the captive-bred lion industry, more specifically to what’s often referred to as “canned” lion hunting. In a nutshell, canned hunting involves paid excursions in walled-off encampments where hunters can shoot semi-tame animals without the need to track them in the wild or the chance of escape for the animal. After the program aired, what was going on behind the fences of private property was no longer hidden.
Despite all this, the captive lion breeding industry still has tremendous staying power. But it also comes with costs for the entire country, which relies heavily on wildlife tourism.
Recent studies show that the captive-bred lion industry has had a dramatically negative effect on “brand South Africa” by tarnishing the country’s reputation. One study found that nearly 4 billion U.S. dollars in tourism income could be lost over the next seven years if “business as usual” continues.
Industry supporters, however, allege that it has positive economic benefits, including employment and tourism.
Indeed, the captive-bred lion industry has expanded exponentially in terms the sheer quantity of animals, the uses of these animals, and the number of people employed. Jobs include farm workers, hunting operators, taxidermists — and even slaughterhouse workers.
Supporters also argue that the industry aids conservation and has a positive effect on wild lions, alleging that breeding takes the pressure off wild lion populations, and that profits are reinvested in conservation efforts.
Activists, on the other hand, argue that captive-bred lions do not benefit the economy, as the industry appears to mostly benefit a small group of elites rather than communities or other citizens. They also say the practice has no conservation value whatsoever because of inbreeding, diseases and the animals’ semi-tame nature. They further contend that breeding has created new commercial uses, demands and markets for products relating to these animals, particularly internationally.
One such example is the trade in lion bones, which are used for so-called “medicinal” purposes and other dubious commercial ventures. While the bone trade was initially thought to be an offset of the trophy-hunting industry, recent reports indicate that this is not the case. Instead, many animals are bred specifically for their bones. An exposé last month found that one slaughterhouse killed 54 lions in just two days. This took place at a facility that bills itself as an “eco-farm.”
As the largest legal exporter of lion skeletons, South Africa has been accused of fueling illegal trade and activities, spurring increased trafficking of other species including tigers and even rhinos, normalizing the demand for these products, and hindering conservation efforts of other countries and organizations.
The bone trade presents additional welfare concerns. There’s no need for lions raised for slaughter to be aesthetically pleasing (as opposed to trophy-hunted lions, which are destined specifically for display), so captive-bred lions often suffer from physical defects. Lions bred for slaughter don’t need to be healthy, but sick lions pose a risk to human health through zoonotic diseases such as tuberculosis.
In addition to the lion-bone trade itself, there’s also a major “volunteer” sub-industry that has grown tremendously and attracts international tourists. Visitors pay to touch and spend time with young cubs, a seemingly innocuous activity that actually acquaints young animals with human contact and sets them up for the next stages of the life cycle of a captive-bred lion. For this reason, these encounters are known as the “snuggle scam.” Tourists are often unwitting participants who believe that their efforts and money are aiding conservation efforts.
In most instances, these predator facilities are nothing more than commercial operations breeding and exploiting animals for a range of activities, from canned hunting and the bone trade to cub petting, ‘walking with lions’ and volunteer activities. https://t.co/mSLVhGV7kEpic.twitter.com/1uWWDYrsJr
All of this can be quite shocking, but — ethical, economic and other arguments aside — the law weighs heavily in favor of industry.
The Legalities
The trade in lions and their body parts across international borders was restricted as early as 1977 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). However, in 2016 CITES granted South Africa a special annotation, essentially allowing it to decide its own legal annual export quota of lion “bones, bone pieces, bone products, claws, skeletons, skulls and teeth for commercial purposes, derived from captive breeding operations.”
Following this decision, South Africa established a quota of exporting 800 lion skeletons in 2017, then almost doubled that amount to 1,500 in 2018. (That year’s quota was subsequently reduced and is still the subject of pending court proceedings.) It’s worth noting that the department ultimately responsible for determining the quota has indicated that animal welfare and related matters are out of its scope and that it does not have the power to regulate these issues.
Domestically there are a plethora of laws and regulations covering lions and other wildlife, yet huge gaps and difficulties exist with the current regulation. Many claim that this patchwork system has effectively facilitated the growth and protection of the lion industry, rather than safeguarding these animals from the wide range of atrocities they face.
One such difficulty is the fact that the national government and each of the nine provincial governments have concurrent jurisdiction on environmental issues under which “wild” animals traditionally fall. This means that the regulation is composed of diverse laws, at different levels throughout the country, some of which are decades old and were enacted prior to the growth of the captive lion industry, and even before the end of apartheid.
When laws do apply, they generally only require permits for “restricted activities” such as hunting, catching, killing, growing, breeding and propagating. These permits can be obtained for as little as 4 U.S. dollars each, which pales in comparison to the thousands of dollars paid to trophy-hunting operations.
Complicating the matter, provinces don’t issue these permits in a uniform manner and there’s no centralized permitting system or sharing of information, so no provincial governments have oversight or insight into what the others are doing.
This system presents additional monitoring and enforcement challenges. For example, the Department of Environmental Affairs reported this past March that nearly 40 percent of the 227 breeding facilities inspected in four of the provinces were noncompliant with regulations and many were operating with expired permits — although these were subsequently renewed.
Other matters that remain inadequately regulated include the methods of hunting, registration and document requirements, and prohibited and restricted activities.
Notably, no legal definition for canned hunting exists. Rather, regulations prohibit permits from being issued if certain circumstances exist (i.e., if the lion is released in an area adjacent to a captive holding facility for large predators). This allows the lion industry to widely state that canned lion hunting is illegal, even though captive lions are still hunted. Even major global hunting organizations have spoken out against this practice, but with no formal legal definition, the term remains open to interpretation, and canned hunting continues.
Previous attempts to regulate canned hunting have been thwarted, mostly by those profiting from lion-use activities. In 2005 the Department of Environmental Affairs introduced draft regulations that included both a definition of and prohibition for “canned hunting.” These were not adopted but led to a further attempt to regulate the industry in 2007. Proposals that year included requiring lions to roam for a minimum 24-month time period before they could be hunted. These regulations were challenged by the organization now known as the South African Predator Association, whose members include lion breeders, which launched a court case against the department. The industry ultimately won the case in the highest appeal court on mostly procedural grounds, setting aside the proposed regulations and allowing the industry to flourish.
As a result, there remains no specific regulation for the captive-lion industry that is formally promulgated by government. The other, more general, threatened or protected-species regulations are over a decade old and do not effectively protect these animals nor govern the industries that use them.
The lion industry itself, meanwhile, has set its own norms and standards for hunting “ranch” lions. Although these are voluntary and unenforceable, and (one might argue) deficient in various respects, the industry refers to them as one of its successes.
Unfortunately this type of “soft law” is not uncommon in South Africa’s animal-use industries. They are often used to fill regulatory gaps but ultimately lead to the government’s failure to establish formal regulations. This ensures the protection of industry interests.
In contrast to environmental laws, there are laws that criminalize certain actions relating to domestic animals. Ironically, because these wild animals live in captivity they fall under this legislation to some extent. Thus at least some measure of protection is awarded to them — although much uncertainty still exists (for example, relating to their welfare). As government does not properly enforce this legislation, it is left up to overburdened and under-resourced societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals to fill the gap.
Finally, the role of corruption and political influence cannot be underestimated in the country — but that’s a whole other can of worms.
The Opportunity?
A glimmer of hope presented itself in August 2018, when the Parliamentary Committee on Environmental Affairs organized a two-day “colloquium” about lion hunting.
The committee’s final report, released the following November, resolved that the Department of Environmental Affairs should, as a matter of urgency, initiate a policy and legislative review of captive breeding of lions for hunting and lion-bone trade with a view to putting an end to this practice. Many organizations working on this issue hailed it as a success and called it a “nail in the coffin” of the captive-lion industry in South Africa.
It wasn’t.
In March 2019 the department released a statement that it would essentially rather see the continuation of this industry through the establishment of norms and protocols — in other words, better regulation. This statement, perceived as backtracking, caused an outcry which appears to have fallen on deaf ears.
The Future
How then do we solve this problem? Ideally, efforts to protect lions (and more generally all animals) should be contained in law that is both certain and enforceable, as I wrote in my recent paper for The Forum of Animal Law Studies.
It doesn’t appear things are moving in that direction yet. Last December the department announced that it would appoint a panel to review policies relating to wildlife, particularly lions. Notably, the public call contained a requirement that members up for nomination to the panel should be “committed to and subscribe to … sustainable use.” Following this, there’s a general feeling that NGOs may be excluded from the panel for not agreeing with the principles of utilizing these animals, especially since the then-Minister of the Department herself stated during the colloquium that if the lion-breeding facilities were shut down and the trade banned, thousands of lions would have “no value.”
Under these circumstances, what else can be done? Given these animals’ apparent lack of value in the eyes of the department under whose jurisdiction they fall, there is now a need to look outside the legal system, and even beyond the country’s borders.
That’s already starting to happen. Over the past few years, various animal, wildlife and protection agencies have banded together and formed coalitions and forums to lobby for change. Their efforts focus not only on the law but the activities of national and international corporations, foreign government, universities and other entities.
In addition to NGOs, other organizations and industries have taken a stand. In one of the most public examples, many airlines have announced that they will no longer ship hunting trophies. Countries such as Australia and the Netherlands have also banned trophy imports. However, the countries that import the most lion bones, including Vietnam, Laos and other Asian countries, and trophies, such as the United States and certain European countries, have not followed suit.
At this point it’s unclear what the future holds for the captive breeding and use of lions. Hopefully the recent animal cruelty case, exposé and publicity have provided some additional visibility to the industry and the plight of lions.
The decisions we make over the next few years will undoubtedly have a national and global effect on lions — indeed, on all nonhuman and human animals. No matter what happens, the actions and inactions that allowed this industry in the first place will require us to examine our morality for many years to come.
Wild lions. Gabriel White (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Further information and resources on the lion industry:
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.
Ranchers pay just $1.35 a month to graze cattle on public lands and national forests. You couldn’t feed a cat or dog for 10 times that amount.
What animal could survive on $1.35 worth of food a month?
Certainly not your average housecat, which can eat up to $45 worth of food every 30 days.
So why, then, do cattle and other livestock in the U.S. get to graze on public lands for a month at a time for roughly the price of two cans of Fancy Feast?
The shocking thing is, ranchers now pay even less than they used to. Earlier this year the Trump administration lowered the monthly fee for grazing on public lands and national forests from $1.41 to $1.35 — the lowest price allowed by law.
The fee covers one “animal month” — 30 days of grazing — for each cow, or cow with calf. The same fee applies for every five sheep or goats.
These grazing fees — collected by the Bureau of Land Management — brought in only $16 million in 2018 (before the monthly fee was lowered). That sum doesn’t even cover the costs to administer the program or the environmental degradation caused by livestock grazing on public lands.
“BLM’s own records reveal that much of the sagebrush West is in severely degraded condition due to excessive commercial livestock grazing,” Kirsten Stade, advocacy director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a press release when the new fees were announced. “Lowering already ultra-low grazing fees only encourages more abuse of public rangelands.”
How many livestock animals are we talking about? That’s hard to say. Last year the website The Daily Pitchfork calculated that about 1.9 million “cattle equivalents” (a number that represents multiple types and ages of livestock) feed on public lands. Those numbers are hard to verify because BLM has since moved or removed all of the files that were used to compile the Daily Pitchfork’s reports, as well as related government reports from the Congressional Research Service.
BLM “page not found” retrieved May 16, 2019
The numbers also do not include so-called “trespass ranchers” like Cliven Bundy, who graze their livestock on public lands without paying required fees.
What’s the solution to this problem? Raising the fees would be a good start. PEER reports that the grazing fee on private lands in 16 western states is currently $22.60 a month — still not quite enough to feed a cat, but more in line with actual costs. Raising the fees even higher might encourage ranchers to find new ways to raise their animals instead of relying on subsidized use of public lands — and to protect fragile habitats in the process.
Most dam removals take years, often decades, of political, ecological and financial wrangling. A new book, Same River Twice, looks at three dam removals and what made them possible.
We’ve spent a century in the United States feverishly building more than 79,000 dams. Two decades ago we started to undo some of that, dismantling nearly 1,000 dams, many aging and unsafe, and restoring the rivers they had impoverished.
Despite this uptick in dam removal, there’s no blueprint for how it happens — the politics, engineering and ecology are unique to each case. Still, our experience so far can help guide future dam-removal projects. That’s the premise behind a new book, Same River Twice: The Politics of Dam Removal and River Restoration, by Peter Brewitt.
Brewitt, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Wofford College, takes a close look at three dam-removal projects in the Pacific Northwest, digging into the political, social, regulatory and scientific aspects of removal. His three historic case studies are relevant to communities across the country.
The first case study examines two dams on the Elwha River in Washington, which runs through Olympic National Park to the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the Pacific Ocean. The dams meant different things to different people: The downstream community of Port Angeles saw the dams as “places where human ingenuity had improved nature,” Brewitt writes. But environmentalists and members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe saw the devastating impact the dams had on native salmon runs and how they blocked restoration of one of the wildest rivers in the country.
Motivated by ecological and cultural concerns, removal efforts began gaining momentum in the mid-80s. By 1992 the Elwha Act, a piece of federal legislation aimed at river restoration and dam removal, was passed. But the actual removals would still take nearly two decades to achieve. Efforts were delayed by a vocal local opposition group and funding problems.
As Brewitt details, dam removals are not immune to the politics of the day, and efforts to take down the Elwha dams in the 1990s coincided with the Pacific Northwest’s bitter “spotted owl wars,” which pitted environmentalists and loggers against each other.
Even though the dam issue had nothing to do with logging or owls, “Environmental advocates who’d been trying to remove the Elwha dams found themselves facing hardened opposition that reflexively hated them,” he writes.
Despite this local culture war, the 105-foot-tall Elwha Dam and 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam finally came down in 2011 and 2014, making it the largest dam removal project in the country.
A similar situation played out in Grants Pass, Oregon, with Savage Rapids Dam, an aging structure that proved deadly to Rogue River salmon. The dam’s owner, Grants Pass Irrigation District, agreed to remove the dam in the mid-90s but faced enormous pushback from the public that delayed the project.
“The removal of Savage Rapids Dam destroyed no jobs, bankrupted no businesses, released no toxins,” writes Brewitt. “The dam’s function, to divert the waters of the Rogue River into GPID’s canals, continued as before — the district, using pumps, delivered the same amount of water to its patrons. But hundreds of people had fought furiously, for years, risking their bank accounts, their reputations, even their friendships in the process.”
A local coalition felt invested in the scenic and recreational values provided by the dam and its impoundment, Savage Rapids Lake. Controversy over the dam was enmeshed in the same growing anti-government and anti-environment sentiment that plagued the Elwha effort: In striking echoes of the modern Trump era, dam savers labeled their opposition “Nazis” or environmental terrorists, rebuffed scientific reports, and conflated dam preservation with somehow helping to “save America,” Brewitt explains. Many stoked fears that the removal of this dam would lead to the removal of other key dams in the region including on the Snake and Klamath rivers.
At the basic heart of the issue was a clash of values and beliefs. In the end, coalition building overcame ideological clashes, propelled by a federal judge ordering the stakeholders into mediation rather than issuing a decision that might further inflame conflict. The dam finally fell in 2009.
But not all dam removals are so contentious.
The removal of Marmot Dam. (Photo by Portland General Electric, CC BY-ND 2.0)
The situation with the Marmot Dam, part of the Bull Run Hydroelectric Project, on the Sandy River not far from Portland, Oregon played out differently, writes Brewitt. The dam, which at one time powered Portland’s trolley system, was owned by Portland General Electric. By the early 2000s the project produced only 1 percent of the region’s energy and was a growing economic liability as environmental regulation increased. The company made the decision to decommission the hydro project in 1999 and planned to remove Marmot Dam and the nearby smaller Little Sandy Dam shortly after.
Public concern slowed the removal, particularly local residents’ attachment to a recreational lake created by the power project, concern about how draining it might impact groundwater and the ecological impacts the released silt would have on the river. But the opposition never reached the antagonistic levels seen in Grants Pass and Port Angeles.
Marmot dam came down in 2007, and Brewitt credits the relatively short time span of the process — less than a decade from inception to removal — to the fact that the biggest obstacle wasn’t if the dam should be removed, but how. The paramount concern was how to protect wild populations of salmon from hatchery-raised stock that had been blocked from the upper reaches of the river by the dam.
While these three dam-removal projects took place in the Pacific Northwest, Brewitt contends that similar stories could also be written about dam removal on the East Coast or the Great Lakes. And by studying the detailed history of these cases, we can glean some larger points that apply elsewhere in the country or the world. Here are a few:
Dams that are of little economic value will continue to make good candidates for removal, but a source of contention will remain over who should claim financial responsibility.
Science is useful and necessary, and we need more of it — particularly in understanding how river ecology changes in the months and years following dam removal. But not everyone willingly accepts scientific reports if it doesn’t fit their point of view. So science alone won’t resolve all conflicts.
Culture plays a big role. Dams become monuments to communities, impoundments are seen as natural features on the landscape even though they’re far from it, and “beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and as such is not subject to negotiation,” Brewitt writes.
Mega-coalitions must be formed in order to garner enough public and political support and raise the necessary funds.
Ecological restoration is good for the economy, and it now employs more people than logging or coal mining.
All this means we’re likely to see more dam removals in the future.
“As national values and regional economies shift and scientific knowledge develops, ecological restoration is becoming a nationwide political priority,” Brewitt concludes.
We need more books like Same River Twice to examine what works, what doesn’t, and what we can learn from our efforts.
Major reforms are needed to the federal program that assesses flood risk, but Congress just punted — for the 11th time — on an opportunity to fix it.
It’s been the wettest 12 months on record in the continental United States. Parts of the High Plains and Midwest are still reeling from deadly, destructive and expensive spring floods — some of which have lasted for three months.
Mounting bills from natural disasters like these have prompted renewed calls to reform the National Flood Insurance Program, which is managed by Federal Emergency Management Agency and is now $20 billion in debt.
The program was established in 1968 as a way to provide flood insurance to properties with high flood risk — some of which is subsidized by taxpayers — and to use management programs to help reduce risk.
But Jessie Ritter, director of water resources and coastal policy at the National Wildlife Federation, says the program has unintentionally done the opposite over the years. By offering government-funded insurance where private companies wouldn’t, it’s made it easier to build in flood-prone areas. Local land-use decisions in some places haven’t helped, either.
Most people agree that some reform of the National Flood Insurance Program is needed. Four former FEMA administrators recently sent a letter to Congress asking for just that. But legislators — who disagree how to accomplish that goal — have been kicking the can down the road by issuing short-term extensions since the program’s last five-year authorization lapsed in September 2017.
Meanwhile homes and communities continue to flood and the insurance program’s losses keep stacking up.
“In the absence of reforms, costs in taxpayer dollars and lives lost will only get worse,” the former FEMA administrators wrote in their letter urging action.
It’s past time to make the necessary changes, Ritter says. “Congress has been unable politically to get to a place where we can meaningfully reform this program and address some of the underlying symptoms that are making disasters so costly in our country,” she says. “A perpetuation of the status quo makes no sense at a time when we are spending billions annually on relief in response to a continual string of disasters.” This spring the most destructive Mississippi River floods in 25 years resulted in thousands of lost homes, damaged businesses and flooded farms.
House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters said the most recent extension, which she co-authored, gives more time for a bipartisan bill to attempt a larger reform of the program — and that this will be the last short-term extension. Waters has been a longstanding advocate for reforming the program and sponsored 2017 legislation that cancelled $16 billion of its debt, which had climbed to $30 billion that year in the wake of Hurricane Harvey and other disasters. Further reforms promised by Congress that year did not materialize.
Mapping the Flood Line
The program’s growing debt is only part of the issue.
FEMA has been criticized for using outdated flood maps that don’t accurately portray the risk that communities face, either now or in the near future. Kathleen Schaefer, a researcher at the University of California, Davis who spent a decade working as regional engineer for FEMA producing flood insurance maps for California, says that the current process to update maps is time-consuming, bureaucratic and costly.
And the data that the agency does have isn’t granular enough to communicate property-level risk.
“One property to the next may have very different levels of risk based upon their actual elevation,” explains Ritter. Soil type and land use on each property can also affect flooding. “And right now FEMA just doesn’t have that level of sophistication in their flood maps.”
It’s not that the technology to do that doesn’t exist — North Carolina is using it — but it hasn’t been mandated nationally for FEMA.
Another issue is the accuracy of the maps. If a property falls into what FEMA determines is a 100-year floodplain, owners with federally backed mortgages are required to purchase flood insurance. “Some of those maps are super outdated, and that floodplain line in some places, because of climate change, is probably no longer accurate,” says Ritter.
The floodplain line also creates a false sense of security for those who own property outside of it and aren’t required to purchase flood insurance but may still have some level of risk. FEMA’s current system reduces flood risk to “in” or “out” — black or white. “And that’s not how risk works,” says Ritter. “Risk is shades of gray.”
Schaefer and other researchers from the UC Davis Natural Hazards Research and Mitigation Group looked at severe flooding that claimed 13 lives in the Baton Rouge area in 2016. They found that a third of the flooding was outside FEMA’s 100-year flood zone.
Extensive flooding in southeast Texas from Hurricane Harvey. (Photo by Penn State, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“Many floodplain residents and political leaders falsely believe that flooding cannot occur beyond the mapped 100-year line,” the researchers wrote. “But nationwide, roughly 25 percent of National Flood Insurance Program flood-damage claims occur outside of 100-year zones.”
Environmental Costs — and Solutions
It’s not just bad for property owners and taxpayers. There are environmental implications, too.
“Subsidizing insurance rates inadvertently encouraged development in floodplains that never should have been developed in the first place,” says Ritter. “Not only does that decrease community resilience, it impacts habitat and wildlife.” Natural floodplains are incredibly rich ecosystems that support fish, birds, plants and a host of other species.
Ritter says her organization would like to see more money from the program spent trying to prevent flood damages instead of paying billions to rebuild after a disaster — especially in areas with recurrent flooding. There’s also a lot of untapped potential to restore natural features such as wetlands and floodplain habitat, which can reduce flood risk, protect communities and create environmental benefits, she says.
“Where those types of nature-based approaches can work, they should be incentivized and given first consideration,” says Ritter. “If communities can reduce their rates by proactively reducing their risk, then it’s a win-win across the board for everyone.”
Moving Forward
Having worked at FEMA, Schaefer thinks the 50-year-old federal program, tied to the congressional rulemaking process, can’t provide the localized approach that’s currently needed.
“Any changes that you’re going to make to the program, you’d have to make on a nationwide scale,” she says. “And people on the Gulf Coast think about their flood risk differently than people in California’s Central Valley — you’re not going to be able to find the compromise that is going to get you where you need to go.”
Schaefer instead sees an opportunity for a bigger role for the private market and community flood insurance programs that would allow for more detailed modeling to assess and mitigate risk.
Climate change should be creating a sense of urgency for program reforms, says Ritter. Average temperatures are increasing and the U.S. is seeing rising sea levels in some coastal communities. It’s also getting wetter — 2018 was the sixth year in a row that average rainfall in the U.S. was more than the 20th-century average. Hurricanes are predicted to get stronger with climate change and natural disasters are already costing a fortune — $91 billion in the U.S. alone last year. Hurricanes Michael and Florence accounted for $49.4 billion of those costs and resulted in more than 100 deaths.
“There is an important link between the National Flood Insurance Program and climate resiliency,” says Ritter. Reforming the program “is a big opportunity to improve how we as a nation respond to and prepare for worsening impacts of climate change.”
A series of paintings by artists Laura and Gary Dumm seeks to challenge viewers with images of pop-culture monsters facing ecological collapse.
Sometimes the latest bad environmental news makes us want to scream like someone in a horror movie who’s just come face to face with Frankenstein’s monster.
Frankenstein’s monster isn’t too happy about the news, either.
Neither are the Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong, Chucky or other horror-movie monsters who appear in a recent set of paintings by artists Gary and Laura Dumm of Cleveland, Ohio.
The paintings — exhibited as the “Here There Be Monsters” series — depict the iconic characters surrounded by smog, pesticides, plastic pollution, oil, fracking flames and soon-to-be extinct species.
It’s a quirky, powerful series of paintings created by a duo with a long history of commenting on society through their work. Gary, 71, is a cartoonist and graphic novelist perhaps best known for his decades-long collaboration with “American Splendor” writer Harvey Pekar. Laura, 68, is a pop-art painter whose work often touches upon issues related to animals or social rights. Together they’ve worked together on numerous projects, with their environmental series being one of their most striking.
We contacted the Dumms to talk about protest art and their look at the real-life monsters affecting the environment.
What inspired you to develop this monstrous series?
Gary: We were looking for a way to do some serious collaborative works about the environment, and Laura first suggested doing a series about bugs and how certain issues like pesticide overuse were affecting them and the environment. We tried our damnedest to come up with something viable, but nothing was working well enough…until I came up with the broader idea of using classic horror monsters from movies as the main characters. Thinking about the fact that most of the monsters were failed scientific experiments made them a good match as recognizable vehicles for expressing some complex ideas. We agreed that these icons could be the “hook” to draw in viewers and also be the messengers for things that we had to say about threats to our environment. And the addition of humorous touches, to leaven the serious subject matter, has proven to be both popular and thought provoking in peoples’ reactions to this series.
Did you have any challenges in completing the series?
Laura: The only challenge is the usual one: coming up with good ideas that resonate with both of us. There’s lots of research, thinking, discussion and sketching done to get each resulting piece to say what we want in a manner that simultaneously strong while not being a diatribe. We feel that we’ve come up with some wonderfully surrealistic and humorously bizarre paintings that hopefully resonate and stay with most viewers. Unfortunately, it appears that there are still too many dire subjects left for us to tackle about the future of our planet. We won’t be short of subject matter.
What do you hope viewers will learn or experience through this work?
Gary: We hope to inform the public. When someone looks at any of the paintings they are first attracted by the monster or the color. After they stop, read the title, enjoy the monster, then they focus on the message and hopefully a conversation will follow. We had one person tell us he “doesn’t buy water in plastic anymore because of our painting.” One college-educated person had no idea what GMOs or Monsanto were. After talking about our “Scream of the Butterflies,” she did more research and became more informed.
A movement to protect quiet places is gaining steam on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, but it has to contend with the Navy’s growing fleet of “Growler” jets.
On a chilly March morning, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton and his assistant, Laura Giannone, hiked into a glade of moss-draped maples in the Hoh Rainforest of northwest Washington’s Olympic National Park. They set up a tripod topped with ultra-sensitive recording equipment to listen to the murmurings of a landscape just then awakening from winter dormancy.
Above the low rush of the nearby Hoh River, the melodic trills of songbirds rippled through a still-leafless canopy. Then, suddenly, the low thrum of a jet aircraft built in waves until it eclipsed every other sound. Within half an hour, three more jets roared overhead.
Hempton has spent more than a decade fighting for quiet in this forest — the traditional homeland of the Hoh Indian Tribe, who lived here before it was a national park and now have a reservation at the mouth of the Hoh River. In 2005, Hempton dubbed a spot deep in the Hoh “One Square Inch of Silence,” and created an eponymous foundation to raise awareness about noise pollution. But he couldn’t stop the sonic intrusions from ramped up commercial air traffic and the Navy’s growing fleet of “Growler” jets training over the Olympic Peninsula. “In just a few years, this has gone from one of the quietest places on Earth to an airshow,” he told me.
As the Hoh got noisier, rather than concede defeat, Hempton broadened his effort into a global crusade. In 2018, he launched Quiet Parks International (QPI), to certify places that are relatively noise-free, in a bid to lure quiet-seeking tourists and thereby add economic leverage to preservation efforts. For Hempton, the sounds of nature are as critical to a national park as its wildlife or scenic vistas, and as the world gets louder, the importance of protecting quiet refuges as places of rejuvenation grows. “Our culture has been so impacted by noise pollution,” he said, “that we have almost lost our ability to really listen.”
Everywhere, people are becoming more aware of the noise in the lives.
Food critics routinely carry noise meters to restaurants, towns are banning gas-powered leaf blowers, and noise-metering apps are providing crowdsourced guides to refuges of quiet in cities worldwide. As evidence mounts that the stress of noise raises the risk of heart disease and stroke, so does interest in escaping the clamor.
Hempton visited the Hoh in March with Giannone, an Evergreen State College senior majoring in audio engineering and acoustic ecology, to train her in data collection for the Quiet Parks International certification. After recording, they went over her notes. The ambient sound averaged 25 decibels (whisper-quiet) and the peak noise, from a jet, hit nearly 70 decibels (vacuum-cleaner loud). Mix in the distant hum of vehicles and a chainsaw’s whine, and the longest period of unadulterated nature was just three minutes. By contrast, a cornerstone of the Quiet Park certification will be a noise-free interval of at least 15 minutes. The Hoh met that requirement easily — until recently.
The Hoh River Valley rainforest in Olympic National Park. (Photo by James Gaither, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“This is really incredible,” Hempton said, after Giannone tallied the noise intrusions. “This is a national park, and natural quiet is on the list of protected natural resources,” along with native plants, historic sites and dark night skies, among other assets.
Noise pollution in wilderness is not about loudness per se, according to Frank Turina, a program manager with the National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division. Rather, it’s about how unnatural sounds can shatter “the sense of naturalness” essential to a wilderness experience, he said. “One of the biggest ways that civilization creeps into wilderness is through noise.”
Noise has particularly severe effects on wildlife. Research shows that the din of humanity remains pervasive in protected areas. Intrusive sound disrupts animals’ ability to navigate, avoid predators, locate food and find mates — beaching marine life, altering birdsong and causing stress that’s linked to shorter lifespans. “Obviously, we aren’t the only ones listening,” Hempton told me. “But we are the only ones who can choose to listen; wildlife listen to survive.”
Hempton hopes that the “quiet park” standards, which are still being finalized, help. Similar certifications, or “ecolabels,” have helped boost other environmental causes, including the Blue Flag beaches, created to protect fragile coastal environments, and the Dark Sky Places of the International Dark-Sky Association, which battles light pollution. Much of the work of QPI will involve cultivating an appreciation of quiet through educational programs and partnerships. For example, QPI partnered with a virtual-reality education nonprofit to create a VR tour of the Hoh to teach kids about noise pollution and ecology. Furthermore, the label will give tourists information they currently lack. Hempton suspects many will favor noise-free options. “We know from history that underlying every social movement is a widespread need for something that’s valued, but not being provided,” he said. “I feel all the ingredients for a social movement for quiet.”
Certification highlight what people value, according to Rob Smith, northwest regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, and “a quiet park label says that the sounds of nature matter.” If local communities and the managers of Olympic National Park bid for a quiet-park certification, he said, “it would give us something to point to with the Navy to say, ‘This needs protection, too.’”
A few weeks after Hempton and Giannone visited the Hoh, the Navy released a final environmental assessment for its plan to add even more Growler jet training over the Olympic Peninsula — from the current 82 jets to 118 by 2022. The Growlers, which specialize in jamming enemy radar and communications, are named for their very loud, low-frequency roar.
Residents across the Olympic Peninsula have forged the Sound Defense Alliance to fight the expansion, lobbying to spread the jets around the country rather than have them all at Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. Sherry Schaaf, a retired schoolteacher who lives in Forks, about 20 miles northwest of the Hoh Rainforest, and her boyfriend, David Youngberg, are two of the anti-noise locals. Schaaf sometimes rents her house to people visiting Olympic National Park, and she and Youngberg often chat up out-of-towners. “Many of them talk about the quiet and how beautiful it is,” Schaaf said. “But they also say, ‘We heard the planes, and it was so loud and rumbling that we couldn’t even hear ourselves talk.’ ”
Since 2000, the National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division has helped park managers across the country minimize noise by, for instance, restricting snowmobiles. But overflights are the biggest noise threat in backcountry areas, and the Federal Aviation Administration, not the Park Service, controls airspace. While the Park Service can request flight-pattern changes, as it successfully did for Rocky Mountain National Park, it can’t force the issue.
For their part, Navy officials said they work to minimize the Growlers’ disturbance by, for example, using flight simulators and other virtual training tools. But spreading out the Growler squadrons would involve costly inefficiencies and logistical complications that “would degrade the Growler community’s overall effectiveness,” according to a 2018 environmental impact statement. And Michael Welding, the Navy’s public affairs officer on Whidbey Island, pointed out that the vast majority of noise complaints are from people living near the Growler airfields, where pilots do low-altitude training, rather than from visitors to Olympic National Park.
Still, the roar of the jets is clearly audible in the park. Whether visitor numbers will fall significantly if overflights intensify is an open question: Research on whether eco-certifications influence tourists’ destination decisions is mixed. But profits aside, Vinod Sasidharan, a professor at San Diego State University who specializes in sustainable tourism, said certifications are often more about “raising awareness and setting transparent standards” within the tourism industry.
And tourism is vital for the Olympic Peninsula, said Youngberg, who spent more than two decades in the Navy, including deployment on an aircraft carrier during the Gulf War. Every year, about 3 million people visit Olympic National Park, pumping $385 million into the local economy in 2017, according to the Park Service. The park also supports more than 3,500 jobs in a region where unemployment is about double the national rate. Youngberg pointed out the decline of the region’s timber and fishing industries. “We’re a pretty poor county,” he said, “and it’s going to crush us if we lose tourism and our reputation for beauty, and peace and quiet.”
Many sports teams use wildlife and endangered species as their mascots. But our research shows that fans often don’t know their beloved mascots are endangered — or how they can be protected.
Sports team mascots serve several important purposes for colleges, universities and professional organizations. Mascots help establish brand identity and provide a point of emotional connection for fans. They symbolize attractive qualities such as strength, power, and luck. Perhaps most importantly, mascots are believed to help teams win.
But with the exception of mascots representing Native Americans, little analytical attention has been paid to the entities that sports team mascots represent — including animal species like tigers, bears and dolphins.
Recognizing the lack of research about animal sports mascots, my colleague Brian McCullough and I set out to explore the relationships sports fans have with their favorite teams’ mascots. Our work was published recently in the journal Society & Animals.
For our research, we set out to determine if there was a connection between fans’ commitment to their favorite team and their awareness of the conservation status of the species represented by that team’s mascot.
Our research shows that, unfortunately, conversations about plight of the species represented by a mascot rarely occur.
This is particularly troubling when the species has an endangered status. For example, an intercollegiate institution with a black bear as its mascot may share little information about the animal beyond the cartoonish physical representation it has produced. Rarely, if ever, do institutions make an effort to educate the public about the species, advocate for its survival, or protect the species and its natural habitat from harm, exploitation and extinction.
Photo: Tim Lewis (CC BY-SA 2.0)
In the broader context of sport, this is not surprising. Some of the earliest sporting events pitted animal against animal or animal against human for the purposes of entertainment. Many of these events still occur despite public condemnation. Bullfighting, cockfighting, animal baiting, foxhunting, dog racing and dogfighting all continue to take place under the guise of “sport.” The use of animals also continues with regard to sports equipment. The dead bodies of animals provide material to make baseball gloves, golf bags, saddles and more. Sports spectators and fans also consume meat in immense quantities while watching events at sports venues, bars and at home.
In this context, the use of nonhuman animals and their environments by humans in the sports context can be described as anthroparchic. Anthroparchy refers to the human domination, oppression and exploitation of natural resources to serve their own interests. As a result, speciesist ideologies are endemic to sport and sports organizations. This means that little to no responsibility is being taken for the livelihood and survival of the nonhuman species directly involved in the sport experience.
Photo: David Goehring (CC BY 2.0)
This is not to suggest that responsibility for these species rests with any one entity, but rather that the survival of endangered species that serve as sports team mascots should be a shared responsibility.
Drawing upon that notion of shared responsibility, a takeaway from Young’s social connection model of responsibility, we argue that any sports organization using an endangered species animal as their mascot has a degree of responsibility in ensuring its safety and survival.
This is actually an opportunity for sports organizations, as we found when investigating sport fans’ knowledge about their endangered species mascot at a Division 1 institution located in the Midwestern United States. Our research revealed that people who possessed a high level of fan identity wanted to learn more about how their endangered species mascot. In some cases these fans also wanted information about conservation of the species. Most fans were not aware of how few individuals of their mascot’s species were left in the wild, suggesting that a program focused on education could be incredibly helpful.
Unfortunately, in this particular instance, the athletic director of the school was not open to providing education to sport fans, as he felt it was too political an issue.
Despite this, as our research shows, it’s more than possible for other sport organizations and institutions to take a proactive stance and embrace their responsibility to protect the very species they’re exploiting. That’s just playing fair — and will help ensure that the species teams use as their mascots stick around for overtime and many seasons to come.
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.
