Native Renewables: Powering Up Tribal Communities

An organization focused on increasing energy independence for American Indians is helping to bring light, jobs and new opportunities to tribal communities.

There’s something amiss in the Southwest. The region has the best solar potential in the country, yet thousands still live in homes without electricity. The problem is especially acute in native communities like the Navajo Nation, which was passed over in earlier efforts to bring electricity to rural communities.

Suzanne Singer and Wahleah Johns saw this problem as an opportunity. In 2016 they started the organization Native Renewables to help bring power to homes on the Hopi reservation and the Navajo Nation. The project also works to train a local workforce to build, maintain and manage renewable energy systems.

We spoke with Singer, a mechanical engineer and a member of the Navajo tribe, about the promises and hurdles of expanding renewable energy access in native communities.

What made you decide to use your engineering skills to expand renewable energy capabilities for Native American communities?

I started thinking about it when I was a graduate student intern for the Tribal Energy Program at Sandia National Labs. Learning about the amazing things other engineers and other tribes were doing planted a seed in my mind that I could use my capabilities to potentially improve the lives of native people.

Suzanne Singer (Photo courtesy of Native Renewables)

Several years later, a chance encounter with Wahleah Johns, our executive director, led to many conversations about our similar passions and ultimately the formation of Native Renewables. We wanted to empower native people to own their power — through education and by using renewable energy — to help solve energy access problems.

One amazing thing about being involved in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) community is meeting other Native American students and professionals who are building their technical skills and looking for an outlet to use those skills in their communities.

What are some of the biggest challenges to scaling renewable energy systems in communities?

In the context of our work, there are more than 15,000 Navajo homes that lack electricity. With a reservation the size of West Virginia, a major challenge of electrification is the cost to provide grid-tied power to every home in rural areas. One potential solution is to provide access to an off-grid photovoltaic system with battery storage that is affordable for low-income families. Our goal is to provide a pathway for families to go solar without introducing a financial burden.

For larger utility-scale, commercial or community projects, the challenges can vary from tribe to tribe. There are 573 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages, and even more state-recognized tribes. One challenge can be having the initial capital funding to invest in a project. There can be some environmental hurdles and questions around how the project impacts wildlife, sacred sites and use of lands. With the success of every tribal project, there is motivation to learn from those successes to scale up the number of projects.

What’s most exciting to you about the field of renewables right now?

I’m excited to see the role it plays in tribal energy infrastructure in the next several years — particularly on the Navajo Nation, where the president and vice president recently signed a proclamation in support of renewable energy. Being in the southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, the Navajo Nation is well located to take advantage of the solar resource potential.

What opportunities are you hoping your work creates?

One of the biggest impacts we can make is educating native people of all ages about solar energy. Historically, some energy projects on the reservation involved the donation of photovoltaic systems without much explanation of how to use the system, what maintenance is needed, or what to expect after years of use. Our goal for education and outreach is to expand technical knowledge and to demystify how these systems work. With a better understanding, we hope that owners are able to use the system as intended and have them last the expected lifetime.

For families that want photovoltaic systems, we also want to reduce reliance on fossil fuels needed for lighting or electricity. With the possibility of reliable electricity, we want to improve living standards by allowing students to be able to do their homework at night and increasing the productivity of all family members. I can’t explain how heartwarming it feels to see families turn on a light switch in their homes for the very first time and be excited about the possibilities.

What can the rest of us do to ensure access to reliable and clean energy for Native American communities?

First, it’s important for people to be aware that many Native American communities are at a disadvantage when it comes to energy access, like the tens of thousands of homes on the Navajo Nation that don’t have access to grid-tied electricity or running water. Some communities, like those in Alaska, pay significantly higher costs for their energy. While there is a lot of great work internationally to remedy these issues, we want everyone to understand that lack of access is not just a problem outside our borders.

Second, investing in indigenous communities and organizations doing the groundwork is so important to growing capacity from within the communities. This includes support through donations, volunteering, sharing our work, or continuing political actions that favor renewable energy, workforce development and STEM education.

Third, projects should aim to have strong partnerships with the local communities. As stewards of the land, there is valuable knowledge that exists. Building relationships can take time and transparency, but I think this is the best path to deploying successful projects.

Protecting Jaguars Across Borders

When big cats cross from one country into another, they can fall victim to wildlife traffickers, drug cartels, highways and more emerging threats.

In early April the mutilated body of a jaguar was discovered in Mexico’s Yaxchilán Natural Monument.

Researchers investigating the death quickly concluded that the animal, which had been tracked in neighboring Guatemala since 2015, had crossed the border and fallen prey to wildlife traffickers, who may have taken its head for sale on the black market.

Deaths like this, when a jaguar crossed the border from a protected area into a different country, may have something to do with the big cats’ plummeting populations, experts worry.

“The males have to move across long distances and sometimes go outside of reserves or protected areas to buffer zones and areas populated by people,” says Rony García-Anleu, director of the biological research department for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Guatemala.

Today the wide-ranging jaguar (Panthera onca), which once lived throughout South America and north into the United States, is considered a threatened species. Conservation groups estimate there are only 15,000 wild jaguars left, mostly due to poaching and deforestation.

As García-Anleu explains, the boundaries between countries are important for humans, but they don’t exist for animals. Jaguars require vast amounts of barrier-free land and don’t care about man-marked territories. While females stay in one area, males roam across continents in search of food and mates. They crisscross borders throughout the Americas, traveling as far south as Argentina and as far north as Arizona and New Mexico in the United States.

To learn more about how borders create problems for jaguars, WCS has used camera traps to track and study 14 jaguars in Tikal National Park, a World Heritage site in Guatemala’s Petén Province. Home to thousands of animal and plant species, the park’s 7,700 square miles of forested canopy stretch into neighboring Mexico and Belize.

The study found that the big cats were constant travelers. WCS compared photos of jaguars in Tikal with photos taken by conservation groups in Mexico and Belize and discovered the organizations were often tracking the same animals. Each jaguar’s coat has unique spots that, like human fingerprints, can be used to identify individuals.

Tikal is just one example of reserves across the Americas that exist along borderlines or occupy land in multiple countries. Such reserves attract people as well as wild creatures. In Central and South America, they’ve become home to guerrilla groups, refugees, cattle ranchers and traffickers.

Human vs. Jaguar

Drug traffickers “use the jungle like a shield,” says García-Anleu, explaining that criminals set ablaze swaths of forests to clear land for private airstrips. “This is why the majority of the forest fires occur in this [border] part,” he explains, pointing on a map to the western border of Guatemala and Mexico. “Here, you can see a lot of airplanes that narco-traffickers abandon.”

Along with the dwindling numbers of jaguars and rising numbers of drug gangs, you can also find vulnerable families who sought refuge from violence in central Guatemala during the country’s decades-long brutal civil war. The 36-year-long conflict ended in 1996 with hundreds of thousands dead, 83 percent of whom were estimated to be Mayan.

Many people were legitimately relocated and given land titles in these areas, while others, both before and after the 1996 Peace Accord, settled out of desperation as Guatemala’s population grew and land ownership was awarded only to an elite few, explains WCS program director Roan McNab.

Today some settlers are “clueless about the laws and get snookered, but most are well aware that the land is a protected area,” he says. Now people settle illegally — not as war refugees but “because they are desperate or because they are land speculators.”

WCS estimates there are now 10,000 people settled in Laguna del Tigre National Park and 15,000 in Sierra del Lacandon National Park.

“Land is one of Guatemala’s most precious commodities,” says McNab. “Given the levels of corruption and the undercurrent of influence from narco-trafficking on the border with Mexico, land speculation has been, and remains, rampant in these two border parks.”

WCS has worked with one of the rural communities, Paso Caballos, since 2008, training and employing people to assist with conservation.

The organization also fostered a conservation agreement with local and national government, including a grant of $25,000 every year, half of which is invested in vital services for 1,800 people. The other half pays for patrols of a 20-square-mile buffer area outside the village.

But Paso Caballos is the only community offering to assist with conservation, possibly due to threats from criminal gangs, McNab says.

Clearing the path for sustainable development and conservation will require the government to prioritize addressing organized crime. The situation now “is chaotic, providing a clear win for the organized crime interests that prefer weak institutions and instability in the area,” he says.

All of this growth and crime has hurt the local wildlife. As more people began to occupy reserve land along the border, jaguar habitat naturally decreased, as did the animals’ prey. This created further conflict between the cats and people. Hungry jaguars, which typically avoid humans, have been known wait until nightfall to prey on calves on cattle ranches located next to reserves. To protect their livelihoods, farmers often hunt and kill the great cats.

In response to this growing threat to jaguars, WCS decided to help one rancher by using a simple remedy, an easy-to-build enclosure to safeguard calves at night. The enclosure, similar to ones used to protect livestock from lions and wolves in other parts of the world, proved successful. The farmer told his neighbors and they all started to build their own cattle enclosures, says García-Anleu.

“We did not want to take a punishment approach,” says García-Anleu, adding that sharing information and pictures of jaguars with the communities that live on or near to reserves helps to motivate people — regardless of background, nationality or ethnicity — to join and assist in conservation efforts.

A New Threat Emerges

On the northeastern side of the Guatemalan border in southern Mexico, James Callaghan, director of the Kaxil Kiuic Millsaps Biocultural Reserve in Yucatan, explains how another human-induced obstacle threatens jaguars across the continent.

There are “a lot of fatalities from highways, with cars hitting jaguars and killing them,” says Callaghan.

One of the biggest emerging threats to jaguar habitat in southern Mexico at the moment is a proposed interstate train line called the Tren Maya (Mayan Train), which would cross five southeastern Mexican states (Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Chiapas and Tabasco) and encourage domestic and international tourism. Multiple jaguar reserves, including Kaxil Kiuic and Calakmul Biosphere on the Mexico-Guatemala-Belize border, will be affected by Tren Maya.

Alongside other large infrastructure projects in Mexico, such as dams and wind farms, Tren Maya crosses Mayan communal land and will disrupt the migration paths of jaguars and their prey, degrade water sources and decrease forest area.

“We are not against development,” he says. “The big issue is, can it be sustainable? Can we create win-win situations for all of the animals, humans included?”

A Call for Cooperation

The same question of balancing human infrastructure needs with wildlife is also being asked further north, in the state of Arizona, where experts say jaguars — along with black bears and many other animals — are threatened by the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico. Part of Arizona’s border with northern Mexico is also a 1,000-square-mile reserve.

The border wall “would be ‘game over’ for both jaguar and ocelot recovery in [the U.S.],” said Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, in a statement alongside a video released this year of a rare ocelot spotted in Arizona.

Both Callaghan and García-Anleu say humans and jaguars alike can benefit from international and interstate conservation cooperation and the standardization of data.

“One of the biggest desires of [conservation] groups is to create a common database,” says Callaghan.

“We need a good monitoring system that we can share with other countries,” says García-Anleu. “This jaguar trail is a long trail, so we need to work closely with people in Belize and Mexico.” No international system like this currently exists, but several countries and organizations each have their own monitoring programs.

More importantly, for the border-crossing jaguar to thrive again in the Americas, experts say humans need to work together across state and country lines. That includes tackling a wide range of anthropocentric issues ranging from sustainable infrastructure development to the destruction of reserves by traffickers.

As Callaghan says, “To move anything forward with the conservation of the jaguar, we have to work with all people, indigenous, local and abroad, and we have to work together.”

A Dream of Mountain Gorillas Deferred

Is it worth flying halfway around the world to see an endangered species if the greenhouse emissions from flying put that species further at risk?

I may have just talked myself out of one of my dreams.

For years now I’ve held out hope of an opportunity to travel to Africa to see one of my favorite species, mountain gorillas, in the wild. This year it looked like that dream could finally come true. I have the vacation time, I have the money (well, the credit cards), and I don’t have any work or personal commitments keeping me close to home.

I could do it if I really wanted to.

But a question has been gnawing at me: Should I do it?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the big problem looming over a trip like this is its impact on the climate. Based on some quick calculations I made on a travel site, it looks like an airplane trip to Uganda would produce at least 2.13 metric tons of CO₂ emissions. That, according to the EPA website, is the equivalent of burning 2,329 pounds of coal — enough energy to charge my cellphone more than 271,000 times.

And that’s just for the trip there, using one possible flight path. It doesn’t even count the return flights, ground travel or other accommodations.

All told, any trip to see my beloved mountain gorillas could produce something in the neighborhood of 5 metric tons of planet-damaging emissions.

Damn, that’s a lot.

With climate change threatening just about everything on Earth — including mountain gorillas — does it make any sense for me to do something that would produce so much atmospheric damage, and something that could contributing to damning the very species I want to see?

We all know that ecotourism, done right, can do a lot of good. This may actually be a fair example of that. In order to see mountain gorillas I would have to buy special permits, and that money would, in theory, be funneled back into mountain gorilla conservation. Much of the other money I would spend on travel, tour guides and food would help support local economies, giving people a reason to support their local wildlife and habitats.

On top of that, as a journalist I would certainly write about my trip, hopefully inspiring others to understand the threats these animals face and the need to protect them.

But is that enough?

I know others have done it. A journalist colleague flew to China last year to see and write about giant pandas. I recently spoke to a professional conservationist who took some vacation time to fly to Asia to see snow leopards. Another friend regularly flies to remote parts of the world for important environmental journalism work.

So why can’t I do the same?

The thing is, I also know people who are not flying for the very same reasons that worry me. One of them is climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who runs a website called No Fly Climate Sci, where he and other researchers, academics and activists pledge not to fly, or to fly as little as possible, and to meet their professional commitments with less emission-heavy methods.

I reached out to Kalmus about my conundrum.

“That’s a tough one,” he told me. “It’s probably no surprise that I can’t answer for you. Personally, however, I would not fly there. I know too much about the damage that burning fossil fuel does.”

And that brings to me to my decision. Right now, I just can’t see myself making my longed-for journey. I’m not saying others’ choices to fly to these remote locations are wrong, but personally I can’t balance out the costs and benefits for myself (or even for my readers). I know we’re at a place in time where every single action we can take to reduce emissions on a personal and societal level is absolutely necessary. I already fly a few times a year for work, so adding a massive, continent-hopping journey like this would just feel wrong.

And so I defer my dream to see mountain gorillas. And beyond that, my other dream to see orangutans in Borneo. And the next dream to see rhinos in South Africa. And the next fantasies after that.

Perhaps someone can talk me back into it. They could argue that I’d use the opportunity to tell stories about conservation. Maybe they could offer information on techniques to offset the emissions from my trip, although Kalmus tells me he feels those exist more to make people feel good than to actually compensate for anything. Or they could encourage me to find out exactly how the money I would spend would directly benefit mountain gorillas and the species around them — messages and details I could convey to my readers.

Or maybe I could just take some of the money I would have spent on that trip and donate it to a nonprofit dedicated to mountain gorilla preservation — something that would help to keep these incredible species going for as long as possible.

That feels like a better dream after all, at least for now.

But damn it, I still want to see mountain gorillas.

Cigarette Butts: The Most Littered Item in the World

The most commonly found piece of trash on beaches isn’t plastic bags or straws. It’s even smaller and contains dozens of dangerous chemicals.

We’ve known for more than 50 years that smoking cigarettes comes with health hazards, but it turns out those discarded butts are harmful for the environment, too. Filtered cigarette butts, although small, contain dozens of chemicals, including arsenic and benzene. These toxins can leach into the ground or water, creating a potentially deadly situation for nearby birds, fish and other wildlife.

These tiny bits of trash are a very big problem. Each year trillions of cigarette butts are tossed out around the world. Beach cleanups continually find that cigarette butts are the most-littered item — even more than plastic bags.

Municipalities have started to take steps to curb plastic pollution, enacting bans on plastic straws, bags and other single-use items. Will similar efforts be undertaken to snuff out cigarette butt litter?

Hundreds of Planned Dams Threaten Central America’s Last Free-Flowing Rivers

An indigenous resistance is leading the fight to protect Central America's rivers from an onslaught of dams that threaten the region's rich biodiversity.

This story originally appeared in bioGraphi c, an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

If you were to somehow snorkel up the Sixaola River from the Caribbean Sea to its source in Costa Rica’s Talamanca Mountains — charging up rapids, scaling waterfalls, and gaining more than 10,000 feet of elevation in the process—you would notice an apparent paradox: The further from the ocean you ventured, the more marine fish you would encounter.

Costa Rica’s streams are dominated by amphidromous fish and shrimp, creatures that split their curious lives between fresh water and salt. Species like river gobies (Awaous banana), mountain mullet (Agonostomus monticola) and banded shrimp (Macrobrachium heterochirus) lay their eggs in downstream reaches; once hatched, their larvae wash to the ocean, where they develop until they are large enough to reenter their natal rivers and ascend to the headwaters, maturing as they travel. Navigating these vertiginous streams requires extraordinary adaptations: Gobies in the genus Sicydium, for instance, inch up sheer rock faces using pelvic fins that evolution has modified into suction cups. The climb eventually weeds out all but the hardiest migrants, animals whose stamina would impress a salmon. The Sixaola and other Costa Rican rivers thus function as what scientists refer to as “altitudinal biological corridors” — ties that bind the mountains with the ocean, the highlands with the low.

The Sixaola and its tributaries provide sustenance and spiritual passageways as well as ecological connections. As you travel upriver, you will pass through the valle de Talamanca, a lush, sloping bottomland whose Indigenous residents, the Bribri, cultivate bananas, plantains, cacao and yucca. The river sustains the Bribri, furnishing drinking water and edible fish like bobos and lisas, species of mullet. It’s also fundamental to cultural life: According to Jairo Sanchez, a Bribri member who lives in the valley, rivers serve as trails that guide “spiritual helpers” through the world, and thus deserve respect.

“Humans can’t live without water. Water can get by without us,” Sanchez says. “That’s why we should feel a little less than water. We are not bigger than it.”

Plantain transport — Locals prepare to transport plantains along the Sixaola River in southeastern Costa Rica. (Photo by David Herasimtschuk)

Not everyone, however, shares his reverence. Nearly 400 dams are currently proposed for Central America’s rivers, including several that would flood the Talamanca Valley and collectively displace 60 percent of its Native inhabitants. “We will lose land and jobs,” warns Yin David Ellis, a Bribri man in the village of Tsoki. “It’s as if I went to your house and took your home without your permission.”

For now, however, the valley’s rivers remain free-flowing. That’s thanks largely to a feisty Indigenous resistance — as well as a nonprofit that, for nearly two decades, has been assembling one of the tropical world’s most voluminous troves of biological data.

Bill McLarney first came to Costa Rica in 1967, a fish biologist from upstate New York drawn to Central America for reasons that mystified even him. Enchanted by the tropics, McLarney bought land near the Panamanian border and, in 1971, founded a small environmental nonprofit with a Honduran emigrant named Jeronimo Matute Hernández. Soon after the organization launched, Talamanca’s cacao trees, the source of the valley’s most important cash crop, succumbed to frosty pod rot, a fungal disease that destroyed 95 percent of the harvest. McLarney, Matute and their small but growing team scoured the global tropics for fruit trees that could weather Costa Rica’s climate, then set about helping local farmers establish agro-ecology systems featuring new crops like guava and sapote.

As the nonprofit, now called the Asociación ANAI, expanded, it supported a diverse array of sustainable development initiatives: establishing wildlife refuges, reforesting stream corridors, attracting ecotourists. Apprehensive about perpetuating conservation imperialism, McLarney strived to train and empower locals, remaining, where possible, in the background of his own organization. “The idea is to develop capacity in local people to the point where we are not necessary,” he says.

That strategy is epitomized by ANAI’s Stream Bio-Monitoring Program. McLarney is first and foremost a fish biologist who, in 1990, established a biological surveying project in North Carolina, scouring the Little Tennessee River watershed with teams of volunteers for creatures like the greenfin darter (Etheostoma chlorobranchium) and the spotfin chub (Erimonax monachus). In 2001, he started a similar program in Costa Rica, training locals to conduct habitat assessments, scoop up aquatic insects, and survey fish via snorkels and electrofishing (a research method that entails running direct current through the water to temporarily stun fish). The goal was to develop what McLarney calls a library, a long-term record of biodiversity that ANAI could use to plan restoration projects, educate residents and track environmental change.

“Nature is always speaking,” says Maribel Mafla, a Colombian biologist who has coordinated the program nearly since its inception. “Science is the language in which we can make the translation.”

Mafla’s most important job is recruiting the next generation of translators. ANAI teaches field-based aquatic science lessons for 32 local schools and has trained more than 20 “bioeducators,” Indigenous students well-versed in fish research and education. Take Jairo Sanchez, who, as a child, ran away crying the first time he met McLarney, a gruff white man with a drooping mustache. Today Sanchez, 34, is a skilled naturalist who’s teaching his own son, Manuel, the tricks of the stream-survey trade.

Jairo Sanchez and another Bribri man conduct a snorkel survey of one of their local streams. ( David Herasimtschuk)

“He’s like a duck and can swim well in any river,” Sanchez says of his son, “but he doesn’t have enough experience yet about nature and its richness. I always take him so he can learn and observe the various species of fish and insects.”

But biomonitoring isn’t merely an educational exercise. In fact, whether Costa Rica’s aquatic biodiversity will remain unspoiled for Manuel’s own children may depend upon it.

In the United States, the era of the mega-dam has come and gone: We largely ceased constructing concrete barriers in the 1970s, and in recent years we’ve torn out gargantuan structures on the Elwha, Penobscot and Sandy Rivers. The developing world, by contrast, is in the throes of a nascent infrastructural boom. More than 3,500 dams are currently planned or under construction worldwide, the vast majority in developing regions: Southeast Asia, South America, Africa and the Balkans. Dam advocates argue that cheap hydropower will lift poor nations out of poverty and produce crucial carbon-free electrons; opponents point to the destruction of freshwater ecosystems, the methane emissions generated by reservoirs, and the displacement of Indigenous communities.

Costa Rica and Panama are no strangers to hydropower’s dilemmas. In 2016, Costa Rica completed the Reventazón Dam, a 425-foot-high wall that permits the nation’s electric grid to run full-time on renewable energy — while simultaneously cutting off a critical migratory pathway for jaguars. And that controversy pales compared to the firestorm surrounding Panama’s Changuinola I Dam, a 325-foot-high barrier that forced the relocation of more than 1,000 Indigenous people near La Amistad World Heritage Site, a protected area that straddles Costa Rica’s border with Panama. Changuinola I, along with another large dam on the nearby Bon River, provoked the concern of the United Nations, which in 2011 asked Panama to halt construction and conduct an official environmental assessment. The request was ignored, and the dams completed.

The 325-foot-high Changuinola I Dam forced the relocation of more than 1,000 Indigenous people near La Amistad World Heritage Site, a protected area that straddles Costa Rica’s border with Panama. (Photo by David Herasimtschuk)

Changuinola I did not sate Panama’s appetite for dams: The country is still contemplating an impoundment on the Rio Teribe, one of the region’s few remaining free-flowing rivers. Although Costa Rica, which has an environmentally friendly reputation to uphold, is not as impetuous as its neighbor, it has at various times considered up to 20 potential dams on four rivers in the Sixaola watershed that would flood Indigenous territories held by the Bribri and the Cabécar. “If people have to leave their farms, where would they go?” Mafla demands. “Many families who make their income through (farming) would end up at zero.”

Aquatic ecosystems would fare just as poorly. Cut off from headwaters by concrete obstacles, runs of migrating fish would collapse, says ANAI biologist Ana Maria Arias. Even if fish ladders did manage to convey gobies, eels, and other fishes past the dams, eggs and larvae would settle out and die in slow-moving reservoirs. Shrimp, which shred and break down leaf litter, would suffer as well, short-circuiting nutrient cycles. Add it all up, says Arias, and severing the connection between mountains and sea would almost certainly doom the region’s riverine biodiversity, destroying important subsistence fisheries in the process.

A large school of creek tetras congregates at the base of a waterfall. (Photo by David Herasimtschuk)

The potential for ecological catastrophe is, in part, what makes ANAI’s bio-monitoring so crucial. Prior to the program’s creation, McLarney says, some officials claimed that steep rapids and waterfalls prevented fish and shrimp from reaching headwater streams in La Amistad. ANAI’s proof that migratory fish occupy high-elevation streams — indeed, that the aquatic fauna in many mountain creeks is composed entirely of amphidromous animals — provides what Sanchez calls a “weapon” in the Bribri’s fight against hydropower. By driving wedges between the Talamancan lowlands and La Amistad, ANAI’s work suggests that dams could eliminate more than 90 percent of the protected area’s aquatic biodiversity.

“We’re the first ones to make that information available to local conservationists and Indigenous people, to add it to their bag of arguments against the dams,” McLarney says.

Dam proposals in the Talamanca Valley presently lie dormant, staved off for now by Indigenous activists and ANAI’s evidence. Yet the peril is far from dead. As David Brower, a man who knew a thing or two about fighting infrastructure, put it, “They only have to win once — we have to win every time.” In the meantime, the region’s rivers face an array of more quotidian problems: unmanaged livestock, trash dumping, even deliberate poisoning to catch fish. Bernandina Torres, the Bribri co-manager of a small cacao farm, is particularly concerned about the deforestation of river corridors. ANAI’s riparian plantings, she says, are often promptly hacked down for firewood, heating up streams and diminishing flows. “With lots of drought, it can get too dry and the fish can have a difficult time going up,” Torres says. “I’ve seen the importance of having shade.”

If the Sixaola and other Costa Rican and Panamanian rivers are to survive these multifarious pressures, ANAI’s work will have to long succeed McLarney himself. “The process will not be complete until my job is held by somebody local,” he says. Fortunately, there is no shortage of up-and-coming candidates. There’s Marcio Bonilla, for instance, who, says McLarney, can identify fish as well as any Western scientist. Or Yin David Ellis, who enrolled in ANAI’s bioeducator program as a student and now compares entering a river to experiencing paradise. “Maybe in the future I can be a leader for the community,” David says. “Who knows what destiny brings?”

Amazing New Geckos Discovered in Myanmar — Just As Their Limestone Habitats Are Being Mined

The worldwide demand for limestone for use in cement production threatens these rock-climbing species and other amazing wildlife.

Lee Grismer and his team had a tight deadline.

Shwe Taung, one of Myanmar’s largest industrial companies, had invited Grismer and an international team of experts to one of their limestone mining sites to conduct an environmental impact assessment and survey the local wildlife. The researchers didn’t have much time to complete their mission.

“They said, ‘you can work here from morning until three o’clock, but then you have to leave because we’re going to blow it up,’” recalls Grismer, a biologist at La Sierra University. “So we start surveying and while we’re working they’re drilling these big old holes all around us and stuffing tubes full of C4 down the holes with primer core.”

The researchers didn’t find much that day because most of the animals they were looking for are more active at night, so they finished their work in mid-afternoon prepared to leave — but not before hearing a series of massive explosions behind them.

Grismer and his colleagues returned to the site that night and were both shocked and amazed at what they found.

“The whole place was just cratered,” he says. “But along the edge of these craters, we found a brand-new species of gecko.”

That was just the start.

“Our trip in 2016 only lasted 19 days and we found 21 new species.”

They’ve continued their discoveries ever since. Grismer and collaborators from Flora and Fauna International have now found and officially named 28 new gecko species, with a dozen more species descriptions waiting to be published. The rock-climbing reptiles are vibrantly colored, evolutionarily unique, and adapted to very narrow habitats — and most of them are unprotected or at risk.

That’s because of the booming global construction business. “The limestone in Myanmar is so rich in the components that are necessary to make cement that a lot of foreign and national companies are expanding their mining operations,” he says. “Myanmar has one of the most extensive limestone ecosystems in the world, and it is the least protected of any country in the world, with maybe 1 percent of it being considered sensitive.”

Dangerous Habitat

If conservation work is going to happen, it needs to happen fast.

Grismer says that many of these areas are being quarried while they conduct their surveys. “We’re collecting in one area and they’re blowing up the place right next to us,” he says.

That’s not slowing them down. “We’re getting to as many places as quickly as possible, finding and describing these new species and getting them published. That way NGOs like Fauna and Flora International and other environmental organizations in Myanmar can put these species up to be red listed and protected.”

The new gecko species, Cyrtodactylus chrysopylos. Photo courtesy of Lee Grismer

It isn’t easy work, often involving climbing steep rock faces or crawling on their bellies through caves — not unlike the geckos they find in those areas.

Nor is it exactly safe to be working in Myanmar, a country long plagued by war and violence.

“We actually have armed rebel groups and militias protecting us while we collect,” Grismer says. “I took a trip last November where we found more gecko species and we had to have armed militias go with us, but they were battling another militia on the other side of the river.”

Sometimes the researchers get caught up in the conflict.

“We were hanging out at a monastery after a survey and then a gun battle broke out nearby,” Grismer recalls. “The monks are going, ‘Guys, guys, guys, get out of here. Run, run, run, get out now.’ ” They ended up running more than a mile across a rice paddy in a thunderstorm while lightning crashed down around them.

“It’s fun to talk about now, but not while it’s happening,” he says with a sigh.

Life in the Towers

The biodiversity discovered in these expeditions — which also includes newts, toads, snakes and other species — lives in habitats few other researchers have explored.

Myanmar’s valued limestone typically manifests itself as hills, caves or even rock towers rising as high as 1,300 feet above the ground. Most of these sites are isolated from each other by vast swaths of agricultural fields.

“Picture a huge, monoculture rice paddy,” Grismer says. “All of the forest around it has been cut down, but looming out of the middle of this rice paddy is this big karst tower. It’s got native vegetation on it, and just about everything that lived in that forest prior to the rice paddy has now moved into that karst tower. So they act as sort of refugia — archaic museums that still maintain the biodiversity of these areas, albeit in fragmented form.”

That isolated nature has, in many ways, protected the species that live there.

“An animal that’s going to live on that limestone, rather than in the forest, requires a completely different body structure,” Grismer says. “It’s even more extreme if you’re going to move into a limestone cave. But the advantage here is that you have no competitors for food, and the predator abundance is greatly reduced so there’s nobody trying to eat you.”

That’s also led to a lot of evolution, which has given rise to the abundance of unique species.

“This situation allows these animals to adapt, to express their genetic constitution in different evolutionary ways, which has manifested in their body morphology for climbing and living in the dark and things like that. So what we see in these areas are a high density of limestone-adapted species that are long and spindly with big eyes and these very interesting color patterns.”

A new gecko species, Cyrtodactylus chaunghanakwaensis. Photo courtesy Lee Grismer

But that very same evolutionary path that made all of these species unique from each other also puts them uniquely at risk.

“These highly specialized species are really, really well adapted to doing what they do,” Grismer says. “In doing so, they’ve lost much of their genetic variation, so if there’s a slight perturbation in the environment they can’t handle it and they go extinct quickly.”

And as he points out, “blowing up karst towers is a little bit more than a slight perturbation.”

A Rush to Identify — and Rescue

As different as these species all are from each other, their habitats are similar enough that researchers can now arrive at a new karst tower or cave and immediately start finding new species.

“We know how to start looking and where to search because of all the errors that we’ve made in the past and gotten wrong,” Grismer says. “We see the same patterns recurring over and over in these unrelated spaces.”

That’s helping them to identify as many species as possible, as quickly as they can — and meanwhile the hunger for cement threatens wildlife not just in Myanmar, but around the world.

“Myanmar doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he says.

They’ve had successes and won some battles.

In an inspired move, Grismer and his colleagues named the first new species they found after the company that had hired them, calling it the Shwetaung bent-toed gecko (Cyrtodactylus shwetaungorum).

The discovery inspired Shwe Taung to take efforts to protect the species. “Based on our recommendation they purchased an adjacent mountain range, where we also found that species, which they set aside as a biodiversity offset so they could continue their mining operation and protect the species as the same time,” Grismer says.

The limestone caves themselves are another source of protection.

“These caves are very important places of worship for monks,” Grismer points out. “A lot of these limestone areas are Buddhist monasteries, and nobody’s going to go in and grind down a monastery. So the religious aspect of this concrete is actually, by default, protecting a lot of these endemic species.”

Karst cave — Exploring a karst cave. Photo courtesy Lee Grismer

Not enough land or species have been protected, though. That means some of Myanmar’s unique biodiversity could vanish in the blink of an eye — or the flash of a detonator.

“I lose sleep over it at night wondering what’s going to happen to these species,” Grismer admits. The sight of construction wherever he travels serves as a constant reminder of what we’re losing. “When I drive to school every morning and I see them putting in these new cement freeways, I’m thinking, how many geckos they killed, you know? What karst tower did they grind down for these new freeways? It’s all around us.”

But still the successes they’ve achieved — like with the Shwetaung bent-toed gecko — keep them moving forward.

“We’re seeing good results and we’re seeing protective measures being levied based on our work,” Grismer says. “It’s encouraging us to keep going and push harder and deeper and stronger.”

Can Buddhism Help Save the Planet?

Yes it can, argues the new book Ecodharma — but only if Buddhism saves itself first.

Does saving the planet from its current ecological crisis fall within the basic tenets and callings of Buddhism? Author David R. Loy argues that it does.

Loy should know. The noted scholar and Zen teacher co-authored the groundbreaking “Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change” 10 years ago, which has since been signed by the Dalai Lama, Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh and thousands of others. The declaration was revised and presented at the Paris climate treaty in 2015, where it called for people to accept their “individual and collective responsibility to do whatever we can” to meet targets to lower carbon emissions and save the planet from global warming.

Now Loy is back to talk about how to achieve that goal. His thought-provoking new book, Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis, starts off by presenting readers with the basic facts about climate change and the other ecological and social problems plaguing the planet. This should serve as a thorough (and thoroughly terrifying) primer for any readers who aren’t fully aware of the issues.

Loy then asks if the eco-crisis “is also a Buddhist crisis” and discusses how Buddhism may need to evolve to address the current ecological problems affecting the Earth and all who live here.

In particular Loy levies criticism at western Buddhism, where “serious money is available for some high-profile meditation centers… but apparently not for organizations that seek to promote the social and ecological implications of Buddhist teachings.” He also notes that these meditation centers tend to hold their sessions indoors, cut off from the nature and trees that the Buddha celebrated in his teachings.

So what are those Buddhist teachings, and how specifically do they fail the modern world? As Loy points out, one of the most important goals of Buddhism is the alleviation of suffering, which helps lead to enlightenment. But Loy argues that all too often the practice of alleviating suffering only addresses individual need and leaves out broader, societal issues.

“When we encounter a homeless person who is suffering, for example, we should respond compassionately,” Loy writes. “But how do we respond compassionately to a social system that is creating more homeless people? Analyzing institutions and evaluating policies involves conceptualizing in ways that traditional Buddhist practices do not encourage.” In fact many Buddhist groups actively discourage social engagement in broad-scale issues. There are thousands of Buddhist organizations in the United States, but only a handful related to environmental issues.

This, he writes, is Buddhism’s “greatest challenge ever.” None of the worldwide forms of Buddhism that have developed over the past 2,400 years ever had to deal with “an ecological catastrophe that threatened civilizational collapse and perhaps even human extinction,” so they’re not currently equipped to handle these very modern problems.

Or are they? They may not have the organizational structure and drive yet, but Loy points out that “Buddhist teachings do not tell us what to do in response to the ecological crisis, but they have a lot to say about how to do it.”

Loy devotes the most important chapter of this book to this question of “how,” focusing on Buddhist concepts such as interdependence, nonduality, the “three poisons” (greed, ill will and delusion) and the five precepts. These, he says, provide the core set of values for taking on climate change and other issues. If you believe that you should cause no harm to other beings — one interpretation of the first of the five precepts — then addressing the ecological crisis must also be part of your value system.

From a Buddhist perspective, he argues, the problem is not individuals actively evilly “but institutionalized structures of collective greed, aggression and delusion that need to be transformed.”

You’ve probably heard similar statements from environmental and social-justice groups.

As it turns out, Buddhism and the environmental movement have a lot more in common. One of the book’s appendices reprints Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Bodhi’s “Simple and Practical Steps Toward Mitigating Climate Change” (also available here), which calls for actions that “abstain from all evil” such as rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline and imposing a carbon tax. It also suggests taking paths that cultivate good, such as shifting to plant-based diets and promoting the mass production of electric and hybrid vehicles.

Bodhi ends his treatise by encouraging people to “take direct action to block climate-destroying projects, such as oil rigs, pipelines, fracking sites, etc.”

Meanwhile, Loy writes, the two groups may have something to learn from each other. Environmentalists can teach Buddhists how to be more socially engaged, while Buddhism can offer activists the tools they need to avoid “fatigue, anger, depression and burnout.” (Sign me up.)

Your mileage on Ecodharma may very well depend on how engaged you are with the principles of Buddhism, and many readers may need to meditate on Loy’s recommendations. Science-minded folks might take exception to Loy calling climate change “a spiritual crisis,” while non-Buddhists may not understand his lessons about taking the bodhisattva path, and Buddhists might feel uncomfortable with the ideas and challenges he’s presenting. Yet the book may also present an opportunity and framework for Buddhist groups and like-minded individuals to take up the mantle of social engagement and seek enlightenment for the entire planet — before it’s too late.

Missed Connections: How Climate Change Is Imperiling Pollinators

In the new book, Protecting Pollinators: How to Save the Creatures That Feed Our World, Jodi Helmer explains how small changes in temperature can disrupt the partnership between plants and pollinators.

Jodi Helmer’s new book Protecting Pollinators: How to Save the Creatures That Feed Our World is now available.

Amy Boyd never planned to study climate change.

Boyd, a biology professor at Warren Wilson College, was researching sweet shrub (Calycanthus floridus), a native woodland plant that thrives in forests near her office in Asheville, North Carolina, when she noticed something was off.

Each spring, when Boyd ventured out into the forest to check bloom time of the sweet shrub, she separated the petals and watched as sap beetles (Nitidulidae) flowed out. As their name suggests, sap beetles are known for feeding on sap, often in the wounds of trees. The plump black beetles also nosh on flowers, fruits and fermenting plant tissues and are attracted to sweet shrub for its pungent rotting-fruit fragrance. On the sweet shrub, Boyd noticed the beetles bedded down in the shelter of the reddish-brown petals before they unfurled. Sap beetles, the main pollinators of sweet shrub, populated the plant in significant numbers. “They would come out like clowns out of a clown car at a circus. You can’t even imagine how many beetles were hiding in there!” Boyd recalls.

The same thing happened season after season: Boyd went out into the woods in mid-May, opened the sweet shrub petals, and the sap beetles flowed out. A few years ago, spring temperatures spiked and the sweet shrub bloomed three weeks earlier than normal. For the first time since Boyd started studying the native plants in 2007, she parted the petals and not a single beetle spilled forth. “What we’re seeing is that when the flowers bloom later in the spring, the beetles show up,” she explains, “and when the flowers bloom earlier in the spring, the beetles aren’t there. As we look more globally at how the timing of spring is changing, climate change seems to be implicated.”

The sweet shrub and sap beetles depend on each other but use different cues to decide when to be active and when to reproduce. Thanks to climate change, they are missing each other.

It’s estimated that climate change will lead to an average temperature increase of two to four degrees Celsius before 2050. The shift might seem minimal — when summer temperatures increase from 80 to 84 degrees, we might not even notice — but the impact on pollinators could be profound.

Various models have documented patterns of climate change and how pollinators have responded. Data show that warmer temperatures have led to declines in certain pollinator populations; earlier arrivals of spring, which has advanced about 2.3 days per decade, have impacted the first flowering dates of plants and the seasonal flights of certain pollinating insects.

Over the past century, the timing has advanced four days per one degree Celsius, with bumblebees advancing their spring flight times an average of two weeks between 2001 and 2007 alone. Both plants and pollinators are also shifting their locations to adapt to warming temperatures: species have shifted an average of 6.1 kilometers (3.79 miles) closer to the poles per decade. In Southern California, 90 percent of dominant plant species made a mean elevation shift of 65 meters over the past three decades, creating mismatches between geographic distribution of interacting species. Overall, it appears that insect-pollinated

plants react more strongly to a warming climate than self-pollinating plants, and flowers with earlier bloom times are more sensitive than species that bloom later in the season.

In some cases, co-dependent species both emerge earlier and continue the relationship needed for their mutual survival — a process scientists refer to as a “linear advancement.” While some studies suggest that pollinators might be robust enough to withstand climate disruptions, a growing body of research illustrates just the opposite. Scientists cite global warming as “one of the biggest anthropogenic disturbance factors imposed on ecosystems.”

Timing is Everything

Pollinators need plants for nectar and pollen; plants need pollinators to set fruit and reproduce. These partnerships have evolved over millions of years and the timing is precise: pollinating insects mature at the exact time nectar flow begins. Both plants and pollinators depend on climate signals to start biological responses like blooming and mating (the timing of these events is called phenology), but not all species use the same cues. Some rely on temperature, while others use day length. When the cues that species depend on change, the biological processes that have evolved to coincide stop matching up. In other words, if temperature increases from historic norms before day length increases, species might emerge at different times.

Climate change is leading to earlier springs, so those species that depend on temperature cues are leafing out, blooming, mating, or laying eggs earlier while those that depend on day length still come out at the same time. Regardless of the temperature, the timing of their biological responses remains the same. These “phenological mismatches” cause problems for both species.

Long-term data collected from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory between 2009 and 2016 suggest that the snow is melting earlier, leading flowers to bloom sooner. This might seem like a boon to pollinators, but early access to the nectar buffet comes at a price. The sooner spring arrives, the higher the risk of frost or late-season droughts that kill off blooming plants. Flowers that bloom earlier might not bloom as long, causing nectar to plummet during a time when pollinators depend on it. Three species of bumblebees in the Colorado region — the black-notched bumblebee (Bombus bifarius), the yellowhead bumblebee (B. flavifrons) and the white-shouldered bumblebee (B. appositus) — are struggling to access enough nectar, which researchers attribute to climate change.

Ogilvie, the researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, commented, “There isn’t that much research on the topic, which is kind of impressive given how abundant bumblebees are, [but] we lack some long-term monitoring of insect populations.” Ogilvie and her collaborators looked at both the number of flowers blooming in a season and the number of days flowers bloomed; they found that pollinators had fewer nectar sources and those sources had become less reliable. Bumblebee populations fell when there were fewer days of blooming.

For two other species, the number of low floral days increased, suggesting climate change is having a negative effect. For the remaining species, the impacts of earlier springs are more complicated. These bees saw increases in both the number of low floral days and the number of good floral days, so it’s unclear exactly what effect climate change will have. “You would think that climate change would have a positive effect because of the longer seasons, but it really means there are more days in a season where there aren’t enough flowers for the bees,” Ogilvie explains.

The total number of flowers did not fluctuate, but climate change did make the seasons longer, so bees needed to forage over longer periods of time, putting a strain on available flowers. Bumblebee colonies face a greater risk of starvation because of more days with fewer flowers. Honeybees may be better able to adapt than other pollinators because they store nectar and pollen to feed their colonies during a dearth. By contrast, bumblebees do not store food, making them more vulnerable when less nectar and pollen are available — but Ogilvie believes that bumblebees are resilient. “Bumblebees are quite intelligent,” she says. “It’s possible that if there are fewer flowers on a particular day, they may expand the types of flowers they’re visiting. If bumblebees are able to behaviorally respond to the changes in the flowers, they might still be able to get enough food to survive.”

Dr. Robert Bullard: Lessons From 40 Years of Documenting Environmental Racism

The pioneering researcher shares what he’s learned from studying environmental racism — and the movement working for justice — for more than four decades.

This March an important new study revealed that black and Hispanic communities in the United States face a disproportionate amount of air pollution caused mostly by whites. It was the first time researchers examined not just who is harmed by pollution but also who causes it.

For Dr. Robert Bullard, the findings weren’t a surprise. A distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, he’s been gathering data on environmental racism since long before there was a term for it. As a sociologist at Texas Southern University in the late 1970s, he began researching environmental racism in Houston communities after his wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, took a case representing members of a black middle- class community who were fighting a landfill in their suburban neighborhood.

The lawsuit was the first case in the United States to use civil rights law to challenge environmental discrimination. And while a judge ultimately ruled in favor of the company running the landfill, Dr. Bullard was inspired to learn more about other communities of color facing unjust pollution burdens. Over the past 40 years, he’s become a leading expert, with 18 books on the topic. Along the way he’s been recognized as “the father of environmental justice.”

We talked with him about the Houston study that led to a career-long investigation and how much progress he thinks we’ve made since.

How did you begin researching what we know of today as environmental justice?

I got started around 1979 in Houston collecting data and doing research on a lawsuit that my wife had filed: Bean vs. Southwestern Waste Management Corp. A municipal landfill was being placed in a predominantly African-American suburban community of homeowners, and she wanted to know if it was random or part of a pattern of discrimination.

I had 10 students in my research methods class at Texas A&M University, where I was a professor. And I told my students that in this study we would be sociologists as detectives, trying to find out what happened in Houston over roughly 40 years.

Using a racial lens — an equity lens — is more common today, but in 1979 that was not something that most people thought of as part of any kind of research study or to challenge the location of these facilities.

But I think having data and having proof really goes a long way in getting people to understand that you’re not just talking about emotion, you’re not talking about getting sympathy — you’re talking about justice.

Dr. Robert Bullard is often called the “father of environmental justice.” (Photo courtesy of Texas Southern University)

What did you find in Houston, and did the results surprise you?

When we looked at the data and analyzed it, we found that 5 out of 5 of the city-owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Six out of 8 of the city-owned incinerators were in black neighborhoods. And 3 out of 4 of the privately owned landfills were in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Even though blacks only made up 25 percent of the population from the 1930s to 1978 — the period that I looked at — 82 percent of all of the waste dumped in Houston was in black neighborhoods.

It was eye-opening for me to realize what we were looking at was not random. Houston is the fourth largest city and the only major city that doesn’t have zoning — it didn’t have zoning then, and it doesn’t now — so these were decisions that were made by individuals.

Houston is in the south. It was part of the resistance to civil rights and equal protection. So when we discovered these findings, it was not surprising that this kind of discrimination existed since discrimination like this existed in terms of housing, education, employment, voting, etc. So this was another layer of structural racism.

How did it impact your own professional trajectory?

And after what we found in Houston, it made me want to know if it was just there or other places. So I expanded the study to Dallas and looked at lead smelters and found that they just happened to be located in black and brown neighborhoods.

And I then I expanded my research to Louisiana to look at what was happening along the Mississippi River corridor that’s commonly referred to today as “cancer alley” and found a disproportionate share of the chemical plants, refineries and waste facilities along the river were in black communities. Then I found the largest hazardous-waste landfill in the country was located Emelle, Alabama, which is 95 percent black. Then I went all the way to Institute, West Virginia, a town first settled by freed slaves, and there I found a Union Carbide plant that was only place in the U.S. that manufactured methyl isocyanate — the same gas that leaked from the Bhopal, India plant and killed 2,000 people.

So when I pieced together these five case studies looking at waste facilities, landfills, chemical plants and incinerators, the pattern became really clear. And that’s how I wrote Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality — the first environmental justice book.

How was it received at that time?

I finished the book in 1990 and I sent the manuscript to a lot of publishers. And I got back lots of rejection letters saying there was no such thing as environmental racism — that the environment was neutral.

This whole idea of trying to collect the data and show the relationship between race and place and the siting of dangerous facilities and pollution was not something that was easy to convince people was true. Way back in 1979 when we showed the Houston data to some of the environmental groups their response was, “Well, isn’t that where the landfills and the dumps are supposed to be?” They saw nothing wrong with it.

We showed the same data to a couple of civil rights organizations and their response was, “We don’t work on the environment. We work on housing, voting, education and employment discrimination.” It took almost two decades before the environmental community and the civil rights community converged to understand what we were talking about — that environmental racism, environmental justice is real.

When you look back at the past 40 years, how far do you think we’ve come — especially in light of the March study about pollution burdens?

The study basically reinforced what we have been saying for the last 40 years and has been documented for the last 40 years. It also reinforces that we still need to keep doing these studies.

When you start looking at the data and looking at the studies, what’s occurring is that race is still the most potent variable to explain who’s getting dumped on and who’s getting sick. African-American children, for example, are 10 times more likely to die from asthma than white children.

But it doesn’t mean that we have not made progress. In 1989 there was not a single book on environmental justice or environmental racism. In 1990 there was one. If you look today, you’ll find that there are thousands of books on this issue and it has expanded from toxics to look at transportation, housing, food security, disaster response and climate change.

We’re still getting to justice, but we’re not there yet. We have a long way to go to dismantle the institutionalized and structural racism that is so embedded in every institution in our society.

The Last Known Female Yangtze Giant Turtle Has Died — What Happens Next?

The tragic death, following an artificial insemination procedure, leaves just three turtles of the species alive.

The last known female Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) died over the weekend, pushing the world’s most endangered turtle species one step closer to extinction.

Known by her keepers at China’s Suzhou Zoo as Xiangxiang, the nine-decade-old turtle died unexpectedly on April 13 after an artificial insemination procedure, the fifth such attempt to help the animal produce offspring with Susu, the zoo’s 110-year-old male. The procedure reportedly went well, and Xiangxiang was in good health before it began, so the cause of her death is not yet known. A necropsy has been planned, and her ovarian tissue has already been collected and saved.

Her passing leaves the species with just three known individuals: Susu and two wild turtles that each live in separate lakes in Vietnam. The sex of those two wild turtles, one of which was just discovered a year ago, is not yet known.

The news of Xiangxiang death was “like being kicked in the gut,” says Rick Hudson, president of the Turtle Survival Alliance. “It’s a sad, tragic day. We’d really invested so much in that female over the years and had assembled the best repro team in the world to work with her. I can’t imagine what the team that was there went through this weekend. They tried for 12 hours to revive her.”

Yangtze giant softshell turtle — Xiangxiang basking in the sun. Photo by Emily King, courtesy Turtle Survival Alliance

Xiangxiang and Susu, who lived at Suzhou Zoo for many years, had attempted mating on their own but never produced any fertilized eggs. Attempts to artificially inseminate Xiangxiang and hopefully save the species from extinction began in 2015. That’s when researchers realized that Susu’s penis had been mangled, probably decades earlier in a fight with another male (back when there were other males to fight). The damage wasn’t severe enough to prevent mating, but it was enough to block insemination.

Getting semen from the male and inseminating the female was never an easy task.

“Male softshell turtles have one of the most complex reproductive organs we know of,” Hudson told me in 2015. “It’s a bizarre-looking appendage with multiple tentacles and it’s just a huge, horrible looking thing. It’s that way for a reason. All of those appendages and things that come off them must fit inside the female softshell turtle’s anatomy somehow.”

At the time, they didn’t know exactly how those male and female sex organs worked together. They’ve learned a lot since then by examining other softshell turtle species. Hudson says the reproductive team had just finished working with a non-endangered species of giant softshell at Singapore Zoo “and had really perfected their artificial insemination technique.”

Meanwhile, they’d also improved their techniques for extracting semen from the male and “we had just gotten our best semen sample ever,” Hudson reports.

Getting that semen in place isn’t as easy as one-two-three. “The insemination procedure took about three hours of carefully directing that semen directly into the oviduct,” he says. “We thought we had our best chance ever of success.”

Anesthetizing and artificially inseminating an animal is always risky, but Hudson says “we didn’t have any choice.” With the two captive animals unable to reproduce naturally, artificial techniques were the last and best hope of saving the species . If they’d succeeded, the female could have laid dozens of eggs and the species could have been back on track to eventual recovery. Tragically, this time it did not work out.

Hudson praises the international team of collaborative organizations and researchers who have put so much work into trying to save this species, including the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Turtle Survival Alliance’s reproductive expert, Gerald Kuchling.

“To have the fortitude and the willingness to seek out these new solutions, knowing the risk and putting yourselves in a position open for criticism…these guys are my heroes,” he says.

Now the last glimmer of hope for this species lies not at Suzhou Zoo but in the lakes of Vietnam. The first step: figuring out if these last two wild individuals are male or female.

“We’re going to try to trap one of the animals and sex it and put a radio transmitter on it so we can back and find it later,” Hudson reports. “If that’s successful, we’ll try to trap the other animal in the other lake and determine what sex it is. The Vietnamese government is calling the shots on this and we’re playing a supporting role.”

What happens if the two turtles in Vietnam end up being a male and female? “Optimally I’d like to see those two animals set up in a nice, natural lake captive-breeding situation where we could build a nesting beach and know we could find the eggs. But it’s all speculative at this point because we don’t know the sex yet.”

Right now the team needs to recover from the death of Xiangxiang.

“It’s very emotional because you put that much blood, sweat and tears into something and then have this happen,” Hudson says. “It’s really demoralizing. But we’ll persevere.”