Legume Gone: The Shocking Reasons for a Tree’s Extinction in India

It appears to have been wiped out by pollution, development and illegal mining by “sand mafias.” Will other plants soon follow?

Sand is big business — and a dangerous one.

Around the world illegal sand mining — often run by vicious “sand mafias” — has been linked to black markets, violence and even murder. It’s the shadier side of a multibillion-dollar industry with a voracious appetite for minerals used in everything from construction to electronics to toothpaste.

This criminal activity has already caused massive ecological problems wherever it occurs, and now the sand mafias appear to have contributed to something new: the extinction of a rare tree in coastal India.

According to a paper published in March in the journal Phytotaxa, an exhaustive search along the coasts of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, has failed to find any evidence of a rare legume tree known as Vachellia bolei. Researchers have declared the species is “possibly extinct.”

The paper itself blames “habitat destruction and other anthropogenic factors” for the possible extinction. That’s fairly general, but an email from the research team gets more specific.

“We strongly believe that sand mining, illegal felling of trees and conversion of coastal sand dunes for cultivation might be the major reasons for the possible extinction of Vachellia bolei,” write the authors, K. Sampath Kumar, K. Kathiresan and S. Arumugam.

The researchers conducted more than 100 surveys between 2012 and 2017 looking for Vachellia bolei and other local plants. As they write, it wasn’t always the easiest work. Illegal mining has eliminated many coastal sand dunes, causing severe coastal erosion, and “it is not even possible to survey some of the areas that are under the ‘control’ of these mafias,” they say. (They add that they never felt as though they were in danger, although they were blocked from exploring mining areas by workers who thought they were investigative journalists.)

Sand mining
Sand mining in the Kaveri River, Tamil Nadu. Photo: P Jeganathan (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The mafias aren’t alone in bearing the blame for damaging the local ecosystem. A number of other factors also threaten coastal plant species in Tamil Nadu, most notably “continuous and severe” pollution from a growing human population and rapid levels of development. “Mindless waste disposal all along the coastal habitats and into or near watercourses is rampant,” the researchers say. “We must remember that whatever pollution happening in the plains and the nearby hills ultimately reaches the estuaries and the sea. This also creates tremendous pressure on the fragile ecosystems.”

North Chennai Thermal Power Station
The North Chennai Thermal Power Station has a history of pollution. Photo: Prateek Rungta (CC BY 2.0)

Other risk factors include coral mining — which has resulted in the shrinking or submergence of several nearby islands — illegal logging for firewood and other uses, dwindling freshwater flow into estuaries, climate change and possibly invasive species.

As a result of all of these threats, Vachellia bolei is not the only plant at risk in Tamil Nadu.

“This is just tip of the iceberg, as there are many more species vanished or vanishing,” the researchers write. They estimate that about 30 percent of the estimated 2,000 plant species along the coast have now become locally threatened. In particular, they point out, the number of mangrove species known to grow in the area has fallen from 30 to just 13.

The ecological cost of losing Vachellia bolei is hard to estimate. The species was only scientifically collected three times, and although its role in the ecosystem was never studied it was probably significant. The researchers note that other legume species from the Acacia genus serve to enrich the soil, sequester carbon, stabilize dunes and provide habitat to a variety of birds and pollinator insects. The plants’ nutritious pods are eaten by humans and cattle, while the bark, flowers and other parts have been tapped for their medicinal uses.

Could Vachellia bolei still exist? The paper indicates the tree would have been hard to miss during surveys due to its large size, “prominently nerved” leaves and spines with sharp tips. Still, the researchers tell me, there’s a “most remote” change that it still clings to life in the region’s sacred groves, which have a long tradition of protecting local botanical species. The groves were not covered in this study because they’re typically located away from the coast.

Whether illegal sand mining caused, or just contributed to, this extinction, the announcement is a reminder of what else we have to lose. The authors say they hope this research will serve as an “eye-opener” to bring attention to the problems in Tamil Nadu and lead to “prioritizing and conserving many other wild threatened coastal plants of the region — and thereby preserve the diversity of dependent insects, animals and microbes — in the near future.” More broadly, conservation groups have long warned that sand mining around the world threatens biodiversity and endangered species, and without action Vachellia bolei may not be the last to disappear.

“I’m not surprised” by this extinction, says Kiran Pereira, founder of SandStories, an initiative that talks about the need to better manage the world’s consumption of sand. “I am saddened, but I would like to remain hopeful that we can turn the tide at least for the other species that depend on sand.”

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Plastic Pollution: Could We Have Solved the Problem Nearly 50 Years Ago?

What if we’d listened to the researchers who first warned us about plastic pollution in the 1970s?

There’s plastic in seabirds, in the middle of the remote Pacific Ocean, even in people. It’s a challenge to turn to the news these days without reading or hearing the latest horror story about plastic pollution. These updates seem new and striking and scary, but in reality much of the fundamental information contained in these stories is actually far from fresh.

“In the last five years there has been more published research on plastics than in the previous 50 years,” says Marcus Eriksen, 5 Gyres Institute cofounder and research director, who’s a well-known contemporary documentarian of microplastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other parts of the oceans. “In the past the public did not get adequate information, or the right information, early enough to act.”

The Revelator took a deep dive into reams of historic plastic pollution research and uncovered that much of what’s considered “new” today has actually been known by scientists for decades but was not well publicized in the popular media until recently.

That delay in spreading the news about the threats of plastic came with a major cost. In the time since scientific research on plastic pollution was first published in the early 1970s, billions of metric tons of plastic waste has been tossed in landfills and accumulated in terrestrial and marine ecosystems — and in the bodies of countless people and animals.

That scientists knew plastic pollution was a growing problem back in the Seventies begs two essential questions: What would the world be like if we had listened to early researchers much earlier? And what prevented us from listening?

Initial Findings

The earliest peer-reviewed research on plastic pollution in the oceans was based in observation of how the materials were behaving in the environment.

One paper, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies in 1972, identified the phenomenon of plastic consumer packaging washing up on isolated shorelines as an ecological concern. Written by University of Aston chemist Gerald Scott, the paper discussed the problematically slow biodegradation speed of plastic in the marine environment and outlined a “need for the acceleration of this process” to prevent further ecological harm.

That same year a scientist named Edward J. Carpenter, who now works as a professor at San Francisco State University, became the first to publish warnings about what would eventually be known as “microplastics.” While posted as a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Carpenter published two landmark 1972 papers describing “plastic particles” in the Sargasso Sea and plastic spheres used for plastic production (called nurdles) that had absorbed PCBs in waters off Southern New England and were found inside several fish caught there.

The decades following Carpenter’s initial work saw the publication of just a few dozen papers on marine plastic pollution. In fact, from the time Carpenter announced finding small plastic particles in the oceans, it took more than three decades for the scientific term “microplastic” to be published in major international publications. Today publication of these papers is much more frequent. A search of Google Scholar found 771 papers containing the words “microplastic” or “microplastics” published in 2018 alone.

Although plastic pollution wasn’t making news headlines decades ago, the research did continue, with several important early findings made. This includes the 1973 discovery of small plastic particles accumulating in the bodies of seabirds (today we know more than 90 percent of all seabirds have eaten plastic at some point in their lives) and the identification of large quantities of plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean between California and Japan (where we now know the Great Pacific Garbage Patch lies).

Plastic bird stomach
Plastic found in one dead seabird’s stomach. Photo: Carol Meteyer, USGS

Early research suggests that scientists knew from the start that the biggest issue with plastic is that it never decomposes. It only breaks up into tiny pieces that can be ingested by marine wildlife and humans, with unclear — but almost certainly negative — consequences.

One major concern is toxins, which plastic can both absorb and leach out. While this issue has gotten significant amounts of media coverage in the past few years, some of the earliest plastic pollution researchers supposed that if ingested in small amounts, “consumed particles of plastic could release sufficient amounts of PCB’s to affect seabirds,” as Stephen I. Rothstein wrote in a 1973 paper on marine plastic pollution.

It took more than a decade after publication of the papers by Carpenter and other early researchers before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States’ main ocean science agency, convened the world’s top marine scientists to discuss plastic pollution. In 1984 the agency hosted the First International Conference on Marine Debris. As former NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center deputy director Jim Coe later recalled, the goal of the conference was to discuss whether or not marine debris, specifically lost and abandoned fishing gear, “was a problem worth people’s attention.”

They quickly agreed that it was. Scientists at the conference concluded that plastic was accumulating in the natural environment and called for more research to better understand what seemed to be a growing problem. They also made the earliest call for legal action to prevent pollution from ships, which prompted Congress to fund an early version of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program called the Marine Entanglement and Research Program — which had a responsibility of facilitating research, publicizing data and minimizing the problem.

Plastic Industry Influence

During the early 1980s, plastic manufacturers continued to sell consumers on the utility of their products, specifically plastic bags, without publicly acknowledging that the materials were harming the environment. In fact, they tried to show the opposite by pushing ideas about plastic’s abilities to be reused and recycled.

“Plastic bags can be reused in more than 17 different ways, including as a wrap for frozen foods, a jogger’s wind breaker or a beach bag,” the industry-backed Plastic Grocery Sack Council told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. A New York Times story published a few years prior lightly debates whether or not consumers would prefer using plastic bags to paper, given the industry’s push to get them into grocery stores around the world — without mentioning any of the environmental consequences.

Plastic bag
Photo: John Platt (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

But the real push for plastic started even earlier. Plastics-history expert Rebecca Altman recalls how a 1950s packaging magazine editor told industry insiders that “The future of plastics is in the trash can.” Altman, who has deeply explored the human connection to plastic, says that the world had to be conditioned to carelessly consume. Prior to that time, “it was not in the culture to use something once and throw it away.” Today the items most commonly found in nature are so-called “single-use” plastics.

Promoting public narratives about litter to focus on recycling as a solution has, for a long time, “been a way to deflect attention and responsibility for product design away from industry, and has been very effective,” says Eriksen.

Despite this focus on recycling, recent research finds just 9 percent of plastics ever made have been recycled, and the large majority has either ended up in landfills or the natural environment.

A Plastic Cover-up?

Though contemporary plastic pollution scientists say they are aware of these past studies and their significance, they claim the public is not — due to insufficient news coverage of the issue and industry campaigns designed to keep them in the dark.

“Industry has aggressively defended themselves, manipulating public perception, and attacking scientists perceived as a threat,” Eriksen says.

“For both papers in Science the Society of the Plastics Industry sent a representative (twice) to Woods Hole, basically to intimidate me,” claims Carpenter, the early plastics researcher. “I was not given tenure at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and I think the plastic papers hurt my career there.”

That trade group is now known as the Plastics Industry Association. When reached for comment, it refused to confirm or deny Carpenter’s claims.

But it’s well known that certain industries have covered up the link between tobacco use and cancer, and fossil fuel use and climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Disinformation Playbook,” corporations have followed a specific pattern when attempting to block legislation and minimize their liability for problems created by their products. The plastics industry appears to have followed the same predictable plays as other deceptive businesses: blitzing scientists who speak out with “inconvenient” results or views, diverting attention from scientific recommendations (to cut plastic use), and making strong attempts to block unfavorable policies (banning or restricting plastic use), among other strategies.

Besides industry silencing of research and shaping consumers’ mindsets around waste, Altman suggests the media also played a part in the issue of global plastic pollution first being overlooked and then finally coming to the fore of global consciousness. It’s a combination of plastic pollution worsening and the nature of media changing over time, Altman says. Today social platforms have the ability for anyone, anywhere, to share what has been ignored long enough to become an enormous and visually compelling story. Just think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and all the media attention that’s gotten in the past decade, she says.

“Culturally we focus on environmental problems of a spectacular nature, the kind of havoc that happens in a bewildering instant,” she says. “It’s hard to see the slow-moving disasters or tragedies that happen over time — the drip, drip, drip — until it’s of a disastrous proportion.”

Carpenter agrees, emphasizing the gap between the scientific discovery of plastic pollution in the oceans and publicity about the problem. “I believe that the Captain Moore TED Talk on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plus Marcus Eriksen of 5 Gyres, plus a video on dying albatrosses at Midway Island, plus the graphic video of the sea turtle with the plastic straw up its nose began to finally wake up the public,” he says.

What’s the Solution?

Nonprofits like 5 Gyres are now pushing an agenda toward public awareness, corporate responsibility and the idea of a circular economy — an economy that focuses on keeping waste to a minimum while maximizing materials’ use. NGOs’ activism has also kick-started a spurt of municipal and national policies aimed at reducing use of plastic items worldwide in a bid to cut pollution. If people won’t stop using plastic items on their own accord, recent research suggests rules limiting their use of plastic items by charging a fee for its use or banning it outright is the best way to get them to stop.

The plastics industry has actively fought such legislation, and despite the publication of research calling for a reduction in plastic use it continues to sell its products while pushing recycling as the best method to reduce waste and litter. In one recent example, major beverage corporations led by the Coca-Cola Company sent a letter of opposition last year to the European Commission following the EU’s proposal to require that plastic bottles have tethered caps. Traditional bottle caps are commonly lost in the marine environment because they so easily separate from bottles. In the letter the corporations cite the efficacy of deposit return schemes and recycling in reducing plastic litter. They proposed increased efforts to “reinforce and incentivize [the] right consumer behaviors” in lieu of changing their product designs. Coca-Cola recently revealed that it produces 3 million metric tons of plastic packaging every year.

When asked about the issue of plastic pollution and how to best address it, the Plastics Industry Association sent a statement to The Revelator saying the association “believes uncollected plastics do not belong in the natural environment and that is why we partner with other associations, non-governmental organizations and intergovernmental authorities to coordinate efforts to strengthen recovery systems around the globe to prevent the loss of any plastics into the environment. Our members understand that our industry needs to be a part of the solution. We encourage education and call for the enhancement of our recycling infrastructure in order to encourage new end markets for plastics.”

But experts say product redesigns and infrastructure don’t solve the problem. “Ocean plastics are a symptom of poor upstream waste management, poor product design, as well as consumer littering behavior,” Eriksen says. “It’s a perpetuation of old narratives, where pollution is caused by consumers. Regulation of products and packaging must be fought for intensively.”

The quick solution to the problem: Use less plastic.

As Carpenter pointed out nearly five decades ago, the more plastic we make and use, the more will end up in the natural environment. As he wrote in 1972: “Increasing production of plastics, combined with present waste-disposal practices, will undoubtedly lead to increases in the concentration of these particles.”

That’s a message we should have listened to decades ago, which still needs to be heard today.

“The public did not get adequate information, or the right information, early enough to act,” says Eriksen. “Industry has been very effective at controlling the public narrative, but today they cannot control things the way they did in the past. Social media and mass communications have allowed people to organize.” And that’s starting to make a difference.

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The Coal Industry Isn’t Going Anywhere — Yet

Surprisingly, the climate-threatening industry is still in a growth mode in some parts of the world. Will that change fast enough to save the planet?

What does the future look like for coal?

If you listen to coal insiders, the next few years will still burn bright for the notoriously polluting industry. According to data analytics company GlobalData, coal production will “grow exponentially to 2022,” with more than 300 potential new coal projects launching over the next four years. GlobalData predicts annual production increases in India, Indonesia and Australia at a staggering 10.9 percent, 3.9 percent and 2.3 percent.

Although GlobalData also predicts that 100 projects will close worldwide, the company anticipates a total annual coal production increase of 1.3 percent over the next four years, which follows a modest growth of 2.8 percent in 2017 and 0.1 percent in 2018.

But other experts offer a different picture, one that paints the coal industry with a far less certain brush. They point to climate change, failing economics, bank divestment, polluting technology, legal and social challenges, the rise of cheap natural gas (another potent source of greenhouse emissions) and vast improvements in renewable energy technologies. Combined, these factors suggest the coal industry may struggle to stay viable in the coming years.

For now, though, the question seems to be: Will the coal industry fade quickly enough to make a difference for the climate — or will it keep chugging along at current levels?

“Are we on a long flat plateau, which would still mean a disaster for the planet, or are we on an escalating downward path, a path toward actually saving the planet?” asks Justin Guay, director of global climate strategy at the Sunrise Foundation, which advocates for closing coal plants and shifting financing out of fossil fuels.

Demand, Not Supply

One major problem with GlobalData’s numbers is that coal production may be rising, but coal consumption hit its apex five years ago.

“Global coal consumption peaked in 2014 and has declined marginally since then,” says Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Opening up new supply won’t increase demand, unless it results in an oversupply that forces the market price of coal down, so there is a price-driven increase in demand.”

That seems unlikely, since the price of coal has actually gone up over the past few years, Guay points out.

“That’s partially because we’re finally forcing the coal industry to pay for its externalities — mostly for air pollution, but also for water pollution and other things that they do to degrade the environment,” he says. “Once you slap these new technologies on a coal plant, their competitiveness against the newer, cleaner, cheaper stuff gets worse and worse and worse.”

Instead of looking at production, Buckley develops his own projections by looking at electricity demand, which partially drives the demand for coal. “China, India and Southeast Asia are all seeing electricity demand grow, whereas in America, Japan, Europe and Australia electricity demand has been flat at best for a decade,” he says.

Globally electricity demand increased by 27.5 percent between 2007 and 2017, according to IEEFA calculations. During that period, China’s energy demand nearly doubled, while India’s increased by 88 percent. Conversely, energy demand in the U.S. actually fell 3.4 percent during the same decade.

The reason coal has had such a growth curve in Southeast Asia is that renewable energy levels started so low in the region that countries turned to coal to keep up with demand. That’s about to change, Buckley says, as renewables have made enough inroads to the markets and are now growing at a pace that should cover all further increases in electricity demand.

“In India, in the 11 months to February 2019 net new thermal coal power additions were 20 megawatts whereas net new renewable energy installs were 6.7 gigawatts,” he says. “This is straight from the Central Electricity Authority reports — facts, not a forecast. Peak thermal coal in India is within sight. Other countries reliant on more expensive imported coal — think Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, Philippines, Malaysia — will see renewable energy tariffs fall below import coal-fired power plant tariffs over the coming five years. At that point thermal coal goes into a slow, inevitable, technology- and finance-driven terminal decline trajectory.”

Profits in the Wind

Speaking of renewable energy, the growth and improved efficiency of wind and solar power continue to chip away at coal’s market.

This comes in combination with the coal industry’s increasingly bad economic outlook.

A new report, issued March 25 by the policy group Energy Innovation, finds that 74 percent of existing coal plants in the United States actually cost more to operate in 2018 than it would cost to replace them with new wind and solar plants — often as much as 25 percent more.

According to the report, coal is at a “cost crossover” point in the United States, where the expense of operating a coal plant puts them financially at risk, compared to building new wild or solar projects.

This is a new dataset, but the trend has been clear for some time.

“If you look at the global model published by Carbon Tracker, 42 percent of existing coal units around the world are cash-flow negative today, which means essentially they’re bleeding money and not sustainable,” says Guay. “By 2030, 56 percent of all units around the world — China, India, everywhere — will be cash-flow negative. It’s pretty hard to maintain market share or let alone grow if you’re more expensive than your competitors. And that has been something that has been building for several decades as wind and solar costs have declined.”

Money Talks

As for cash, it’s becoming harder and harder for coal companies to get their hands on it.

Around the world banks and other financial institutions are pulling their money out of the coal industry. Recent research authored by IEEFA’s Buckley finds that more than 100 major financial institutions have restricted coal funding since 2013.

The pace is accelerating. At least 34 of these divestments occurred just since the start of 2018. It’s not enough to compensate for the estimated $1.9 trillion that banks have invested in fossil fuels since the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, according to a new report from the Rainforest Action Network, but it’s a sign that coal financing is quickly becoming not worth the risk.

The limited access to investment capital is already making a difference when combined with the growth in renewables, Buckley reports.

“I was on a CoalTrans India panel debate with Tata Power, the largest private company in India a couple of weeks back. The opening comment from Tata was that they will never again build another coal-fired power plant in India. Why? Bank finance is not available, and renewable energy is now materially lower cost than a domestic thermal power plant in India… There goes the biggest growth market for coal globally — puff, gone.”

Buckley expects similar shifts in China in the next two years.

“It is very telling that this month the biggest Chinese holding investment company, SDIC, announced it had completed its exit from the coal industry now, two years ahead of schedule,” he says. “Coal was the single biggest profit contributor to SDIC over the last decade. This is a first for China, and it’s unlikely to be a lone event.”

Meanwhile, Buckley says he feels that lack of finance is already delaying previously announced projects, pointing to a laundry list of announced projects that have missed their expected start dates. “I would suggest new thermal coal mine developments are being delayed because global capital is rapidly reassessing the long term viability, and Chinese, Japanese and South Korean equity is far less available than it was five years ago,” he says.

The Social License

One of the reasons banks are pulling out is, of course, the risk to the planet — which may explain why public sentiment also has something to do with it.

“The social license for the industry has completely eroded,” adds Guay from the Sunrise Foundation. “Coal is now viewed as a toxic substance. It’s whispered in the same breath as tobacco or asbestos. Nobody wants to be associated with this industry. And when that happens, it’s pretty hard to then turn around to political benefactors ask for help. So that’s been a pretty big deal.”

As that social license dissolves, announcements of new coal projects around the world are being met with outcry, protests and lawsuits.

“People are joining together to dismantle the power of the fossil-fuel industry, cut their funding, and stop fossil-fuel projects in their tracks,” says Hoda Baraka, global communications director for the activist group 350.org.

Coal’s Last Gasp — and Ours?

But even with all of these threats to the industry, the industry still presents itself as healthy.

Once again that’s nothing new, says Guay, who points out a history of industry reports projecting dramatic growth over the past few years — most of which never materialized.

In many ways, though, the coal industry really is growing, at least for now. China, for example, just approved four massive new mines in an effort to grow its economy.

“We’ll see growth in places like India, Indonesia and Southeast Asia writ large,” says Guay. “But those growth centers can’t make up for the absolute declines we’re seeing, particularly in the U.S. but also in Europe, Australia and other countries where electricity demand is flat.”

Still, that worldwide growth, the experts tell us, puts the planet in peril.

“We cannot afford to build any more coal-fired power stations,” says Baraka. “Every ton of coal burned makes an immediate contribution to the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, causing long-term and irreversible climate change. We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground now to ensure that we stay below 1.5 degrees in order to avoid catastrophic environmental breakdown.”

Everyone we interviewed for this article highlighted the absolute need to accelerate efforts to get rid of coal and disrupt this growth cycle.

“Of all the ways we generate energy, coal has just got to be the worst from start to finish, from extraction to burning and beyond,” says Guay. “It’s polluting along that entire chain. And frankly, even if climate change were not the existential threat I think it is, it would still merit disappearing from our lives based purely on air pollution concerns, water pollution concerns, and any of the other number of toxic elements that the industry spews every day. So yeah, to me it couldn’t be gone from our lives fast enough.”

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How to Keep Conservation Policies From Backfiring in a Globally Connected World

There are specific things we can do to make sure good intentions don’t just transfer environmental harms from one place to another.

For many years environmentalists have urged the public to “think globally, act locally” – meaning, consider the health of the planet, then take action in your own community.

But this approach can have unintended consequences. In a recent study, I worked with colleagues from academia, government and the nonprofit world to gather examples of fishery, forestry, agriculture and biofuel policies that appeared successful locally, but on closer inspection actually created environmental problems elsewhere, or in some cases made them worse.

For example, in my field of fisheries ecology and management, one strategy for managing the problem of bycatch — when fishermen accidentally catch non-target species, such as sharks, sea turtles and dolphins — is to reduce local catch limits. But when the United States curtailed Pacific swordfish catch between April 2001 and March 2004 to protect sea turtles, U.S. wholesalers imported more swordfish from other countries’ fleets operating in the Western and Central Pacific.

These fleets subsequently caught more swordfish to meet continued U.S. market demand. In the process, the number of sea turtles unintentionally hooked by fishermen increased by nearly 3,000 compared to before the closure.

My colleagues and I see this pattern, which scholars often call leakage or slippage, as vast and growing. To help address it, we identified ways to avoid taking actions that just displace environmental harms from one place to another rather than reducing them.

Transferring Environmental Harm

Once environmental problems are addressed locally, people often assume that they have been solved. But if demand for whatever they are trying to conserve — land, wildlife, energy resources — stays high, people will obtain them from other sources. In the process, they cause environmental damage in locations or economic sectors that are less strictly regulated.

These scenarios often shift impacts from developed nations to emerging economies. For example, a study based on data from 2001 indicated that 31 percent of timber harvest reductions in the United States were shifted to less developed nations, including tropical forest countries in South and Central America, southeast Asia, and west and central Africa as well as boreal forest countries like Russia. Companies sought timber from these countries to satisfy demand in the United States and other parts of the world created by reduced U.S. exports.

Such effects are common in forestry. One study estimates that 42 to 95 percent of logging reductions in specific countries or regions are shifted elsewhere, offsetting environmental gains. Less wealthy countries that get the additional business often benefit economically, but in many cases they have not yet developed policies to help ensure that they use their natural resources sustainably.

Slippage can also occur within countries. Seeking to promote sustainable forest management, Peru adopted long-term logging concessions starting in 2002. By 2005, however, deforestation and forest disturbance increased three- to four-fold in surrounding nonconcession areas

Similarly, in 2003 Mexico enacted a federal conservation program that compensated landowners for forest protection. Deforestation significantly increased in neighboring, non-enrolled forest tracts.

The U.S. Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of production and plant it with species that will improve its health, may also cause such effects. One study found that between 1982 and 1992, Midwest farmers retired 17.6 million acres under the Conservation Reserve Program, but simultaneously brought at least 3.7 million acres into production — possibly because cropland retirements drove up crop prices. This offset 9 percent of water and 14 percent of wind erosion reduction benefits from retiring the original croplands.

A Path Forward

In a world where markets are becoming ever more globalized, it is urgent to limit negative environmental impacts of resource use, rather than just displace them from one region or nation to another. There are a number of ways to do this.

To assess whether a policy will cause environmental harm elsewhere, it is important for natural resource managers and policymakers to understand the relationship between demand for a product and its supply. For example, when prices of hardwood species are high, more environmentally conscious consumers or those on a budget are likely to use bamboo or other materials for flooring instead.

However, some varieties have unique features or connote social status. Examples include rosewood, which is highly prized for uses that include musical instruments, and shark fin soup, a dish viewed by many Asians as a symbol of wealth and prestige. Because these materials often are rare, possessing them becomes a sign of social status, which can stimulate wealthy consumers to purchase more. Conserving them may require other actions, such as special legal protection for source species.

Governments and environmental groups can also use marketing campaigns to reduce demand for scarce resources, educate consumers about the consequences of their purchasing decisions and encourage producers to be transparent about the environmental impacts of their products. Examples of such efforts include eco labels, traceability programs and consumer guides, which have been widely implemented for forestry, fisheries and agricultural products.

Seafood watch guide
Excerpt from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch consumer guide (California version), encouraging users to choose fish from sustainably managed fisheries. Monterey Bay Aquarium, CC BY-ND

Studies show that such tools can produce real environmental benefits, such as increases in fish stocks and in support for creating protected areas. Most of these improvements appear to be made by industries that must make significant changes before they can join these programs. For example, fishermen may need to shift away from traditional but destructive fishing practices before their catch can be certified as sustainably caught. These programs often are more successful in developed countries that can finance such steps than in emerging economies.

Avoiding Conservation Illusions

Natural resource conservation policies are a fundamental tool for using Earth’s resources responsibly and sustainably. In a world where consumers can purchase products made on the opposite side of the planet, these policies must look beyond their own jurisdictions. If not, well-intentioned conservation efforts may only create the illusion of protection.The Conversation

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

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Fight Climate Change — by Loving Carbon?

The new book Burn says we need to rethink our relationship with carbon and embrace one of its solid forms — biochar.

Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper have done the unthinkable: They’ve written a love story to carbon. At a time when much of the world is working on strategies to rid ourselves of carbon to combat the climate crisis, they posit in a new book that we should be embracing it. Or at least some of it.

“Right now carbon is getting a bad rap. Carbon creates dirty energy. Carbon creates grit, grime and gunk,” they write in Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth. “Carbon should be global-warming enemy number one. But in truth, carbon is something we should all love and cherish. Carbon is life. In the right balance, carbon gives life.”

Burn book coverTheir book focuses on the merits of one particular form of carbon, known as biochar, which a charcoal-like substance. It’s formed by taking biomass, which can come from sources such as wood, plants, crop waste, manure or solid waste, which is then heated (but not completely combusted) in a furnace with little to no oxygen — a process known as pyrolysis. The result is a stable structure that locks away carbon before it would have been emitted as those materials decay or are completely burned.

While charcoal is used mainly as a fuel, biochar instead has myriad other applications, the authors say. It’s most well-known in agricultural circles as an additive to improve soil. It’s been used for thousands of years in small-scale farming, but only more recently has it been touted to help combat climate change by sequestering carbon in that very same soil.

Sequestration of carbon is crucial in helping to address the dangers of the climate crisis, where scientists say we have to not only reduce our current greenhouse gas emissions but also create “negative emissions” by removing carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases from the atmosphere. How we do that with appropriate technology is a hotly debated topic.

Bates and Draper say that biochar could play a role in reducing our carbon footprint, but they stop short of selling biochar as a silver bullet to fix the climate crisis. It’s presented as just one tool in the toolbox. Most research on biochar’s potential to aid in climate mitigation has looked at its use to sequester carbon in soil: Add it to soil, and it won’t break down for years, preventing the carbon from returning to the atmosphere. The authors say biochar can lock away carbon for hundreds or thousands of years, which is true under certain conditions. But not everyone is convinced: Studies have found that period can range from less than 10 years to hundreds or thousands of years, depending on soil type, the biomass used, the temperature at which the biochar was produced and other environmental conditions. And scientists have cautioned that not enough field research has been done to understand all those variables.

While there’s debate over how effective biochar will be at sequestering carbon in soil, Burn looks in great detail at other applications for biochar, whether on its own or blended with other products — a field with a lot of possibilities but also a lot of unknowns.

Both Bates and Draper have been studying biochar for years. Bates, a lawyer, scientist and teacher, has written previous books including The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook and The Biochar Solution. Draper is the editor of The Biochar Journal and is a board member of the International Biochar Initiative.

Other experts have expressed ample concern that the amount of land needed to scale up biochar production will cause more environmental problems than it solves and potentially result in land grabs. Bates and Draper though don’t recommend that we plant forests or fields for use in biochar production the way corn is grown for biofuels. Instead, they say, we should mine our existing waste streams and make use of things we don’t want — wood chips, coffee residue, hazelnut shells, poultry waste, rice husks… the list goes on. Turning waste into a resource is undoubtedly something we need to do more of and seems like it could work at a regional level, but it’s unclear how scalable the biochar industry would be relying on diffuse sources of biomass. Although Bates and Draper also describe their vision as a “buckshot” strategy where numerous projects of varying sizes could end up with cumulative impacts.

There’s also the added complexity that biochar, which can come from many sources, isn’t one exact thing with an industry standard that’s universally accepted. Different kinds of biomass will result in different kinds of biochar. Some may be useful for one application but not another. You don’t want to use a biochar made from a waste stream in agricultural soils, but maybe it’s better suited in toxic remediation.

While the book focuses on the climate potential of biochar, Bates and Draper spend much of their pages touting some other benefits that could result from various applications, although some don’t seem to be proven at the commercial level yet.

They write that biochar can help treat water through carbon filtration and can be used in wastewater plants or along roadsides to neutralize road salts and prevent chemicals from flowing into waterways.

Biochar has also been studied as a replacement for up to 30 percent of the sand, gravel and other aggregates used in cement production, which could help alleviate some of the environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emissions from mining those resources. Tests have also shown that bricks produced with certain kinds of biochar provide better thermal insulation, potentially helping to save on heating and cooling costs, they write.

Another area of possibility is in the paper industry. The authors write that biochar can be used to filter effluent at paper mills and then be added to paper packaging, where it would provide better insulation, protect electronic products from electro-magnetic fluxes, and absorb odor and condensation. It can even slow produce from ripening and reduce food waste, they explain.

Research is even underway to determine if biochar can help replace petroleum-based composite materials that are widely used in the manufacturing of thousands of products — everything from helicopter blades to fishing rods.

The authors describe one experiment they conducted that yielded a new composite material:

By melting extruded polystyrene foam packing peanuts and clamshell containers (C8H8) in an acetone bath — (CH3)2CO — and adding powdered biochar (C) until it stiffened, we produced a light, structural, fracture-resistant, char-tile that can be molded to any shape. It could be kitchen tiles, surfboards, iPhones, tennis rackets, boats or biodomes.

But wait: There’s more, they say. Biochar can also help clean up some of our messes, like aiding reclamation work at mine sites.

“If you put your biochar in concrete, asphalt, composites or electronics, you can then use carbonized municipal wastes and industrial wastes, which greatly expands both the available biomass supply and the available land area,” they write. “Carbon cascades convert problems into opportunities.”

How much of this is theoretical? So far, not many large-scale, commercially successful opportunities have taken off. Making biochar cost-competitive in the industries it can disrupt is still an uphill climb.

The authors say that biochar ventures are good candidates for climate funds and investment opportunities that are in search of “shovel-ready” projects. But skepticism remains among some in the scientific community.

Bates and Draper’s overall view that we need to rethink our relationship with carbon, though, isn’t bad advice.

“We have to go from spending carbon to banking it,” the authors write. “We have to reverse the way carbon is going, change direction and send it in exactly the opposite direction; down, not up. We have to flip the carbon cycle and run it backward.”

But is biochar the best way to do that? The book makes a good case for opportunities beyond sequestration in soil, but it seems we may be decades before it’s proven a robust climate solution — and by then we may all be charcoal.

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The Surprising Clue to Reducing Human-Elephant Conflict: Minerals

Asking why elephants travel to specific areas can help us to better understand and reduce human-elephant conflict.

The increasing human population and global intensification of agriculture have had a major impact on the world’s natural ecosystems. This, as we’ve seen, has had devastating effects for populations of mega-herbivores such as African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana).

Elephants and other animals with vast home ranges have found themselves forced into increasingly smaller geographical areas, often restricted by fencing or other human activities. These smaller areas are then, in turn, under huge pressures to meet the animals’ nutritional needs. This can cause animals to alter their movement patterns and search for new sources of food, potentially causing human-elephant conflict.

Due to their vast food consumption — as much as 600 pounds a day for an adult bull — and sometimes destructive behavior, African savanna elephants can rapidly cause significant damage to crops and vegetation and pose a risk to human life and infrastructure. When elephants and humans come into conflict like this, people may feel the need to retaliate. All too often in these conflicts, the elephant ultimately loses. Human-elephant conflict will only worsen in the coming years due to continued increase in the global human population to 9.7 billion by 2050, the associated growth of agriculture, and a predicted reduction of 200–300 million hectares of wildlife habitat worldwide.

To understand more about these conflicts — and how to prevent them — my colleagues and I conducted a review of existing research to understand how nutritional needs dictate the movements and migrations of elephants and other large species. Our paper was published recently in Peer J.

Our review highlights that the African savanna elephants (and other herbivores) consider nutritional drivers as a factor in their movement choices. Animals make decisions about their daily, seasonal and annual movements based on several factors, including availability of water, presence of human activity, social behavior and topography, which all play a role alongside nutrient availability.

We found there are many examples of elephants moving to purposefully consume certain minerals, including calcium, iodine, iron and zinc. These minerals are available to elephants from plants, water and soil and all contribute to meeting their yet-undetermined nutritional needs.

As we write in our paper, exploring this relationship further could yield new tools for predicting future animal movements and reducing conflict.

There’s a lot left to learn about this — field reports have shown African savanna elephants and other animals making travel choices based on what appear to be regional deficiencies in key minerals, but that requires more research. We also need to learn more about the nutritional requirements of elephants and how those needs differ between males and females, as well as between species.

But based on what we do know, research shows that correlating patterns of movement and availability of nutritional minerals could aid conservation managers to make informed decisions about elephant movement and thus help to mitigate human-elephant conflict. For example, national parks and fenced reserves often occupy marginalized land of poorer quality, so supplementing elephant diets could help to keep the animals from gravitating to more nutritious, mineral-heavy crops and human settlements.

Tools like that, along with better understanding of what elephants need in their daily and seasonal movements, can help to keep more elephants — and people — alive and out of trouble.

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.

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Environment Remains Under Siege Two Years Into the Trump Administration

President Trump promised massive deregulation — and although he’s lost some cases in court, his successes still threaten people’s health and the climate.

Two years into his presidency, Donald Trump has racked up some high-profile policy failures. There’s no wall spanning the length of our southern border, no denuclearization underway in North Korea, and ethics scandals have swamped his administration.

But when it comes to environmental policy changes, the administration’s record of success has been remarkable.

The Trump team has effectively stalled or reversed at least 78 major environmental rules, including broad national policies aimed at stemming and monitoring air and water pollution, curbing toxic substances in the environment, protecting wildlife, and conserving public lands.

The administration has taken particular aim at stopping or slowing Obama-era directives and regulations aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas pollution that’s altering the climate. Trump lifted the previous administration’s coal-mining moratorium on federal lands, rolled back its curbs on both smog-causing and climate-heating pollution from oil and gas operations, power plants, and other industrial operations, and threw into doubt standards that would improve the fuel efficiency of cars, pickup trucks and SUVs.

Trump squeeze
Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour

The administration has also moved to rescind California’s right to set its own, stricter tailpipe standards under the Clean Air Act.

“Fossil fuel producers are kind of at the heart of all this,” says Jessica Wentz, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change. The attacked regulations all have different goals, she says, but overall their effect would be to reduce fossil fuel consumption. “Producers do not want that.”

These environmental rollbacks have put the public’s health in danger, says former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, both by fulfilling the anti-regulatory wish lists of polluters and by largely cutting environmental and public health advocates out of the rulemaking process.

“I find that it’s more responsive to industry than I think is healthy for us,” says Whitman.

“Industry has a right to be heard, but that’s not the only advice or input you take. You take it from the other side as well,” she says, referring to environmental and public-health nonprofits. “I never met with anyone from industry when we had an active ongoing regulatory process that particularly affected their industry,” Whitman adds.

That stands in sharp contrast to current EPA head Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, who according to CNN has “maintained the custom of his predecessor Scott Pruitt” in meeting extensively with representatives of firms or industries regulated by the agency — while at the same time ducking nonprofits. Between April and August of 2018, CNN reported recently, Wheeler met more than 50 times with industry figures and just three times with environmental groups.

Meanwhile, at the Department of the Interior, Acting Secretary David Bernhardt is presiding over several top appointees who have used their government positions to aid the industries they are tasked with regulating, as well as former colleagues and employers at ultra-conservative lobby groups that include the National Rifle Association. Their signature effort may be an attack on the Endangered Species Act that could permanently cripple the keystone environmental law.

Bernhardt is himself a longtime agriculture and fossil fuel lobbyist who was Interior’s senior lawyer during the Bush administration. After rejoining the agency under Trump in 2017, he helped tear up Obama’s multi-stakeholder deal to protect the increasingly rare greater sage grouse, a bird whose habitat overlaps with millions of acres of fossil-fuel-rich western federal lands.

Wentz says she anticipated Trump’s attacks on “big picture” Obama-era climate regulations, such as withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate pact and weakening regulations on power plants. But the “all-out attack on every component of federal climate regulation and policy and guidance” surprised her.

“A good example would be this proposed repeal of the regulation that extended light bulb efficiency standards to a broader class of light bulbs, what were considered sort of unusual or specialized light bulbs,” says Wentz. The rule would cut energy use by an estimated 80 billion kilowatt hours annually (enough energy to power around 770,000 U.S. homes, according to advocates), save ratepayers a collective $12 billion in energy costs, and significantly reduce air pollutants that cause asthma as well as climate change.

But according to the industry publication EHS Daily Advisor, a 325-member trade group called the National Electrical Manufacturers Association intensively lobbied the Department of Energy to roll back the standards, and the agency formally proposed to do so in early February.

A Bumpy Road to the Future

Environmental groups and others have taken many of these moves to court — and made a few notable wins.

But even if the rules themselves are saved, it could still be years before the federal government regains momentum on grappling realistically with climate change, says Wentz, who runs the Climate Deregulation Tracker at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. As of Feb. 14 she has catalogued 113 anti-climate rollback actions by the administration since Trump took office.

That delay will be costly, Wentz says, because time has almost run out to avert catastrophic climate change.

“Every report we see from the IPCC and the United States’ own global climate research program [finds] that it is necessary for us to take urgent, immediate action,” says Wentz, “You have to have a very significant and rapid emissions reduction. And so the more we delay, the bigger the problem gets, and the harder it is to solve it, and the more we’re passing all of these costs to our kids and to future generations.”

It’s too soon to tell whether the new wave of hearings by House Democrats will weaken the pace of Trump rollbacks, or the administration’s attempts to give them a veneer of scientific validity. As I’ve covered in my newsletter, (de)regulation nation, the White House recently scored some legal victories of its own, including a federal court ruling in February that the government can waive dozens of environmental laws to build barriers along the Mexican border. A longtime climate change skeptic, Prof. John Christy of the University of Alabama, was recently named to a top EPA science panel. Meanwhile Wheeler, the EPA’s new administrator, is an experienced lobbyist who will likely avoid the sorts of ethics violations that brought down his former boss, Scott Pruitt, and craft rollbacks more carefully to survive court challenges.

Still, Trump’s zeal for environmental rollbacks played a part in 2018’s “blue wave” of Democratic electoral victories, notes Whitman, and will likely factor into 2020’s presidential and Senate elections for Republicans as well as Democrats.

“He controls the levers of power right now within the party, so I think it’s going to be very hard,” she says. “We’ll have to wait it out and then we’ll have to get to a point where [voters] realize that they can make the changes, and that this is something they want to do.”

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How to Inspire a Renaissance in Natural History and the Science of Conservation

Citizen scientists can use simple tools to study the DNA of plants and animals in their communities and help contribute to our understanding of the world.

Naturalists are quintessential parts of the countryside. With interests ranging from fossils to fungi, birds to buttercups, they’re the custodians of the living world. If a threatened plant declines or an invasive insect appears, more often than not it’s a humble naturalist who’s the first to sound a warning. In many ways they’re the front line in our battle to protect the natural world.

So what would happen if the naturalists themselves became an endangered species?

Sadly it’s already happening. In today’s world a large percentage of elderly naturalists are retiring and quickly vanishing from our wild places. Many academic biologists have lamented the decline of naturalists and taxonomists, with warnings from as far back as 20 years about the need to encourage future naturalists to enter the profession.

Their heirs apparent are a younger generation, many of whom are becoming increasingly disconnected from the natural world. A striking study in the journal Science found that school-age children could identify 80 percent of the Pokémon shown to them, while they only recognized 50 percent of local wildlife species.

It’s clear that a change is needed — a renaissance. But to bring about this rebirth of natural history, we must first understand how it’s undertaken today and how it might be revitalized in the future.

Natural history is a science based largely on observation. Although most naturalists know a great deal about many plants and animals, most favor a particular group over others. They spend time observing them and in doing so build a more complete picture of the lives these species lead and the roles they play in our ecosystems.

The unfortunate fact is that this sort of study is very time-consuming. Many naturalists spend countless years learning to recognize the tiny differences among particular species, and even more time sitting in the field observing them once they know how to tell them apart.

This is where the danger lies. As the number of known species goes up and the number of naturalists goes down, we inevitable end up with a natural history deficit — a shortfall wherein we know that a lot of species exist, but not much else about them.

Technology is helping to solve this problem. Since the start of the 21st century, DNA technology has become increasingly ubiquitous and correspondingly inexpensive. Biologists have used the technology for a range of purposes, but perhaps none is more vital to natural history than the practice of species barcoding.

Each organism has its own genome, made up of genes that are in turn made of DNA; this genome is essentially the “recipe book” used to build that species. However, some genes have more utility than simply constructing a species. Based on the speed at which these genes mutate over successive generation, they can also help tell us how distinct species are from each other. A number of these genes are what are called barcoding genes. Much like the unique barcode you find on a product in your local supermarket, these genes have a particular order that identifies the individual species to which they belong. So rather than sequencing the whole genome of a species, which is prohibitively expensive, we can examine these short sections of the barcoding genes to delineate and recognize species. Species barcoding allows biologists simply to screen the DNA of mystery organisms and quickly determine their identity, without having to spend years learning the subtle physical differences traditionally used to distinguish organisms.

Up until recently the technology required to undertake species barcoding has been too expensive for private citizens to own. In the past few years this has changed, as the equipment required has decreased in price and size. Now the average naturalist can assemble their own portable DNA barcoding lab for the price of a second-hand car. With this they can extract DNA, sequence it to get those precious species barcodes, and then compare them to the vast libraries of barcodes available online in global repositories like GenBank.

Species barcoding by citizen scientists could help spark the natural history renaissance we so desperately need, but what sorts of questions and issues could naturalists answer with the technology?

For one, the scats of cryptic or hard-to-catch species can be analyzed to yield their DNA, while smaller or less mobile organisms like plants and invertebrates can be analyzed whole to give their unique species barcodes. Through this a naturalist can determine the number of species in a given area simply by analyzing DNA in a back room or in the field. Going one step further, they can use these species barcodes to match the various life stages of animals like dragonflies, which start their lives as aquatic naiads in ponds and lakes before emerging as the adults we’re so familiar with. This can allow naturalists to study the lives of any species from beginning to end.

young detective
Photo: Pixabay

The diets of animals are notoriously difficult to study and require either long-term observations of feeding, detailed examination of the meagre remains in their scats, or a combination of the two. Observing feeding behavior is difficult because it’s often hard to identify all the different foods consumed by animals. Try stepping outside and trying to identify, at a distance, and to the species level, the invertebrates the little birds in your garden are preying on. It’s impossible. Identifying the contents of scats is equally challenging, and even the most accomplished naturalist cannot readily determine the contents to the level of species. Fortunately, with species barcoding it’s possible to identify, to species level, the contents of scats, and through this, the diets of those animals that produced them. This can reduce years of laborious field observation and scat examination down to a few weeks of collecting droppings, sequencing them and then matching those new sequences to known species.

Apart from diet, parasites are incredibly important to study when trying to understand an animal or plant. They are key to nutrient cycling and the regulation of some host populations. On top of this, each free-living host supports numerous parasite species that add a significant swath to Earth’s biodiversity. Naturalists trying to understand the diversity and ecology of parasites have often had a difficult time of it, owing to the great number of species, the difficulty with which they can be identified, and the often-complex nature of their life cycles. With species barcoding naturalists can begin to answer previously difficult questions like, which hosts do particular parasites live in, why are some threatened parasite species declining, and which parasites can move between domestic animals and wildlife. By examining these questions naturalists will not only help us better understand the functioning of our ecosystems but also the health of our wildlife.

Citizen scientists already contribute heavily to modern species understanding through programs such as iNaturalist, which allows users to upload photos and locations of any plants or animals they encounter. This work, which might start as a hobby and become more of a lifestyle, is becoming increasingly useful to academic scientists, as the data sets generated grow ever larger.

At this point in time we are on the edge of the democratization of DNA barcoding technology. Small devices like the iPhone-sized MinION DNA sequencer produced by Oxford Nanopore Technologies to read and record DNA sequences are already on the market for close to the same price as the latest smartphones. The first step toward the widespread use of DNA barcoding tech will likely come from community organizations and natural history societies that can leverage finds from members to set up small DNA barcoding tool kits for the collective use of members. Though increasingly cost is falling, as speed and efficiency rise we’ll see such tech spread to biology classrooms and private individuals soon enough.

Just as iNaturalist helps us determine where species live, species barcoding promises to revolutionaries the way we practice natural history. It’s cheap, accurate, and can help the next generation of naturalists answer some of the most complex questions of the living world. All that remains now is for us to start barcoding and lead the world into a natural history renaissance.

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.

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Clean Water at Risk as Trump Administration Ignores Science

Scientist Ellen Wohl explains why the administration’s decision to rewrite a key component of the Clean Water Act is scientifically unsound and dangerous.

When lawmakers passed the Clean Water Act of 1972, they agreed the federal government needed stronger regulations to protect the waterways that we rely on for drinking, fishing, recreation and supporting a healthy environment.

But our watersheds are more than just major rivers — there are wetlands, ponds and small streams, some of which only contain water part of the year. And it’s in these waterways that an ongoing, unseen conversation happens between surface and groundwater.the ask

Exactly which waters are protected under the Clean Water Act has been a source of continued litigation. Scientists say keeping our drinking water clean means protecting this vast network, but special-interest groups like developers and farmers have fought for a narrower definition.

So the Obama administration went through a long scientific review and rulemaking process to clarify the issue. The result, known as the Waters of the U.S. Rule (or the Clean Water Rule), passed in 2015 and immediately faced opposition from farmers, industry groups and some states. Two years later it became a target of the Trump administration, which has been working to repeal and replace the rule to protect fewer waters.

We talked to Dr. Ellen Wohl, a professor of geosciences at Colorado State University and an expert in river systems, about what the Trump administration’s proposed rule change would mean for the health of our waterways.

Why has it been so hard to agree on what waters are protected under the Clean Water Act?

Ellen Wohl
Colorado State scientist Ellen Wohl on the Alsek River. (Courtesy of Ellen Wohl)

There is fundamental disagreement between scientists’ and special-interest groups’ understanding of river networks. Scientific understanding indicates that tiny headwater streams, channels that do not flow continuously (such as ephemeral channels that flow only after rainfall and intermittent channels that flow only where they intersect the water table) and wetlands that are not connected on the surface with rivers are vital parts of a river network and significantly influence water quality, the rate of flow and the biological communities in larger rivers.

Consequently, scientists and environmental advocates who base their advocacy on scientific knowledge want these waters to be covered.

Special-interest groups as diverse as realtors, farmers and public utilities do not want these waters to be covered because it’s perceived as restricting development and land use by increasing the protected portions of river networks.

Why are disconnected wetlands and streams that don’t always flow so important ecologically?

For at least two reasons. First, even though surface connectivity is not continuous in time and space, these portions of a drainage basin can sometimes connect, such as during snowmelt or after rainfall. During these periods organisms can migrate for breeding or to reach new habitat, and the habitat diversity provided by ephemeral channels and disconnected wetlands is important to many aquatic and terrestrial organisms.

Salamanders are one example: Some species of salamanders spend much of their adult life in forests, but rely on ephemeral wetlands for breeding and nursery habitat.

Second, ephemeral channels and wetlands without surface connectivity can still be connected below the ground with other portions of the drainage basin. This has a big impact on water quality — underground is where microbes in the soil work to remove harmful nutrients like nitrates from water that will eventually return to the surface in perennial rivers.

What does Trump’s proposed rule change get wrong about the science of river ecology?

Pretty much everything. By ignoring the substantial body of scientific literature on headwater streams, temporary rivers (ephemeral and intermittent) and wetlands without surface connectivity, the proposed rule change ignores modern scientific understanding of how rivers and river networks function. And by doing so it will significantly reduce the effectiveness of the Clean Water Act and undermine the intent of the original law, which is to protect surface water quality in the United States.

There have been a lot of rollbacks of environmental regulation since Trump took office — how significant would this rule change be?

Rivers throughout the United States are already heavily compromised in their hydrological and ecological functions. We’ve built levees that block floodplains, channelized rivers and removed native land cover in many upland areas. By doing so we have significantly increased the magnitude of flood peaks and reduced the potential for recharge of ground water.

We have also increased the amount of nitrates entering our waterways — primarily from fertilizers and fossil-fuel emissions — and at the same time we’ve reduced the ability of rivers to remove nitrates. The effects of these changes appear most dramatically in the enormous increases in nitrate fluxes to nearshore areas and the resulting “dead zones,” such as in the Gulf of Mexico.

The reduced ecological function of rivers also appears in rates of extinction for freshwater species, which are much higher than extinction rates for terrestrial species.

How can we best protect our waterways? Was the current rule developed under the Obama administration sufficient?

The rule developed under the Obama administration reflects a long collaborative process between diverse stakeholders. As such, there were compromises made by both sides. As a river scientist, I don’t consider the current rule perfect, but it’s far better than the proposed changes.

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Can Native American Tribes Protect Their Land If They’re Not Recognized by the Federal Government?

State laws and policies in California have made some progress possible, but many tribes still lack legal recognition and struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and the environment.

Louise Miranda Ramirez has fought to protect her ancestral lands and cultural sites for most of her 60-plus-year lifetime.

“It’s so hard to save our lands and ancestors when we’re living in areas with people who make lots of money and don’t care about us,” says Ramirez, the tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen Nation, known as OCEN. Ramirez and her fellow leaders have a rough task on their hands: Their traditional lands encompass Carmel, Pebble Beach, Big Sur, Asilomar and other highly coveted — and uber-expensive — communities along the Central California coast and Coast Ranges. Preserving burial sites, protecting traditional gathering areas from development and preventing villages from being bulldozed was at one time virtually impossible, as the tribe lacks federal recognition.

Nearby, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is addressing similar issues.

“Creator gave us the responsibility to care for Mother Earth and all living things,” says Chairman Valentin Lopez. The Amah Mutsun’s lands lie within the contemporary northern Salinas Valley, portions of San Benito County and Pinnacles National Park. “We knew that we had to find a way to exert stewardship over those lands to restore our relationship with the land.” Like Ramirez’s tribe, Amah Mutsun is also not federally recognized.

California has the largest number of non-federally recognized tribes in the United States because of a “perfect storm” of policy decisions. In 1851-52, shortly after the state entered the Union, the country negotiated 18 treaties with California tribes guaranteeing lands and other rights. But the Senate refused to ratify the treaties, leaving most California Indians without land or legal protections. Only Natives who ended up on small settlements called rancherias eventually received federal recognition, which didn’t all last. Then, in the 1950s, Congress terminated 109 tribes across the country, including 41 California tribes. Some of those tribes have never been restored. Today 55 tribes in California lack federal recognition, more than 20 percent of non-recognized tribes nationwide, according to the Government Accountability Office.

How can these tribes work to preserve their ecologies, maintain biodiversity and thus keep their cultures strong?

A Painful History (and Present)

Conflict between Indigenous peoples and federal, state and local governments over tribal cultural and environmental resources have played a major role in the history of the Western Hemisphere since Europeans first stepped onto the lands of the Americas. While tribes recognized by the U.S. government have more than three centuries of federal law to back them up, non-federally recognized tribes by and large lack the legal authority to step in when a local ecology or cultural area is threatened by development or resource exploitation.

On the state level, California has had the dubious distinction of being one of the worst offenders in historically opposing the rights of both recognized and non-recognized tribes.

One of the best-known examples of how non-recognized tribes’ rights get overrun concerns the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. The 125-member tribe in Northern California has called the McCloud River home for millennia, but saw its lands taken by the federal government in the 1940s when Shasta Dam was constructed. Many of the tribe’s village, burial and cultural sites soon disappeared under the reservoir’s rising waters — and the salmon runs, upon which much of Winnemem’s culture and food supply is centered, are gone. The Bureau of Reclamation now plans to raise the dam another 18.5 feet, endangering the remaining Winnemem sites. The small tribe has been waging a public relations war for several years to call attention to its plight, including organizing the annual Run4Salmon, holding a war dance on the dam and participating in many documentaries.

However, without federal recognition, the tribe is likely to lose its remaining sites. As Chief Caleen Sisk remarked during a recent water protectors meeting, “We’ll have to take our young people out and show them where we used to have these ceremonies.”

Native environmental activists such as Kyle Powys White are concerned that the federal government still won’t engage with these tribes on a government-to-government basis.

“It’s just really become apparent over the years how so many of the solutions that tribes have been exploring don’t pertain to state-recognized tribes or unrecognized tribes,” says Whyte, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a professor at Michigan State University.

“When I was on the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science, which used to be in the Department of the Interior, we oversaw several of the climate science programs,” says Whyte. “Funding and support for tribes for climate change was coming from the federal government, yet they were really focused on federally recognized tribes.” But Whyte notes that federal agencies required to serve all communities through climate programs couldn’t wrap their minds around the need to include non-federally recognized tribes in their “portfolio.” Although officials attempted to determine how to work with unrecognized and state recognized tribes, Whyte says that “the whole idea really didn’t make sense to a lot of people in those agencies who had been trained with the idea that there’s a government-to-government relationship or trust relationship.” He says that although that concept works well in other areas, climate change isn’t one.

California Makes Progress

So where does this leave tribes like OCEN, Amah Mutsun and Winnemem? Ironically enough, the tribes have turned to the state of California, which in recent years is finally making up for its history and recognizing the environmental and cultural advantages of working with all the Indigenous peoples within its borders.

The first step came in September 2011 with an executive order issued by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. that directed all state agencies to communicate and consult with tribes, including non-recognized tribes endemic to California. The order also established a tribal advisor in the governor’s office whose duties are to oversee and implement government-to-government consultation between the administration and the tribes of California.

Then, in 2014, the California State Legislature passed A.B. 52, also known as the tribal amendments to the California Environmental Quality Act. This gave more teeth to existing Native American heritage protection laws, but more importantly it clarified what Indigenous peoples have always practiced and believed — that a project that has “a substantial adverse change in the significance of a tribal cultural resource…is a project that may have a significant effect on the environment.” A.B. 52 stipulates that such projects be evaluated as to cultural impacts, and that tribes are part of the environmental assessment process. It also outlines mitigation measures to limit or eliminate impacts on cultural areas.

State agencies such as the powerful California Coastal Commission have developed, or are in the process of developing, policies to engage with the 109 federally recognized tribes as well with the 55 California tribes and tribal communities acknowledged by the state through the Native American Heritage Commission, the agency responsible for identifying and cataloging native cultural resources.

In fact, the situation is better for tribes in California than on the federal level, says Angela Mooney D’Arcy. She’s the executive director of the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, an organization that advocates for Native peoples and helps them to build their own advocacy structures. As she points out there is no federal right for cause or enforcement to protect sacred sites, such as other laws like the Clean Water Act provide. For example, D’Arcy points out the Supreme Court decision Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association. This decision notes that, “as long as government policy or practice doesn’t prohibit an Indigenous person from thinking about religion, it’s not a constitutional violation of their First Amendment rights,” D’Arcy says. “That was the death knell for sacred site protection on the federal level.” Not even federally recognized tribes have been able to do much in off-reservation protections, D’Arcy notes, pointing to cases like the evisceration of Bears Ears National Monument.

“But things are different in California,” says D’Arcy, who’s Juaneño/Acjachemen. That’s because state law allows California’s attorney general to bring a case under the direction of the Native American Heritage Commission if a proposed project on state lands is likely to harm a cemetery or cause irreparable damage to a sacred site.

That’s how a coalition of Native peoples, local environmentalists and surfers were able to save Panhe, a 9,600-year-old Acjachemen village sited within San Onofre State Park in Orange County.

Panhe is the most sacred place to the Acjachemen people, and it’s also an important ecological site. Because it’s on state land, the tribe and its allies were able to use the state’s public resource code to reclaim Panhe for the tribe’s use for ceremonies, prayer and burial.

One of D’Arcy’s goals is to showcase how Indigenous peoples can similarly use state laws and policies to reclaim lands.

As an example, she points to the recent acquisition of 688 acres of coastal land by the Kashia Pomo Tribe. Even though the tribe is federally recognized, it’s a great model for other tribes to follow. The return resulted from a partnership between nonprofit organizations such as the Coastal Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land, the private landowner and the tribe.

“The private landowner wasn’t going to permit the Coastal Trail going through their land,” says D’Arcy, “but the tribe worked out an agreement to allow the segment to be constructed.” That willingness helps alleviate the state’s concerns that returning land to Indigenous peoples will impede others’ access to those lands, she says.

Another example: Ramirez, from the Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen Nation, notes that the California Coastal Commission recently acted in the tribe’s favor to require an oceanside landowner to create a 165-foot easement to preserve a tribal site; however, she notes that she had to work through the Big Sur Land Trust to get that easement. She says that recognized tribes are also supporting OCEN’s efforts to have human remains and artifacts returned, and the U.S. Army gave the tribe a cemetery plot on one of its bases.

From Landless Tribes to Land Stewards

“Because indigenous peoples have the millennial-old relationship with place and the responsibility to care for the place, I think you will actually see better care for the environment when land is returned to tribal control,” says D’Arcy.

Amah Mutsun and other California tribes have created land trusts — nonprofits that work with landowners and agencies to preserve important cultural and ecological sites — including Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve in Santa Cruz County, part of the California state park system. And the tribe is partnering with the National Park Service to protect and nurture traditional gathering sites within Pinnacles National Park. They even conducted a cultural burn — which is a prescribed burn that’s been practiced by Native peoples for millennia to eliminate wildfire fuels, enhance food sources, support biodiversity and groom watersheds — to support plants used in traditional basket-making.

“Our partnership with Amah Mutsun is helping us learn how tribes care for the land,” says park botanist Brent Johnson. “It’s deepened our relationship,” he adds. “Rather than sitting in an office talking, we’re outside together and looking at the lands and plants.” However, Johnson is careful to note that because Amah Mutsun isn’t federally recognized, the park service can’t call it a government-to-government relationship. Instead, it’s more of a community partnership.

Amah Mutsun garden
Tribal Elder Michael Higuera and Chairman Valentin Lopez planting at Pie Ranch. Photo by Sally Kimmel, used with permission of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band

Non-recognized tribes are still navigating choppy waters, though. D’Arcy points out that California cities and counties are the next level of government that needs education on inherent sovereignty, and federal and state policies can come into conflict when non-recognized tribes exert their rights. And progress is needed in other states, which could learn from the steps being taken in California. Further progress, the tribal leaders tell us, will be central to the development of coordinated programs to address cultural rights, preserve lands and waters, and especially to create a united response to climate change.

Whyte says he’s met many people in government or academia who have found themselves confronted by the idea that all indigenous peoples, not just federally recognized tribes, play a role in protecting their lands around the country. Moving forward means figuring out ethical ways to collaborate with a broader range of partners, including developing trustful relationships that extend beyond the standard government-to-government policies of the past.

“That’s necessary whether you’re in California, Oklahoma, the Great Lakes or the Arctic,” he says.

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