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.”

Utah’s Coal-ash Pollution: A Toxic Example of a National Problem

The majority of coal plants in the United States, like the Hunter Power Plant in Utah, are contaminating groundwater with toxic pollutants, a new report reveals.

The three smokestacks of PacifiCorp’s coal-fired Hunter Power Plant loom in the skies on a 1,000-acre site just south of Castle Dale, Utah.

Commissioned in 1978, the Hunter plant burns millions of tons of coal a year and generates more than 1,500 megawatts of electricity for use in nearby communities.

But it also generates something else: greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants, including coal ash.

Coal ash, or coal-combustion residuals, is primarily produced from burning coal in power plants. It contains mercury, arsenic and other byproducts that can pollute waterways, drinking water and the air, according to the EPA. These chemicals can cause cancer, developmental disorders and reproductive problems, says Earthjustice, a nonprofit organization that specializes in litigation of environmental issues.

While some power plants dispose of coal ash in landfills, others discharge it into nearby waterways under the plants’ discharge permits.

Those discharges add up. According to the first comprehensive national study of coal-ash pollution, 91 percent of all coal plants in the country are contaminating nearby groundwater with toxic pollutants.

The study, conducted by the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project with assistance from Earthjustice, found that the groundwater near 242 out of 265 coal-fired power plants contains unsafe levels of at least one pollutant, including heavy metals such as arsenic and lithium.

According to the report, 52 percent of the plants have unsafe levels of arsenic, which the EPA classifies as a carcinogen, and 60 percent of the plants have unsafe levels of lithium, which can cause kidney and neurological damage.

The study ranks the 10 worst polluting sites, including Utah’s Hunter, which came in at number 8. The report states that the groundwater beneath Hunter “is contaminated with lithium at concentrations 228 times safe levels and cobalt at 26 times safe levels.”

PacifiCorp acknowledged that cobalt, lithium and molybdenum all exceed groundwater-protection standards at the site in a letter sent Dec. 12, 2018, to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.

Despite this pollution and risk to local water sources, the Bureau of Land Management is currently planning to sell 200 acres of public land to PacifiCorp for an expansion of the Hunter coal-ash disposal site. PacifiCorp is the parent of Rocky Mountain Power, Utah’s largest utility company.

Ashley Soltysiak, director of Sierra Club Utah, says it would be “irresponsible” to give PacifiCorp more land to expand the existing coal-ash site.

“The fact that the Hunter coal plant is making headlines for its groundwater contamination shows that PacifiCorp is incapable of complying with safe groundwater standards,” she says. “Giving them more land to use for a new landfill would be irresponsible of the Bureau of Land Management, given that they have already caused contamination at their current landfill.”

A History of Pollution, a Risky Future

During most of the 20th century, power companies dumped coal ash into unlined landfills and waste ponds. For years the lack of a barrier between the coal ash and groundwater allowed for leaks and contamination of underground water supplies, according to the report.

After several high-profile coal-ash spills in Tennessee and North Carolina, the EPA finalized the first federal regulation for the disposal of coal ash, referred to as “Coal Ash Rule.” The 2015 regulation established groundwater monitoring requirements for coal-ash dumps and required power companies to publicize the data starting in March 2018.

The new report analyzed this data, which was collected from more than 4,600 groundwater monitoring wells located around the coal-ash dumps of 265 coal-fired power plants, representing about three quarters of the coal power plants across the United States.

The rest of the plants did not have to comply with the federal Coal Ash Rule’s groundwater monitoring requirements last year, either because they closed their ash dumps before the rule went into effect in 2015 or because they were eligible for an exemption.

The threat to groundwater comes from both coal-ash ponds and dry coal-ash landfills, according to the report. The monitoring data revealed unsafe levels of contamination at 92 percent of ash ponds and 76 percent of ash landfills.

Many of the coal-ash waste ponds around the country are poorly and unsafely designed, with less than 5 percent having waterproof liners to prevent contaminants from leaking into the groundwater, and 59 percent built beneath the water table or within five feet of it.

Among the top 10 most contaminated sites are a family ranch near San Antonio, Texas, where dozens of pollutants leaked into the groundwater from the San Miguel Power Plant.

Another top contender is the Duke Energy Allen Steam Station in Belmont, N.C., where the coal-ash dumps built underneath the water table are now leaking at least 12 pollutants including cobalt — which can cause thyroid problems and other health issues — at concentrations more than 500 times safe levels.

David Rogers, senior representative for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign in the Carolinas, says it’s the oldest active coal plant in the state.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t that surprised that the Allen plant rated so high in terms of level of pollution,” he says. “Duke has been resistant to truly protecting those communities by excavating that coal-ash site and moving the toxic mess to dry lined facilities away from our waterways and drinking sources.”

Rogers added, “The reality is that there’s no perfect way to deal with coal ash. That is why we are pushing so hard for Duke to retire all of its coal fleets, because every single day, they continue to burn coal. They are just making this problem bigger and bigger.”

Duke Energy Corp. had proposed covering some of its ponds and leaving it in place, but on April 1 North Carolina officials ordered the company to remove coal ash from all storage basins in the state.

Utah’s Coal Plants

Power companies have made some effort to reduce the impact of these sites, but local experts question how effective they would be.

Soltysiak expresses doubts about mitigation efforts applied by PacifiCorp, which include so-called research farms at the Hunter and Huntington coal plants.

“The idea is that waste water from the plant goes to a pond to water the farms so that only the plants absorb the water,” she says. “Rocky Mountain Power claims that the waste water is safe. But if that were the case, there would be no need to divert it to the farms.”

The Sierra Club and its partner, the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, filed a lawsuit in 2015 over the concern that the water at Huntington runs through the coal-ash ponds is contaminated. The most recent Huntington permit document says that this research farm practice must be phased out by 2022.

The state of Utah has a history of coal dependency and has played a critical role in contributing to the nation’s energy sector, Soltysiak says. Still, available technology and opportunities could allow the state to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy, she says.

However, there haven’t been any efforts by Utah’s legislature to curtail the coal plants. In March, Utah’s State Senate panel advanced a legislation that would fund exporting the state’s coal in an attempt to hold onto Utah’s fading coal industry.

Grace Olscamp, communications and outreach associate at the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, says Utah is “unique” in its relationship with coal because it was the first state to build a power plant close to the fuel source, rather than the city. That led to significant transportation cost savings and allowed Utah to have some of the cheapest coal power in the country.

“But Utah does face the same problem that most states with coal plants face: significant investments,” Olscamp says. “Utilities invest millions and millions of dollars into coal plants, whether it’s to keep them up-to-date with the latest regulations or simply just trying to keep them operational. If the utility were simply to shut down a coal plant, they would lose millions, so, naturally, they want to avoid that.”

Although Utah still embraces coal, it has taken some steps toward more sustainable energy. This year the Utah legislature passed a resolution that supports renewable energy development in rural parts of the state.

That’s a start, but Soltysiak say the state should take further steps.

“In recognition of Utah’s long history with coal, we need to be looking towards bringing in new, clean energy jobs and more economic diversity to sustain coal-dependent communities, re-mediating the environmental damage caused by generating coal, and dealing with the legacy pollution from burning coal,” she says.

No Response From Federal Officials, But Some States Step Up

Federal officials have not issued a formal response to the report.

An EPA spokesperson says by email that the agency is reviewing the EIP report and is unable to comment at this time.

But the spokesperson added, “It is important to note that the federal regulations for the disposal of coal-combustion residuals, finalized in 2015, require groundwater monitoring as a first step in a process to monitor and assess contaminants from [coal combustion residual] units. Where contamination is detected above specified levels, the regulations require the owner or operator of the facility to initiate measures to clean up the contamination.”

It doesn’t look like much of this problem will be cleaned up anytime soon.

President Donald Trump vowed to prop up the dying coal industry during his presidential campaign. In 2017 the Trump administration made steps toward rolling back the Clean Power Plan, a signature regulation by the Obama administration that was viewed as the most important step toward curbing carbon emissions, which come mostly from coal power plants.

Also in 2017, an appeals court granted a request from the Trump administration to stop a plan for new pollution controls at Utah’s oldest coal-fired power plants, including Hunter. The move dealt a blow to the efforts to reduce haze near Utah’s iconic national parks such as the Arches and Canyonlands.

Then, in July 2018, the EPA issued a rule that weakened consumer protections related to coal-ash management. It was the first major move under new EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist. The changes will allow some coal-ash ponds to remain open until October 2020 — a year and a half longer than originally planned.

But there is some progress on the state level. Abel Russ, senior attorney at EIP, says some states do more in terms of coal regulation than the federal rules require. For example, he says, while the federal rule doesn’t cover landfills that were closed before 2015, Georgia is regulating those landfills on a state level.

“There are some states that are good role models, and states that are bad role models,” Russ says. “But there’s a lot of room for states to grow on this issue and do a better job.”

Meanwhile Russ estimates that about half of the coal ash buried in America is in landfills and ponds that were closed before 2015, and therefore, are not regulated by the Coal Ash Rule.

“We are hoping that someone should take a note of that fact and require a more comprehensive inventory of all of the ash coal repositories across the country and require clean-up where necessary,” he says.

In its report EIP calls for companies that operate coal plants to dig up the coal ash from all dumps that are located near groundwater and put it elsewhere.

When asked whether it’s possible to clean up coal-ash contamination, Russ says it depends on the site. In some cases it moves very quickly, and in some places it moves slowly.

“You won’t be able to clean up everything,” he says. “But you really can make a difference at each site and see it in a short period of time. It might be five years, it might be 10 years, but you will see the groundwater return to normal if you take the source of pollution out of the picture.”

Why Every City Needs a Climate Storyteller

The Climate Narrative Project, started by author Jeff Biggers, is training a new generation of storytellers to help us meet the challenges of climate change.

We have a big job ahead of us. The perils of climate change will require that we craft new policies, fund robust scientific research and dramatically rethink most of the infrastructure we rely on — everything from energy to food to transportation. Supporters of a Green New Deal have insisted that we need a World War II-scale mobilization to put the brakes on a fossil-fueled economy. All of this may conjure the work of engineers, urban planners, designers, scientists and policymakers.

But that’s not all.

We’ll also need more storytellers, says Jeff Biggers.

Biggers, a journalist, playwright and historian, has written hundreds of articles and eight books, including Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition and Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland. He’s spent decades deeply entrenched in movements for environmental protection and justice, but says he still felt we were falling short on inspiring the change needed to meet the scale of the problem.

So in 2014 he started the Climate Narrative Project, which works with high schools, universities and communities across the country to fuse science and art into new narratives about climate change and solutions that cut across disciplines and media.

We spoke with Biggers about his work helping to train climate storytellers and how it’s changing communities.

Jeff Biggers reads from his book, Resistance. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

What led you to start the Climate Narrative Project?

I feel like we have a climate communication crisis as much as a climate crisis. We’re not just up against a formidable lobby of oil, gas and coal, but somehow we need to rise above the noise, the distractions and the globalization of indifference to injustice in daily life. While the majority of Americans recognize the growing problem of climate change, surveys have found that most people rarely discuss it or know how to engage in real action.

I’d seen this for years — decades — as a long-time organizer and environmental justice chronicler in coal country. We had often failed at communicating the right story to galvanize enough support to change destructive policies or hold outlaw coal companies and their bankrolled politicos accountable.

What do you hope the project will achieve?

Returning to my roots as a storyteller, I felt we needed to bring together science, humanities and the arts to come up with new climate narratives that could galvanize action and envision ways for regenerative solutions: in effect, to train a new generation of climate storytellers as community organizers.

Based in Iowa, I’ve worked with campuses, community groups and planners in towns and cities across the country, from Appalachia to the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, to rural Arizona to cities in Silicon Valley. I train with artists in all forms of storytelling — dance, theatre, film, spoken word and creative writing, visual arts and radio — in order to rethink our ways in regards to energy, food, waste, urban design and transportation, and our connection to our local history and nature. Then we envision a roadmap through stories in how we can transition toward creating carbon neutral regenerative cities and campuses — ways in which we don’t simply “do less harm,” but actively repair the environmental destruction and replenish our natural resources.

A mural from the “Ecopolis” project in Gary, Indiana. (Photo by Jeff Biggers)

What has been one of your favorite stories that have been told through the project?

In one of my Climate Narrative Project cadres an art student in Iowa stunned her audience by displaying a beautiful painting she had done of the prairies, spoke about her interviews at Standing Rock and then poured black oil all over it to demonstrate the impact of pipeline bursts.

What kind of effects have you seen on audiences or in the communities where these projects have been created?

On a community level, I was blown away by the “Ecopolis” stories composed by a group of urban farmers, rappers, educators, jazz musicians and artists in Gary, Indiana, who brought together an unusually diverse coalition — mainstream environmental groups, churches, teachers and students, business people, city administrators — with their vision of the famous steel city as a carbon neutral regenerative city, walking us through a decade of transitions to green-enterprise zones and circular economies, soil mitigation and local food, rewilding and reconnecting to the extraordinary and biodiverse Indiana dunes.

After the multimedia theatre event at a solar-powered church, the local groups sat down for a lunch hosted by urban farmers and began the process of making this vision a reality.

On a campus level, I’ve been amazed by the Climate Stories Collaborative at Appalachian State University, which followed up our Climate Narrative Project training as an initiative to bring together 23 different academic units and departments to engage students and faculty with story-driven climate actions.

Climate Narrative Project at the Harker School in San Jose, California. (Photo provided by The Harker School)

As climate impacts increase and this issue hits home for more and more people, do you think art and culture will play a bigger role in how we understand the problem and craft the solutions we want to see?

If we’re serious about engaging communities for climate action and environmental justice, storytelling and all the arts must play a key role in our initiatives. I tell every organization, community and interfaith group, school and university, and especially town and city councils: Don’t waste your resources on bureaucrats, task forces and commissioning studies that no one reads — invest in the arts, storytellers, writers, playwrights and farmers.

Every organization, campus and city should have a Climate Storyteller-in-Residence, a Climate Artist-in-Residence, a Farmer-in-Residence, etc. If we are to meet the urgency of climate action, we must be training brigades of climate storytellers to astonish, inspire and organize our communities.

‘This Is Not Like a Fence in a Backyard’ — Trump’s Border Wall vs. Wildlife

How will the border wall affect jaguars, bears, birds, bees and other wildlife? And what other solutions might work better without harming people or ecosystems?

How will Trump’s border wall affect wildlife in the United States and Mexico?

As I discussed recently on the Sciencentric podcast, the wall’s true impact becomes more evident when you envision all of the things that accompany it: Roads, vehicles, lights, and acres upon acres of cleared habitat. That’s bad news for jaguars, bears, birds, bees and hundreds, if not thousands, of other species.

Check out the video interview below, where host Eric R. Olson and I also discuss The Revelator, my work on “Extinction Countdown,” and what technologies might work instead of a wall.