Dr. Warren Washington, who helped pioneer climate modeling, has seen science advance, even as policies to meet our climate challenges have lagged.
When Warren Washington completed his doctorate in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University in 1964 he was just the second African American ever to earn a PhD in the atmospheric sciences. In May, Washington, now 82, will return to the school for a ceremony as a building is named in his honor.
It’s just one more thing that Washington, a pioneer in the study of climate change, can add to a long list of accolades. In 2010 President Obama honored him with the National Medal of Science. And this month Washington was named winner of the Tyler Prize, the prestigious award recognizing environmental achievement. He shares this year’s prize with fellow climate scientist Michael Mann.
Washington helped pioneer the field of atmospheric computer modeling, a tool that’s widely used today to help better understand climate change. At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he began working in 1963, he helped build one of the first computer models to understand the Earth’s climate. He worked there until retiring last year.
With more than 50 years of research aimed at understanding the Earth’s climate, Washington has had a front-row seat to both scientific discovery and political inaction.
Warren Washington looking at microfilm showing simulation results in 1973. (Photo by UCAR, Ginger Hein, CC BY-NC 4.0, via OpenSky)
“We proved that we could make a model of the atmosphere showing the basic change of seasons, the change of day/night, temperature and winds,” he says, remembering back to his work in the 1960s. “Our first objective was to build a model and get reasonable results, and the second was to use the model to understand future and past climates.”
That groundbreaking work was also incredibly tedious. “Computers at the time were very slow, so it took us one day of computing time to do one day of simulation,” he says.
They continued to refine their models and, in the late 1970s, Washington and his colleagues were enlisted by the Department of Energy to test how increasing carbon dioxide affects the climate system.
“We were one of the first modeler groups to actually carry out an atmospheric model coupled with ocean models and sea ice models — we brought in other aspects of the climate system,” he says. And they confirmed what other scientists were also finding out — that climate change was caused by increasing greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide.
As skeptics posited other theories, like increased solar radiation, Washington and his colleagues used their models to debunk the claims. “Climate models are a tool that allow you to separate one effect versus another and as we did that we got a better understanding of what was happening and became more confident in giving our opinions to the policymakers,” says Washington.
The more advanced modeling today has helped show that hurricanes are getting stronger, and droughts and heat waves more intense. And it’s not just apparent in the models. “We’re the first generation that can actually see the climate changing — in the past you could live a lifetime and never see hardly any climate change,” he says.
The complexity of global climate models has increased enormously over the last four decades, as shown in this graphic. (Graphic by UCAR, CC BY-NC 4.0, via OpenSky)
Washington admits that the current situation affects him in a deeply personal way. “I have 16 grandchildren and they’re going to see significant climate change in their lifetimes.”
And that, he says, concerns him. As a scientist it also makes him feel a certain sense of responsibility. “We feel an obligation to speak out about what we know, and if we’re honest about it, what we don’t know,” he says. “But the overwhelming consensus from scientists who study climate change is that the culprit is increasing greenhouse gas emissions — so the question is, how do we deal with it?”
The answer, he says, is that we’ll need to invest in technologies like wind and solar, as well as cut back on fossil fuel production, but new technologies to help mitigate climate change will also be important.
“I think the science, engineering and technology fields are coming up with some good ideas that need to be explored,” he says. But that will take more research and pilot studies, which require resources. And that’s one of the reasons he has been unhappy with the Trump administration abandoning the Paris Accord, which he says, may not be enough but is at least moving countries in the right direction. “President Trump has ignored the agreement and he hasn’t given any reason why other than that he doesn’t believe in climate change,” says Washington. “Well, he doesn’t believe in facts in general.”
Fighting the climate crisis is time sensitive and needs to be done as quickly as possible. But Washington says that will take a lot of courage from politicians, something made tougher by the influence of the fossil fuel industry in campaign finance. He is heartened, though, to see that public opinion has shifted considerably and nearly 70 percent of Americans think climate change is now a major environmental issue, according to research from Yale University.
Scientists are also getting better at communicating about their findings, too, says Washington. He thinks that the awarding of this year’s Tyler Prize to himself and Mann, who’s known for his work in science communication, speaks to the efforts of the broader scientific community. “I interpret it as that the whole community has worked hard to do the research and to communicate to the public and policymakers,” he says.
Over the course of his career he has advised six presidential administrations. The current one is not among them, but Washington says if he could, he’d tell the Trump administration to reverse its opinion on climate change and rejoin the Paris Accord.
“We need to get on the right side of starting to do more — we see it happening at the state level and in some cities that are taking take steps to deal with climate change,” he says. “I think there would be a lot of public support for it.”
Products marketed to kill rodents are instead threatening the lives of the wildlife that eat them as poisons travel up the food chain.
People who consider rodents to be pests often turn to an array of products, known as anticoagulant rodenticides, which are marketed to lethally “solve” the issue with poisoned bait. But researchers have been collecting evidence for years showing that it’s not just nuisance rats that can end up dead.
Some of the most recent studies, conducted in California, found that everything from Pacific fishers to bobcats to northern spotted owls often become victims of rodenticides. The list of potentially affected wildlife is long — basically anything that preys on a rodent could be at risk, because the poisons are so toxic they travel up the food chain, and in some cases, can remain in an animal’s body for years. It can even leapfrog in utero from one generation to the next.
“If you have a very poisoned rat, you’re going to have a very poisoned hawk,” says Kelle Kacmarcik, director of wildlife solutions and advocacy at WildCare, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Marin County, California.
And that’s a huge problem.
The threatened northern spotted owl on the Klamath National Forest in Siskiyou County, Calif. (Photo by Kendra Knight, CC BY 2.0)
“Food web contamination is a red flag indicator for not just for one species but all other species dependent on that prey item,” says Mourad Gabriel, a research associate faculty at the One Health Institute, Wildlife Heath Center at the University of California, Davis and co-director of the nonprofit Integral Ecology Research Center. His research has looked at the risk to fishers and northern spotted owls from rodenticide exposure from cannabis farms, a growing problem in California. But “other species may start to become imperiled because of this emerging threat,” he says.
Rodenticides affect wildlife around the world and have been used since the 1940s, but recent studies in California have helped illuminate the impacts and ignite calls for regulatory or policy changes.
California took an important first step in 2014 by increasing restrictions on some rodenticides and the state is currently evaluating whether it will take more action. But that’s still not enough, say some experts, like those at WildCare, who want to see a state ban on the products and more public education and behavior changes to reduce the use of the poisons. How to target those messages though, depends on the audience.
In urban and suburban areas, the biggest users of rodenticides are regular consumers who buy the products at hardware stores for home use or hire pest-control applicators to treat their properties. In agricultural areas, it’s applied by farmers to keep rodents away from crops. In forested parts of the state, it’s been dumped by the pound at illegal and trespass cannabis operations on public, private and tribal lands.
A bill introduced in the California legislature last year would have prohibited the use of anticoagulant rodenticides except in public health emergencies, but it stalled in committee. A new bill was just introduced in February, providing hope for some legislative action on the issue.
While the state figures out what to do the poisons are traveling up the food chain, endangering more and more wildlife.
A Widespread Problem
Anticoagulant rodenticides are sold under dozens of brand names with a number of different active ingredients. They work by affecting the animal’s processing of vitamin K, which inhibits clotting and coagulation, ultimately leading to uncontrolled internal bleeding. One of the most common first-generation anticoagulant rodenticides uses the blood thinner called warfarin as its active ingredient, but rats appear to have developed a resistance to it.
Manufacturers responded by developing a new line of more toxic products, using active ingredients like brodifacoum or bromadiolone, which have no medicinal uses. These second-generation rodenticides pack a bigger punch in a small amount and are designed to deliver a lethal dose to a rodent with just one feeding. They also have longer half-lives, which means the poison can stay in the animal’s liver for years, compared to just days or months with the first-generation poisons.
Both of these factors contribute to an increased possibility of nontarget wildlife eating poisons intended for rodents. Second-generation rodenticides don’t kill animals right away. It can still take days, and in that time a sick animal often consumes more of the poison and exhibits signs of illness, making it an easier target for predators.
Documentation in California shows that the problem of rodenticides moving up the food chain and affecting nontarget wildlife is widespread.
A 2017 study found that hawks hunting for prairie dogs preferred those that had been treated with rodenticides to those which hadn’t because “the poisoned prairie dogs were easier to capture due to lethargy and decreased awareness,” according to an analysis of the research by California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation.
A study by Gabriel and colleagues tested the livers of two distinct populations of fishers (Pekania pennant) collected between 2007-2014 from the mountains of Northern California and the Southern Sierra Nevada. The researchers found that 85 percent of the fishers had been exposed to one or more anticoagulant rodenticide. That’s bad news for fishers, which are already imperiled by habitat loss and are currently being reviewed for listing under the Endangered Species Act.
More recently, in a 2018 study, Gabriel looked at two owl species in California and found anticoagulant rodenticides in 70 percent of northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina), which are listed on the Endangered Species Act. And for barred owls (Strix varia), which rely less on rodents in their diet, the researchers found 40 percent had anticoagulant rodenticide exposure.
In both studies, cannabis operations were the likely sources of exposure.
Rodenticides found at a cannabis farm in California. (Photo by Integral Ecology Research Center)
“Rodents love cannabis plants because of the high water and sugar content that these plants have,” says Gabriel. “And so in order to dissuade them from damaging their cannabis plants, cultivators are placing the anticoagulant rodenticides out there.”
Another study by different researchers published in 2015 in Ecotoxicology found that 88 percent of bobcats (Lynx rufus) living in the mountains near Los Angeles had exposure to anticoagulant rodenticides.
The problem isn’t just in rural areas. At WildCare, located 20 miles north of San Francisco in suburban Marin County, tests from 2015-2016 identified 13 species with rodenticide exposure. Raptors tested had a 78 percent poisoning rate. For mammals like bobcats, coyotes, foxes and racoon it was 86 percent.
Many of the animals tested in these studies didn’t die from poisoning, but even these sublethal amounts can still be problematic. California Department of Pesticide Regulation scientist Deborah Daniels reported in a 2013 letter from the department that it can “reduce the fitness of wildlife at a time when wildlife are already meeting numerous challenges.”
For example, in one study, researchers found that rodenticide exposure in bobcats may have led to an increased susceptibility to mange, a parasitic infection that’s increasingly fatal to the species in California.
“No matter how large or small, you’re looking at a toxic poison in the systems of these animals,” says Alison Hermance, director of communications of WildCare. And anticoagulants mean that even a small scrape can cause an animal to bleed out, turning an otherwise minor injury into something fatal.
Researchers have found animals in California with up to five different kinds of rodenticides in their systems at one time. Gabriel says that understanding all the ways sublethal doses of poison affect animals, including the build-up of multiple kinds of poisons, is “a new field of research that needs to be tackled extensively.”
Mixed Results
The fact that wildlife are dying from rodenticides has been documented for years. But what to do about it is still being debated.
Daniels concluded there was enough data to find that “exposure and toxicity to nontarget wildlife from second generation anticoagulant rodenticides is a statewide problem.” And that problem, she wrote, persisted in both urban and rural areas. Testing on 492 animals between 1995 and 2011 found that 73 percent had some traces of at least one second-generation poison.
So California took action to limit the sale of the second-generation products, which it deemed a bigger health threat. In 2014 it banned their sale to ordinary consumers — people could no longer just stop at the corner store to buy some — but they continue to be available to licensed pest-control applicators and those in the agriculture industry.
Unfortunately, the regulation hasn’t been very effective yet. Kacmarcik at WildCare says they haven’t seen the amount of second-generation rodenticides in wildlife decreasing; in fact they found a small uptick during the first two years after the regulation went into effect.
There are a couple of reasons. The first is that some of these long-lived poisons persist in animals for years. The second is that it is still legal to pay someone to apply the poison. And third, people stocked up the products as many stores unloaded their supplies for cheap just before they were banned. So even though the sale of them is no longer legal, they’re still being used.
Dr. Mourad Garbiel at a cannabis grow site clean up. (Photo by USFS, CC BY 2.0)
For forested rural areas where cannabis operations are often the biggest culprit, Gabriel says, “We are seeing a decrease in second generations, but a major uptick in first generation being applied.” Despite the legalization of cannabis cultivation in California, thousands of operations still flout the regulations and many operate illegally on public lands. Many of these poisons are left behind when operations are abandoned, endangering wildlife and costing the state millions in cleanup costs.
The state, in a November 2018 report, admitted that its “limited data” showed that exposure rates to the second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides had not decreased. The report concluded that these second-generation poisons have “significant adverse impact to non-target wildlife.” But the state doesn’t think the first-generation products pose a significant risk. Gabriel, however, says the risks are still there even though the products are less toxic and there is extensive documentation that the poisons can still transfers to predators. At WildCare, nearly 30 percent of the animals tested had been exposed to a first-generation anticoagulant rodenticide.
Searching for Solutions
The Department of Pesticide Regulation is currently considering whether to reevaluate its regulations for the second-generation products and what specific data it would need if did, says Charlotte Fadipe, the agency’s assistant director. “In general, the department is considering data related to second generation anticoagulant rodenticide exposure rates, as well as any resulting risk of adverse impacts to non-target wildlife.”
Finding solutions to curb the use of anticoagulant rodenticides at cannabis farms will be extra tough. “You’re looking at a new, emerging threat and risk,” says Gabriel. “Current regulations don’t seem to be sufficient enough to keep it in check.” Since those who are running illegal grows aren’t likely to follow stricter pesticide regulations, more resources for enforcement are also needed, he says. Without that many of these cannabis operations will continue to pose a threat to other efforts to conserve wildlife populations in the state.
Hermance says that WildCare would like to see a complete restriction on anticoagulant rodenticides. “It’s such a tragedy that these poisons kill or injure the animals that nature has provided to give us rodent control,” she says. “Hawks, foxes, owls, racoons are out there eating rodents every single day — knock them out and you’re going to have a much bigger problem down the road.”
And in most cases, poisons simply aren’t needed to solve a problem, they’re just easier. “I’m amazed at just how quickly people jump to poison as a solution to a nuisance problem,” she says.
Raptors like red-tailed hawks have been more effective in Ventura County, Calif. at eliminating pests than poisons. (Photo by Jon D. Anderson, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Until there’s more state action, public education on the risks to wildlife and on alternatives to poisons is needed.
In one recent example, Ventura County in Southern California has turned to raptors to decrease the number of ground squirrels burrowing in its dirt levees and dams. The birds have proven to be better and cheaper than poisons.
That’s the type of lesson that the experts hope will resonate not just in California but around the world. “Stop and think about what’s causing the problem and how you can solve it without poison,” says Kacmarcik. “If we could get more people to do that, you’d see a significant reduction in the poisoning that’s happening.”
New genetic tests may reveal the secret to saving the critically endangered Siamese crocodile from extinction.
Conservationists trying to save the critically endangered Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis) from extinction face a unique challenge.
Only about 1,000 of these relatively small, heavily poached crocodiles remain in the wild, where their populations are scattered between several Southeast Asian countries. Cambodia, the country with the most Siamese crocodiles, only has about 250 adults, all of which live in small, isolated populations of 50 or fewer individuals. Recent research has shown that very few of these groups are actively reproducing.
Even as the wild population disappears, hundreds of thousands of Siamese crocodiles — perhaps more than a million — can be found on farms in Southeast Asia, where their soft skin is harvested as a valuable commodity. Tapping into this plentiful supply of captive animals could, in theory, help to save the wild crocodiles from completely disappearing.
There’s just one problem, and it’s a doozy. For years now, the captive crocs have been considered useless for conservation purposes because they’re all thought to be hybrids of Siamese, saltwater and even Cuban crocodiles.
According to anecdotal knowledge of the industry, the two non-native species were imported and bred with Siamese crocodiles in order to increase their size and growth rates. That was great for commercial interests, but not much good for the species as a whole. Taking any of those hybrids out of captivity and introducing their genes into wild populations “would alter the fate and identity of the species permanently,” says Frank Rheindt, an evolutionary biologist and assistant professor with National University of Singapore.
Here’s the thing, though: What if that common wisdom about the scope of this hybridization isn’t completely correct?
For several years now, researchers have been investigating whether farmed Siamese crocodiles really are all hybrids. One of the first signs that this might not be the case turned up in 2009, when tests conducted on 69 crocodiles at a wildlife rescue center did not find any evidence of hybridization in 35 of the animals, suggesting that they were possibly pure Siamese crocodiles.
Ten years later, a new paper by Rheindt and his colleagues, published in the journal Molecular Ecology, takes this further. The researchers used novel genomic approach (a much more advanced series of tests than were used a decade back) and examined 60 Siamese crocodiles, including some wild-caught individuals that have been on a farm for many years and another group from breeding centers and other farms. The researchers sequenced thousands of genome-wide markers and found evidence of genetic “introgression” (hybridization) from other species, but not to the degree expected. Only six of the individuals tested contained hybrid genetics from saltwater crocodiles, while another two carried unidentified “ghost” genes that the researchers suspect may have come from Cuban crocs.
The results were so good that 12 of the animals tested in the study were released to the wild. Four more pure Siamese crocodiles were selected for captive-breeding efforts.
This is obviously a small study, but it has broad implications. For one thing, it suggests that there may be more purebred Siamese crocodiles on farms than previously believed — perhaps many more.
“I was highly surprised that we found such a limited volume of genetic introgression,” says Rheindt. “It’s heartening to see that estimates of the surviving pool of pure Siamese crocodiles have risen from the hundreds to the tens of thousands as a result of our study.”
Rheindt says they are now talking with their partners about screening crocodile genetics on a larger series of farms in Cambodia. They’ve also been approached to conduct similar studies on another Siamese crocodile population in Indonesia.
There’s actually a tight deadline to start this work, because the same research contains another startling revelation: The remaining wild Cambodian crocs now have such low genetic diversity that they risk possible extinction in just five generations if their situation doesn’t change.
“Five generations is not a lot,” says study coauthor Balaji Chattopadhyay, a population geneticist and research fellow at the National University of Singapore. “When we see such a drastic drop in genetic diversity, it’s not good for any population.” Species with impaired genetic diversity often have problems breeding, become more susceptible to disease and lose the ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions — all threats the Siamese crocodiles could now face over the next few decades.
For Cambodia’s crocodiles, he says, “It’s like an impending doom situation.”
Finding additional healthy, pure specimens on farms and releasing them into breeding wild populations would start to reverse the genetic loss and “slow the train of extinction,” Chattopadhyay says.
How many more crocodiles would need to swim free in Cambodia for that to happen? “For a slowly reproducing and large species such as the Siamese crocodile, ideally we would want to see a Cambodia-wide population in the high hundreds or more to see this species move out of the immediate danger zone of extinction,” Rheindt says. He believes there’s enough remaining habitat left in the country to sustain those higher numbers.
Of course, other threats still exist, including ongoing poaching. Ensuring that relocated crocs aren’t later recaptured for sale to farms would be critical to the success of any reintroductions. Rheindt admits that the “great value of each crocodile individual and the financial incentives for capture” hampers many of the ongoing conservation efforts for the species.
If the techniques from this study end up revealing more pure Siamese crocodiles, it could be the next step in a long road toward the species’ recovery. Chattopadhyay says the government, farms and conservation groups would need to establish policies on the use of farm animals for reintroductions. After that there would need to be field studies to find the best release sites, and then ongoing monitoring to make sure the relocated animals start breeding in the wild.
“They should be monitored for a few generations at least,” he says. “This is a long-term effort.”
While further decisions about the Siamese crocodile are in the works, the researchers hope the new genomic toolkit they developed for this study will be of use for a wide variety of additional species.
“We wanted to propose a methodology that can be adopted by any conservation effort,” Chattopadhyay says. “We believe this kind of genetic component can help a lot for any conservation management effort where you’re looking into reintroduction from captivity.”
In fact, Rheindt reports, they already have work in the pipeline to study the genetics of heavily trafficked species such as pangolins, frogs and birds.
“Here in Southeast Asia, the scale of the environmental crisis is daunting,” Rheindt says. New tools like this might not stop illegal wildlife trade from happening in the first place, but they could help to heal some of the damage it has caused — starting with the Siamese crocodile.
The Bramble Cay melomys, a tiny island rodent, was wiped out by sea-level rise, according to the government of Australia.
It’s official: Climate change has claimed its first mammal extinction.
This week the Australian government declared the extinction of a tiny rodent called Bramble Cay melomys (also known as the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat, Melomys rubicola). The quiet announcement was buried in a press release about enacting stronger protections for other endangered species. It comes three years after a more detailed declaration by the state government of Queensland, which itself followed an exhaustive search of the cay seeking any evidence of the species’ existence.
The Bramble Cay melomys lived in just a single habitat, a small reef island at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, near Papua New Guinea. The sandy cay — which only measures about 1,100 feet by 500 feet and rises just three feet above sea level — has in recent years been buffeted by storm surges from extreme weather events. The heavy waters have reportedly wiped out about 97 percent of the land mass’s vegetation — the melomys’s only source of food.
According to the 2016 report, the last person confirmed to have seen the Bramble Cay melomys alive was a fisherman who spotted one in late 2009. It now seems possible that could have been the last surviving member of the species.
The Bramble Cay melomys was once described as relatively common, but that was no longer the case by the end of the 20th century. A 1998 survey estimated the population at 93 individuals, down from “hundreds” two decades earlier. Additional surveys in 2002 and 2004 turned up just 10 and 12 of the rats, respectively, according to accounts published in a 2008 recovery plan for the species. That plan, which now seems painfully prescient, called out sea-level rise, flooding and coastal erosion as then-potential threats.
Sadly, not much was ever done about that 2008 recovery plan, and those threats became very real. Tim Beshara, federal policy director for the Wilderness Society, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the plan was never finished or acted upon.
The Australian government’s announcement should come as no surprise. When Queensland announced the likely extinction in 2016, they identified “human-induced climate change [as] the root cause of the loss of the Bramble Cay melomys” — a fact picked up in headlines at the time around the world.
Now those headlines are repeating. Even Fox News picked up the melomys’s extinction in an article warning about a sea-rise “time bomb” that Antarctic melting will pose for the region.
That’s something, at least. Perhaps this second declaration of the extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys will finally inspire enough attention to prevent the loss of similar species — or at least give governments a push to mobilize protective efforts before it’s once again too late.
What border communities really need are solutions to address economic, health and climate problems — and the mesquite tree can help.
President Trump has declared a national emergency to fund a wall along our nation’s southern border. The border wall issue has bitterly divided people across the United States, becoming a vivid symbol of political deadlock.
But for many of us who actually live along the U.S.-Mexico border, the wall is simply beside the point. We know that a wall can’t fix the problems that straddle the boundary between our nations; nor will it build on our shared strengths. So a group of us — ranchers, farmers, conservationists, chefs, carpenters, small business owners and public-health professionals from both sides of the border — have come up with a better idea. We call it the Mesquite Manifesto.
Our plan would tackle the root causes of problems that affect border communities on both sides. While the media have fixated on the difficult conditions in Mexico (and other Central American nations) that propel immigrants northward, there are real problems on the U.S. side too. The poverty rate in this region is twice as high as for the nation as a whole, and joblessness drives many into the lucrative drug trade. Poor diets and inadequate healthcare contribute to high rates of disease: Nearly one-third of those who live along the border suffer from diabetes. And a rapidly growing population, along with rising demand from industry and agriculture, is stressing the region’s limited water supply — a problem made worse by the changing climate.
To address these problems and build a sustainable future for the region as a whole, we look to mesquite, the iconic native tree that grows in every county and municipio along the border. Its gnarly branches have provided food, fuel, medicine, shade and shelter to indigenous communities in the borderlands for more than eight millennia.
Deep-rooted mesquite trees such as velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina) and honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) are remarkably drought-resistant, anchoring the arid desert land and fixing nitrogen to improve the soil. Their seeds contain more protein than soybeans and can be milled to make flour with a low glycemic index, which helps regulate blood sugar.
A bee visits a mesquite tree blossom in Arizona. (Photo by Ken Bosma, CC BY 2.0)
It’s no wonder that mesquite long sustained indigenous communities in this fragile land. What is remarkable is that mesquite is seen as a nuisance tree by many who live here now. Indeed there’s scientific consensus that mesquites are among the most “under-managed” resources on our continent, though they cover nearly 200 million acres of arid and semi-arid lands in Mexico and the United States.
We believe that targeted investments in restoring and managing mesquite could become — dollar for dollar and peso for peso — the most cost-effective investment ever made in the future of arid America.
Mesquite-pod flour, which is now used in baking, brewing and in the preparation of low-glycemic food products, sells in many states for $22-24 per pound;
Sustainably harvested hardwoods that are of stunning color, texture, shape and durability. Mesquite wood can be sold for $5-10 per board foot, to be used by furniture makers, floor designers, guitar-makers and builders;
Fuelwood that is already valued at $200-400 million per year by the “mesquite barbecue” industry, which now uses trees selectively harvested from rangelands in the U.S. Southwest;
Mesquite honey, which is already a multimillion-dollar industry in most states along the border;
Other products with emerging markets, including biofuels, biochar, culinary and medicinal gums, and mesquite-smoked beer, coffee and whiskey.
We propose the establishment of capacity-building centers to develop mesquite-based industries in every watershed crossing the border. These centers could provide bilingual training in a variety of skills related to arid lands agro-forestry and sustainable forest-product development. Schools and churches that have been closed down in impoverished rural areas and border cities could be renovated by local construction workers and repurposed as training centers for a binational “Green New Deal” effort.
Mesquite wood ready for a BBQ. (Photos by Forest and Kim Starr, CC BY 2.0)
There are many bilingual teachers, researchers, craftsmen, brewers and chefs who already have the capacity to train and mentor others in range management, ecological restoration, permaculture, hardwood craftsmanship and furniture making, honeybee management, mesquite pod milling, brewing and baking, and the marketing of non-timber forest products.
Mesquite could be cultivated on private, state and federal rangeland (but not in parks or wildlife refuges, which should remain pristine). Millions of acres could be managed in ways that restore, rather than exploit, the land. For example, the trees can be pruned or thinned for their wood, rather than clearcut. And seedpods can be selectively harvested to leave enough for wildlife and regeneration.
Managing mesquite in this way could produce environmental benefits. Mesquite forests and the plant communities they shape offer numerous “ecosystem services,” including wildlife habitat for beneficial insects, birds and bats involved in pollination and pest control; flood control; heat amelioration in urban settings; and recreational amenities such as birdwatching and the hunting of gamebirds like quail and doves.
Communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border need help. We do not, however, need a multibillion-dollar wall of concrete or steel. Instead, let us recognize our shared culture, economy and geography — and value the tree that has long sustained the people of this unforgiving land. By investing in mesquite, we can build a restorative economy that enables communities on both sides of the border to prosper and thrive.
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.
President Trump’s invocation of a national emergency to build his border wall is worrying and “illegal,” according to scholars.
By Julian Hernandez and Molly Stellino, Cronkite News
PHOENIX – President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday to redistribute government funds to build his long-sought after wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but experts question whether it’s constitutional.
“So we’re going to be signing today, and registering, national emergency and it’s a great thing to do, because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people and it’s unacceptable,” Trump said in a Rose Garden address.
In a statement, Rep. Tom O’Halleran, D-Flagstaff, said this action would divert resources from the Department of Defense and law enforcement programs to fund a border wall.The statement also said that $3.5 billion from the Pentagon’s military construction fund, $2.5 billion from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction initiative and $600 million from the Department of the Treasury’s drug forfeiture program will be shuffled to fund the construction of the border wall.
Although the National Emergencies Act of 1976 grants the president broad authority to declare a state of national emergency, there is debate as to whether any federal laws grant the president the authority to redirect funds to the border wall construction and to instruct the military to build the wall.
The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, a law and public policy center that specializes in constitutional issues, compiled a list of federal laws and the powers they grant to presidents that can be used in a time of war and during national emergencies.
The exact statutory powers that President Trump plans to use aren’t yet known because the emergency text has not yet been made public.
That uncertainty worries Jon D. Michaels, professor at the UCLA School of Law, because he says the president has not shown the same level of responsibility, discretion and caution as previous presidents who have declared a national emergency.
“The level of responsibility that has been exercised (by earlier presidents) has been sufficient that we haven’t worried about all these extra statutory authorities kicking in because they’re not being exploited,” Michaels says.
The Brennan Center said that statutory powers 10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) and 33 U.S.C. 2293 might offer some legal cover for the president’s wall-building ambitions.
During a state of emergency, statutory power 10 U.S.C. 2808 (a) says that the secretary of Defense may undertake military construction projects that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.
And statutory power 33 U.S.C. 2293 allows the Army to terminate or defer any Army civil works project and apply the resources to authorized military construction, civil defense projects that are essential to national defense.
Some constitutional law experts say there is no explicit power granted to the president by any federal laws or by the constitution, to use the military to build the border wall.
Professor Bruce Ackerman, Sterling professor of law and political science at Yale University and a constitutional expert, says Trump’s use of a national emergency presents a grave constitutional problem.
“It is illegal for the commander in chief to use military resources for domestic law enforcement, except where explicitly authorized,” he says, adding that no explicit authorization exists.
Ackerman says this will provoke a constitutional crisis involving the military if Trump orders his generals to begin construction on new border barriers.
“The important point is that the generals are going to have to decide immediately: Are they going to follow the law of the United States or are they going to follow the commander in chief?”
Because Trump “only pointed to issues of domestic law enforcement, criminal enforcement and the like in his remarks today,” Ackerman says, it would be an unconstitutional use of his executive powers.
In 1952, he says, the Supreme Court ruled in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer that a president can’t use his commander in chief powers for domestic law enforcement. The case arose during the Korean War, when President Truman ordered the secretary of Commerce to seize and operate most of the nation’s steel mills to avert a expected steelworker strike.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government ethics watchdog based in Washington D.C., already has filed suit against the Department of Justice for failing to provide documents outlining the legal authority of Trump’s emergency declaration. The American Civil Liberties Union and Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., announced they intend to file separate lawsuits in the coming weeks.
Once a challenge is filed in court, Ackerman says, “the Supreme Court is going to decide in six months to a year.”
In the meantime, the national emergency declaration can be undone if both the Senate and House of Representatives pass a joint resolution and Trump signs it. If he vetoes the joint resolution, it would require two-thirds of both the House and Senate to override the veto.
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A new book asks, “Can we feed the world without destroying it?” The answers might surprise you.
The world needs to change the way it eats, not just as individuals but as a society.
That’s the message from a groundbreaking report issued last month by the EAT-Lancet Commission, which made a series of societal recommendations to help the world’s ever-increasing human population ensure its food security in the face of global warming.
The recommendations are all designed to accommodate a planet that is projected to contain 10 billion people by the year 2050. They include switching to a diet that’s low in meat and sugar but higher in whole grains, fruits and vegetables; cutting food waste; reducing fossil fuel use and emissions; and incentivizing small and medium farming.
The changes, the report said, would lead to a healthier planet and healthier people, while also helping the more than 820 million people currently suffering from chronic hunger.
Coincidentally, the report came out the same week as a challenging new book that makes many of the same recommendations, while also presenting some contrasting and complementary ideas.
According to Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?, written by food activist Eric Holt-Giménez and published by Polity Press, we already produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, and we’re gearing up to grow even more to accommodate the projected increase in human population.
All that food comes with multiple costs, including climate change, drought, water contamination, habitat loss and species extinctions — which themselves put the very future of food at risk. Holt- Giménez writes, “our greenhouse-gas-spewing industrial food system has entered a dangerous negative feedback loop. The way we produce and consume food is undermining our ability to produce food at all.”
So where is all this food if so many people are still going hungry? Holt- Giménez — who says as many as 2.5 billion people are hungry — argues that hunger is less a problem of production and more a function of our global food system and poverty. “People are going hungry not because of lack of food,” he writes, “but because they are too poor to buy it.”
Much of that poverty, Holt- Giménez claims, is actually caused by the agricultural industry:
“Commercial farmers don’t produce food to feed people: they produce food to sell on the market, where they compete with other food producers. Whoever can produce the most food at the cheapest price will have the most market power — power to flood markets and push out other producers. When smaller, subsistence farmers who are actually growing most of the world’s food go broke, they often go hungry.”
Perhaps more importantly, he writes, the commercial agricultural system forces farmers to grow monocultures for the global market, which doesn’t help anyone living on or near the farms themselves. “Farmers are nutrient-deficient,” he writes, “because they no longer grow a balanced diet.”
And much of what the world produces is never consumed. About 30 to 50 percent of the world’s food rots on the fields or in landfills, resulting in wasted water and energy and excessive production of greenhouse gases — which bring us back to the climate-change threat.
What’s the root cause of these problems? Holt- Giménez places the blame squarely on capitalism. The global food system, he writes:
“…is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed to work: it expands constantly, concentrating wealth in a few, powerful monopolies, while transferring all the social and environmental costs onto society. These costs are borne inequitably by women, the poor, indigenous peoples, people of color, the working class, rural communities — the most exploited and vulnerable.”
He calls this the “hunger-industrial complex,” a system that guarantees people will go hungry by refusing to address low wages and economic inequality.
On top of that, and in contrast to the Lancet report, Holt- Giménez argues that the world population isn’t going to explode by 2050. It’s more likely, he writes, to level off, which presents two problems for capitalism: “the specter of stagnant population growth and of communities too poor to buy the food being produced.”
So what are the solutions? Holt- Giménez says hunger and famine will only be solved by putting political power back in the hands of the world’s poorest people. In other words, it requires transforming the concept of food security into one of food sovereignty.
More broadly, he argues that a food movement could “catalyze society to demand the deep systemic reforms on which our collective future depends.” This would require linking food with other concepts such as climate justice, the women’s movement and the indigenous rights movement. That linkage would help address agriculture’s contribution to the climate crisis.
Holt-Giménez lays out a few guidelines for making this possible, including embracing the “polluter pays” principle, where food production will need to be responsible for its water and soil use and greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing livestock production and meat consumption would refocus the grain industry toward producing human food, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and allow farmers to diversify their crops. Providing farmers with living wages would also give communities the financial support they need while removing the incentive for overproduction. Finally, he calls for the dismantling of the world’s food, agriculture and chemical monopolies as another way to protect farmers and consumers.
Like the EAT-Lancet report, Can We Feed the World presents a challenging set of ideas and science and facts to back up its case. As Holt-Giménez writes, global warming threatens the world’s food, while the world’s food system threatens us with worsening climate change and ever-increasing inequality. The two publications may not completely agree, but they do present a unified message that immediate change is needed.
The unexpected announcement reverses a plan to move people out of critical protected habitats — and puts the nation’s amazing biodiversity at risk.
Some of the most important habitats in the United Republic of Tanzania, one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, could soon be inundated with farmers and livestock following a recent decree by President John Magufuli that orders relisting protected lands as village property.
This is a major reversal for Tanzania, a country known for its wild spaces, including World Heritage sites ranging from the Ngorongoro Crater and Mt. Kilimanjaro to the vast Selous Game Reserve and famous Serengeti National Park. Tanzania’s protected areas support an amazing array of wildlife, including some of the largest remaining elephant and lion populations in Africa and the continent’s largest wildebeest and zebra migrations.
Udzungwa red colobus (Piliocolobus gordonorum) in Udzungwa Mountain National Park. This primate, an endemic to the Udzungwa Mountains, is already in danger of extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation from agriculture and livestock. Photo courtesy of Brennan PetersonWood.
In addition to the large and well-known national parks, Tanzania also holds many smaller forest and game reserves; in total this network of protected lands accounts for over 30 percent of the country’s land mass. These smaller forest and game reserves, while lacking the large and charismatic species or wide-open views that attract tourists and money, still contain many endemic species and subspecies. The geographically isolated nature of many of the forest reserves — like ones adjacent to a small conservation NGO we managed from 2016-2017 — means the species contained within are vulnerable to habitat loss. Many local species like the Udzungwa red colobus and Kipunji monkey are listed as endangered and critically endangered by the IUCN.
President Magufuli’s announcement puts much of this land, and the survivability of the country’s wildlife, at risk.
This threat wasn’t on the horizon for most conservationists. Prior to the announcement, the government had actually earmarked more than 300 human settlements where people have recently moved in and built houses for removal from protected areas. Some of these forest invaders have been identified as foreign nationals who settled in as recently as July of last year.
The president’s recent directive stopped the eviction of those settlements and directed ministries to begin the process to formalize them into villages. In his statement he also ordered “leaders in the ministries concerned to identify conservancies and forest reserves that have no wildlife so that the same are given to landless pastoralists and farmers.” He decreed that forest reserves lacking trees should also be handed over to farmers and directed an inquiry into changing a current law that prohibits cultivation of crops within about 200 feet of any river — a law that’s already often ignored, at the expense of the health of the country’s waterways.
Tanzania’s population is one of the fastest growing in the world and has expanded from around nine million people in 1961 to more than 55 million today. As the human population has increased, so, too, has the number of domesticated animals. The country currently holds more than 35 million heads of livestock. President Magufuli cited both growing populations as the justification for his directive.
The announcement comes at a time when protected areas and wildlife around the world are facing increased threats, including Brazil’s new president announcing increased Amazon deforestation and the loss of one of the last intact lowland rainforest ecosystems in Central America. Unfortunately the move in Tanzania has not received anywhere nearly the level of international attention as these other actions.
President Magufuli’s directive does compare, however, in its potential for destructiveness. For example, the order lacks any clear guidelines or determining factors for when a reserve would be considered empty and no longer serving a conservation purpose. Regulatory standards based on science are of utmost importance in these situations, as even seemingly empty reserves can still support populations of invertebrates, birds and other more difficult species to visually record. Many of the large charismatic mammals whose presence is often used to establish protected areas are migratory in nature and may only pass through certain areas infrequently. With climate change disrupting rain patterns across Africa, these migrations and timings are becoming more unpredictable and random than before. Habitat loss and fragmentation are the leading threats to wildlife with ever-shrinking protected lands becoming more isolated. This leads to increased edge-effect threats and genetic inbreeding among formerly wide-roaming species. While a reserve may seem empty of permanent occupation by large mammals, the land protected can still serve as a vital corridor linking other protected areas, particularly in times of drought or other disturbances.
Once under control of village leadership the previously protected lands will almost certainly be over-grazed and inefficiently and unsustainably farmed, resulting in the desertification of even more of the country.
Another particular concern is the statement that forest reserves lacking trees should be handed over to farmers. Most rural households in Tanzania cook over open wood fires, and both legal and illegal wood cutting already exist at unsustainable rates. Magufuli is ignoring the fact that reserves currently lacking trees became deforested through past illegal logging and grazing. Rewarding villages by handing over those reserves will most likely encourage further deforestation in protected areas.
A. Harvested firewood taken within the Wildlife Management Area adjacent to Ruaha National Park to be sold in the nearby village of Tungamelenga. B. Firewood being harvested just outside the protected boundaries to be used for home consumption. C. Stacks of firewood in the village of Tungamelenga, which will last only a few days, origins unknown. Photos courtesy of Adam C. Stein and Isacka Lemulebeli
Relaxing the law prohibiting crop cultivation within 200 feet of waterways will also have massive negative impacts on the ecosystems. Agricultural runoff, streambank erosion and overuse of limited water sources will almost certainly occur. Increased farming near water sources will also increase human wildlife conflicts as animals such as elephants, hippos and bush pigs frequenting those waterways will now come into increased contact with crops. Overconsumption of waterways is already a major driver of human wildlife conflict in Tanzania, with rivers running dry and forcing elephants out of national parks and into farmers’ fields.
This isn’t the only emerging environmental problem in Tanzania. The announcement comes on the heels of a project to dam the Rufiji River at Stiegler’s gorge in the Selous Game Reserve, a World Heritage Site, putting it at risk of losing that classification. Conservationists have expressed grave concern over the project, while economists point out that greater electricity production can be achieved through the expansion of already existing natural gas, geothermal, wind and solar.
Given Tanzania’s rate of human and livestock population growth and reliance on foreign aid, the president’s call to increase land areas for human activities is understandable. But Tanzania relies heavily on wildlife tourism, which accounts for more than $2 billion annually and over 12 percent of employment. Further loss of protected areas — which are crucial to the survival of both isolated endemic species and long-ranging mammals such as lions and elephants — will likely result in a decrease in the tourism income that is vital for the economic health of the country.
Simply delisting protected land is unlikely to achieve long-term results given the unsustainable farming and grazing practices available to most Tanzanians. Specifically, maize is still grown mainly by smallholders and medium-scale farmers using traditional techniques that have yields significantly lower than the potential for the land. In addition, pastoralists’ response to increased livestock deaths as a result of overgrazing and climate change has been to increase herd size to serve as a buffer against further losses, thus exacerbating the problem.
Notably, many alternative methods of increasing human livelihoods while simultaneously protecting sensitive species habitat and forest reserves have successfully been employed in Tanzania. Instead of delisting land, the government should invest in teaching better agricultural practices and income diversification, which would have lasting positive effects and still allow the protection of wildlife and habitat.
This is obviously still a developing situation, but it could become a disaster for Tanzania’s wildlife and subsequently its economy. It’s possible that the government could succumb to international pressure and reverse course, but any delay in strengthening protections for these forests could be what truly turns them into empty woodlands devoid of the life that makes Tanzania so special.
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.
Researcher Emily Francis explains how the coast redwoods and sequoias fared during California’s drought and what that means for future climate resilience.
California’s most iconic trees can live for centuries — but can they survive in a warming world?
Populations of the state’s two redwood species — coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) and giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) — have already declined by 95 percent since 1850 due to logging and development. Now scientists want to know how climate change and drought will affect them in the near future.
Many of California’s other tree species are already known to be at risk. The record-breaking drought that plagued the state from 2011-2016 killed an estimated 129 million trees, mostly in the state’s mixed-conifer forests that include trees like white fir, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, sugar pine and California black oak. The drought left entire swaths of the Sierra Nevada streaked with the sight of reddish-brown dying or dead trees.
California redwoods didn’t display as much obvious damage, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t impacted. Figuring out how and why they would be affected by future droughts and warming temperatures — and how they’ll resist the changes — remains an important line of questioning, not just for the trees themselves but for everything around them. The famous trees make for great tourist attractions, and also serve important ecosystem functions. They capture more carbon dioxide than any other tree and provide habitat for hundreds of bird species and everything from black bears and elk, to mountain lions and beavers.
“Old-growth forests are important to society for many reasons, but their worth cannot be measured,” says Emily Francis, a fifth-year PhD student in the department of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University who’s studying how redwoods are responding to drought and climate change. “It is humbling to consider the depth of their history and resilience as living organisms.”
We talked to Francis about her research and what the future may hold for these beloved trees.
What have you learned about how climate change is affecting redwoods?
Climate change has resulted in warming temperatures in California, which has increased the severity of droughts. Redwoods are adapted to environments with high water availability, so increasingly severe droughts threaten redwoods.
On the other hand, redwoods are also experts at utilizing water from fog or coastal low clouds. Fog supplies water through condensation on leaf surfaces and fog drip, which in some locations, can exceed water input from winter rainfall in a normal precipitation year.
However, access to fog water is variable depending on where trees are located — at high elevations, or at locations where fog is blocked by a mountain, fog moisture is largely absent. We expect redwoods without access to fog water to be more sensitive to climate change.
Stanford University researcher Emily Francis in a redwood forest. (Photo courtesy of Emily Francis)
How did redwoods fare during California’s recent five-year drought?
Coastal redwood forests suffered less mortality than the mixed-conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains, most likely because fog cover in redwood forests both moderated the exceptionally high temperatures and supplied moisture to redwood forests during the driest and hottest summer months.
But it’s likely that their growth rates and carbon uptake were still severely impacted. We’re currently measuring growth rates from tree rings dating back to the 1950s to study the effect of recent droughts on tree growth rates and to quantify the buffering effect of streams and fog on redwood responsiveness to drought.
Are there any differences between how climate change or drought is affecting the two tree species?
The natural climate conditions of coastal redwood and giant sequoia habitats are very different. Giant sequoias are endemic to the Sierra Nevada mountains, which is a much drier climate with no access to water from fog during the summer. Because of this, redwoods and giant sequoias have variable responses to drought, but both respond by reducing the volume of leaves in their canopy, which seems to be a very effective strategy. Both species suffered relatively low mortality rates during the recent drought.
For giant sequoia in particular, few individuals died during the recent drought, and many of those that did were trees that had suffered damage during recent fires. The low mortality rates of giant sequoias were in stark contrast to other adjacent tree species — in particular sugar pine and ponderosa pine — which suffered high mortality.
Visitors to California’s Sequoia National Park photograph the General Sherman redwood tree. (Photo by Linda Tanner, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
What do we still need to learn about how climate change may affect redwoods?
We still need better predictions of the impact of climate change on fog patterns in California to understand how redwoods are responding to climate change.
Current projections of climate change’s impact on fog are contradictory. Is it increasing or decreasing? On the one hand, long-term airport records of fog cover suggest that it declined over the second half of the 1900s relative to the first half. On the other hand, some predictions suggest that warming temperatures in the Central Valley of California could increase the coastal-to-inland temperature gradient, thereby resulting in more fog cover.
Finally, the formation of fog cover is dependent on a cold coastal upwelling zone off of the coast of California, which is also vulnerable to climate change.
What does the long-term picture look like for the health of California’s redwoods?
While temperatures continue to rise in California, drought stress in redwood forests is likely to increase. In response, the natural habitat of redwoods may be reduced.
Over large geographic scales we expect the natural habitat of redwoods to move northward, and over small scales within forests, we expect redwood habitats to become more confined to sites that have high access to water from streams and fog. Because of this, it’s important to identify and protect these redwood stands — especially those that are close to streams and in high-fog environments.
The removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River helped river conservationists reimagine what’s possible.
Welcome to the first edition of “Turning Points,” our new column examining critical moments in environmental history when change occurred for the better — or worse.
More than 1,000 people lined the banks of the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine, on July 1, 1999. They were there to witness a rebirth.
The ringing of a bell signaled a backhoe on the opposite bank to dig into a retaining wall. Water trickled, then gushed. The crowd erupted in cheers as the Edwards Dam, which had stretched 900 feet across the river, was breached. Soon the whole dam would be removed.
The Kennebec hadn’t run free here since 1837.
Those who advocated for the dam’s removal promised that devastated fisheries would return, and the city of Augusta would benefit from new recreational opportunities and a revitalization of the riverfront.
They were right. But it wasn’t just Augusta where change was felt.
The removal of Edwards Dam became a pivotal moment in the history of the environmental movement and river restoration in the United States. It was the first functioning hydroelectric dam to be removed — and the first time the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ever voted, against the wishes of a dam owner, not to relicense a dam.
But most importantly the demolition signaled a shift in thinking about how we balance environmental and economic interests — and that had a ripple effect.
“It was the first big dam that came out that demonstrated to the country that our rivers had other values beyond industrial use,” says John Burrows, director of New England Programs for the Atlantic Salmon Federation, which was a key player in the dam-removal effort. “It helped folks recognize that our rivers, which we’ve not taken good care of for several hundred years, could be a different asset for communities. And for society.”
Killing a River
Building the Edwards Dam was never a popular idea. Even in the 1830s there was concern that the robust fisheries of the lower Kennebec River would be wiped out. But the cheerleaders of industrialism prevailed, and the dam was built in 1837 to bring power to local mills.
The consequences were immediate.
The dam’s construction shut the door on the migration of nearly a dozen sea-run fish species that used to swim up more than 40 miles from the Atlantic Ocean in search of prime spawning habitat in the Kennebec and its tributaries.
“The river was transformed from being a thriving producer of millions of fish such as shad, herring, striped bass, Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and alewives and supporting a wide cornucopia of other species ranging from otters to eagles — into a wastewater drainage system,” Jeff Crane, a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Martin’s University, wrote in a paper published in 2009.
Within a few years, the alewife run on the Sebasticook River, a tributary of the Kennebec just upstream from the dam, was gone. Where once you’d been able to catch 500 salmon a season in Augusta, by 1850 you were lucky to get five. The state reported that the shad industry there was completely lost by 1867. And the sturgeon catch on the lower Kennebec declined from 320,000 pounds a year before the dam to just 12,000 pounds a year by 1880.
In the 1900s the river’s problems got even worse. The Kennebec River became a dumping ground for toxic waste from paper mills and municipal sewage. Log drives from the upstate timber industry choked the river’s flow, and declining oxygen levels from sewage caused major fish kills. By the 1960s no one wanted to fish or swim in the Kennebec anymore.
Brian Graber, who now works as the senior director of river restoration at American Rivers, grew up in Massachusetts and spent his summers in a family cabin outside Augusta. The Kennebec River of his childhood wasn’t a place to have a good time — or even to live.
“I think what struck me the most as a kid was that all the buildings in downtown Augusta were facing away from the river and were either boarded up or just didn’t have windows at all along the river,” Graber recalls.
But things began to gradually improve after the passage of the national Clean Water Act in 1972.
The state of Maine spent $100 million on water-treatment facilities between 1972 and 1990 to clean up the river and meet modern environmental laws. Improvements in water quality triggered a new interest in expanding river restoration. The Kennebec wasn’t hopeless after all.
But one hurdle remained.
Thinking Big
During the 1980s efforts to improve fish passage at dams and water quality in the river continued. Even though many environmental groups thought dam removal was the best ecological hope for restoring the Kennebec, few believed it was a winnable campaign.
“At that time removal of dams was a pretty outlandish concept and most people who we were interacting with did not see us prevailing,” says Pete Didisheim, senior director of advocacy at the Natural Resources Council of Maine.
The only other talk of dam removal happening then in the United States was across the country on Washington’s Elwha River. (The Elwha’s two dams wouldn’t end up being removed, however, until 2011 and 2014.)
In 1991 the owners of the Edwards Dam, Edwards Manufacturing Company, applied for a 50-year renewal license to operate it. The newly formed Kennebec Coalition jumped in to convince the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of the relicensing, to deny that permit. The coalition was made up of the nonprofits American Rivers, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and Trout Unlimited and its Kennebec Valley chapter.
“People began to not only imagine what dam removal would do for the benefit of the fish, but also what it would do for the benefit of the town if they had a functioning, free-flowing river running through it,” says Andrew Fahlund, currently senior program officer at the Water Foundation, who was working for American Rivers during the push for dam removal.
The coalition had a strong argument. The dam produced only 3.5 megawatts of power, providing less than 0.1 percent of Maine’s electricity. It employed only a few people and was aging and unsafe, having been breached numerous times. It blocked critical upstream fish habitat, including the migration of endangered sturgeon.
And a restored fishery would bring economic as well as ecological benefits — profits that could be more widely shared than those of the small company that owned the dam.
But taking down a functioning hydroelectric dam for the benefit of fish had never been done before.
“Initially the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff issued their proposal that the dam should be relicensed,” says Burrows. “It took our organizations doing a lot of work with some experts to actually demonstrate that the ecological values of removing the dam outweighed the power generation.” The coalition produced 7,000 pages of documentation on the impacts of the dam and the economic importance of a restored fishery.
At the same time, they worked to educate the public and earned national attention and the support of Maine’s governor, Angus King, who said that the removal of the dam would help the Kennebec “reclaim its position as both an economic asset and an ecological miracle.”
Dam proponents countered that removal would be too expensive and would cause riverbank erosion, bring more downstream floods and lower property values for those along the riverfront.
But in 1997, after mounting evidence from the coalition, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted to deny license renewal. It ordered that the dam be removed. People campaigning for removal were ecstatic, while dam owners across the country were shocked.
This was the first time the commission used its authority to deny a permit against the wishes of a dam owner. And it hasn’t been done since.
It wasn’t just the commission’s ruling that was groundbreaking; it was also the first time a dam was coming down on the main stem of a river and not a smaller tributary, which Graber says was a significant achievement. “It was a pivotal moment for us to build a national movement to take out dams,” he adds.
A crowd gathers on the banks of the Kennebec River of the breaching of Edwards Dam in 1999. (Photo by NRCM)
The battle wasn’t yet won, though.
It took another year for a negotiated settlement to be reached with the dam owner, conservation groups and federal and state agencies that managed to stave off the threat of lengthy lawsuits from Edwards Manufacturing Company.
Much of the funding for the removal ended up coming from Bath Iron Works, a downstream shipbuilder that was expanding its operations into prime sturgeon habitat. The company paid into the dam-removal settlement as part of its environmental mitigation.
The decision had far-reaching impacts.
“The success of this effort would serve as an example of what could be accomplished for other river restoration activists around the nation, thereby contributing to the dramatic growth of dam removal efforts and fisheries restoration projects,” wrote Crane.
A River Reborn
The removal of Edwards Dam in July 1999 turned out to be a chance for Augusta to rebuild its relationship to the river.
“Like most towns in New England of that era, their backs had been turned to the river for more than 100 years,” says Fahlund, who was on the banks that day. He remembers it feeling electric and the atmosphere festive — music played, commemorative T-shirts were sold and reporters from around the world showed up.
It was also, he says, a day of mixed emotions for some residents. The dam had been a piece of the town’s history for more than 160 years, both infrastructure and monument, but part of the campaign to remove it had been to counter the notion that dams are meant to last forever.
That echoed beyond the town limits. “Even though it wasn’t a huge dam, it had somewhat of a seismic impact on people’s thinking about dams that they’re not necessarily permanent fixtures in eternity on the landscape,” says Didisheim.
As soon as the dam came down, the river rebounded. Fish immediately had access to 18 more miles of habitat, up to the town of Waterville at the mouth of the Sebasticook River. Atlantic sturgeon began to swim past the former dam site, and alewife and shad soon returned. Within a year seals could be seen chasing alewives, a type of river herring, 40 miles upstream from the ocean.
Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams were removed. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)
And with alewives coming back, so did everything that eats them — river otters, bears, mink, bald eagles, osprey and blue herons.
But the best indicator of the ecosystem’s recovery was the resurgence of aquatic insects like mayflies and stoneflies, which signaled improved water quality.
“They all rebounded and the diversity just skyrocketed,” says Fahlund. “And so we knew something great was happening and that it was going to lead to everything we had hoped.”
Within a few years the river began to meet higher water-quality standards.
“The water… is now that much healthier because it’s no longer sitting still and dead,” stated a 2009 editorial in the Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel. “Instead, it bubbles and spills its way downstream across rediscovered gravel bars and river ledges, collecting and absorbing oxygen as it moves toward the ocean. The river is alive in a way it hasn’t been for generations.”
The benefits spread to the community as well. A park and trails were built along the waterfront. “People are out on the water, mostly paddling a kayak or canoeists,” says Graber. “The downtown is starting to make use of the river more. The buildings that have been redeveloped are now using the river as an amenity. The river’s really just come back to life both for humans and the ecology.”
Ripple Effect
The success didn’t end in Augusta, though. The removal of Edwards Dam ignited efforts to take out the next obstacle up-river, the Fort Halifax Dam on the Sebasticook River in Waterville. After eight years of work that dam was removed in 2008, further extending habitat for native fish.
“We have species like sturgeon, striped bass, rainbow smelt and other key sea-run species which now have access to all of their historic habitat in the watershed,” says the Atlantic Salmon Federation’s Burrows.
The breaching of Ft. Halifax Dam on the Sebasticook River. (Photo by NRCM)
The removal of both dams, in conjunction with active stocking of alewives into lakes and ponds upriver and in other parts of the watershed, has helped the river herring population rebound dramatically. The number of alewives returning to spawn jumped from 78,000 in 1999 to 5.5 million last year.
And the downstream estuary has reaped rewards, too.
When those billions of juvenile river herring leave the freshwater lakes and rivers, they head for the sea and may spend between three and five years in the marine environment. There they serve are a food source for everything from cod and haddock to whales and seals.
“They are really a kind of keystone ecological species for the Gulf of Maine,” says Burrows.
The river herring are also a valuable source of bait for commercial lobstermen, who in recent decades have had such a deficit in securing local supplies that they’ve had to turn to importing bait from southeast Asia, introducing a host of new environmental problems and costs.
“We’ve now got the largest river herring population on the east coast of the United States, maybe even on the entire eastern seaboard of North America, but that population could easily be three, four times what it is now,” says Burrows. “And so we’re continuing to work on restoring more habitat and we’re hoping to see those populations continue to increase.”
Didisheim says an estimated 27 million alewives have reached spawning habitat since the Ft. Halifax Dam was removed, and none of it would have happened without first removing the Edwards Dam.
The Edwards Dam also helped propel a large restoration project a couple hours northeast of Augusta on the Penobscot River. Conservation groups worked with the dam operator on the Penobscot to increase hydropower generation on some other dams and then remove a series of lower dams that opened up more than 1,000 miles of river access for fish, especially critically endangered Atlantic salmon.
While that project was being developed, its proponents could point to the Kennebec River restoration as an example of what could be achieved.
“The Kennebec River activists and city and state leaders did not have the advantage that later river restoration activists would have — namely, the Kennebec River restoration itself as powerful example of how quickly river restoration could work and how successful it could be,” wrote Crane. “This is the one reason that the Edwards Dam removal is so important; it showed other communities the process required and how successful it could be.”
A Movement Grows
Dam removals followed outside Maine. When the Edwards Dam was removed, about five dam removals were taking place nationwide each year. Last year it was 80. Since Edwards, more than 1,100 dams have come down.
Many of these have been small dams, but there have also been high-profile projects, like the two Elwha River dams that were the largest dam-removal project so far in the world.
The removal of the 125-foot-tall Condit Dam in 2011 on the White Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia River in Washington, was a big step in aiding threatened salmon and steelhead. The Condit was removed because adding modern requirements for fish proved to be uneconomical — it was cheaper to remove the dam than build fish passage.
Overall there’s been a shift in public thinking about dams over the past two decades. “It’s not just something that conservationists and environmentalists are advocating for anymore,” says Amy Souers Kober, communications director at American Rivers. “Dam removal also makes sense for economic reasons and public safety in a lot of cases.”
That includes Bloede Dam on the Patapsco River in Maryland, where nine people have drowned, she says. Efforts to remove the dam there began in September.
Dam-removal proponents don’t think we need to take out all of our dams, and of course we couldn’t. The United States has more than 90,000 dams, and many still serve crucial functions. But where dams have been removed, the past two decades have shown the environmental results are unparalleled.
“There’s no faster or more effective way to bring a river back to life than taking out a dam,” says American Rivers’ Graber. “That’s why we focused on it for 20 years. It’s a win for environmental reasons, public safety and a relief from liability for dam owners.”
Ultimately, dam removals are much bigger than the dams themselves, says Kober. “Dam removals are really stories about people reclaiming their rivers.”
Only about 1,000 of these relatively small, heavily poached crocodiles remain in the wild, where their populations are scattered between several Southeast Asian countries. Cambodia, the country with the most Siamese crocodiles, only has 
According to the 2016 report, the last person confirmed to have seen the Bramble Cay melomys alive was a fisherman who spotted one in late 2009. It now seems possible that could have been the last surviving member of the species.
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Within a few years, the alewife run on the Sebasticook River, a tributary of the Kennebec just upstream from the dam, was gone. Where once you’d been able to catch 500 salmon a season in Augusta, by 1850 you were lucky to get five. The state reported that the shad industry there was completely lost by 1867. And the sturgeon catch on the lower Kennebec declined from 320,000 pounds a year before the dam to just 12,000 pounds a year by 1880.
