September’s Best Environmental Books: The Green New Deal, Vanishing Species and Effective Activism

This month brings important new books by Naomi Klein, photographer Joel Sartore, Jonathan Safran Foer and water activist Maude Barlow.

September has arrived, summer vacation season is over and it’s time to get stuff done — not just for the month ahead but for the future of the planet.

revelator readsWith that in mind, this month sees the publication of an amazing array of books on a wide range of environmental issues, covering everything from climate change to burning rainforests to protecting our water. We’ve combed through the catalogs to pick the 13 best new eco-books coming out in September, including titles from an impressive team of experts and award-winning authors. Check out our list below, pick the ones that are best for you or your family, and read up on new ideas for fixing what we’ve broken — then get to work.

The Green New Deal:

To start off our list, this month brings not one but two books about the need for a Green New Deal.

on fireFirst up, Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein offers us On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. This collection of new and previously published reports examines the state of the environment around the world, ranging from the Great Barrier Reef to the Vatican. And as you’d expect from a firebrand like Klein, this impassioned, justice-oriented book presents a call for immediate transformation of the systems that have produced the climate crisis (and so many other crises along the way).

Taking a slightly different path, economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin brings us The Green New Deal, a cautionary tale that warns the world economy (if not the world itself) will fall apart in under ten years if we don’t take immediate action to mothball extractive energy technologies. Subtitled “Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth,” Rifkin’s book serves as a call for world governments to decarbonize their economies, post-haste.

Wildlife and Conservation:

missing lynxThe Missing Lynx: The Past and Future of Britain’s Lost Mammals by Ross Barnett — Eurasian lynx were wiped out in Britain 1,300 years ago, but there’s now an effort to bring them back to their old stomping grounds. Could other species, even megafauna, soon follow? Barnett look at the lynx and other extinct British species to see what we’ve lost following their disappearance from the ecosystem and what we might gain from rewilding projects. Along the way, he asks if these types of projects should even be conducted at all. That’s a timely, important question in this era when we’re even talking about brining extinct species like the mammoth back to life.

gone is goneGone Is Gone: Wildlife Under Threat by Isabelle Groc — Aimed at teenage readers, this profusely illustrated and thoroughly researched book looks at endangered species around the world — and what we can do to help them. Conservation icon Jane Goodall provides the foreword. (For juvenile readers, check out a similarly themed book out this month: Survival by artist Louise McNaught and writer Anna Claybourne.)

Vanishing: The World’s Most Vulnerable Animals by Joel Sartore — Critically endangered and extinct-in-the-wild species get the spotlight in this stunning, 400-page photography book, the latest in Sartore’s “Photo Ark” project for National Geographic. This could be your last chance to see many of these species, so take some time to linger on each image and reflect on the very real faces of impending extinction.

Climate Change:

we are the weatherWe Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer — If we want to fight climate change, we (individually and collectively) need to put down the breakfast sausages and rethink many of our other agricultural products. A stylishly written and thought-provoking book from the author of Everything Is Illuminated and Eating Animals.

The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America’s Coasts by Gilbert M. Gaul — Hoo boy, the coastal destructive coming our way due to climate change and sea-level rise is going to be expensive…and taxpayers will carry the costs. Gaul, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, recounts the history of coastal development (or over-development, to be precise) and lays out the case for changing the way we regulate and subsidize risky construction.

Activism and Environmental Justice:

whose water is it anywayWhose Water Is It, Anyway? Taking Water Protection Into Public Hands by Maude Barlow — One of the world’s most notable water-justice activists provides a step-by-step guide to help communities keep themselves from going dry due to the actions of irresponsible companies and governments. (Check out our interview with Barlow.)

Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community From the Mining Industry by Joan Kuyek — Covering everything from how to stop a new mining project to figuring out how to clean up an abandoned mine, this important book offers activists a primer for taking on all manner of extractive industries that can harm human health and the environment.

Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature and Social Action by Kari Marie Norgaard — A sociological look at North American colonialism, focusing on the Karuk Tribe of northern California and their political struggles for environmental justice and food sovereignty.

And Two More for Good Measure:

Waste by Kate O’Neill — A simply titled book about a very complex issue: What do we do with all of our stuff? From food waste to plastic recycling to the remnants of our ubiquitous electronics, O’Neill examines the politics and future of what we throw away.

rainforestRainforest: Dispatches From Earth’s Most Vital Frontlines by Tony Juniper — A gorgeous, thoughtful and increasingly necessary book examining the roles that rainforests around the world play in regulating our planetary systems. Juniper, a noted environmentalist who has spent decades working on rainforest conservation, devotes a good portion of this book to the threats that human-caused fires pose to these essential ecosystems — a timely topic, to say the least.


That’s our list for this month, but don’t stop here: You can find dozens of other recent eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.

Fighting Water Privatization with ‘Blue Communities’

Author and activist Maude Barlow talks about the growing global movement to protect public control of water resources.

It was 1985 and privatization, deregulation and free trade were in the air. Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan were negotiating a free trade deal — a precursor to NAFTA. Among the goods it would cover: “Water, including … mineral waters … ice and snow.”the ask

That set off alarm bells for Canadian activist Maude Barlow, as she explains in her new book Whose Water Is It, Anyway? Taking Water Protection into Public Hands:

“I asked myself, Who owns water and who is making decisions about this precious resource? I had always assumed that water belongs to us all. But I was about to learn that the world was straining its water resources even then and that a number of private corporations and interests were moving in to take control of and profit from growing water scarcity.” 

That year Barlow helped found the Council of Canadians, a nonprofit focused on democracy, trade and environmental issues, and jumped headlong into a global battle to protect public control of water resources — a fight in which she’s been a leading voice ever since.

Among her accomplishments, Barlow was instrumental in the United Nations’ decision to declare access to clean water a human right in 2010. She’s also received accolades for her efforts including the Right Livelihood Award and the Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship Award. She’s currently the honorary chair of the Council of Canadians, chair of the board of Food and Water Watch and a councilor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council.

In Whose Water Is It, Anyway? she writes not just about the hazards of water privatization but about proactive efforts that communities are taking to protect water resources, including the Blue Communities Project, which started in Canada in 2009 and has spread to cities, universities, unions and faith-based organizations around the world. Blue Communities commit to defending water as a human right, protecting water resources for the public trust and banning bottled water from municipal facilities and events.

We spoke to Barlow about the different forms that water privatization can take, the solutions offered by Blue Communities and our biggest water threat.

Maude Barlow
Water activist and author Maude Barlow. (Photo by Michelle Valberg)

What are some of the threats that water privatization poses to communities?

Water privatization has been proven in many studies and in real experience to be a terrible mistake. Handing control of water services to private companies removes public oversight of a crucial source of life and of what should unquestionably be a public service.

Private water and wastewater services employ fewer staff, cut corners on source protection, provide poorer customer service and charge higher rates. More recently, pro-privatization proponents have argued that public-private partnerships (P3s) are better than full privatization in that they maintain government control over the water source. However, in practice, there is little difference between the older forms of full water privatization and P3s, as both have to incorporate the profit motive into providing water services. So public funds that should go into delivery of services and water protection instead go to investors.

You’ve worked with a lot of communities that have fought back against water privatization. What have you learned?

Since 2000 some 267 municipalities around the world that had tried water privatization — including some big cities such as Paris and Berlin — have returned the management of their water services to public control. In many cases, the fight was long and intense and it cost the public money to buy back their water systems.

But there are many examples of increased quality control, more funding for water source protection and lowered water rates for the public once private investors are no longer a part of the equation.

Beside corporations controlling public water or wastewater systems, what are some other forms of water privatization?

Water is bought and sold under water market regimes in California and other parts of the world. Water becomes privately controlled when a foreign investor, company or government gets control of local land and water in what are called “land grabs.”

In other cases, when water is bottled for commercial sale, it is privately owned and many of the wells and water sources used by the big water bottling companies are under multi-year contracts.Book cover

Water is also considered a tradable good in “free trade” agreements and subject to the market disciplines of trade rules. Foreign investors can and have claimed ownership of water sources they use to produce their product in another country.

There is a mighty contest taking place in our world: Is water a commodity to be put on the open market like oil and gas or a public trust and a human right to be guarded as a commons for all time? This has been the fight of my life.

What’s gained by becoming a Blue Community?

A Blue Community is an act of hope. Instead of being against the many threats to water, a Blue Community offers a vision for the future based on the belief that water is a human right and a public trust. It also tackles the growing crisis of plastic pollution by committing a municipality (or university or place to worship, etc.) to phasing out bottled water on its premises.

Some Blue Communities take it a lot further. Berlin set aside a fund to promote safe tap water more broadly to the public and to provide drinking water refilling stations throughout the city.

A Blue Community realizes that we cannot protect source water and watersheds if we turn the decision-making about local water sources over to private investors. The Blue Community Project is also a wonderful educational opportunity to teach about water, why it matters and how we have to care for it.

What keeps you up at night?

The declining state of the planet’s water sources. We humans are polluting, mismanaging, diverting and over-extracting water at an unprecedented rate and the supply of clean water is dramatically dropping just as the demand is skyrocketing.

We have made serious inroads toward fulfilling the 2010 United Nations resolution recognizing the human right to water but it cannot be realized if there is no clean water to be found. The water crisis, just like the climate crisis, is a visceral threat to human rights as the competition for water is pitting rich against poor, urban against rural, industrial development against Indigenous survival, and region against region.

Only if we come together to protect water and share it more justly will we avoid the conflict that is hovering at the edges of our lives.

Pacific Bluefin Tuna Fishing Proposals Jeopardize Recovery Efforts

The Pacific bluefin tuna is vulnerable to extinction and yet fisheries managers may vote to increase the number that can be caught.

Pacific bluefin tuna remains a species at risk. Despite a 2017 agreement on a rebuilding plan by countries that catch the species, overfishing that began nearly a century ago continues, leaving this highly valuable fish at less than 4 percent of its historic size — and vulnerable to extinction.

When the managers responsible for Pacific bluefin tuna meet Sept. 2-6 in Portland, Oregon, they must reject proposals from Japan and South Korea that would raise quotas and put the future recovery of the population at risk. Instead, the decision-makers from the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, which jointly manage the species, should exercise caution, not increase catch limits, and focus on long-term sustainable management of the fishery.

The rebuilding plan that was passed just two years ago aims to return the species to 20 percent of its historic size by 2034. Japan’s proposal calls for increasing the catch of both juvenile and adult Pacific bluefin, and comes even after countries rejected a similar proposal from Japan last year. Any increase in catch quotas would exacerbate overfishing and delay or derail the chances of a recovery. Additionally, recovery depends on an increase in recruitment — an estimate of the number of new fish entering the population in a given year — but signs point to a possible decrease in recruitment last year. Managers should wait for the results of an official stock assessment, scheduled for next year, to confirm if the plan is working before even considering raising the bluefin quota.

Effective management should be based on responsible, sustainable quotas and stock assessments that account for uncertainty, not on overly optimistic expectations that recruitment will increase and then remain high. The constant back-and-forth on quotas for Pacific bluefin reinforces the need to agree on a science-based, precautionary harvest strategy that is tested in computer simulation. Modernizing bluefin management in this way will result in a more automated, transparent, predictable — and effective — system that moves away from contentious yearly debates to more forward-thinking, strategic planning.

Long-term, sustainable, international management is the last hope that any gains in the Pacific bluefin population won’t be immediately reversed by future decisions prioritizing short-term profit. At this year’s meeting, managers and the countries that depend on a healthy Pacific bluefin population must demonstrate their commitment to science-based, precautionary management by maintaining the established rebuilding plan and making progress by adopting a robust and sustainable harvest strategy for the species.

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.

This story was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Asian Otters: Out of the Water and Into…a Café?

The international community took steps to protect two increasingly rare species this week, providing an important reminder that treating otters as pets harms the iconic animals in the wild.

In recent years Asia’s otters have been subject to intense poaching, primarily for their pelts. Markets in East Asia greatly value their smooth, dense, water-adapted fur. At same time the poaching of live otters for sale in the pet trade has become an emerging crisis. Even in Japan’s famous cat cafés, otters have proven to be attractive alternatives to felines. The small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus), with its charming reputation, is especially vulnerable to such trade.

This week the international community took a major step to support these otters. At the 18th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the world’s governments voted overwhelmingly to apply their strongest level of protection to both the small-clawed and smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata).


Otters are found alongside — and in — rivers, streams and shorelines in many parts of the world. These semi-aquatic small carnivores eat fish and a variety of shrimp, crabs and other invertebrates. Those who study otters know them to be intelligent, lively and highly social within their extended family groups.

When I was doing field research in the lowland and swamp forests in different parts of Malaysia in Southeast Asia, I took great pleasure in glimpsing the telltale signs of mud slides down the river banks — a sure sign that otters were in the area. Seeing a small family of small-clawed otters bounding alongside a small river would inevitably enliven my day.

Observing the world’s smallest otter in action was always a treat and, delightfully, not uncommon some 25 years ago.

But since then they — and their larger Asian cousins, smooth-coated otters — have become increasingly, alarmingly rare. Massive loss of lowland and coastal swamp forests to development, industrial agriculture and aquaculture — together with serious pollution of waterways — has greatly reduced their potential habitat and food supplies.

smooth-coated otters
Smooth-coated otters at Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, India. Photo: Manan Singh Mahadev (CC BY 2.0)

Meanwhile international criminal networks traffic otter pelts with other valuable species, such as tiger and leopard. Unfortunately enforcement across the clandestine trade chain for otters tends to be much weaker than for their readily recognizable big cat fellow carnivores, despite the fact that the otter trade often occurs on a huge scale. One seizure by enforcement officials might result in the discovery of hundreds of pelts.

This week’s decision by CITES parties to list both small-clawed and smooth-coated otters on Appendix I means that all international commercial trade in both species is now illegal. It gives governments in countries where the otters naturally live, as well as those in countries where they are trafficked and sold, additional legal tools to stop this devastating trade.

Much work still needs to be done. These and other otter species require additional protections at the national level to prevent domestic trade and further habitat loss. Existing otter cafés should switch back to domestic species such as cats to reduce consumer demand for more captive otters, and authorities should ensure that this happens. Enforcement of the new international trade rules will be critical to the species’ survival.

That’s why this week’s action at CITES is important: It sends a message to the global community that these entirely wonderful animals are in trouble and need our help — and that does not mean cuddling them in our homes and cafés. It means leaving them, undisturbed, in their wild tropical habitats, with their own extended families — to dive for fish, play and thrive in their natural homes for decades to come.

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

California Tribe Hopes to Conquer Climate Woes — With Fire

Returning prescribed fire to California forests is the focus of a new climate-adaptation plan from the Karuk Tribe, but the federal government will need to play big role.

More and more land in California is going up in flames. The area in the state burned by wildfires has increased by a factor of five since 1972, according to a recent study, which identified human-caused warming the likely culprit.

So what’s to be done?

The Karuk Tribe wants to fight fire with fire.

This summer the tribe, one of the largest in the state, released a climate-adaptation plan that calls for a return to a more natural fire regime. According to the plan, using prescribed burns at appropriate times of the year in place of the current policy of fire suppression would reduce the possibility of high-severity fires, which have proven deadly and costly for California in recent years and are expected to worsen as the climate warms.

“Climate adaptation is about restoring human responsibilities and appropriate relationships to the natural world,” says Bill Tripp, deputy director of Karuk Natural Resources Department and a co-author of the plan.

Wildfires have always been a part of the ecology of California, and “Karuk people have long been part of the ecosystem,” says Tripp. Prescribed burning, in particular, has been a key part of cultural practices of Indigenous people for millennia. As the Karuk climate plan explains, “Due in part to these thousands of years of purposeful fire management, the forests of this region are ecologically dependent on fires that are low in heat production, or ‘cooler’ fires.”

But much of that historic burning was snuffed out with the arrival of white settlers and a century-long U.S. government policy of fire suppression. In the Karuk territory and many other areas of the West, ecosystems are adapted to burn frequently, but suppression disrupts those natural processes. Instead, forests end up with dense, homogenous stands of trees, meadows are crowded out and dead materials accumulate on the forest floor — all of which can contribute to high-intensity fires that are now being supersized by warmer, drier forest conditions.

For the Karuk this has consequences for everything from food to culture. As the plan explains, “The exclusion of fire has led to radical ecological changes including high fuel loads, decreased habitat for large game such as elk and deer, reduction in the quantity and quality of acorns, and alteration of growth patterns of basketry materials such as hazel and willow.”

Logging
Logs from the Westside salvage logging sale after a fire near the Klamath River. (Photo by Jenny Staats)

Many scientists, as well as tribes, are calling for more controlled burns, but efforts for the Karuk to bring fire back to the land — and better increase their resilience in the face of climate change — are complicated by issues of sovereignty and lagging policy.

Contested Land

The Karuk people hail from the rugged and remote Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains in Northern California, along the Klamath and Salmon rivers. Most of their aboriginal territory of just over 1 million acres is currently managed by the federal government as national forest, although the tribe never ceded the land.

Instead the tribe’s “heavily timbered, mineral-rich homeland” was “taken by the United States without ratification of its treaties negotiated in 1851,” historian Stephen Dow Beckham wrote in an article two years ago. With the promise of a reservation never fulfilled, the tribe has virtually no land base.

Tribal members are still dependent on the resources from the nearby forests for food, fiber and cultural practices, but decisions about how that land is managed falls to outside agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service.

That leaves the tribe with little control over its own future. The tribe is concerned that poor land management, combined with climate change, increasingly puts them at risk and threatens their cultural resources.

The risks have already started to materialize: Temperatures in the region have increased 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1931, and the tribe has already seen more variable precipitation, decreased snowpack, earlier snowmelt, less spring runoff, drier fall weather, a longer fire season, and more insect pests and pathogens — including Phytophthora ramorum, which causes “sudden oak death.” All those things are expected to worsen with warming temperatures, and the ecological changes could affect other species of cultural significance for the tribe, including chinook salmon, Pacific lamprey, beavers, Pacific giant salamander, tanoaks, evergreen huckleberry and elk. Some species already face compounding environmental pressures from fire suppression, dams, logging and water diversions.

But the biggest concern is in the increased risk of high-severity fire, which can damage homes and infrastructure, create public-health risks, destroy cultural resources and diminish water quality. Big wildfires have already hit close to home for the Karuk. In 2008 the massive Klamath Theater Complex Fire, a conflagration that united 11 separate blazes, burned for three months in the region and consumed more than 190,000 acres. Then in 2014 the Happy Camp Complex Fire burned 134,000 acres, ripping through the heart of Karuk territory and prompting the tribe to turn its community center into a refuge for residents forced to evacuate their homes.

Happy Camp fire
A view of the Happy Camp Complex Fire in the Klamath National Forest in California, which began on Sep. 17, 2014. (Photo by Joshua Veal, U.S. Forest Service)

The Karuk’s climate-adaptation plan is an effort to shift the management dynamic and builds on some recent cooperative work among the Forest Service, the Karuk and other local groups.

“This plan is years in the making and we’re hoping we’ll be able to actually start to change the paradigm in the way fire is managed in Karuk country,” says Tripp.

The Karuk’s plan is also part of a growing effort from dozens of tribes across the United States to assess climate vulnerability and build adaptation plans, although each tribe faces unique challenges, especially tribes without federal recognition. (The Karuk have federal recognition, a relative rarity in California.)

It’s a trend that’s deeply needed.

“Indigenous people are disproportionately impacted by the changing climate as they lack the financial resources to build new infrastructure,” says Kari Norgaard, associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the Karuk plan. “But for the Karuk, their vulnerability to climate change is also a function of state policy — the Karuk’s ability to do what they want to do is reduced because of those structural conditions.” Basic management decisions regarding land-use, logging and fire policy are out of their hands.

At the same time, says Norgaard, tribal members possess a wealth of information on the management of local ecosystems that should play a leading role as the region plans for how to cope with climate impacts.

“Native American tribes and native nations have been at the forefront of a lot of climate work, whether that’s in the-street-protests or putting up solar panels or doing climate adaptation plans,” she says.

But daunting challenges remain.

“One of the biggest obstacles is the sense that indigenous knowledge is sort of dead or not valid,” says Norgaard, who has conducted collaborative research projects with the Karuk since 2003. “Many people just do not understand how much indigenous knowledge about fire use is really a modern science still today.” Western scientists have increasingly called for the incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge into new plans for reintroducing natural fire regimes back to the landscape.

The Science of Burning

Indeed the Karuk’s call for more prescribed burning is supported by a growing body of scientific studies.

“Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge,” Crystal A. Kolden, an associate professor in the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho, wrote in a report in the journal Fire. “The scientific literature has repeatedly reported that prescribed fire is often the most effective means of achieving such goals by reducing fuels and wildfire hazard and restoring ecological function to fire-adapted ecosystems in the United States following a century of fire exclusion.”

Smoke over river
Smoke over the Klamath River during the Klamath River Prescribed Fire Training Exchange.
(Photo by Jenny Staats)

Despite those scientific findings, the actual practice of prescribed burns lags greatly, as does funding. A recent report from Climate Central found that federal funding for prescribed burns is a fraction of what’s allocated for suppression.

And that’s become obvious on the ground. Kolden’s research revealed that prescribed burning hasn’t increased across the western United States in the past 20 years. In some places it has actually decreased. Most of the prescribed burning happening in the country, she found, was in the Southeast.

That worries Bill Tripp.

“When I hear the agencies talking about having a 97 percent success rate of suppressing fires, it makes me think that 97 percent of what should have been burning isn’t,” he says.

Kolden’s report suggests that we need a larger cultural shift and better public education about prescribed fires and their role in reducing wildlife risk. “Without such a shift, more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable,” she wrote.

And that’s at the crux of the Karuk’s intention with their plan, a big part of which is working on increased engagement and public education, as well as more “interjurisdictional coordination” — allowing the Karuk to help drive management policy.

But even if all that goes well, there are still challenges to returning low-intensity fire to areas that haven’t been burned in 100 years.

“Just the cost alone is going to be quite expensive, and then there are issues of workforce development and training,” says Tripp. “It’s not just about burning a certain number of acres. It’s about how you put fire on the ground — it needs to be done right.”

There’s also the public perception or “social license,” he says. Twenty years ago, the majority of people believed that all fire was bad, says Tripp. But he’s seen that mentality shift in recent years. More and more people are learning that fire can be used beneficially — although it can be still be a tough sell in a state that has seen recent wildfires claim dozens of lives.

But the Karuk are hoping to convince people through example. The tribe has been working closely for years to develop a plan with the Six Rivers National Forest on a 5,500-acre demonstration project that will allow them to begin some restoration and prescribed burning in the national forest. They hope to carry the lessons learned from that work to further efforts, says Tripp.

Picking up acorns
Students from the Klamath River pick up acorns from a recently burned area near the town of Orleans, Calif. (Photo by Jenny Staats)

“I’m hoping that we could end up getting to a place to where we can just all work together to make this all happen and try to mitigate these effects of climate change the best we can and protect as many of the species as we can that may be in peril,” he adds.

Norgaard says she feels that efforts like this can help people see that the threats of climate change and wildfires don’t have to leave people feeling disempowered.

“There is a lot we can do,” she says, “and we need to be doing it now.”

The Federal Government’s Cruel War Against Wildlife

USDA’s Wildlife Services often uses “cyanide bombs” to kill animals, but that’s just one of the inhumane weapons in their arsenal.

Wildlife advocates got a much-needed win recently when the EPA withdrew its support for M-44 “cyanide bombs” used to kill coyotes and other animals. The devices — which attract animals with tasty bait and then inject a deadly dose of sodium cyanide into their mouths — have been used for decades by a USDA program called Wildlife Services to eliminate animals that are perceived as threats to agricultural interests.

The announcement came just five days after the EPA re-approved the use of M-44s, a move that generated outcry from around the country.

Of course, M-44s are just one of the weapons in Wildlife Service’s arsenal. The program’s staff uses a variety of additional tools and methods to complete their tasks, including several that wildlife advocates consider to be cruel and inhumane.

These methods add up. All told Wildlife Services killed 2.6 million animals in 2018, including 1.1 million invasive species and 1.5 million native animals.

For more on these methods and some of the species affected, check out our video below:

Winners and Losers: Here’s What Ocean Warming Means for Fish

New research finds that ocean warming has damaged some fisheries and benefited others, although the losers outweigh the winners. But there’s still some encouraging news.

Climate change has been steadily warming the ocean, which absorbs most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, for 100 years. This warming is altering marine ecosystems and having a direct impact on fish populations. About half of the world’s population relies on fish as a vital source of protein, and the fishing industry employs more the 56 million people worldwide.

My recent study with colleagues from Rutgers University and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that ocean warming has already impacted global fish populations. We found that some populations benefited from warming, but more of them suffered.

Overall, ocean warming reduced catch potential — the greatest amount of fish that can be caught year after year — by a net 4 percent over the past 80 years. In some regions, the effects of warming have been much larger. The North Sea, which has large commercial fisheries, and the seas of East Asia, which support some of the fastest-growing human populations, experienced losses of 15 percent to 35 percent.

Although ocean warming has already challenged the ability of ocean fisheries to provide food and income, swift reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reforms to fisheries management could lessen many of the negative impacts of continued warming.

How and Why Does Ocean Warming Affect Fish?

My collaborators and I like to say that fish are like Goldilocks: They don’t want their water too hot or too cold, but just right.

Put another way, most fish species have evolved narrow temperature tolerances. Supporting the cellular machinery necessary to tolerate wider temperatures demands a lot of energy. This evolutionary strategy saves energy when temperatures are “just right,” but it becomes a problem when fish find themselves in warming water. As their bodies begin to fail, they must divert energy from searching for food or avoiding predators to maintaining basic bodily functions and searching for cooler waters.

Thus, as the oceans warm, fish move to track their preferred temperatures. Most fish are moving poleward or into deeper waters. For some species, warming expands their ranges. In other cases it contracts their ranges by reducing the amount of ocean they can thermally tolerate. These shifts change where fish go, their abundance and their catch potential.

Warming can also modify the availability of key prey species. For example, if warming causes zooplankton — small invertebrates at the bottom of the ocean food web — to bloom early, they may not be available when juvenile fish need them most. Alternatively, warming can sometimes enhance the strength of zooplankton blooms, thereby increasing the productivity of juvenile fish.

Understanding how the complex impacts of warming on fish populations balance out is crucial for projecting how climate change could affect the ocean’s potential to provide food and income for people.

Temperature map
Warming is affecting virtually all regions of the ocean.

Impacts of Historical Warming on Marine Fisheries

Sustainable fisheries are like healthy bank accounts. If people live off the interest and don’t overly deplete the principal, both people and the bank thrive. If a fish population is overfished, the population’s “principal” shrinks too much to generate high long-term yields.

Similarly, stresses on fish populations from environmental change can reduce population growth rates, much as an interest rate reduction reduces the growth rate of savings in a bank account.

In our study we combined maps of historical ocean temperatures with estimates of historical fish abundance and exploitation. This allowed us to assess how warming has affected those interest rates and returns from the global fisheries bank account.

Losers Outweigh Winners

We found that warming has damaged some fisheries and benefited others. The losers outweighed the winners, resulting in a net 4 percent decline in sustainable catch potential over the last 80 years. This represents a cumulative loss of 1.4 million metric tons previously available for food and income.

Fisheries map
The reddish and brown circles represent fish populations whose maximum sustainable yields have dropped as the ocean has warmed. The darkest tones represent extremes of 35 percent. Blueish colors represent fish yields that increased in warmer waters. (Chris Free, CC BY-ND)

Some regions have been hit especially hard. The North Sea, with large commercial fisheries for species like Atlantic cod, haddock and herring, has experienced a 35 percent loss in sustainable catch potential since 1930. The waters of East Asia, neighbored by some of the fastest-growing human populations in the world, saw losses of 8 percent to 35 percent across three seas.

Other species and regions benefited from warming. Black sea bass, a popular species among recreational anglers on the U.S. East Coast, expanded its range and catch potential as waters previously too cool for it warmed. In the Baltic Sea, juvenile herring and sprat — another small herring-like fish — have more food available to them in warm years than in cool years, and have also benefited from warming. However, these climate winners can tolerate only so much warming, and may see declines as temperatures continue to rise.

Management Boosts Fishes’ Resilience

Our work suggests three encouraging pieces of news for fish populations.

First, well-managed fisheries, such as Atlantic scallops on the U.S. East Coast, were among the most resilient to warming. Others with a history of overfishing, such as Atlantic cod in the Irish and North seas, were among the most vulnerable. These findings suggest that preventing overfishing and rebuilding overfished populations will enhance resilience and maximize long-term food and income potential.

Second, new research suggests that swift climate-adaptive management reforms can make it possible for fish to feed humans and generate income into the future. This will require scientific agencies to work with the fishing industry on new methods for assessing fish populations’ health, set catch limits that account for the effects of climate change and establish new international institutions to ensure that management remains strong as fish migrate poleward from one nation’s waters into another’s. These agencies would be similar to multinational organizations that manage tuna, swordfish and marlin today.

Finally, nations will have to aggressively curb greenhouse gas emissions. Even the best fishery management reforms will be unable to compensate for the 4 degree Celsius ocean temperature increase that scientists project will occur by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.

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

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

Is Science Failing the World’s Primates?

A look at five years of published studies finds that most primate species and habitats remain understudied. There are ways to fix that.

There are more than 500 known primate species, but it would be hard to tell that by looking at recent research. Want to know how chimpanzees are doing across Africa? We can tell you plenty about them. But understanding how nocturnal pottos are doing across the same region? That may be more difficult.

Here’s why: A new study by primatologists Michelle Bezanson of Santa Clara University and Allison McNamara of University of Texas-Austin surveyed 29,000 recent journal articles and found a lack of diversity in the species studied, field sites chosen and research topics.

And that’s troubling. Now is a critical time for primate conservation: Approximately 60 percent of primate species are endangered, half of them critically. And yet, as McNamara and Bezanson’s research of peer-reviewed studies published between 2011 to 2015 found, less than 20 percent of research was focused on conservation. Instead the studies focused on topics such as behavior and ecology, which address theoretical questions. And many papers did not acknowledge the contributions of local communities. Without basic research on the most severely threatened primate species, we lack the information and infrastructure needed to save them. And successful conservation efforts can only happen with the cooperation and investment of the local human communities who live alongside them.

In addition, there was a strong bias toward a small set of species.

graphic of species studied
Species represented in field primatology publications 2011–2015. Top 10 species represented by species‐specific silhouettes labeled with number of field visits: Pan troglodytes, Macaca fuscata, Macaca mulatta, Alouatta palliata, Alouatta pigra, Gorilla gorilla, Cebus capucinus, Papio hamadryas, Ateles geoffroyi, Lemur catta. All other species are represented by dots, the size of which reflects the number of field visits. In all, 240 species were examined in 876 field visits.

Slightly less than half of the 504 known primate species were the subjects of published research. Only 18 percent of publications focused on primates that were critically endangered or lacking the necessary data for IUCN assessment. The most frequently studied primates were the common chimpanzee in Africa, followed by long-tailed macaques and rhesus macaques in Asia, mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys in Central America, and western gorillas in Africa. Of the 10 most commonly studied primates, only the western gorilla is critically endangered.

The authors also found that research was limited geographically. Most of the primatologists whose studies they looked at worked in forested areas, primarily in national parks. Mainland Africa had the highest number of site visits, followed by North/South America, Asia and Madagascar. In each of these regions, site visits were concentrated among a handful of long-term research locations. In Madagascar, for instance, nearly half of all published research came from just four field sites.

With research limited to well-known study sites and popular species, we risk losing the understudied species before we can begin to understand them. When conservation efforts start too late, we may end up looking for animals that are no longer even there. For example, efforts started in the 1990s to search for Miss Waldron’s red colobus (Piliocolobus waldroni) after almost two decades without seeing a living individual. Though there has been evidence of what may the last few dead animals from photos and pelts, they are now presumed to be extinct.

These data present an alarming perspective on where primatologists are focusing their research efforts — but there’s reason for hope, as well.

The researchers focused on higher-impact publications, and that may have skewed the results to paint a grimmer picture. The journals assessed in this study have high standards for publication. As the field of primatology has been saturated with new researchers, increased publication pressure and diminishing funding opportunities, the stakes have gotten higher. While peer review plays an important role in ensuring publications meet scientific standards, they are also biased toward prioritizing novel theoretical research, at the expense of population surveys and basic ecological data.

Additionally, as the bar for publication is often set by the best-funded projects at long-term field sites, it’s increasingly difficult to publish research based on limited sample sizes, shorter field seasons, or without the breadth of long-term data. But that kind of research is needed, because some small studies provide key information on basic natural history and set up the baseline data and infrastructure for future research.

And some of that research may be out there — just not in the places that McNamara and Bezanson surveyed. I suspect that if we looked at regional journals focusing on African, Asian, or Central and South American primates, we’d see a greater representation of species breadth, as well as conservation-focused articles. Some primatologists may also be preferentially submitting their conservation work to journals with that focus, where the research may be more likely to inform on-the-ground efforts.

Still, McNamara and Bezanson’s survey reveals a need for changes in the field of primate research to better serve conservation goals.

Howler monkey
A mantled howler monkey at El Zota Biological Field Station in Costa Rica. (Photo by Michelle A. Rodrigues

A good place to start is examining the kind of research opportunities that get funded in the first place. The competition for publication can act as selection pressure, encouraging funding agencies to devote resources to long-term sites and established researchers, and discouraging students and early-career researchers from branching out to new sites and new species. These pressures are intensified by the competitive nature of both academic and non-academic job markets in which publications may make the difference between staying in primatology or leaving the field altogether.

The stakes are even higher if you conduct research at a newer field site, or on a species that is difficult to study. Researching understudied primates requires surmounting a number of hurdles, including finding funding, obtaining research permits, and overcoming the logistical challenges of establishing the field site and accessing the primates themselves. Most studies of primate behavior and biology require habituation, where researchers must attempt to follow the primates until they adjust to the researchers’ presence. This process can take anywhere few weeks to decades and is not always successful. But without habituation, it’s very hard to collect direct data on the animals.

Funding agencies that focus on primate fieldwork need to prioritize applied conservation research rather than solely theoretical work. Funders can ensure that primate fieldwork addresses conservation impact by instituting requirements that studies tackle the broad implications of their findings, such as conservation initiatives including local educational outreach and policy outcomes.

Editors and reviewers at top primatology journals should consider the way their review processes may hinder publication of conservation-focused research. Rather than holding all manuscripts under review to the data standards of established long-term field sites and well-studied species, these journals could encourage editors and reviewers to consider publication of smaller sample sizes, shorter field seasons or smaller datasets if the manuscripts present data from newer field sites and understudied primate populations.

Finally, primatologists should consider how to best generate public interest in primate conservation and galvanize that interest toward conservation funding. One of the most frustrating challenges for primatologists is that much of the enthusiasm for our study subjects ends up causing the primates harm. Interest in cute viral videos and selfie tourism often fuels the illegal pet and entertainment trades, while misleading the public to believe the primates are not endangered. We need to combat these problems and find new ways to channel public interest in charismatic primates into successful conservation outcomes.

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.

Outlaw Oceans: Exposing Slavery, Overfishing and Other Abuses on the High Seas

Journalist Ian Urbina’s daring new book The Outlaw Ocean uncovers a dark world of exploitation on the high seas — a world that exists out of the public eye and beyond the rule of law.

Our oceans are a vast, lawless frontier. But this long-exploited, still mysterious realm is central to modern economic life.

About 90 percent of international trade occurs by ship. Oceans provide fossil fuels and then absorb most of the carbon dioxide and heat produced by burning them. Billions of people in the poorest countries rely on the ocean for food and work.

And some of the most brutal forms of economic exploitation take place on the water. Sea slavery and other flagrant human-rights violations are rampant. And industrial-scale overfishing, both legal and illegal, has undermined conservation efforts and pushed prized fish species toward extinction.

This all happens out of view: The average American has little idea what went into putting fish on his or her plate, or where all that plastic packaging will end up. Even governments that try to police the worst abuses are often in the dark.

Thankfully new light is being shined on the problem.

New York Times reporter Ian Urbina has gone to great, dangerous lengths to peel back that veil. First in his “The Outlaw Ocean” series, and now in his new book, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontiers, Urbina reveals the horrifying conditions and idealistic possibilities of life at sea.The Outlaw Ocean cover

The scope of Urbina’s reporting has been astounding. He’s recounted a harrowing voyage on a massive Thai purse seiner worked by forced Cambodian labor and a months-long pursuit of an illegal fishing boat through iceberg-strewn waters. He’s interviewed whistleblowers about sea slavery and illegal dumping by cruise ships. He’s told of a submarine trip to a Brazilian coral reef that oil companies sought to secretly hurt and travels with a colorful maritime repo man. He’s made visits to a ship that offers abortions near places where they’re illegal and ocean outposts that claim a quirky kind of national sovereignty or illegally trade arms, oil or people.

“For all that adventure, though, the most important thing I saw from ships all around the world, and have tried in this book to capture, was an ocean woefully under-protected and the mayhem and misery often faced by those who work these waters,” writes Urbina in his introduction.

Even when enterprising journalists, activists or regulatory agencies discover and expose some to the worst abuses of our oceans — such as fishing-boat workers getting kidnapped or tricked into brutal, years-long servitude or desperate stowaways summarily executed — there are few effective international mechanisms to right the wrongs.

“Such is the inconvenient truth of globalization: it is based more on market sleight of hand than on Adam Smith’s invisible hand,” Urbina writes. “By outsourcing this task [of staffing fishing boats] to manning agencies, the people who work in the corporate responsibility and human resource offices of the grocery store chains and fish wholesalers further down the supply chain need not try to understand or explain how it is possible that the captains on these boats found workers willing to work for so little.”

Capitalism and its big players treat oceans as an inexhaustible domain for extracting resources and dumping waste, while avoiding national human-rights and environmental-protection laws and standards.

And yet, as Urbina writes, “the ocean was not meant to be a thing we use or a place where we extract resources and dump waste. It was vast habitat that we should leave alone or, better still, protect and help to flourish. Less meant to fill our wallets or stomachs, the ocean was an opportunity to expand our humanity, foster biodiversity, and prove our ability to live in balance with the rest of the planet’s occupants.”

To that end the book concludes with recommendations for ways we can better protect mariners, create a more transparent food-supply system, protect ocean environments from illegal dumping and plundering, and devise a system for monitoring and investigating offshore crimes.

But first we need to open our eyes to the important role of oceans in modern life and summon the political will to be their wise stewards.

“The ocean is outlaw not because it is inherently good or bad but because it is a void, like silence is to sound or boredom is to activity,” he writes. “While we have for centuries embraced and touted the life that springs from these waters, we have tended to ignore its role as a refuge of depravity. But the outlaw ocean is real, as it has been for centuries, and until we reckon with that fact, we can forget about ever taming or protecting this frontier.”

Intelligence Thieves: How Toxic Pollutants Are Robbing Communities of Color

In her new book, author and ethicist Harriet Washington unearths one of the most overlooked aspects of environmental racism.

Flint, Michigan, may now be synonymous with environmental health disasters, but Flint is no anomaly, says science writer and ethicist Harriet Washington. We are a nation of Flints. From small towns like Anniston, Alabama, to big cities like Washington, D.C., environmental health dangers are widespread and communities of color are the people most likely to be assaulted by heavy metals, pesticides and other poisons. the ask

Environmental racism has been well documented for decades — beginning with the work of sociologist Robert Bullard in Houston in the 1970s to a recent study in March on pollution burdens.

But as Washington writes in her new book A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, the fallout from environmental toxicity isn’t just physical. Lead, arsenic, mercury, PCBs, phthalates, DDT and even some pathogens can all rob people of their mental acuity and lower their intelligence, disrupting their livelihoods and thwarting their potential.

Washington, a former research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School and senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, is also the author of Infectious Madness and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

We spoke to Washington about why the dangers to mental capacity from environmental pollution are so often overlooked, why communities of color bear the brunt and what can be done about it.

How did the idea for this book come about?

I’ve always been fascinated by poisons of all kinds — everything from heavy metals to pathogens. In the early ‘80s I managed a poison-control center that was part of an upstate teaching hospital in New York. But after a while I began to see there were social patterns and so I studied public health.

I did a piece for the American Scholar called “The Well Curve” about how neglected tropical diseases were lowering the cognition of people in the developing world. And as I wrote that article, I also noted that these tropical diseases that we think of as being foreign diseases, they’re actually domestic diseases now — we have them right here in our country. And I realized that pathogens, along with the traditional heavy metals and industrial chemicals people worry about — all these things are concentrated in enclaves of people of color.

Harriet A. Washington
Author and medical ethicist Harriet Washington. (Photo courtesy of publisher)

And they are in fact hobbling people cognitively and behaviorally, as well as physically. They’re stealing cognition as well as health, and this is an emergent situation.

Most of the research on environmental health issues focuses on things like cancer clusters and other kinds of impairments to physical health. Why did you decide to focus on how environmental toxins threaten intelligence and mental capacity?

I think that the lowering of intelligence is a lot harder to perceive sometimes. If you’re poisoned as an infant or maybe in the womb or as a child, behavioral problems or lowered cognition may not be recognized until decades later. We’re not always aware of the fact that these industrial chemicals and heavy metals are eroding our intelligence. It’s not as easy to see as cancer.

David Ralll, a scientist [and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences] once said that if thalidomide [which was widely used to treat morning sickness] had lowered IQ instead of causing very visible birth defects, it would still be on the market.

I also wanted to point out how important it is to understand the exquisite vulnerability of fetuses and the young to environmental poisons. One of the arguments by industry scientists is that we’re often talking about tiny little exposures that can’t be dangerous. But we know now that tiny exposures can be devastating to a fetal brain. I think that dismissing an exposure because it’s small is very foolish.

You write in the book that poverty is often talked about as the biggest risk factor for why some communities face greater threats from environmental toxins, but actually race is a better indicator. Why is that mistake so often made and what’s the danger of it?

The fact is that being poor is a risk factor, but your race is a much stronger risk factor. If you look at data on income and toxicity, African Americans with a mean income of $50,000 to $60,000 — solidly middle class — have a much higher rate of exposure than white Americans who make $10,000 a year.

So clearly poverty is not the most important risk factor in this — race is. And I think that it’s so often described misleadingly as socio-economics because people are more comfortable with that. If you admit that it’s race rather than socioeconomics that dictates these exposures, well what are you saying? You’re admitting to racism, which is a shameful thing to admit.

Socioeconomics actually sounds better. But unfortunately, it’s also a subtle form of blaming the victim. We still have this Calvinistic hangover where it’s believed that poor people are poor because of some fault or some flaw of their own. So it’s a lot more comfortable to say they’re poor and that’s why they are at risk of toxic exposure than because they’re black or Hispanic.

What do you think we lose as a society by these assaults on intelligence from industrial chemicals and other environmental toxins?Book cover

I think it might be almost impossible to tease out exactly how much we’re losing.

One of the things that we’re insufficiently attentive to is that people in these ethnic enclaves — people on the reservations, Hispanics and African Americans living in these fence-line communities or in urban settings — they’re suffering the most, but the whole country is suffering.

Bruce Lanphear [a physician and a professor in Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University] looked at what a drop in just 5 IQ points across the U.S. population would mean. And he found it would cut the number of gifted children in half and dramatically increase the number of mentally handicapped people.

We’re losing a great of deal of intelligence to lead, mercury, arsenic and industrial chemicals. Even pesticides that have been banned for 40 years, like DDT, are still showing up in children’s food. We’re basically operating in a sea — like a witch’s brew — of industrial chemicals that are poisonous and are weakening our cognition.

It’s really pervasive and we’ve quantified it enough to know that it’s a crisis.

Is the environmental community doing enough to combat environmental racism?

With the environmental community there’s always more that can be done. But I think it’s really important to acknowledge the fact that we’re making strides and going in the right direction — as long as you exclude the EPA, which is doing much worse.

For a long time I thought of environmental groups as having good missions but very divergent from those of African American and Hispanic people because they were focused on things like preserving the wild and on recreational environmental issues — things that seem very tangential to saving the lives of people who are directly threatened by toxins.

But that has changed. I see their missions evolving and now they are also tackling some of these issues. I think it’s pretty common belief that the issues facing people of color, who are the worst victims of exposure to environmental toxins in this country, are separate from those of whites, but that’s not really true. As cognition in ethnic enclaves is affected, as their behaviors are affected by these poisons, it’s going to affect the entire country. So it’s a problem for all of us.