Drones, Algae and Fish Ears: What We’re Learning Before the World’s Largest Dam-removal Project — and What We Could Miss

Scientists studying conditions on the Klamath River hope to help recovery efforts here and around the world, but they still lack dedicated funding.

HAPPY CAMP, Calif.— Laurel Genzoli is trying to psych herself up to change into shorts, grab her kayak and head to the banks of the Klamath River. But it’s cold — somewhere in the 40s. Summer has swung quickly to fall, and the sun is fighting a losing battle with the thick morning mist that has blotted out the triangle tops of the pine trees.

But cold or not, it must be done.

It’s late September, and Genzoli, an aquatic ecologist, is wrapping up a last day of “summer” research on the Klamath River in Northern California. The day’s task, which begins at a campground in the small town of Happy Camp, is collecting dissolved oxygen sensors that she’s covertly left at seven different locations along more than 100 miles of river, which have been gathering data all season.

The information she’s collecting is part of her research for a Ph.D. at the University of Montana, but it’s also part of a much bigger scientific effort involving multiple state and federal agencies, tribal scientists and other university researchers.

Genzoli carries her kayak to the river.
Laurel Genzoli uses her kayak to access dissolved oxygen sensors she’s placed in the Klamath River to research water quality and photosynthesis. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

They’re on a tight deadline.

The Klamath is a river in peril, plagued by dangerously poor water quality and collapsing salmon populations. That could start to change as early as 2022, when four dams are likely come down on the river — the biggest dam-removal and river-restoration project in history. Dam removal is expected to help solve many, but not all, of the river’s challenges, and understanding the change that does happen is crucial to planning the next steps for improving the river’s health.

With so much at stake, scientists like Genzoli are rushing to gather as much baseline data as they can about conditions that exist today, from sediment to stoneflies to salmon. They need to know what’s there so that in the months and years following the dams’ removal they can track the river’s changes — what happens to fish, food webs or water quality? What happens when reservoirs become rivers again and when salmon get a chance to reach their upstream limits for the first time in a century?

And perhaps most importantly: What lessons from the largest-ever dam-removal project can we apply to future efforts on other rivers in the United States and around the world?

“It’s a huge opportunity to learn about what dams do to rivers and what taking them out can also do,” Genzoli says.

But making the most of this grand scientific experiment will require time and a big infusion of money, something that many researchers worry is in short supply.

A River Upside Down

A team from the U.S. Geological Survey arrives to Happy Camp at the same time as Genzoli, and she drops in on their evening downtime, which involves bowls of homemade chili and animated talk about how they’ll help sort out one of the biggest challenges in dam removal — what happens to the sediment.

Free-flowing rivers are always washing sediment downstream, but a dam blocks that process. Restarting that flow by taking out a dam (or several) opens up a big concern: What happens to the sediment that’s been accumulating behind the barrier for decades?

It’s not a small question. The removal of the Elwha dams in Washington, the previous record for biggest dam-removal project, unleashed an astonishing 20 million tons of sediment into the surrounding environment.

Before USGS researchers can understand what will happen when the Klamath dams are removed, they need to determine what kind of sediment exists in the river now, how it typically moves, and how much additional sediment washes into the river from its tributaries. The composition of the sediment matters, too. About 85 percent of what’s built up in the reservoirs is fine material — particles smaller than sand. That’s much different than other large dam removals, like those on the Elwha, which had a lot of gravel and cobbles.

“On the Elwha we saw a lot of sediment sitting on the riverbed for months to a couple of years,” says Amy East, a USGS research geologist who worked extensively on the Elwha dam removal. “We expect on the Klamath that a lot of what sediment does come downstream will flush out really quickly.” That speed could mean fewer changes to the shape of the river from new sediment deposits in gravel bars and a shorter period of time when the flurry of material pulsing downstream would disturb aquatic life.

The task of determining what scientists call a river’s “sediment budget,” though, is not easy, especially for such a large, complex and unusual river as the Klamath.

While most rivers begin high in the mountains and become more tame (and often more polluted) as they head downstream through agricultural and urban areas, the Klamath does the opposite.

It’s so unusual that experts have dubbed the Klamath “a river upside down.”

It begins its 250-mile journey in arid south-central Oregon, near the town of Klamath Falls, where flat farms and ranchland stretch to the heels of the Cascades. As it drains from Upper Klamath Lake, the river heads south and passes through irrigation canals and a 60-mile gauntlet of six dams — Link River, Keno and J.C. Boyle in Oregon, and then, after it dips across the California border, Copco 1, Copco 2 and Iron Gate. The lower four, all of which are hydroelectric, are the ones slated for removal.

After Iron Gate the Klamath finally gets a chance to behave like a river. It flows naturally through a crooked 190 miles, narrowing into tight and rugged canyons as it passes through the Klamath Mountains, finally spilling into an estuary at the mouth of the Pacific Ocean 20 miles south of Crescent City.

Map of Klamath Basin and dam removal project
PHOTO: The Klamath River watershed and the four dams slated for removal. (Map by Klamath River Renewal Corporation)

To understand sediment transport and other questions along this long and varied watershed, USGS researchers like the ones visiting Happy Camp need to employ a host of tools.

First, they’ve set up a network of stations in the mainstem and tributaries where they take key measurements, including stream flow. Then they take samples along a cross section to get a concentration of the sediment that’s in that water.

Every 15 minutes sensors also record the turbidity of the water — a measurement of the clarity of the water, which correlates closely with the amount of suspended sediment. The higher the turbidity, the cloudier the water appears. All of this helps them to figure out the overall load — the amount of sediment traveling over a given time period.

So far they’re up and running at a handful of sites but will add more in the future, says Chauncey Anderson, a hydrologist and water-quality specialist for the USGS Oregon Water Science Center.

He’s out on the Klamath for field research, watching from a distance as a colleague flies a drone overhead, whirling along in a lawnmower pattern above a bench of small rocks along the river. It’s dry here now, but come winter higher flows may submerge parts of this area. The drone will help map the sediment and its various sizes — distinguishing a grain of sand from a cobble.

After that Anderson and his colleagues will “ground truth” the drone’s accuracy, picking through the rocks in select sample areas and recording their sizes.

Checking the sediment
Chauncey Anderson (left) analyses sediment along the Klamath River. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

They’ll conduct this detailed mapping work in key spots along the river, and at least once more before and after dam removal, to measure the changes in the thickness of the sediment.

The drone work complements other mapping efforts employing a range of cutting-edge technologies. USGS already helped fund a flight over the entire length of the river that used Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR — a remote-sensing method that uses beams of light pulses to measure distances. And the Army Corps of Engineers and the Yurok Tribe — one of several tribes that call the Klamath watershed home — have already conducted a boat-based bathymetric survey, which essentially creates an underwater topographic map from Iron Gate Dam to the Pacific.

The combination of LiDAR flight data with the bathymetric boat data will provide a high-resolution map of the water above and below the surface, allowing for a three-dimensional model of the whole river.

“We can use that, and along with our intensive surveys in places like this, to detect finer scale changes than we’ve been able to do before,” says Anderson.

The USGS researchers hope to conduct those surveys again multiple times after dam removal to track how the river has changed — something nearly impossible to accomplish just a few years ago.

“The technology has advanced a lot and we’re in a position to do some stuff that people haven’t been able to do before on such a big scale,” Anderson adds.

A Productive River

While the USGS flies drones and measures rocks, about 30 miles away Genzoli takes a short kayak upriver to retrieve one of her dissolved oxygen sensors dangling from a branch and submerged beneath the river’s current. After returning to the bank, she takes a toothbrush from a zipper pocket in the front of her life vest and gives the sensor — which looks like about the size and shape of pool thermometer — a good scrub.

It’s been two weeks since she last pulled the instrument from the water, and already a green film of algae has begun to adhere to its waterproof casing.

The slimy goop doesn’t surprise her. The Klamath is notorious for being a really “productive” river — it has high rates of photosynthesis and can produce lots of algae and other aquatic plants. The abundance comes in part from upstream nutrients like nitrogen washing off of agriculture fields and runoff from the phosphorus-rich Cascade Mountains. But the effects of both are supersized by the loss of wetlands that once helped filter those nutrients before entering the river.

Filamentous algae
Laurel Genzoli examines algae growing in the Klamath River. The nutrient-rich river is known for having high rates of productivity. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

And when you add those nutrients to pools of warm water collecting in reservoirs behind the dams, it creates huge blooms of algae, some of which are toxic and potentially deadly to fish and other wildlife, humans included. One particularly dangerous algae species, Microcystis aeruginosa, secretes a toxin called microcystin that can cause everything from headaches to liver damage and has prompted public-health warnings in the Klamath basin during summer months.

“When you take a free-flowing river and you turn it into a large nutrient-rich bathtub, you’ve just created the ideal conditions for this kind of algae,” says Susan Fricke, water resources coordinator with the Karuk Tribe, whose ancestral territory includes Happy Camp and many other areas where researchers are active on the river.

Fricke points out that what happens in the reservoir doesn’t stay in the reservoir.

“It then discharges into the river below and goes through Karuk aboriginal territory and then down to Yurok territory,” she says. The toxic algae can travel 180 miles down the river in just a couple of days, creating an ecosystem and public-health threat.

The Karuk and Yurok have monitored water quality, including dissolved oxygen, on the river for years — data that Genzoli has also incorporated into her own research. High rates of photosynthesis from the ever-productive Klamath River cause big swings in dissolved oxygen, and that in turn can stress out fish or even kill them — even when the algae being produced isn’t toxic.

This summer Genzoli spent three weeks swimming around in a snorkel mask and flippers to look at what’s growing beneath the surface of the water. She surveyed the amount and kinds of rooted aquatic plants and filamentous algae, the kind of algae that threads together like mesh. This stuff isn’t toxic, but it’s still important to understand how it affects the ecosystem.

“Previously we didn’t really have an inventory of how widespread aquatic plants are in the river,” she says. Collecting that baseline data was one goal.

She’s also working to better understand how the kinds of aquatic plants in the river affect the rates of photosynthesis, and in turn, water quality — a key aspect in restoring the river.

Return of the Salmon

Genzoli hopes her research can also provide some insight into aquatic food webs, because one of the biggest drivers of dam removal on the Klamath is restoring healthy native fish populations.

The river was once the third largest producer of salmon on the West Coast, which helped support tribal communities and a robust commercial fishing industry. Now most of the runs of anadromous fish — species that make their way from the river to the ocean and back like Chinook salmon, coho salmon and steelhead — have declined significantly. The construction of dams that lacked adequate fish passage blocked these oceangoing fish from reaching hundreds of miles of upstream habitat. The warm water created by the dams led to the proliferation of fish disease, including the lethal pathogen Ceratonova shasta, and harmful algal blooms, further imperiling fish runs. As a result some runs are no longer commercially fishable or are curtailed. Klamath coho are even listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The removal of the lower four Klamath dams is expected to aid the recovery of these species, so scientists are gathering key baseline data related to native fish.

Fishing for salmon
A Yurok fisher uses a net at the sand spit across the mouth of the Klamath River during a short commercial salmon season in 2011. (Photo by Linda Tanner, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Darren M. Ward is a professor in the Department of Fisheries Biology at Humboldt State University, an hour south of where of the Klamath spills into the Pacific Ocean. Ward and his graduate student Max Ramos have been clambering through hillsides clad in poison oak and, last year, study areas engulfed in wildfire smoke, to conduct research on tributaries of the Klamath River above Iron Gate dam.

They’re conducting habitat surveys to try to locate sites that would make good rearing habitat for coho salmon once the dams come out.

“Identifying the places where they’ll be able to recolonize and hopefully expand their populations is pretty important,” he says. “It’s not very often you have the opportunity to do an assessment like that, where the species isn’t around, and then directly test it in a couple of years when the dams come out.”

While salmon aren’t in these creeks now, other fish still swim their waters — and Ward is surveying the resident fish communities to see what’s out there and how many there are.

He’s also examining how those fish deal with new neighbors — other fish species that might arrive in the same habitats.

“With that baseline data, we’ll be able to see how the fish communities change after salmon come back,” he says.

Another big change with returning salmon could define the future productivity of the Klamath and its denizens. When the fish return to the river post dam-removal, they’ll arrive with bodies full of marine-derived nutrients from living and feeding in the ocean. And when they eventually travel upstream to spawn and die, their carcasses will provide a boost of nutrients to the ecosystem for the first time in a century. This will be especially helpful in tributaries that are minimally impacted by human development and low in nutrients.

“That’s essentially lots of fertilizer that’s deposited in those streams,” says Ward.

To better understand that process, he’s working on collecting data on the current nutrient composition of local organisms, including different kinds of vegetation and insects. “Hopefully we’ll be able to see how these things change once we get a new source of nutrient inputs coming in,” he adds.

Another area of study involves what happens to Chinook and steelhead. Larger than coho, those fish are expected to explore even further upstream and into tributaries in the upper watershed in Oregon above Upper Klamath Lake.

Bob Paglucio, a marine habitat resource specialist for the NOAA Restoration Center, is looking at habitat in the tributaries above the dams — Shovel Creek, Fall Creek, Jenny Creek, Spencer Creek and Hayden Creek — where Chinook and steelhead may recolonize and seeing how that habitat could be improved for the fish.

“The last thing we want to do is take down these dams and have the fish go to some habitat that’s degraded and won’t support them throughout their lifecycle,” says Paglucio.

Dam removal will mean different things in different parts of the watershed. The area now between the four dams will change the most as lakes become free-flowing rivers again. That could have big impacts on the native fish that currently reside there.

“The species that have keyed into that particular life history, like some of the redband [rainbow] trout, are going to have a different life history,” says Paglucio. But Mark Hereford, the fisheries reintroduction coordinator for the Klamath district of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, doesn’t see any negative impacts for native fish that are already living there.

“Our resident trout, they’re actually probably going to be more competitive against steelhead trout just because they are residents here,” he says. And it’s possible the two fish could interbreed, says Ward. Despite their different names they’re actually the same species — just with different life histories. Steelhead are anadromous and rainbow trout remain in the river.

But for non-native species, it could be a different story. Fish such as carp, sunfish, and large-mouth and small-mouth bass thrive in slow, warm water — conditions that will likely disappear with dam removal.

“I think once the dams come out and those reservoir habitats aren’t available, those non-native fish are mostly going to go away,” adds Ward. That could further improve conditions for native species by removing competition for food and other resources.

Downstream Effects, Mind-blowing Science

The fish efforts don’t end there.

Robert Lusardi, a research scientist at the University of California, Davis and a cold-water fish scientist for the nonprofit California Trout, is hard at work studying parts of the river and its tributaries below Iron Gate Dam.

He’s teamed up with the Yurok Tribe to study changes in fish assemblages — looking at how native fish and non-native fish are currently using the river, what habitat they’re occupying and where juvenile salmon are rearing.

juvenile salmon in a bucket
A juvenile Chinook salmon is picked up for monitoring during its outward migration in 2015. (Photo by USFWS)

He’s also an expert in aquatic insects, which have rapid life cycles and can be good indicators of changes in the ecosystem. By looking at what happens to mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies — for example, after a disturbance such as a rapid change in water temperature, flow or sediment — he can determine how the aquatic ecology is responding. All of that will be useful when the dam removals create a really big change for the river.

But what excites Lusardi most is a new research endeavor in collaboration with Rachel Johnson, a pioneering fisheries biologist with NOAA. They plan to better understand fish movement by studying fish ears — or a part of them.

Otoliths are a piece of calcium carbonate in the inner ear of fish which keeps a record of a rare element, called strontium, that’s found in the water. Different parts of the river, and different tributaries, have different values of strontium in the water.

“If there’s a difference there, then the fish that rear in those locations will incorporate those different strontium values into their ear bones,” explains Lusardi. When an otolith is pulled from a fish, scientists can understand its life history by seeing the changing strontium values and better understand where it traveled in the watershed.

This research for the Klamath is in its early stages, the scientists were just awarded funding to determine strontium values throughout the watershed. Their goal is to look at where juvenile salmonids are currently rearing below their current stopping point at Iron Gate Dam and track how that will change with dam removal as historical habitat is recolonized by salmon post dam removal.

“If it all works out, it will be mind-blowing,” says Lusardi. “It’s one of the coolest kinds of science I think I’ll be able to work on in the Klamath.”

Uncertain Future

The size, complexity and relative remoteness of the Klamath River watershed have created a need for cooperation among the scientists who work out there.

“No one has the capacity to cover all of the areas,” says Fricke. “That’s why we do best when we work in teams and we work collaboratively.”

That cooperation has become increasingly important because efforts to fund all of this scientific research and habitat restoration have been piecemeal so far.

That’s because the process of paying for the dam removal is almost as convoluted as the river itself.

The dams themselves are owned by PacifiCorp, which realized, when facing the environmental headaches the dams created, that it would be in their best financial interest to remove them.

But they aren’t the ones doing the removal. Instead the company will pass off its license to operate the hydroelectric dams to a newly created entity, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, which will then oversee the removal and restoration.

This new corporation has $450 million to do that work, but that financial pot only includes funding for scientific inquiry directly related to ensuring dam removal doesn’t violate provisions of the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act or other environmental laws.

Understanding how the river changes with dam removal and what that means for the ecosystem isn’t part of the package.

“I mean, this is the largest dam removal effort in the world — it would’ve been great to have guaranteed funding,” says Fricke.

In part, that’s because the dam removal isn’t being driven by any kind of congressional mandate — in fact, just the opposite.

“What we have right now is not the big dream that we all had several years ago when we put together the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement,” says Paglucio. “That was a huge package to remove the dams and do extensive [environmental] restoration, but it never made it through Congress.” Instead dam removal and restoration will be funded by $200 million from PacifiCorp’s ratepayers in Oregon and California, and $250 million from Proposition 1, a water bond passed by California voters in 2014.

As a result scientists have resorted to stitching together money from existing grant programs, but Paglucio says “there’s no big wave of funding like we originally hoped there was going to be.”

And while agencies like the USGS and NOAA are still conducting research, the lack of federal support has placed them in a backseat position, unlike the earlier Elwha dam removal project, where federal agencies helped drive the process. This time around “we’re just studying the effects of someone else [doing] a dam removal,” says East of the USGS.

And there’s one other problem — the timeline for removal has been a bit of a moving target. Right now it looks like the dams will come down in January 2022, but some regulatory hurdles still need to be cleared, including a water quality permit from California and the official transfer of the license from PacifiCorp to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the licensing of hydroelectric dams.

That means that dam removal isn’t officially a done deal yet, which is delaying research initiatives, and likely, funding.

“I think people right now still view it as a risky research investment because there’s the potential that we could gather all this baseline data and it might not come to fruition any time soon,” says Ward. “But as the regulatory and policy side of it moves forward and it becomes clear that the dams are actually, definitely going to come out, then I think there’ll be more investment.”

But even if that happens, Genzoli points out that gathering adequate baseline data isn’t something you can do quickly.

“The problem with waiting is that there’s so much variation in how a river works year to year,” she says. “You can’t just study the river one year before dam removal and one year after and say this is how it’s changed.”

For Genzoli, a lack of funds means that much of her work is on shoestring budget — supported by grants to her advisor and propelled by her willingness to sleep in the back of her car while out on research expeditions.

Despite the hardships, the opportunity to be on the front lines of a scientific endeavor of this magnitude is too important to pass up. And while no one is under the illusion that the removal of the four dams will return the Klamath to pristine conditions, the expected changes are still likely to be profound.

“Dam removal won’t be the end of restoring this river, but we will be able to see what it helps and what it doesn’t,” she says. “It’s likely to achieve two major goals — restoring fish passage and getting rid of these toxic algae blooms — but there’s a billion other things it’s going to influence, too, that would be good to understand.”

Flight Plight: Why I Chose to Fly to an Environmental Journalism Conference

Airplane emissions are a big deal, but do they outweigh the chance to do a better job covering climate change and extinction? And is the anxiety over flying always productive?

FORT COLLINS, Colo.— It’s a cold Wednesday morning, and I’m standing in the dark outside a hotel waiting for my rideshare vehicle to arrive.

My phone chirps to let me know that an unusual car is about to pull up: a Tesla. The driver greets me, and I eagerly climb in the back seat — after I figure out how to open the door (the recessed, aerodynamic handles are just as novel to me as the rest of the car).

It’s my first time riding in one of these all-electric luxury vehicles, and it’s the first low-emissions leg of this week’s travel for the Society of Environmental Journalists conference. As we silently pull away from the curb, I feel energized by the opportunity.

The day before had worn me out. Getting to Fort Collins from Portland, Oregon, isn’t hard, but it’s not exactly easy, either. First there was a cab from home to the airport (my wife had our only car that morning), followed by the flight itself. After that came a bus ride from Denver to Fort Collins that only got me to the outskirts of town. From there I hopped onto a smaller shuttle to my hotel.

The trip took most of the day. By the time I finally arrived at my hotel in early evening, I was tired, hungry, and feeling kind of anxious about all the greenhouse gas emissions produced during each leg of my trip.

I’ve been avoiding journeys like this because — like a lot of my friends and colleagues — I worry about their impact. Planes generate at least 2.5 percent of global emissions, according to Project Drawdown, and while there are much bigger contributors to climate change, air travel still represents a significant amount of risk to the planet, one that grows every year as the number of people flying increases.

I take that seriously. As an environmental journalist who writes about these issues all the time, I try to lead as low-impact a lifestyle as possible. I don’t commute, we rarely eat out, we don’t have kids, and we live fairly minimally. I even made the tough decision earlier this year to skip a vacation to see mountain gorillas in Africa because I couldn’t justify the carbon emissions.

So given those concerns, why was I in Fort Collins?

The mountain gorilla vacation would have been an indulgence, something to do mostly because I could and not because I had to. The trip to Colorado, on the other hand, was work — and a chance to make a difference.

My research into flying also suggested that we probably don’t need to worry too much about the occasional trip for business or family. Yes, science continues to reveal more about the harmful environmental impacts of air travel, and in fact we now know that airline emissions are worse than we realized, but the bulk of airline carbon emissions come from frequent fliers — about 12 percent of American airline passengers. Like the other 88 percent of us, I’ve never counted myself among that crowd. Travel to one conference isn’t going to break my climate bank.

More broadly, I always try to keep in mind that that the vast majority of emissions come from just a handful of corporations, not individual people. Recent research estimates that 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for one-third of all modern greenhouse gas emissions, and many of them — such as the currently on trial Exxon Mobil — have spent decades obfuscating their role in climate change and the danger it poses to the planet. I still take a great deal of personal responsibility for my actions and choices, but I also know who’s generating the bulk of the problem.

That doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook, but it certainly crystalizes the need to take broader societal action.

But here’s the most important reason I flew to Fort Collins: The annual SEJ conference has always provided a great opportunity for me to be a better journalist. I typically attend every other year, and when I’m there I take full advantage of the panel discussions, plenaries, tours and other events to learn the latest information about environmental threats and the nuances involved in reporting about them correctly.

The conference has always led me to great stories. Those often start with the chance to see places, animals and people in person, feel the ground under my feet, hear the tone of voices and vocalizations, and observe body language. Good reporting means getting away from your desk and computer and seeing what’s happening in the rest of the world.

You can’t do any of that by email or phone.

(This year’s most notable story in the making: I got to see a pair of critically endangered black-footed ferrets, which are even rarer than mountain gorillas. Stay tuned for more about them.)

Attending SEJ also allows me to meet fellow editors, staff and freelance journalists, expert sources and public information officers — relationships that pay off for years down the line. I still talk with and interview people I met at my first SEJ conference a decade ago.

The conferences give me a chance to share my expertise with other journalists, especially when it comes to endangered species and extinction.

Similarly, and perhaps surprisingly, this year also gave me the opportunity to talk to several people who had nothing to do with the conference — employees at the hotel, another rideshare driver and a group of students — who had deep, existential questions about environmental issues. Those questions had, in some cases, immobilized them. We had long conversations about their fears, and I feel we all came out of those talks feeling a bit better about the future.

So was the flight worth it? I’d say yes. When it all boils down, going to the conference this year gave me better tools to write about climate change, pollution, environmental justice and wildlife, and that outweighs the costs of my travel.

Of course, my flight plight was fairly specific. Not everyone has the freedom to pick and choose when they fly, and not everyone’s job or family travels serve such a precise need or provide the same opportunities. I’m the rarity: It’s literally my job to minimize my impact most of the time, while also occasionally going outside of my comfort zone to explore these tough questions and decisions — and to communicate their results to you.

I did investigate a few other ways to reduce my impact at this conference, including skipping the airplane. It’s technically possible to drive or take a train from Portland to Denver — each trip would have taken about 20 hours, which would have extended my journey (and cut into my writing time) by several days. I could have even stayed home and livestreamed the few parts of the event that SEJ broadcasted live on Facebook. But then I couldn’t have asked a tough question of acting BLM director William Perry Pendley, spent a night talking about climate reporting with a small group of journalists and scientists, or seen those black-footed ferrets and a dancing bison.

 

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I also looked into carbon offsets, which supposedly counter out emissions from carbon-intensive activities like flying. Unfortunately, it now appears that many carbon offsets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be and don’t do much that actually benefits the planet. That’s a sad truth, and I hope the situation will improve, but for now offsets don’t seem to be as effective or worthwhile as promised.

Even though that option seemed to be off the table, I tried a few of my own steps to “offset” my environmental impact on this particular journey. After I got home I made three equal donations — roughly the cost of my airline ticket — that I thought would pay off for the planet in the long run. The first went to SEJ itself, to support its efforts to further environmental journalism. The second when to biologist Stuart Pimm’s nonprofit Saving Nature (formerly known as Saving Species), which I know from my reporting purchases land and restores critical habitat in Brazil and other countries. The third actually went to The Revelator’s parent company, the Center for Biological Diversity, which puts its money where its mouth is to create this journalistic effort.

That’s my way of investing in the future.

So those are the choices I explored and the decisions I made, all of which revealed something else to me: I’m just as capable of worrying myself into inertia as those students and hotel workers I met in Fort Collins. That anxiety has to stop. It serves no one except the corporations causing our problems in the first place. If we’re terrified, exhausted and immobilized — if we think we can’t make a difference — then we can’t take any steps to learn more, hold the actual causes of our problems accountable, or demand progress and solutions from corporations and government.

And that, my friends, is the ultimate reason why I chose to fly this time. Now that my anxiety has passed, this trip is already paying off. I left Fort Collins feeling stronger than I did on my arrival, and that will give me the ability to keep fighting for our readers and for the planet for at least another 12 months. It might not have been the right decision for everyone, and it may not be the right decision for me a year from now, but it’s the one that ultimately filled me with hope and direction. Those are things we all need.

Plus I got to see black-footed ferrets and ride in a Tesla.

Tap Water Safety: There’s Good News and Bad News

A database lets U.S. residents get quick information about water contaminants and health threats, but there are some bigger issues to consider, too.

Sometimes our drinking-water systems experience dangerous failures, such as the Flint lead poisoning disaster that made major news beginning in 2014. But outside those headline-grabbing crises, how safe is our drinking water?the ask

The nonprofit Environmental Working Group wants to help you answer that question. It has collected all the water-quality information that utilities in the United States submit to their state environmental or public health agencies. That information has been compiled into a newly updated database that allows residents to check the safety of tap water in their community and then learn what kind of actions they can take if their water contains contaminants. In many cases it’s as simple as adding a filter.

But there are some bigger issues lurking that could affect our water quality far into the future. For starters, regulations and standards aren’t keeping up with science, and there are many unregulated contaminants that could pose a health threat. There are also big data gaps on water quality for some people living in more rural areas.

We spoke with Environmental Working Group senior scientist Tasha Stoiber about what we know and don’t know about the safety of our drinking water — and what steps communities can take protect themselves.

Overall, how safe is drinking water for most people in the United States?

I think a lot of people think that because water is tested in the United States and it comes out of the tap, it must be completely fine. Probably most of the time it might be, but there still could be pollutants in there that you should be concerned about.

Tasha Stoiber
Environmental Working Group senior scientist Tasha Stoiber. (Courtesy of EWG)

Many of the federal standards that we do have are not protective enough of health. There hasn’t been a new drinking-water regulation passed in nearly 20 years. We still don’t have regulations for about half of the detected contaminants and the regulations — or the maximum contaminant level — that we do have for a lot of the contaminants are outdated and based on old science.

For example, the maximum contaminant level for nitrate was set based on a standard back in 1962. Science has come a long way since then.  [Editor’s note: The U.S. sets the legal limit for nitrates at 10 milligrams per liter, while some recent research suggests that levels above 5 milligrams increase the risk for certain cancers and birth defects.]

So even though the drinking water is legal for them to serve it to us, it might still be associated with some potential risks for health, especially those who are more susceptible like children or pregnant women.

What should people do? We can’t just switch our tap water to another company.

That’s one of the reasons that we put this tap-water database out. We’d love to start a national conversation about drinking-water quality and how it can be improved. We want people to be informed and we want them to understand more about their water.

We recommend doing your research, finding out what’s in your water and filtering your tap water to eliminate as much of that health risk as you can.

We want consumers to be empowered to ask their water utility or their elected officials about their water. Why are these contaminants in my water? What are you doing to remove them? What treatment technology is available in my community and how are we creating funding to improve water in our area?

There are about 44 million people in the United States who rely on private wells for drinking water. What do we know about the safety of their water?

That’s a big data gap — we don’t have a lot of information on private wells.

There are actually no federal requirements for private well testing. Sometimes depending on the state that you’re in there could be requirements to get a well tested if there’s a real-estate transaction.

But usually in most states it falls on the homeowner to get their well tested. And it just doesn’t happen that much. One issue might be that people have a false sense of security if they’re drinking the water and it seems fine. But the other issue is that testing also costs money. So unless there’s some kind of reason to test for it, most people don’t do it.

And when it comes to public water systems, the most vulnerable are often water systems that serve smaller or rural communities — especially those that rely on just one water source, such as a single well. If you’re a larger system with a number of different sources and one gets contaminated, you can shut it off and not have capacity issues. Large systems usually have the resources and scale of economy to deal with problems that come up. But for the smaller systems, that’s going to be a little bit more difficult.

Which contaminants are you most concerned with right now?

Something that you’ve likely been hearing about in the news is a group of highly toxic fluorinated chemicals called perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) [that have been linked to cancer and harm to reproductive and immune systems]. We don’t have any enforceable national regulations for them and they are pervasive. Some communities may test for them. New Jersey, for example, is setting its own levels for certain PFAS chemicals. [California has also just mandated testing in high-risk areas.] It is really one of the most notorious chemical groups that needs to be addressed.

[Cancer-causing] hexavalent chromium is another one where there’s no federal standard specifically. California did attempt a state maximum contaminant level, but there were issues [after a legal challenge from a taxpayers group] and they had to go back to the drawing board.

It can become a hugely political issue in dealing with any of these things. Communities shouldn’t have to pay for the pollution in their drinking water if a specific industry caused it, but often it ultimately falls on the ratepayers if industry hasn’t taken responsibility.

So we want people to have all of the information available to them. You do get a consumer confidence report every year [from your water utility], but that might not include information on all of the different contaminants that were tested.

But all of that information is in our database. And it breaks down all of the health-associated risks with each of the contaminants and what our gold standard health limits would be for each of those.

Most of our health standards are based California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and their public health goals. Those are based purely on protection of health and no other economic or political factors.

Are you worried that more bad press about tap water will lead people to drink bottled water instead? 

Bottled water is no safer than tap water. It can also contain contaminants, as well as microplastics. What’s more, companies don’t have to disclose bottled-water testing results to the public, so you often don’t know what you’re getting.

That’s why we don’t consider bottled water a long-term solution, and recommend it only be used in extreme cases — such as after storms or earthquakes.

I do think it’s easy to look at the information and to panic or to even get desensitized. Drinking water quality is going to vary depending on where you live. In California, or some other areas where there is longstanding legacy pollution, there are situations where there is an acute risk with water quality and you shouldn’t be drinking what’s out of the tap.

But that’s an extreme situation. For most people there’s not going to be that need to panic immediately. We’re talking about the risk of drinking this water over your lifetime.

Could a British Flea Be the Next Casualty of the Great Insect Dying?

It may not seem charismatic, but Scotland’s Manx shearwater flea could be a symbol that no species is too small or strange to deserve saving.

If a species of bee or butterfly were to vanish from the world, some of us might shed a tear. It’s not an unlikely prospect, as the great insect dying that’s currently underway escalates the chance of losing some of these small but beloved species grows every year.

But what about a flea? Would the loss of one of nature’s most unloved creations give you reason to mourn?

That could happen in our lifetimes. Our new study has just added the Manx shearwater flea (Ceratophyllus fionnus) to the tragic procession of threatened insects marching toward extinction.

Although you’ve likely never heard of it, the Manx shearwater flea is as British as Big Ben or Stonehenge. And it’s been in Britain longer than either.

What makes this species so special, though, is the fact that it’s one of only a handful of insects truly endemic to Britain.

Of the million or so named insect species found across the world, Britain is home to only around 2.7 percent. Of those 27,000 species, most live on continental Europe in addition to the British Isles. But the Manx shearwater flea is one of the rare exceptions that live only in Britain. It dwells only on the windswept Isle of Rùm, off the west coast of Scotland. In fact, it is one of only six insects endemic to the Scottish region of the British Isles.

Sunset over Horse Island, Canna and Rùm. Photo: Chris Booth (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Sunset over Horse Island, Canna and Rùm. Photo: Chris Booth (CC BY-SA 2.0)

So, should we worry about the fate of this tiny, decidedly British flea?

Well, yes.

The species has one of the smallest distributions of any animal on Earth. The entire population occupies a range of less than a third of a mile and is isolated within a single colony of Manx shearwaters (Puffinus puffinus), the only species known to host them. One threat to the bird colony is the introduced brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), which kills and eats shearwaters in their burrows.

manx shearwater
Manx shearwater. Photo: Steve Peck (CC BY 2.0)

Perhaps the greatest danger, though, is simply a lack of knowledge. Very little is known about the size or structure of the Manx shearwater flea population. We don’t know what conditions they need to survive or reproduce, although it does appear that the fleas rely almost entirely on the shearwaters for their life cycle. This fact, coupled with their small range, means that the collapse of the bird colony due to rats, climate change or even plastic pollution could instantly spell the end for this threatened insect.

But, I hear you asking, why care about a flea?

Partly it comes down to principle. Many of us profess a great love for the natural world and wish to leave our children the same biological diversity we inherited from our parents. But nature is very different from a garden. If we pick and choose the species we save based on their cuteness or the radiance of their blooms, our natural world will quickly degenerate to nothing more than a very large garden, filled with orchids and pandas and very little else. Real conservation should be devoid of the “species chauvinism” that places value on one creature over another based solely on how much we like the way they look.

Some may claim that conservation efforts are doomed, though, because the public could never come to appreciate such an unlovable creature. But is this true? A significant percentage of people hate spiders, but many in Britain have rallied to save the ladybird spider (Eresus sandaliatus) from extinction, thanks to advocacy from conservationists. The Manx shearwater flea is an equally marvelous creature; perhaps with the right advocacy on its behalf, the public could come to appreciate it, too.

And there’s actually a lot to appreciate about this little flea. It’s clad in rows of plates comparable to a suit of armor, like a throwback to medieval knights.

Rùm coastline. Photo: John Allan (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Rùm coastline. Photo: John Allan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

A bonus is that it isn’t known to transmit disease or bite people, and even the bird and flea have been suggested to lead an amicable existence together, as is the case with many other species that live in symbiotic relationships.

The fate of the Manx shearwater flea is in our hands. Our actions on Rùm will decide whether this peculiar little insect will become another victim of the looming extinction crisis or a symbol of hope: that no species is too small or strange to warrant saving.

Every species extinction, no matter how insignificant we may feel it to be, tears a small thread from the rich tapestry of life. How those threads connect, and the effects of pulling them out, isn’t always clear before the fact. We tease away the fabric of nature at our own peril.

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.

Tracking Superbugs: Antibiotic Resistance Spreads Among Marine Mammals

New research in the Salish Sea shows how antibiotic-resistant bacteria is growing in coastal waterways and why it's how to track.

One Friday afternoon in August, Stephanie Norman was performing a routine necropsy, hacking away at the remains of a large, pneumonia-stricken harbor seal, when she nicked herself with the scalpel. She thought nothing of it until she woke up Sunday morning. “My finger was this big around,” she said later, making a circle the size of a silver dollar with her thumb and index finger.

Norman, a veterinary epidemiologist, examines stranded seals and porpoises in the Salish Sea for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Despite her injury, she rushed to the airport to travel to a research conference. But on the flight, her symptoms worsened: “The biologist sitting next to me said, ‘Do you know that you’ve got a red streak going up your arm?’ ” So, after she landed, Norman sought help at an urgent care clinic. Knowing her infection could be resistant to antibiotics, she was nervous.

Each year, around 2 million people in the U.S. develop antibiotic-resistant infections, and 23,000 of them die as a result. Scientists need to understand how resistant bacteria travel to control their spread, but that path is far from straightforward. To illuminate the pathways among humans, pets, and livestock to wild animals, researchers must collect samples from a variety of species, including those that live in the ocean.

But sampling marine animals, especially wild ones, is hard. Taking a swab from a creature’s body requires removing it from the water, which disturbs the animal and requires significant time and effort. As a result, there are only a handful of studies on resistant bacteria in wild marine animals and resistant bacteria, leaving scientists with an incomplete picture of how superbugs spread in coastal waterways.

To remedy that, Norman is enlisting help from volunteers who respond to stranded marine mammals around the Salish Sea. They take samples from fresh dead seals and porpoises, which are analyzed for resistance to 16 antibiotics. They bring some carcasses to Norman for necropsies, which provide clues about the animals and their potential exposure to resistant bacteria: what they ate, how they died and any contact they may have had with human-made materials, like fishing lures.

Resistant bacteria might also be latent in the water, partly due to the aquaculture industry’s use of antibiotics. The FDA has authorized three antibiotics to treat ailing fish, which are related to medications also used to treat humans. The treatments, dumped into the water directly or via fish food, easily disperse from open pens; a 2013 study estimated that 80 percent of aquaculture medications make their way into the greater environment. These trace amounts stimulate the growth of resistant bacteria by killing off all but the hardiest strains. Those bacteria can then afflict wildlife and sometimes even find their way back to land, infecting humans. In Washington, studies from as early as 1992 show resistant bacteria proliferating around commercial Atlantic salmon pens.

Other potential sources include sewage, agriculture and stormwater runoff. Tracking superbugs in the ocean as well as on land will provide a clearer picture of how they spread and perhaps suggest ways to minimize transmission. Norman’s test results will be entered into the archives at ARMADA, a nonprofit organization building a database of antibiotic-resistant gene data for researchers. Evgeni Sokurenko, a University of Washington microbiologist on the organization’s advisory board, said this information could help researchers stop bacterial outbreaks before they start. “If you imagine bacterial strains as criminals, what we’re doing is creating a database of these criminals so they can be caught, and (we can) figure out where they’re coming from,” he said.

So far, Norman and her team have collected samples from 28 seals and 10 porpoises. About half carried resistant bacteria, while a sizable portion — half the porpoises and a quarter of the seals — also harbored what Sokurenko calls “nightmare bugs”: bacteria that are resistant to more than one antibiotic, and thus less treatable by the medications doctors and vets typically use. These strains were resistant to ciprofloxacin and third-generation cephalosporins, medications commonly used to treat a wide range of infections in humans. That’s “quite unusual for wildlife,” said Sokurenko.

Norman’s goal is to sample 130 marine mammals by the end of the year. One project can’t unravel all the intricacies of how antibiotic-resistant bacteria spread, but Norman hopes her samples yield some answers. After all, ocean health and human health are inextricably linked, she said. “It’s a two-way street.”

Her finger infection in August drove this home. At first, Norman didn’t know which bacteria was the culprit — just that it came from an ill seal that may have harbored resistant bacteria. “Wow, that’s concerning,” the clinic nurse told her. Together, they decided on two antibiotics, hoping at least one might work: a shot of cephalosporin and a course of doxycycline. A week later, the seal’s lab results came back: It was a type of resistant E. coli, which, luckily, was not resistant to doxycycline — and Norman’s finger was healing nicely.

This story was originally published at High Country News on October 9, 2019. 

Hotbed of Resistance: A Voice From Inside Trump’s EPA

Regulatory rollbacks are just one small part of the Trump administration’s efforts to limit the effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Agency, but there’s a whole lot more, says a career agency staffer.

On Feb. 6, 2017, 300 people took to the streets of Chicago in protest of the impending confirmation of Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of those in the crowd were EPA workers. ThinkProgress described the action as “what appears to be the first protest by federal workers against the Trump administration.”the ask

The effort — led by the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, which represents 900 EPA workers based in Chicago — wasn’t the last.

Three months later the broader AFGE Council 238, which represents Local 704 and more than 7,000 other EPA employees nationwide, launched the Save the U.S. EPA campaign to fight attacks on the agency, its staff, and their effectiveness in protecting the environment and public health.

Nicole Cantello is one of its spokespeople and has been president of AFGE Local 704 in Chicago for the past five months. She’s also spent 29 years as an EPA attorney holding polluters accountable and currently works as senior counsel for water and water enforcement in the Great Lakes region.

Cantello spoke to The Revelator in her capacity as union president about how life has changed for EPA workers during the Trump administration, how those changes affect the environment and why we need a plan to rebuild the agency.

You’ve worked with a number of different administrations over your nearly three decades with the EPA. How much did things change with each one, and how does that compare to life now under the Trump administration? 

The change that the Trump administration brought is the most devastating change that has ever been wrought on EPA.

My first administration was [George Herbert Walker] Bush. That was really the administration that was the most free of any political interference that I’ve ever worked under. Each administration after that had slight differences and slight biases based on politics. But you really didn’t feel that constrained, it was minor.

It’s so different now under the Trump administration, where every single matter that you might bring has a political tinge to it and you cannot bring a case under this administration that there isn’t some kind of issue that is going to raise alarm bells.

It seems like things have basically come to a standstill here. There are just so many hoops to jump through that it’s very difficult to bring enforcement cases.

Nicole Cantello
Nicole Cantello, president of AFGE local 704 at a union rally. (Photo by AFGE local 704)

What are the impacts of this on the ground, to human health and the environment?

Here in Chicago our job is to enforce the law. We don’t do any of the rulemaking like they do in Washington, D.C., where there are a lot of regulatory rollbacks coming out of [now current EPA administrator] Andrew Wheeler’s shop.

But the numbers on enforcement are down nationwide and where I am in EPA Region 5. A lot of times Region 5 does more inspections than the rest of the nation combined. We view ourselves as the engine of enforcement — as Region 5 goes, so goes the nation.

When our enforcement is very low, you know things are really wrong. It means that human health and the environment are not being protected. It means that polluters don’t fear the EPA and that means that they can pollute with impunity, or they believe that they can. And that means that there’s going to be more pollutants being discharged into lakes and streams or into the air.

What is daily life like for EPA staffers?

We had a contract that we had been working under since 2007 that was taken away from us and we were robbed of our workplace rights that we had collectively bargained. As of July 8, we now have what we call a Unilateral Management Anti-Employee Directive. It took away a lot of the things that we had under the old contract, including the right to grieve any disciplinary actions brought against us or changes in our performance reviews.

For my work with the union, it took away any ability for me to help my employees during work time — it basically took away the voice of unions in the workplace.

It also makes it very difficult for workers to feel like they can whistle-blow because what you could be disciplined for now you can’t file a grievance to respond to. That’s a very serious thing. There are three Office of Inspector General investigations going on in Region 5 due to employee whistleblowing — this is a hotbed of resistance.

Another issue is staffing. They have decided to drain EPA staff, especially here in Region 5, by not hiring to replace people. When Trump took office, he announced that he wanted to bring EPA staff down. We were at 1,160 here in the region [at the beginning of 2017] and now we’re down about 950 and it has just been devastating to us. There’s a lot of work not getting done and a lot of environmental protection not happening.

What are you hearing from people working in other federal agencies on environment-related issues? Are their complaints similar?

I don’t know about all of them — I do know that the Department of the Interior has the same workplace issues as we do from the standpoint of the contract. So, the National Park Service, for example, has no contract right now.

The thing about EPA is that when it comes to how much money someone or some industry is going make, we really have an influence on that in a way that the Department of the Interior or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or some of the other science people don’t.

We’re really more like the Securities and Exchange Commission [that regulates the financial industry] in that we can really have a say in exactly how much an industry is or is not going to be profitable because of how much pollution control we’re going to demand from someone.

EPA operates obviously more in a regulatory mode and so is not very industry friendly. And I think that industry has been wanting to turn that around — we’ve been in their sights for a long time. We’re just more of a target.

How long do you think it will take to undo the damage caused to EPA during this administration?

This is something that we have been trying to call the alarm on because the people that are going to have to work on climate change and hit the ground running right away if a new administration comes in January 2020 are my people. We are the people that have control of CO2 from the big sources that need to be addressed immediately — things like power plants — the low-hanging fruit. And it’s my people that are being crippled right now.

We really have to start thinking about the fact that we can’t be reducing EPA staff when it’s EPA staff that has to start working on all this stuff that the kids were just in the streets protesting about three weeks ago.

We need to start thinking about how we’re going to repair EPA right away, so that we can have EPA start trying to save the world.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Fight to Save the EPA

The William Perry Pendley Rehabilitation Tour

The ethically challenged acting director of the Bureau of Land Management made a tense appearance at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference last week to discuss his radical record.

William Perry Pendley wants you think that what he thinks doesn’t matter.

Pendley spent four decades advocating for the corporate exploitation of U.S. public lands. He now serves the Trump administration as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for much of those same public lands.

Over the years Pendley, a self-styled “Sagebrush Rebel,” has pushed for the wholesale divestment of public lands from federal control, denied the existence of climate change and the hole in the ozone layer, denigrated the press, and called illegal immigrants a “cancer,” among other radical, extremist positions.

But now he’d have you believe that those actions and opinions no longer matter.

“My personal opinions are irrelevant,” Pendley said during an on-stage panel moderated by Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post last week at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Fort Collins, Colo. “I have a new job now,” he told the audience. “I’m a zealous advocate for my client. My client is the American people, and my bosses are the president of the United States and Secretary Bernhardt. So what I thought, what I wrote, what I did in the past is irrelevant. I have orders, I have laws to obey, and I intend to do that.”

That appearance represented just one part of what appears to be a broader media strategy to rehabilitate Pendley’s image, including softball interviews for multiple publications and an op-ed for The Denver Post on the eve of the conference.

So what dominates Pendley’s opinions now? Well, he thinks the worst thing facing America’s public lands right now isn’t climate change — it is, in his opinion, wild horses.

But how would he know? During his SEJ appearance, throughout which he deflected a barrage of tough questions from the journalists in the audience, he admitted that BLM’s regional directors had yet to brief him about the already obvious local effects of climate change on public lands, many of which were cited by other panelists during the discussion.

I asked Pendley why he hasn’t been briefed on this, and if there were other issues on which he had also not been briefed.

His response: “Well, yeah, there’s a ton of topics I haven’t been briefed on, and one of the reasons is my recusals.”

Pendley, you see, has a 17-page list of ethical recusals — nearly 60 companies and groups that he used to represent in his role as president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an organization “dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited government, and free enterprise” which the Center for Media and Democracy calls “a training ground for a number of attorneys most active in the anti-environmental movement.”

These recusals include oil companies, energy companies and the National Mining Association, among many others. According to BLM ethical guidelines, Pendley is restricted from actions at the agency that would overlap with the interests of his prior clients, usually for a period of two years.

In other words, he’s not being educated about the issues that define his roles and responsibilities as head of the BLM, and he’s not ethically allowed to do much of that job anyway.

Pendley did continue to answer my question by saying that he’s just been cleared to start receiving briefings on a number of issues, but would not commit to saying when those briefings — most notably the ones on climate change — would occur. “When it pops up on my schedule,” he said about that timeline.

He didn’t seem too concerned, though. After all, he’s got horses to worry about — not to mention oil companies. Although Pendley’s list of recusals remains long, he obviously still finds himself more on the side of maintaining oil-drilling rights and jobs than the rights of the wildlife or climatory systems that depend on public lands. He called Democratic presidential candidates’ “Keep It in the Ground” pledges to stop new drilling “absolutely insane” and characterized oil drilling as a matter of “life or death” for western communities.

He also, in a question from Eilperin about the role of recreation on public land, conflated BLM’s role as a leasing agent of extraction rights with the companies doing the actual drilling and other activities. “We manage 245 million acres of land, 10 percent of the nation’s land mass, and we have a multiple use directive… We drill for oil. We mine coal. We cut trees. We allow ranchers to graze their cattle and their sheep on our lands. Your lands.”

Regardless of his past or present positions, the real measure of a person comes from their deeds, not their words. And Pendley’s rehabilitation tour isn’t all talk. It also obviously serves to build support for the ongoing plan to move much of the BLM away from Washington, DC, and into the West — a change opposed by BLM staff themselves but long supported and dreamed of by Pendley and other anti-federal appointees in the Trump administration. That plan grows closer every day, and when it happens many experts predict that federal control over public lands could begin to erode.

And that might prove to be Pendley’s most defining statement of all.

Saving the Vaquita: New Promises and New Threats

In response to pressures from the international community, Mexico has agreed to take more steps to prevent the porpoises’ extinction — but with fewer than 20 remaining, will that be enough?

Six months: That’s how much time Mexico now has to report on its progress to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) from extinction.

It’s a time-sensitive deadline. After years of decline, as few as 6 to 19 vaquitas survive in their only home, the Gulf of California. Also known as the Sea of Cortez, the gulf lies between mainland Mexico and Baja California — and the porpoises’ population there has slowly but steadily been wiped out over the past decade. First these gentle, blunt-faced porpoises were killed by shrimp fishermen, who accidentally caught the “sea cows” in their large gillnets. More recently they’ve fallen to poachers seeking a rare fish called the totoaba (Totoaba mcdonaldi).

Totoaba swim bladders sell for up to $20,000 each in China, where they’re considered a delicacy and are used in traditional medicine. The bladders are frequently smuggled through the United States before heading to Asian consumer markets.

With transnational criminal cartels leading the totoaba poaching and distribution, and with time running out for vaquita, the future for both species “looks very bleak indeed,” says Richard Thomas, global communications coordinator for TRAFFIC, an NGO focusing on wildlife trade.

Conservationists have urged Mexico to protect the vaquita for years, and the country and its allies have taken many steps along the way, but the species’ population has continued to decline. As a result the international community has now finally put a bit of real pressure on the Mexican government. According to an agreement established this August at the 18th triennial meeting of the member parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), Mexico, in collaboration with the U.S. and China, must now work to eliminate both the supply and consumer demand for totoaba and support a program to remove destructive gillnets from the fishery in the Gulf of California. The three nations promised to meet about these goals in the next few months.

“Urgent measures include maintaining net-free zones, round-the-clock patrolling of these areas with removal of all gillnets — and protection for those carrying out these tasks — and arrest and prosecution of illegal fishers,” says Thomas.

Mexico, meanwhile, must improve its enforcement of existing laws by Nov. 30 and report on its progress to the CITES Secretariat every six months. The first report will be due in early 2020.

“Mexico took this, I think, with a lot of commitment, but also wanted the other parties to recognize the efforts that have been done in the country as well,” says Adrian Reuter, Latin American wildlife trafficking coordinator at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “It’s not that Mexico had done nothing — there’s a long, long list of things they have done — but obviously it’s been insufficient.”

If these new efforts don’t roll out fast enough, or if vaquita continue to die, Mexico could conceivably face international sanctions that would prevent it from exporting some of its most profitable native plants or animals, specifically those species currently listed on what’s known as CITES Appendix II.

CITES, an international treaty covering wildlife trade among 183 member nations, protects threatened species by placing them on two lists that regulate trade. The first, Appendix I, bans all international trade in endangered plants and animals. The second, Appendix II, allows trade, but only of specimens from proven-sustainable populations.

Blocking Mexico from legally exporting its Appendix II species — a step advocated for by several conservation organizations in the lead-up to CITES — is actually a pretty significant threat. More than 2,300 Mexican plants and animals appear on CITES Appendix II, including some coveted species and products such as bighorn sheep hunting trophies, mahogany wood and shark fins.

Other species on the list include boa constrictors, iguanas, corals, spider monkeys and dozens of kinds of orchid.

CITES sanctions, however, don’t happen very often. One of the few noteworthy examples occurred in 2013, when CITES threatened to sanction Thailand if the country didn’t reduce the amount of illegal ivory for sale there. (The threat worked, by the way. The amount of ivory available in Bangkok markets dropped 96 percent by 2016.)

But progress for the vaquita will be much tougher to achieve because of the violent cartels dominating the trade. “The vaquita and the totoaba are a good example of how things can go really, really bad for biodiversity when the commodity is really high-value and organized crime gets involved,” says Reuter.

“It’s a big, big challenge,” he adds. “As we know, the totoaba bladder trade involves transnational, highly organized networks. It’s a high-value commodity. It requires actions being taken like for addressing any other serious crime committed by organized cartels and organizations. Sometimes that’s difficult because it requires lots of resources, staff and coordination that — in many instances, not just in Mexico but in many other countries in the region — are not available to tackle environmental crimes.”

With the time for action growing increasingly tight, will we see any progress on saving the vaquita from extinction? Reuter says he’ll be watching to see what happens by the end of the year, especially to find out if the proposed meeting between Mexico, the United States and China actually takes place. “If it does, it would be a very good forum to follow up on what happened,” he says.

Meanwhile there’s both good news and a stark reminder about the need for action. Last month the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society reported that scientists had, over the course of a few weeks, observed six vaquitas in the Gulf of California, an important confirmation that the animals still exist. “It is excellent to see these vaquitas are well fed, plump and healthy looking,” vaquita researcher Barbara Taylor said in a press release. “This invigorates the resolve for Mexico to protect their species.”

vaquita
Recently sighted vaquita porpoises. Photo: Jay Barlow, courtesy Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Next, 600 Mexican antipoaching troops are scheduled to arrive in the region soon to enforce a “zero tolerance” fishing policy in the vaquita’s habitat.

But those troops may find themselves in the midst of a renewed struggle with local fishermen. Mexico has paid shrimp fishermen to stay out of vaquita habitat since 2015, but those compensation funds reportedly stopped arriving last December, after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office. With fishermen now struggling to feed their families, their leaders say fleets could resume operation any day. “We know about the vaquita, and we’ve done what we can, but we have needs and we have to work,” Lorenzo Garcia, president of the region’s largest fishermen’s federation, told Fronteras.

Even with the imminent arrival of Mexican soldiers, the resumption of gillnet shrimp fishing in the Gulf of California represents a major shift in vaquita conservation efforts. Will it push the tiny porpoises closer to disappearing? The world will be watching.

Four Ways Alaska’s Unending Warming Impacts Everyone

As remote Alaska warms and melts, it kicks off changes that will affect global systems and worsen climate change.

Here in my home state of Alaska, our long summer of record-breaking heat has finally come to a close. Even now, though, temperatures across the state remain well above average, with September representing yet another warmest-month-on-record in several locations.

alaska record temperatures
Alaska record temperatures documented on July 8, 2019. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin.

But as Alaska’s temperatures begin to drop with the arrival of autumn, so, too does the national attention that fires and heatwaves briefly brought to the state. News outlets have moved on to other climate-related stories such as the fires in the Amazon and the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian. In the process they’ve missed the bigger picture: Rapid warming in Alaska remains among the most troubling disruptions of the global climate.

In fact, experts tell us, the warming underway in “the last frontier” isn’t just a local phenomenon. It’s deepening the global climate crisis.

Melting Sea Ice Accelerates Warming…and May Disrupt Global Weather Patterns

While Alaska’s record 90-degree temperatures captured national headlines this past summer, fewer media outlets noticed the epic loss of sea ice along the state’s western and northern coasts. This melting occurred most rapidly in the Bering Sea, which lies between northwestern Alaska and Russia.

Sea ice here is the frozen ocean water that borders Alaska and adjoins the polar ice cap. It has been declining for years, but 2019 brought extraordinary melting that began in February, months ahead of norms. By August the ice had retreated over 150 miles from Alaska’s coast, an unprecedented distance that stunned long-time Arctic observers. Today, at a time when sea ice should be building back up, unusually warm air and ocean temperatures in many locations have delayed the autumn freeze.

“Temperatures in the Bering Sea are running around 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average right now,” says Brian Brettschneider, a climate researcher with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “All that warmth needs to dissipate before ice can start forming again.”

As Brettschneider explains, delayed freezing at this time of year can set the stage for thinner sea ice throughout the winter, which can lead to earlier melting the following spring. This type of self-reinforcing process has long concerned climatologists. The temperature anomalies in the Bering also provide a striking example of the ocean warming  that a recent United Nations report said is now occurring across the globe.

The loss of ice is already upending life in the Arctic by disrupting traditional access to fishing and hunting grounds, threatening coastal communities with erosion and increasing the potency of Arctic storms.

But bigger threats may lie ahead — scientists also believe disappearing sea ice is messing with global weather patterns, potentially increasing the ferocity of hurricanes and heat waves. As ice disappears, the temperature gradient decreases between the planet’s cold north and warmer southern regions. This evening-out of global temperatures has already started changing global wind patterns and climate scientists say it may contribute to the stalling of recent Atlantic hurricanes, including Harvey, Florence and the phenomenally destructive Dorian.

Meanwhile scientists have also attributed deep “wobbles” in the jet stream to Arctic warming. These “wobbles” may be intensifying heat waves like the one that brought dangerous 108-degree heat to Paris this summer.

Increasing Wildfires Torch the “Legacy Carbon” of Northern Forests

For many Alaskans 2019 was the summer of smoke.

In August wildfire smoke gave Anchorage the worst air quality of any U.S. city. Even in September, a month past the historical end of Alaska’s fire season, we still experienced road and school closures, evacuations, smoke and loss of property.

“For Alaska, the length of this year’s fire season was the stand-out part of the story,” says Brettschneider.

While the 2.5 million acres that burned in Alaska this year didn’t represent a state record, they still contributed to a record-setting fire season across the circumpolar North, with particularly large fires burning in Siberia. Researchers say the fires are part of a trend toward more frequent and severe Arctic blazes and a steadily lengthening fire season.

Arctic fires
Arctic fires spread smoke over Alaska on July 8, 2019. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin

Alaska’s increasing wildfires matter globally for two entwined reasons. First, the millions of acres that now burn across the North pump carbon into the atmosphere, increasing global heating. In June alone Arctic fires released 50 megatons of carbon dioxide, more than the total annual carbon output of Sweden.

The kind of carbon being released also makes a difference. Arctic fires burn shrubs, tundra and extensive boreal forest. These types of areas contain up to 40 percent of the world’s land-based carbon, comprised of leaves, plants, roots and residue from previous fires, all lying in near-surface soils. But today’s hotter fires are burning this “legacy carbon,” a term researchers recently applied to carbon that has been safely sequestered for centuries. As this happens, a once reliable carbon sink becomes a source of carbon pollution.

Additionally, the increase in fire shortens boreal-forest burn cycles. Fires happen more often, burning down old trees and giving new trees less time to mature between conflagrations. As a result, forest composition has started transitioning away from old trees capable of storing more carbon to younger trees that store less. This shifting carbon balance, along with other factors such as thawing permafrost, may undermine the carbon-reduction goals that nations around the world have set under the Paris climate accord.

Alaska’s Melting Glaciers Raise Global Sea Levels

Receding glaciers have been a fact of life for my nearly 30 years in Alaska, but nothing I’ve seen compares to this past summer. Early in the season our glaciers lost their protective layer of winter snow, exposing bare ice to months of hot sunshine. This resulted in a hemorrhaging of meltwater that kept rivers roiling with the silty water of melting glaciers, even through a period of record drought.

“This is the continuation of a story that has been ongoing for several decades,” says Twila Moon, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

melting glacier
The Yakutat Icefield in southeast Alaska is considered by glaciologists to be among the “walking dead.” Photo: Maria-José Viñas/NASA

Moon explains that the comparatively low latitude of Alaska’s glaciers has made them vulnerable to melting for many years and that the amount of melting is a significant contributor to global sea-level rise.

Three studies published this year highlight the point. In one, an international research team estimated that the world’s mountain glaciers, which do not include the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, lost a hard-to-fathom 9,000 billion tons of ice over the past 50 years. Researchers further estimated that melting of mountain glaciers, which only constitute about 4 percent of land ice worldwide, fueled up to 30 percent of global sea-level rise throughout the 20th century. They pegged Alaska’s glaciers as the largest single contributor to the melting among the world’s mountain glaciers.

Another study of mountain glaciers predicted that, at current levels of fossil fuel use, Alaska would lose up to 50 percent of its remaining glacier ice in the coming decades, continuing the state’s role as the leading source of melting outside of Greenland and Antarctica. The study predicts another 10 inches of global sea-level rise from mountain glaciers alone — enough to drown low-lying coastal areas from Florida to Bangladesh.

A third study suggests scientists may still underestimate the speed of melting glaciers. By using underwater sonar surveys of Alaska’s LeConte Glacier, researchers discovered melt rates more than two orders of magnitude greater than previously predicted. If the findings test positively elsewhere, this type of melting may boost the estimated contribution of glaciers to rising seas.

The studies put tangible numbers on just how much sea-level rise is a result of Alaska’s famously melting glaciers. Perhaps the most worrisome of all climate change impacts, rising seas threaten to displace hundreds of millions of people from coastlines across the world, sparking famine, conflict and other human migration crises.

Thawing Permafrost and the Carbon Bomb

Slumping roads, sinking buildings, “drunken” forests comprised of leaning or toppled trees — if you live in Alaska, you know these as telltale signs of thawing permafrost.

Lowly permafrost is an often-unsung hero of carbon storage. Frozen in place by millennia of long, frigid winters, it consists of deep layers of leaves, bones, soil, mammoth tusks and other organic material — even caribou poop — that have accumulated in an undecomposed state over time. Scientists have long considered permafrost to be, like boreal forests, a permanent source of sequestered carbon.

Alaska’s permafrost has been thawing for decades. But sharply rising temperatures evidenced by this past summer’s heat have accelerated the change.

As Alaska climatologist Rick Thoman recently wrote on Twitter, “winters in Alaska aren’t what they used to be.”

Researchers at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks have documented permafrost warming enough to push near-surface soils above the freezing mark, even in deep winter. Researchers from Canada to Greenland to Siberia have observed similar warming.

In Alaska the thawing causes erosion that damages roads and other infrastructure and even threatens the survival of entire communities.

But the effects will also be felt on the global scale. The widespread decomposition triggered by this thawing threatens to release massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Scientists estimate this so-called “carbon bomb” could eclipse the annual emissions of China, the world’s largest polluter, and further undermine global efforts to reduce carbon.

frozen methane
Frozen methane captured in ice. Photo: Miriam Jones/USGS.

It would also pose a staggering financial burden. Researchers earlier this summer estimated thawing permafrost will add $70 trillion to the global cost of climate change, an expense that will be borne most by the world’s poorest people.

Alaska’s Warming Is Also the World’s

The rapid warming of Alaska has become a global spectacle, and experts tell us that its impacts will be felt around the world in the years ahead.

In part that’s due to the self-reinforcing nature of the processes now underway, where less sea ice begets less sea ice, more fire leads to more fire, and thawing permafrost jeopardizes the remaining permafrost.

It’s also due to the nature of the Arctic, which scientists increasingly see as a vital source of cooling for the entire planet. As that system destabilizes, livable climates elsewhere are put at risk.

But maybe all of that warming has inspired something, too. As research scientist Twila Moon observes, the public now appears more aware of the important roles played by glaciers and how their melting impacts drinking water supplies, agriculture, global sea-level rise and more.

“I’m really heartened about the increased awareness about climate change,” she says.

But Moon also cautions that there’s still a long way to go in terms of both awareness and action — not just in Alaska, but around the planet.

“We’re not at the level we need to be, given how fast the change is occurring,” she says.

For Indigenous Women, More Pipelines Mean More Threats of Sexual Violence

Tribal activists fear that permits to move the Keystone XL forward will bring not just economic and environmental impacts.

Later this month, the South Dakota Water Management Board will be holding five hearings on water permits needed for the Keystone XL pipeline expansion, which will cross several rivers as it makes its way from the tar sands in Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska. If the pipeline expansion is approved — it’s been on hold for nearly a decade — it will affect several tribal and First Nations communities along its route. Tribal activists fear this will bring not only economic and environmental impacts, but also sexual violence.

Angeline Cheek, a community advocate on the Fort Peck Reservation in Northeastern Montana, is vehemently opposed to the extension. As proposed, Keystone XL would cross just a few miles from the western side of the reservation. On the eastern side, across the North Dakota border, are the Bakken oil fields.

vigil
A vigil for murdered and missing Indigenous women in 2015. Photo by Thien V., Howl Arts Collective (CC BY 2.0)

Cheek’s organization provides workshops and information to reservation residents on the dangers of man camps in the Bakken area. Man camps are large company-owned housing units that people who come to work in the oil fields can move into.

With the Bakken oil boom, these man camps have increased in the region. Population growth because of an extractive industry leads to a surge of individuals — mostly men — who are paid well and living temporarily in rural areas they aren’t otherwise connected to. Since the boom, violent crime, sex trafficking, and rape cases have increased, according to tribal police and local activists.

Cheek and a group of advocates — whose motto is “no fear” — have also created a safety plan with input from the community in anticipation of these impacts. Part of the proposed plan is a text- and call-based early warning system to alert community members of missing people; AMBER alert is only for children.

Though the group has received support from some tribal programs and the broader community, tribal leadership has not signed onto the community safety plan. “I have relatives here who I don’t want to go missing,” Cheek said. “The tribe needs to start thinking ahead. …The tribe should be doing the work I’m doing. They should be thinking of preventative ways to keep the community safe.”

National attention turned to the Bakken in 2012, when Sherry Arnold, a white teacher, was raped and murdered by two men who came to the Bakken in search of work. Yet many Native victims don’t receive this kind of support,  Cheek said. “When something happens to an Indigenous person, to a Native person, why isn’t that being heard? We’re just another number.”

The Sovereign Bodies Institute’s MMIW Database — the only comprehensive, up-to-date database tracking missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. and Canada — details 529 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, the states which Keystone XL will traverse. Nearly 80 percent of these cases are unsolved or no perpetrators have been found, and 30 percent are active missing persons cases. One of those women is Olivia Lone Bear, whose body was found nine months after she went missing from the Fort Berthold Reservation in the heart of the Bakken in October 2017. Some fear these numbers will increase if more man camps come to the Great Plains region.

Line of trailers
A man camp in the Bakken shale in 2013. (Photo by Tara Lohan)

The Canadian government has begun to recognize the connection between the extractive industry and violence against Native women. In June of this year, Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released a 1,200-page report concluding three years of community hearings, story gathering, and forensic research. The report showed a strong link between extraction zones on the missing and murdered women crisis in Canada. It specifically cited rotational shift work, sexual harassment in the workplace, substance abuse, economic insecurity, and a largely transient workforce as contributing to increased violence against Native women in communities near fossil fuel infrastructure.

Also, as an Amnesty International report notes, transient workers are often not counted in census numbers, leading to overwhelmed public services. According to the report, in British Columbia, “frontline service providers supporting marginalized individuals, such as women’s shelters and food banks, describe a situation of constant crisis, as needs outpace their capacity to respond.”

What’s worse, in the U.S., tribal communities often don’t have jurisdiction to respond to the increase in crimes. The Major Crimes Act of 1885 largely limited what crimes tribal courts can prosecute, and Oliphant vs. Suquamish in 1978 asserted that tribal courts cannot prosecute non-Native offenders, even those who live on tribal lands. When the Violence Against Women Act was last reauthorized in 2013, it expanded tribal jurisdiction to include some cases related to domestic violence, dating violence, and violation of protection orders. But it didn’t expand tribal jurisdiction to include sex trafficking or many other forms of sexual violence.

“One of the immediate fixes we’re pushing for is reauthorization of VAWA,” said Annita Lucchesi, executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute. The new version of the law would expand tribal jurisdiction to cover sexual violence, sex trafficking and stalking, among other changes.

In areas where tribes don’t have jurisdiction, either FBI or county sheriffs are supposed to provide support, depending on the state. But that doesn’t always happen. “What we’re seeing is that county sheriffs in [some] states and FBI in other areas are understaffed and underfunded,” Lucchesi says. This has real impacts. According to a Government Accountability Office report, federal prosecutors between 2005 and 2009 declined to prosecute 67 percent of the 2,500 cases in Indian Country involving sexual violence that were referred to them.

If tribes can’t hold individuals accountable for violence, what about the companies themselves? “I think companies have a responsibility to ensure that they’re holding their workers to a high standard of conduct on and off the job, especially if they’re living in company housing like man camps,” Lucchesi said. “And I think that they have a responsibility for public safety.”

Cheek agrees, and also thinks that the Department of Justice and local law enforcement can do more to protect their communities, including sharing data on crime. “They have the research, how come they aren’t letting the reservation know? How come they aren’t working with the reservations to develop safety plans?”

Though Native activists and communities often recognize and call out the connection between violence in their communities and the intrusion of extractive industries, mainstream environmental justice movements and gender-based violence initiatives often don’t overlap. As expansion of oil pipelines continues — like Keystone XL and Trans Mountain in Canada — activists remain vigilant about their impacts on the communities around them.

Resource extraction impacts more than just the economy and the environment. It can endanger the lives of Native women, as communities in Canada and North Dakota have already experienced. “It creates this culture of using and abuse,” Lucchesi says. “If you can use and abuse the water and land, you can use and abuse the people around you too.”

This story was reprinted from Yes! Magazine.