From Snow Leopards to Soldiers: Conservation in a War-torn Land

Alex Dehgan’s new book The Snow Leopard Project details successful strategies for conserving endangered wildlife — and helping people in the process.

In 2006 Alex Dehgan, then the newly hired Afghanistan country director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, was given a daunting task: to strengthen biodiversity conservation and create the first national parks in a country that had weathered three decades of war.

His first assignment was getting field biologists safely from the capital, Kabul, to remote, treacherous terrain to determine whether enough wildlife still existed to even merit establishing protected areas.

That was only the first in a long series of logistical and political hurdles to achieve the project’s goals.

To everyone’s surprise the team eventually found a wealth of biodiversity in Afghanistan — notably Persian leopards (surprisingly, found just outside Kabul), Marco Polo sheep populations, musk deer, and double the estimated population of snow leopards thought possible in the country.

Dehgan and his colleagues’ arduous efforts, chronicled in his new book The Snow Leopard Project: And Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation, highlight one central key to their success: the importance of empowering local people to govern their natural resources.

Despite the land mines, bombings, lack of infrastructure and threat of attack, Dehgan says “Afghanistan was the easiest conservation job I’ve ever had.” Prior to his work there, he’d studied lemurs in Madagascar, helped rewrite environmental laws in post-Soviet Russia, and helped rebuild scientific capacity in Iraq. Compared to those places his latest assignment was a breeze, he says, because the Afghan people were so welcoming and invested in the process.

“The most important investment we made was in the Afghan people,” he says. “You have to harness human behavior, rather than work against it.” To that end his team helped piece together the funding, enhance scientific capacity, strengthen existing institutions and create new ones, where necessary, and empower people to own management systems of national parks.

Alex Dehgan. Provided.

Dehgan recalls how he had goosebumps as he watched the Afghan people assemble and seize opportunities to manage their own system of national parks. “This was about the people, protecting their identity, which helped us be successful in the face of difficult odds,” he says. The largely rural Afghan population understood, perhaps more than most, that human conservation and species conservation go hand in hand. “For them, natural security was clearly tied to national security,” he says.

Dehgan left Afghanistan in 2007, but his efforts ultimately led to the country’s first national park, at Band-e-Amir, that year, which the Wildlife Conservation Society documented was home to ibex, Persian leopards and Himalayan lynx, among other species. After that the momentum continued. In 2014 the 4,200-square-mile Wakhan National Park was established in a corridor of 20,000-foot-high mountains that connects Afghanistan to China and separates Tajikistan from Pakistan. The park encompasses the entire distribution range of Marco Polo sheep in Afghanistan and 70 percent of its snow leopard habitat.

Dehgan credits these and other achievements to the enthusiasm of a vast team of conservationists, from WCS Asia director Peter Zahler to Afghan officials such as wildlife enthusiast Prince Mostapha Zaher, grandson of a popular former monarch and then head of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency.

All of this was about more than just setting aside land. As the team laid the groundwork for the protected areas, they realized the snow leopard faced distinctive threats — notably, poaching and a lack of prey. Illegal trade of exotic pelts was largely driven by humanitarian military presence from the West, Dehgan says. One American soldier reportedly ordered 100 lynx and snow leopard comforters.

To collapse demand for exotic pelts, Dehgan and colleagues first developed an awareness campaign to make it socially unacceptable to own endangered cat rugs, bedding or coats.  The team also went undercover to measure the illicit trade supply and demand, trained customs officials how to spot illegal items, and shut down wildlife trade at pop-up markets on military bases. The Wildlife Conservation Society even began training American soldiers about wildlife concerns, including illegal trade, before they were dispatched to Afghanistan. To Dehgan’s surprise Afghan fur-store owners, whose shops had been hurt in the crackdown, asked him for training to identify which species they could sell legally and without impact on their country’s wildlife.

Instilling pride in a region’s native wildlife is a powerful tool, he says. In the 1970s the international nonprofit conservation organization Rare created a successful marketing campaign that incorporated St. Lucians’ namesake parrot as part of their identity, featuring it on everything from billboards and T-shirts to local music and artistry. The parrot made a dramatic comeback, an example that long resonated with Dehgan and inspired his work in Afghanistan.

In addition to working toward a decline in poaching, the team took steps to tackle the other threat facing the snow leopard — a lack of prey, which led to conflict with farmers, including retaliatory killings, when snow leopards attacked livestock for food. Their efforts focused on restoring rangelands, which, Dehgan says, not only prevents desertification but also serves to better support a prey base to keep hungry snow leopards fed, thereby relieving stress on livestock owners.

The experiences in Afghanistan demonstrated the power of conservation to rebuild governance and diplomacy in conflict areas, which Dehgan says he hopes is one of the main lessons of his book. There are additional areas where it could prove a useful strategy, he adds. For example, one of the largest ungulate migrations in the world was found in 2007 in south Sudan, having persisted over 25 years of civil war.

“Conservation allows a way to reintegrate opposing sides, provides a common language around a new sense of identity, and brings in development dollars to support a struggling country,” he says. It also offers work options for former military in post-conflict areas. Dehgan suggests the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, or even former poachers could be retrained as park rangers or wildlife guardians.

“If we are in places to rebuild societies and reinforce rule of law, rebuilding identity is core to that mission,” says Dehgan. “It’s important not to see ourselves as apart from nature, but that nature is part of who we are.”

Creative Commons

 

 

Previously in The Revelator:

Amur Leopard Population Triples — to 103

Trump Administration Drills Down on Alaska’s Arctic Refuge

The deeply unpopular plan would benefit a few rich oil companies while threatening people, wildlife and the climate.

The Trump administration is barreling ahead with plans to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest refuge in the country and an area of global ecological importance.

Many refer to the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge — the very place where oil drilling is being planned — as the “American Serengeti.” A home for grizzly bears, wolves, musk oxen and a host of other species, the area is famous as the birthing ground for the enormous Porcupine caribou herd, which each spring floods across the refuge’s coastal plain in the tens of thousands, arriving in time to raise newborn calves amid fresh tundra grasses. The coastal plain is also the annual destination for millions of migrating birds, who come from nearly every continent on Earth to raise the next generation of swans, terns and over 200 other species. In late summer these avian visitors disperse to backyards, beaches and wetlands across the planet.

caribou
Photo: Steve Hillebrand/USFWS

Drilling on the Arctic Refuge has long been opposed by most Americans. Among the staunchest opponents of drilling are indigenous people in northern Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, whose cultures and diets are entwined with the Porcupine herd. They include the Gwich’in people of northern Alaska, who have lived in the Arctic for millennia and reside alongside the Arctic Refuge. Their name for the coastal plain is Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, or “the Sacred Place Where Life Begins,” a name reflecting the shared destiny of the caribou and the people. For the Gwich’in and others, fighting against drilling is a cultural imperative and a civil-rights issue.

The refuge has another cultural relevance: It’s a unique part of American conservation history. President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1960 protection of the area followed decades of research and advocacy by some of the tallest figures in American conservation, including Mardy and Olaus Murie, Bob Marshall and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, among many others. These proponents held that the northeastern corner of Alaska should remain as one of America’s last truly wild places, to benefit future generations and the land itself. Informed by the predator-prey research of Olaus Murie and disappointed by a trend toward development in the national parks, advocates pressed for a version of preservation that excluded roads, facilities and interference with predators or other natural ecological forces. They wanted to preserve wilderness.

Photo: USFWS

When Eisenhower’s order protected the area’s “unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values,” it marked the first time federal law specifically protected a thing called wilderness. As Roger Kaye describes in his book The Last Great Wilderness, the move was a precursor to the 1964 Wilderness Act, which the Muries also helped shape and which remains among our bedrock conservation laws. Later, in 1980, Congress affirmed the national significance of the Arctic Refuge by nearly doubling its size.

But to the current administration and its loyal allies in Congress, the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge is destined to be an industrial oilfield. Caribou, birds, native people and history be damned — to say nothing of the climate, which needs another industrial oilfield about as much as Donald Trump needs another criminal investigation into his presidency.

We arrived at this pivotal moment after Republicans, following decades of failed attempts, used the 2017 tax law to pry open Arctic Refuge protections. Led by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, they tacked a provision onto the law’s last page, in Section 20001, mandating drilling on the area’s coastal plain. The law even amended the refuge’s enabling legislation to include oil drilling as a purpose of the refuge. Absurdly, drilling for oil now stands alongside other refuge purposes such as maintaining environmental health, conserving wildlife and protecting the wilderness values Eisenhower singled out back in 1960.

The law also prescribed a strict timetable for drilling. It orders the government to offer a minimum of two massive lease sales in the next 10 years, with the first to be completed by 2021. Each must encompass at least 400,000 acres of the coastal plain and include rights-of-way for a tangle of pipelines, roads, airstrips and other infrastructure, all certain to harm the natural values of the refuge.

Designing those lease sales is the focus of the government’s work today. The process began with an initial public comment period last spring, which garnered nearly 700,000 responses that overwhelmingly opposed drilling. We are now in the second comment period, which quietly opened during the holidays and was originally scheduled to close on February 11 — a period mostly characterized by President Trump’s 35-day government shutdown. The purpose of the comment period is to gather input on an array of generally weak environmental restrictions proposed to govern the lease sales the administration hopes to offer this year. It’s all part of a fast-tracked attempt to transfer large swaths of the coastal plain into oil-industry hands before the 2020 election.

Comments have now been extended through March 13, but the shutdown also resulted in the Interior Department postponing a series of public meetings, which would have enabled people to learn more about the sales. Those meetings are now scheduled to take place this week.

Still, comments were accepted throughout the shutdown. Based on published media reports we know they already include recent objections from the Canadian government, the governments of the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and several Canadian First Nations groups, who all agree drilling on the coastal plain violates international agreements to protect the Porcupine caribou.

Meanwhile the government is expected to invite more public comment soon, this time on the impacts of seismic testing on the refuge. This destructive process, which will unleash convoys of giant “thumper trucks” onto the coastal plain, was previously conducted in 1985 under the Reagan administration. Monitoring a quarter-century later showed that more than 120 miles of ruts still scar the fragile tundra, their hard angles and straight lines intercepting the ponds and meandering streams of the natural landscape. Although testing was scheduled to begin next month, it has been slowed by evidence it may harm or kill denning polar bear mothers and cubs. Ironically, unseasonable warmth and President Trump’s chaotic government shutdown also slowed the process.

The Gwich’in Steering Committee, which includes Alaska Native people who grew up alongside the refuge and have been nourished by its caribou and other resources, are not laying all of their hopes on the comment period. On January 14 their representatives joined other indigenous people in Houston, Texas, to hand-deliver 100,000 letters pressuring SAExploration to withdraw its bid to perform the testing. The Sierra Club reports at least 200,000 emails, calls and letters have been sent to the company, the sole outfit to bid on the project.

The direct appeal to SAExploration reveals how resistance to drilling continues outside of formal comment periods — and it shows signs of success. Last month international bankers at Barclays responded to public pressure by announcing they are unlikely to finance drilling in the Refuge because it is a “particularly fragile and pristine ecosystem.”

Here’s the final insult about drilling in the refuge: It’s not necessary, either economically or for the energy it would produce. Fracking technology and decades of generous public lands giveaways to the oil industry have already given the United States undeniable global energy dominance. Drilling in the Arctic Refuge is an unnecessary excess, especially when we consider that the oil from far-off northern Alaska would most likely be sold for corporate profit to foreign markets, not to support America’s energy needs. All it would serve is to line a few companies’ pockets.

As the accelerated and sometimes confusing work to drill in the refuge moves forward, the time to stop this from happening — and prevent permanent harm to this extraordinary landscape — grows increasingly short. It’s also a reminder of the threat the current government and extractive industries pose to our vital public lands. This is an important fight for wildlife, for wilderness, for the rights of indigenous peoples and for the climate. The Arctic Refuge may be remotely located and out of sight for most Americans, but it should not be out of mind.

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.

Creative Commons

The Toxic Legacy of Environmental Neoliberalism

A look at Poland’s growing ecological disaster — and its polluted past — shows how green ideals can wither on the vine.

At December’s Katowice Climate Change Conference, Polish President Andrzej Duda proudly opened the proceedings by declaring that coal “does not contradict the protection of the climate and the progress of climate protection.”

This bizarre and ecologically immoral statement, and the conference’s general embrace of coal, comes from a country whose history deserves greater attention, especially since it echoes so much of the world’s present situation — and possibly our future.

Since joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish state has doggedly pursued the neoliberal policies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The “free” market and finance were liberated from state intervention on behalf of the commons and the environment. Limitless economic growth and hyperconsumerism became a mantra. State industries and services were privatized. The economy boomed, and according to Western trade analysts, Polish consumers “are used to doing their shopping seven days a week and at any time of day or night.”

However, this recent history can make it easy to forget that Poles lived under communism for 44 years until 1989. This was an era mostly marked by economic recessions, severe consumer shortages and an absolute condemnation of capitalism. For better or worse, citizens accepted their meager material conditions with stoic resignation, and a few embraced a minimalist lifestyle. Simply put, Polish culture was not driven by mass consumption and materialism. Those were unattainable.

But at the same time, Polish Marxists in the immediate aftermath of a destructive World War were convinced that communism would quickly usher in a proletarian utopia of progress and plenty. Steel mills, aluminum smelting facilities, shipyards and cement plants were constructed in an initial spasm of modernizing dynamism. Forests were cleared, wetlands were drained and the countryside was electrified. An infrastructure of railroads and roads was built and a mostly rural population became rapidly urbanized. Poland experienced tangible progress. Like other Soviet satellites, Poland demonstrated to its citizens that Marxism could deliver material wealth.

An example of this early optimism and success would be the economic development of Kraków. With the construction of new district called Nowa Huta in 1949, the city underwent a transformation from what communists regarded as a conservative and bucolic backwater into a modern Marxist metropolis. Built on farmland that was only seven kilometers from Kraków’s old town square, Nowa Huta quickly became a bustling industrial zone. By 1956 the population of this district reached 100,000, and at its center stood the sprawling Lenin Steelworks, which forged millions of tons of steel a year. No thought was given to the mill’s impact on the environment.

Studies conducted in the 1970s show that the Lenin Steelworks generated stupefying levels of pollution. Millions of tons of cadmium, lead, zinc, iron and other heavy metals were annually emitted directly into the atmosphere and local waterways. When compared to current EPA standards for acceptable heavy metal soil concentrations, Kraków’s soil contained 143 times the norm for cadmium, 20 times the norm for lead, and 27 times the norm for zinc. The entire ecosystem was choked with poisonous levels of SO2 and NO2, and the health and populations of local flora and fauna were decimated.

Kraków’s ecological conditions only worsened throughout the 1980s. An average of 121,112 tons of atmospheric particulate matter was released each year by Nowa Huta and Kraków’s other heavy industries. The annual average atmospheric release of carbon, nitrates, fluorine, sulfur and hydrocarbons reached 197,154 tons. The Wisła River, which flowed through Kraków, became a toxic brew of chlorides, sulfur, sodium, phosphates, ammonia nitrogen, calcium carbonate and oxidizable pollutants. Locally grown foodstuffs were heavily contaminated by a variety of toxins such as mercury and lead.

It’s no wonder that under such conditions, Kraków became ground zero for an unprecedented public health emergency, with skyrocketing rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease and a variety of other medical maladies. In 1989 Kraków’s Tuberculosis and Pulmonary Clinic estimated that approximately 30 percent of all Krakowians suffered from serious respiratory illnesses. Doctors from Kraków’s regional Mother and Child Team reported that approximately 25,000, or 10 percent, of Kraków’s children suffered from asthma, up from 0.1 percent in 1900. In a study from 1985, researchers demonstrated that 25 percent of Krakowians suffered from high blood pressure, a fivefold increase in comparison to a rural control population. Similar statistics were found for cardiac ischemia (twofold increase), and cardiac arrest (twofold increase). By 1988, 30 percent of all deaths in Kraków were attributed to cancer.

But even though the city was officially deemed an “ecological hazard area” in the 1970s, communist authorities did absolutely nothing to stop the devastating pollution that plagued Kraków and its environs. One reason for this was financial — the nearly bankrupt Polish state could not afford to install pollution-mitigating technology on its heavy industry — but a more important reason was ideological.

As a system of thought, Marxism continued the Enlightenment’s championing of human reason. Yes, Kraków’s industrial development was destroying flora and fauna, centuries-old architecture, the Wisła River, surrounding farmland and the lives of human beings, but communist leaders argued that such immediate sacrifices would eventually and inevitably usher in a better and more rational world. Through proletarian struggle, faith in the process of dialectic materialism and, because of the historical imperative, a worker’s utopia was destined to emerge. Human ingenuity would ultimately heal, reorder and improve both human society, and eventually nature itself.

For a regime that was already seriously compromised by countless political grievances and substantial economic failures, the poisoning of Poland’s ecology and of its citizens proved to be significant. A nascent environmental movement arose in the 1970s.

The founder of Poland’s Green movement is Antonina Leńkowa, whose book The Scalped Earth (Oskalpowana Ziemia, 1961) directly questioned Marxism’s faith in reason, and indirectly criticized the government’s environmental and economic policies. Leńkowa lamented how humans “easily forgot the responsibilities and stewardship due to earth, our mother.” According to Leńkowa, humans treated earth with callousness and cruelty “that was not a symptom of indifference, but was a symptom of open hostility.” Leńkowa attributed this hostility to a fetish for technology and progress. “Many inhabitants of earth are mesmerized by only one aspect of life, technology, and by its magnificent achievements, blinding them to all other earthy considerations [ecological]. They only serve their one chosen master [technology], they only listen to her commands, and they offer her in homage, everything and anything she desires.”

Being careful never to directly criticize Marxism, the Soviet Union or the Polish government, Leńkowa cleverly avoided censorship by apolitically cataloging disastrous environmental conditions across the globe. Years ahead of her time, she outlined the devastating ecological effects of overpopulation, deforestation, livestock production, industrialization, aquifer depletion, monoculture farming, herbicides and pesticides like DDT, antibiotics in agriculture, the mass extinction of flora and fauna, natural habitat destruction, trophy hunting, urbanization, overfishing, naval sonar technology, the polluting of oceans, oil spills and oil exploration, auto emissions, noise pollution, atomic energy, coal mining and the unwillingness of nations to have sustainable economies which practiced conservation.

Leńkowa concluded her book by asking the existential question that is central to today’s climate breakdown age: “Is it worth to continually promote economic expansion that carries with it the danger of annihilating all life, including the lives of human beings?”

This elegant book had tremendous influence on Poland’s first generation of environmental activists. These environmentalists were scientists, men and women who mostly worked in Polish universities, who were the first to discover and understand the developing ecological crisis enveloping Poland. Because these academics were conducting seemingly apolitical research in the physical and natural sciences, or in medicine, they found the necessary space and freedom to document the kind of data I referenced earlier. Sometimes their papers and findings were censored, but news of Poland’s ecocide slowly began to trickle down to the general public.

The year of Solidarity, 1980, proved to be a watershed. That year, the Polish Ecology Club (Polski Klub Ekologiczny, PKE), Eastern Europe’s first legal and independent environmental advocacy group, was established in Kraków. Mostly composed of Jagiellonian University students and faculty, the PKE issued an open letter to the Polish Sejm demanding environmental protections across Poland. Eventually more than 4,500 members of the faculty, staff and administration signed the document.

This brave political act was rapidly followed by a public campaign of environmental protests and lobbying that, among other accomplishments, successfully shuttered a notoriously polluting facility near Kraków, the Skawina Aluminum Smelter, in 1981.

In the PKE’s wake a diverse multitude of vibrant environmental organizations mushroomed throughout the country. Citizens were sympathetic to the warnings issued by Polish Greens. Environmentalists enjoyed support across all sociopolitical classes in Poland.

The 1980s were a decade of intense grassroots political engagement. Poles were angry. Thousands of ordinary citizens engaged in a multitude of public and private acts of dissent that ranged from telling political jokes at the dinner table, to getting arrested for acts of civil disobedience. Almost everyone recognized that Poland’s ecological crisis was concretely political.

Flash forward three decades and so much has changed for the worse: Coal, once again, is king. After the fall of communism in 1989 it certainly was not self-evident that such a transformation was preordained, so how and why did Poles lose their enviro-political consciousness and become consumer zombies with seemingly little or no care for their environment?

Poland pollution
A degraded landscape in Poland. Photo: Mariusz Prusaczyk (CC BY 2.0)

Janusz Okrzesik, a Polish Green who was politicized in the 1980s and went on to serve as a Sejm Member and Senator in post-communist Poland, offers a compelling answer to this query in his book Through Ecology to Freedom (Przez Ekologię do Wolności, 2014):

The committees disappeared, and corporations arrived. The faith in proletarian victory died, but eternal human greed was resurrected. The worker-peasant alliance was replaced by the supremacy of investors “providing” new jobs and new percentages of GDP. Ecologists have a significantly more difficult battle against this kind of ideology: the former had a concrete address and concrete face, while the authority of money is diffused, anonymous, and unshackled from the influence of public opinion. So far, democracy has not discovered the appropriate method of subduing the appetites of neoliberals.

Poland suffered shattering ecological ravages at the hands of a hated regime, yet it has proceeded to uncritically ignore neoliberalism’s ruination of the environment after 1989. This history serves as a warning to all of us. One would think that Poland’s history would equip Poles to at least question the wisdom of pursuing policies that cause climate breakdown and ecocide. Perhaps this history suggests that humankind will never have the will to cease exploiting our planet?

The recent United Nations-sponsored Katowice Climate Change Conference (COP24) stands as a surreal reminder of our collective refusal to accept the anthropogenic apocalypse unfolding all around us. Most of the 30,000 delegates from around the world few carbon-emitting airplanes to the event. Meanwhile the Polish hosts seemed to deliberately mock the entire occasion. Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa, the EU’s largest producer of coking coal, and PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA, which burns more coal than any other power company in Europe, sponsored the event. On the first day of COP24, delegates were greeted by a coal-miner brass band. Katowice’s commercial pavilion featured coal soap, coal jewelry and coal under glass and in cages, to highlight the region’s efforts fighting climate breakdown.

What must we learn from Poland’s history and current reality? Put simply, we humans are creatures of habit and tradition, even if they end up killing us. In Poland, the people had an opportunity and seemingly the desire to move away from their environmentally destructive ways, and almost did, but they quickly reverted back to the previous paradigm. We must remember that example if we ever hope to carve new traditions and ensure that the planet has a future.

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.

Creative Commons

13 Percent of Florida Manatees Died Last Year

2018 was the second-deadliest year on record for the threatened species — and humans are responsible.

Florida manatees just can’t catch a break.

An estimated 824 manatees died in Florida waters last year, a nearly 50 percent increase over the number of mortalities in 2017 and the second-highest death count ever.

Sadly, a large number of this year’s deaths were human-caused, either directly from accidents or from long-term environmental threats created by anthropogenic forces.

What caused the most deaths this year? Watch our video below to learn more.

Further reading: The Simple Thing You Can Do to Save Lovable but Endangered Manatees

Creative Commons

Beautiful Catastrophe: An Artist-Scientist Looks Into the Face of Extinction

Louisiana-based scientist Brandon Ballengée turns his research on imperiled ecosystems and species into transdisciplinary works of art.

Brandon Ballengée has found a way to make the unbearable beautiful.

Ballengée has professionally merged art and science, creating transdisciplinary artworks that draw on his research as a scientist to look at issues like pollution, harmful algal blooms, habitat loss and extinction.

And his work comes at crucial moment. Mounting environmental crises can push people to turn away — but Ballengée forces us to look at our problems head on by creating mesmerizing art with extinction and imperiled species as its subject.the ask

His work, he says, is intended not to generate fear but empathy, understanding and action.

For 20 years he has used both science and art to chronicle deformities and declining populations among amphibians. Currently he works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University, where he studies the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

And his artwork has hit a nerve — it’s been shown across the United States and in 20 countries around the world.

We talked with Ballengée about how he uses art to communicate scientific findings, why he involves the community in his process and how he’s creating his own on-the-ground restoration project.

How did you end up on this overlapping path of art and science, and where do you hope it leads?

Even as a child I always wanted to be both an artist and a scientist. Pragmatically (and academically) it just took time to sort out how to do this. Today my work as a biologist focuses on species impacted by complicated, often degraded, ecosystems such as amphibians and fishes. This research and the experience of working with impacted organisms motivates and inspires my art. While making art I reflect on the science from a different viewpoint, which leads to new questions, experiments and more science. The practices complement one another and I cannot imagine one without the other.

Artist Brandon Ballengée
Artist Brandon Ballengée and oil-stained shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico collected after the clean up of the Deepwater Horizon spill and part of the installation of “Collapse.” (Photo by JD Talasek)

Through science, I can methodically achieve a better understanding of ecological phenomenon and share these findings with the research community. Whereas my artworks can carry an expressive message about impacted organisms to a wider non-science audience and inspire action.

What’s one of your favorite pieces of art or exhibitions that you’ve created?

My work with amphibians has been more of an emergency response to the current population crisis they face than a favorite series per se.

More than 40 percent of known amphibian species are considered in decline, and more than 200 species have gone missing in recent decades. These are ancient marvels of evolution with a wonderful array of shapes, forms, colors and behaviors. They are “keystone” species to our terrestrial ecosystems, meaning that when they are gone many other species are impacted. They are disappearing so fast. It is both tragic and alarming.

My series of artworks, Malamp Reliquaries, is my artistic response to this study of deformed and declining amphibians, as well as hopefully a means to inspire people to help protect these amazing creatures.

Morpheus art
“DFA 155: Morpheus,” a cleared and stained Pacific tree frog collected in Aptos, California, from a series on deformities in amphibian populations. Courtesy of artist Brandon Ballengée and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC.

What roles do collaboration and community play in your work?

Growing up in a rural environment, I was always inspired by animals and nature. This entrenched in me a strong desire to conserve and protect biodiversity and ecosystems. Bringing this message to the public underlies all of my work in science and art — what I call an impetus for “ecosystem activism.” My field investigations and laboratory programs stress public involvement, engagement and collaboration. Much of my artistic practice is also collaborative as well.

While conducting ecological field surveys I encourage public participation in “eco-actions.” Citizens contribute by actively helping to collect data on wildlife, monitor, even help to restore wetlands and other ecosystems. In turn, they learn about the ecology and biodiversity of where they live and act to protect it. I also encourage participants to express their experiences by making their own art. Through these direct actions we collectively learn, try to fix habitats and share this story with larger audiences through art.

How do you see your work helping to educate the public about environmental issues?

Often people feel that environmental problems are too large and too widespread for individuals to make a difference. This is absolutely not the case. All of our individual actions every day have an influence on ecosystems and biodiversity: what we chose to eat; how we live; where we live; how we travel; if we own land, what we do with it; how we discuss these ideas with others; and on and on.

We are part of a larger living community and can individually and collectively make large differences.

Following this concept, my wife Aurore Ballengée and our two children, Victor and Lily, and I have started the Atelier de la Nature project. Two years ago, we purchased heavily farmed soy fields in rural south Louisiana and have worked to regenerate the ecosystems from a transgenic monoculture into a modest nature reserve and outdoor education center.

We offer environmental education programs, sustainable food and art-science events open to all ages. Already participants have collaborated to “sculpt” the land with native species, worked to reestablish “Cajun” prairie, planted over a thousand native trees, created pollinator habitats and grown food without pesticides using permaculture, Creole and other indigenous methods.

The project has already yielded results in the ecological sense, with dozens of species of birds and mammals returning (and breeding), 23 species of amphibians and reptiles currently occupying the property, countless insects — all coming back to once-barren land. In the human sense, hundreds of youth have helped with restoration of the lands or participated in our programs.

Your postdoctoral research has focused on the biological impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. How has art helped you communicate what you’ve you found?

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the largest environmental disaster in the history of the United States (outside perhaps of industrial agriculture or European colonization). Literally billions of organisms were affected — endangered sea turtles, marine mammals, plankton, deep-water alga, corals, birds, people. There is still so much we do not yet understand about the impact on wildlife populations, coastal (human) communities and the long-term impacts of the Gulf of Mexico food chain and ecosystems. Much more continued research is needed for decades to come.

My installation Collapse called into question the impacts to the Gulf of Mexico’s food chain following the spill and use of harmful dispersants to “clean” the oil. Physically, Collapse was a pyramid shaped installation of preserved fish, other aquatic organisms and Deep Water Horizon contaminates in gallon specimen jars. There were over 20,000 specimens in Collapse — from huge deep sea roaches (isopods), to oil-stained shrimp with physical deformities, to jars packed with tiny sea snails. It was meant to recall the fragile inter-trophic relationships between Gulf species and the way the spill may have altered this.

Collapse was made in collaboration with fellow biologists Todd Gardner, Jack Rudloe and Peter Warny, as well as my former student, artist Brian Schiering, and several Gulf residents who sent oiled specimens but wished to remain anonymous. It took us two years to gather data, specimens and other samples.

Since 2016 my research has focused on locating species of endemic (not found anywhere else in the world) Gulf fishes that have not been reported since the spill. To date there are still 13 “missing” species. With the help of shrimpers, fisherman and Gulf residents I hope we can find these ghosts of the Gulf.

Creative Commons

Found But Lost: Newly Discovered Shark May Be Extinct

Carcharhinus obsolerus (that’s Latin for “extinct”) swam in the waters of the western Pacific, but it hasn’t been seen in 80-plus years.

Over the past two decades more than 260 new species of shark have been discovered by researchers around the world, increasing the number of known species by more than 20 percent.

Now we can add one more to the list. A paper published Jan. 2 in the journal PLOS ONE describes a striking new shark species from the waters off the coasts of Borneo, Thailand and Vietnam. It looks like some similar “whaler shark” species — a genus that also includes the well-known bull shark and blacktip shark — but its teeth, snout, fins and vertebrae are distinctive enough that scientists have declared it to be its own species.

There’s just one problem: The shark was identified from decades-old museum samples and hasn’t been seen in the wild since the 1930s.

That’s why the researchers have named the species “lost shark.”

More formally they’ve dubbed it Carcharhinus obsolerus — the second word in the taxonomic name is Latin for “extinct.”

Despite the name, researchers still hope a game of hide-and-seek might find evidence that lost sharks still exist.

“It is quite possible that the lost shark still roams the coastal waters of the South China Sea, but it was so named because we could not locate specimens” in museum collections or the wild, says coauthor Peter M. Kyne, a conservation biologist and senior research fellow at Australia’s Charles Darwin University.

Of course, we don’t know exactly where to look, as “lost shark” was actually only officially observed three times — two juvenile specimens and a late-term embryo. The original researchers that collected the specimens decades ago never adequately described the species, so the current team has taken steps to complete that process, even though the creature’s historic range and role in the ecosystem are not understood.

Why take the effort to describe the lost shark now, so long after it was last seen? As noted in the paper, similar coastal fish species in Southeast Asia currently face enormous pressure from human activity. Last year the Asia Foundation went so far as to say that many marine species in the area are “near collapse from overfishing.” That makes it critical to identify all of the species — shark or otherwise — that swim in the region so we know what needs to be protected before they disappear for good.

More broadly, the identification of lost shark relates to a bigger initiative, the ongoing Global Shark Trends Project, which aims to assess the extinction risk of the world’s shark and ray species (collectively known as chondrichthyan species) by the end of next year. That’s a necessary process for the nations that signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, which by 2020 must ensure that their fisheries are sustainable and that further extinctions are avoided.

As part of the shark-trends project, Kyle says they will spend the coming year examining the conservation status of many other newly described shark species.

Meanwhile there’s hope that by formally identifying and naming this species, even decades after its last sighting, it may be “lost” no more.

That’s happened in the past. “A close relative, the Borneo shark, was once thought to be lost, with no records since 1937,” Kyne points out. “It was rediscovered in 2004 during fish-market surveys. We hope that the lost shark can be re-found in the future, and so we don’t formally consider it to be extinct.”

It may need a new taxonomic name if that rediscovery ever comes to pass, but for now the lost shark’s name is a reminder of the pressure other shark species face from overfishing — and a hope that other species won’t also disappear.

Will Arizona’s Saguaros Survive Climate Change and Drought?

The Sonoran Desert’s iconic species faces an uncertain future because of climate change and drought.

TUCSON, Ariz. — The click of container lids and swoosh of zippers filled the air on a still morning in Saguaro National Park East.

Tom Orum and his wife, Nancy Ferguson, pulled measuring equipment from the trunk of their dusty white truck, parked in a flat landscape of majestic saguaros towering over teddy bear cholla, prickly pear, woody shrubs and spiny plants.

Orum, 71, and Ferguson, 74, have visited this spot for four decades. Their job is always the same: to monitor the health of more than 600 saguaros on 60 acres of the park. They’re the third generation to measure and monitor these iconic symbols of the West since 1941, and the work has become a treasured ritual for them.

“It’s sort of like having roots yourself to get back to the same place and repeat a process year after year,” said Ferguson, a retired biologist dressed in jeans, a baseball cap and a gray T-shirt decorated with green saguaros.

Ferguson walked past tall, ribbed cactuses, their fat arms pointing in different directions.

“The thing about saguaros is they’re noticeable individuals,” she said. “For most of us, plants are like, ‘Oh they’re all like other plants.’ But saguaros are very much individuals, and that’s something that our culture really relates to.”

But since the 1990s, she and her husband have seen what could be troubling changes in their beloved saguaro flatlands.

Saguaros in the park, scientists say, are responding to climate change and prolonged drought by reproducing less frequently. This worrisome downtick could signal the state’s saguaros are in decline.

Orum, a retired plant pathologist, remains cautiously optimistic. He believes another decade or so of scientific study is needed before scientists can be certain Arizona’s iconic saguaros are declining.

He and Ferguson are a spry couple, fast hikers, efficient at inspecting the saguaros they love. Orum measured the smaller saguaros with a carpenter’s ruler he carried in his khakis, and recorded data on taller saguaros with a 6-foot white plastic pipe he calls Charlotte. Ferguson, armed with a map on a clipboard, wrote down the new measurements on a notebook.

When they visit the park, they always hope to find young, new saguaros. If they do find one, they record its size and log its whereabouts with a compass, which they find more accurate than GPS.

They would drink a milkshake to celebrate finding the young saguaro. It’s a 65-year tradition started by Stanley Alcron, who once monitored these same plots of saguaros.

But for Orum and Ferguson, there haven’t been a lot of milkshakes recently.

An Uncertain Future

From 1993 through 2016, Orum and Ferguson found only three new saguaros in the 60 acres they monitor in Saguaro National Park East. (There are two parts to Saguaro National Park. The eastern part was designated a national monument in 1933. An additional 25 square miles in the Tucson Mountains west of the city were added to the monument in 1961, and it was elevated to national park status in 1994.)

But a 2018 study found the problem of fewer young saguaros on both sides of the park.

Saguaro National Park biologist Don Swann and colleagues found only 70 saguaros younger than age 15 among the 10,000 saguaros surveyed in the park. The study names climate change, prolonged drought and human activity, such as cattle ranching, for the decline in young saguaros.

The results of the study are “broadly applicable to other desert areas for predicting how the saguaro and other long-lived desert species may respond to anticipated climate change,” the authors wrote.

“Some of our biggest concern does have to do with the survival of the younger saguaros with higher temperature and longer dry periods being a potential for the future,” Swann said.

Adult saguaros are well-adapted to dry conditions. Their shallow roots quickly absorb moisture from the soil and their flesh expands to store water.

But saguaros start out just a few inches tall and aren’t able to store much water. Higher temperatures cause water to evaporate more quickly from the soil, which, coupled with drought, has made it hard for new saguaros to survive, scientists say.

Saguaros seem tough, but they’re fragile. Their delicate white blossoms are pollinated by bats, insects and birds, producing fruits rich with tiny seeds. Coyotes and other animals eat the fruit, depositing the seeds in their scat. Most seeds are destroyed by drought, freezing conditions and animals. The few survivor seeds germinate beneath protective “nurse” trees and grow slowly — it can take 10 years for a saguaro to reach 1 inch. But once established, a saguaro can live 175 to 200 years, reach a height of 45 or more feet and weigh more than 2 tons.

Saguaros evolved only in the Sonoran Desert because it offers the two rainy seasons key to their survival. But the challenges posed by climate change and drought show that even a resilient desert species is vulnerable.

Arizona has experienced significant drought since 2000. A recent national study published in the Environmental Research Letters found Saguaro National Park has warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius from 1950 to 2010.

“That’s the equivalent of moving the park over 150 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) south from Tucson to hotter areas in Mexico,” said Patrick Gonzalez, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Small increments of heating can translate into big changes on the ground.”

This means changes in the saguaro population, which could harm many animals that rely on the cactus for food and shelter. The saguaro is a keystone species, essential to maintaining the delicate balance of the Sonoran Desert ecosystem.

“Species in a community evolve over long periods of time, and not all the species respond equally to those changes in climate,” said Osvaldo Sala, founding director of the Global Drylands Center at Arizona State University. “They’re all very tightly connected one to the other, so that can cause unexpected consequences.”

Tom Orum uses a 6-foot piece of pipe to measure a saguaro as his wife, Nancy Ferguson, records the data. Photo by Nicole Neri/Cronkite News

Not Alone

Saguaro National Park isn’t the only national park facing these challenges. Gonzalez and fellow climate researchers conducted the national study and found climate change is causing national parks across the country to warm twice as fast compared with the rest of the United States.

The scientists said location was the main factor causing the disproportionate temperature increases. Most national parks are in areas especially sensitive to human-caused warming, including the arctic, mountainous areas and the Southwest.

Out of Arizona’s 22 national parks, Gonzalez said, 16 have experienced significant warming.

“Our national parks have been exposed to conditions hotter and drier than the U.S. as a whole,” he said. “Climate change is certainly a major driving factor of vulnerability in the future.

Hope in the Rocky Slopes

Scientists are cautiously hoping saguaros will outsmart a changing climate by reproducing on rocky foothills where precious rainwater better resists evaporation.

Swann and his colleagues found a smaller decline in the number of young saguaros in these slopes compared with the flatlands. In these areas, water can get trapped in cracks or crevices and doesn’t evaporate as quickly, providing slightly better conditions for young saguaros.

“In general what we see over time is that in those rocky areas, the saguaro populations tend to be more stable,” Swann said.

Identifying and protecting these resilient areas is one way national parks can ensure species and ecosystems survive future changes. Gonzalez said Joshua Tree National Park in California already has found some success using this method to protect their namesake species.

Scientists have yet to figure out how, exactly, to protect saguaros in the park from climate change and drought. They say they need to understand more. They need to further monitor the cactuses in the rocky foothills, and they need to determine how much of the current decline is caused by climate change versus natural cycles.

Lifelong Learning

Tom Orum and Nancy Ferguson have kept watch over the saguaros on the same 60 acres of the park for nearly 40 years.

Each year, they measure the height, note scars or damages and count the number of arms on each cactus. They also identify new or dead saguaros. Their painstaking, regular monitoring of saguaros has long informed scientific knowledge of the lifespan and population trends of the species.

And they have four favorites. They found these four in 1986, when the saguaros were about 4 years old and just a half-inch tall.

“We found them when they were so small,” Orum said. “When you’ve followed them every year, you get attached to them.”

Now the tallest is 11 feet tall. It grew 8 inches in the past year.

It would sadden the couple if the cactuses were no longer there. They hinge their hopes for the species’ well-being on rain.

“We think saguaros don’t require just a single rainy season,” Ferguson said. “They need rain one summer to get going. They need rain that winter to survive the winter. Then they probably also need a second rainy season to really get established.”

In the drought-plagued 1940s and 1950s, Orum said, there was a similar decline in young saguaros. At the time, scientists weren’t sure whether the drought caused fewer young saguaros or if hungry cattle also were to blame.

But during the especially rainy years of the 1980s, Orum and Ferguson found 30 to 40 new saguaros each year across their acres.

The current decline of young saguaros in the park is not tied to cattle, so scientists figure drought is to blame.

After Orum and Ferguson retired from the University of Arizona in 2000, their love for the desert and saguaros motivated them to keep up the monitoring they’d been doing during their time at the university.

“It’s more important to us to be out here measuring cacti than figuring out how to invest our money, or lots of other things that people do with their time,” Ferguson said.

Besides, their careful scientific observation of the saguaros is key to learning the fate of the cactuses. Only monitoring will show whether saguaros decline or recover.

Orum said he and Ferguson won’t know for sure “until we’re 80 or 85 years old.”

This story is part of Elemental: Covering Sustainability, a multimedia collaboration between Cronkite News, Arizona PBS, KJZZ, KPCC, Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS SoCal.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.  

Previously in The Revelator:

Prickly But Unprotected: 18 Percent of Cactus Species at Risk

Encouraging Energy Conservation: Is Less More?

Many messages about saving energy use multiple arguments to make their case. But our research suggests that may actually be the wrong approach.

Is messaging about consumers’ home-energy habits important in climate change mitigation? Many organizations say yes, and are conducting outreach to raise awareness and persuade individuals to improve their energy use.

But are the messages being used in that outreach actually working? Our research, recently published in the journal Energy Policy, suggests the types of messages that are typically used don’t always have the desired effect. This research also suggests ways to improve energy-conservation messaging.

Often energy-related messages are crafted under the assumption that the information they contain will be received, processed and acted upon in a rational way. What does this mean? As traditionally conceived, rationality implies that people maximize their utility (more commonly referred to as their happiness) subject to their material constraints (i.e. the money they have) and their beliefs about the world (i.e. the information they have).

The richness of human behavior, however, means that people don’t always act in ways that can be explained by this model. People may, for example, care about the utility of others — in other words, they may care about others’ happiness in addition to their own. Constraints may take the form of time or willpower, rather than money. People’s beliefs may be shaped not only by the objective information they have, but also by their perceptions of what other people believe. Moreover, people don’t always act according to the beliefs they hold.

The behavioral sciences have played an important role in revealing these and other nuances in the decision-making process. As a result they have led to more sophisticated decision-making theories, and consequently, to more sophisticated policy interventions based on these theories. Our paper calls attention to a constellation of recent findings that cast doubt on the effectiveness of what has so far been a rather uncontroversial persuasive strategy: that “more is better.” In this case, this strategy implies that by making energy use out to be a more severe issue and providing more arguments in favor of energy conservation, better results will occur.

While this may seem like a sound messaging technique, our review of behavioral science research suggests that “more is better” messages have the potential to backfire, undermining the very objective — greater energy conservation — that they seek to accomplish.

There are three ways this strategy can go awry. First, for many message-senders, it may seem logical to convey the severity of the issue by emphasizing the pervasiveness of energy-intensive behavior. Recent studies, however, demonstrate that this strategy may in fact lead to more energy consumption, not less, because it can give the impression that energy-intensive behavior is a norm. This, in turn, can make consumptive habits seem less unacceptable. Large-scale studies of energy use, for example, have found that when people learn that they use less energy than most, they tend to increase the amount of energy they consume.

Another common messaging strategy draws attention to the scale of a problem by emphasizing the great number of potential victims, with the expectation that this will make people more likely to take action to address it. However, several studies have shown that people are actually more willing to help a single person than a group of many people; similarly, crimes involving a greater number of victims tend to be perceived as less severe than crimes involving fewer victims. These findings suggest that a single, identifiable victim elicits stronger sympathetic reactions than many indistinguishable victims.

Finally, while it is rather reasonable to expect that “more is better” with respect to the number of arguments provided in a persuasive message, there are indications that here, too, this logic may be ineffective and even counterproductive. Recent studies have found that people are in fact less likely to feel persuaded by a message that contains both weak and strong arguments compared to a message that contains only strong arguments. In three experiments, for example, people read public service announcements that contained either two or ten reasons to quit smoking, vote or exercise. In each of these experiments, people who saw the message containing ten reasons rated themselves as less likely to do these things than people who saw only two reasons. This evidence suggests that, quite counterintuitively, adding more arguments to a message can in fact reduce its overall persuasiveness.

So what does work? Taken together, the findings we raise here suggest that the detrimental effects of the “more is better” logic can be avoided by:

  1. Not drawing attention to the prevalence of energy-intensive habits;
  2. Identifying individuals who are harmed by high levels of energy consumption; and
  3. Prioritizing only the strongest two or three arguments in persuasive messages regarding energy conservation.

So while the logic that “more is better” may serve well in some situations, it clearly doesn’t always benefit strategies of persuasion. Recent and emerging work in the behavioral sciences shows the devil is, in fact, in the details with respect to the design of persuasive messages. If widely adopted the insights we’ve gathered could improve the effectiveness of energy conservation efforts and could even contribute to shifting the habits and norms surrounding energy use, which is a key element of overall climate mitigation efforts.

The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the ITF/OECD or of the governments of its member countries, nor those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Creative Commons

Is the Trump Administration ‘Gaming the Shutdown’ to Serve Energy and Hunting Special Interests?

Elected officials and nonprofits groups are wondering why federal workers are being called back from furlough for nonemergency work that aids industry and hunters.

Two years into the Trump administration, its attacks on environmental regulations, policy and science are already well documented. But the current partial government shutdown, now more than a month long, provides a unique lens through which to view the administration’s priorities. The list of what isn’t being done is long and troubling, but equally concerning is what is being done during the shutdown.

Over the past several weeks national parks have been trashed, climate change research stalled and crucial wildfire prevention work halted — all while oil and gas drilling efforts continue to cruise along and national wildlife refuges are reopened to hunters.

Lawmakers and nonprofits are calling out the administration for using the shutdown to cater to special interests like the oil and gas industry while there’s limited oversight, and with possible suspect use of funds.

Aiding Industry

Several moves by the Interior Department to bring back furloughed staff to attend to oil and gas activities aren’t sitting well with some elected officials.

Arizona’s Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote a letter to David Bernhardt, acting director of the Interior Department, admonishing the agency for making sure it’s business as usual for oil and gas industry while ordinary Americans and the environment bear the brunt of the shutdown impacts. The letter was also signed by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.).

“Your department has continued to hold public meetings on oil and gas development on the North Slope of Alaska, refused to extend the comment period for leasing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and opened up Bureau of Land Management field offices to allow drilling permits to continue to be issued,” the letter said.

Dozens of furloughed workers from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management were brought back to work on January 15 in order to complete plans for a major sale of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf Mexico, which is scheduled for March. They were also processing applications for seismic testing for offshore oil and gas exploration but a judge put an end to that on January 18.

“If you are an oil and gas company awaiting a lease, there is a big open sign at the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, where federal workers are being brought in — without pay — to service the oil and gas industry,” Lowenthal, who’s also the incoming chairman of the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. It was telling, he said, that staff members of the same agency who deal with renewable energy are still furloughed.

It’s not just offshore waters, either. The Bureau of Land Management has continued to issue drilling permits on public lands during the shutdown, and some environmental groups are calling into question the legality of those actions, since the public is blocked from participating in the process and can’t even reach agency staff on the phone or file public comments.

“It’s not at all reasonable to completely shut the public out from any access to agencies like the BLM while allowing private industry — the oil and gas industry — to have apparently full access to the agencies,” Connie Wilbert, director of the Sierra Club Wyoming Chapter, told U.S. News and World Report. “The public has no way to get access to the agency to find out what’s going on, yet right in our local newspapers, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming is saying, ‘We’re working with BLM to get this stuff open again.’”

One area of particular concern is oil and gas lease sales planned for February and March that would put more than 2 million acres of public lands across six western states up for auction, even when staff members who would review any environmental issues or cultural concerns from tribes are likely furloughed.

All of this stands in stark contrast to the 2013 shutdown, when drilling permits and leases were halted, Bloomberg News reported. President Trump has exempted the activity during this shutdown.

Gaming the Shutdown

It’s not just federal workers concerned with oil and gas activities that are being brought back to work. A partial restaffing of 38 national wildlife refuges was ordered “to make sure hunters and others have access despite the government shutdown,” the Associated Press reported after obtaining an email from Margaret Everson, principal deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge
The view from the top of Mount Scott at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma. (Photo by Nenortas Photography, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that advocates for public employees who work on environmental issues, says he’s also concerned by information they uncovered that other nonessential staff from six regional offices of the Fish and Wildlife Service were being brought back from furlough to prepare National Environmental Policy Act assessments for more than 60 wildlife refuges that could open hundreds and thousands of acres of refuge lands to hunting and fishing.

Ruch’s organization wrote to the U.S. Government Accountability Office urging it to examine the legality of these staffing moves and what source of funding is being using to finance it and other nonemergency work, like the oil and gas lease sales preparation.

The Interior Department has said that workers are being paid with carryover funds, but Ruch says his organization has no idea where that money is coming from.

“We don’t believe that there are carryover funds,” he says. “We think they are operating in violation of the Antideficiency Act, which is why we are asking the Government Accountability Office to find out what it is they’re doing. In the shutdown, people who are working on life and property protection are brought back as excepted workers to work without salary. But these people are doing nonemergency work on salary.”

It doesn’t add up, he says, and the Bureau of Land Management doesn’t typically have significant surpluses. “We’re in the second quarter of the new fiscal year. Where are they getting this money?”

Ruch says the administration appears to be “gaming the shutdown” and that activities are taking place in violation of the Antideficiency Act for political purposes. But, he admits, it’s hard to fully understand what’s going on because Freedom of Information Act requests aren’t being processed and the shutdown has created a new veil of secrecy.

“A decision has been made at high levels to try to minimize the inconvenience of the shutdown for favored groups,” he says. “And while we understand the politics of it, that doesn’t mean it’s right or it doesn’t bear examination.”

Creative Commons

More Salt in Our Water Is Creating Scary New ‘Chemical Cocktails’

Scientists have found that many inland waterways are getting saltier, and that’s helping to mobilize heavy metals and other chemicals from the soil, creating potentially dangerous combinations.

Gene Likens has been studying forest and aquatic ecosystems for more than half a century. In that time he’s seen a change in the chemistry of our surface waters — including an increase in the alkalinity and salinity of waterways — something he and his colleagues have dubbed “freshwater salinization syndrome.”

Likens coauthored a report published last month that found that not only is salinity increasing in many surface waters, but when you add salt to the environment it can mobilize heavy metals, nutrient pollution and other contaminants that are combining to create new “chemical cocktails” in rivers, streams and reservoirs.

These cocktails can be a danger to our drinking water, wildlife and riverine ecology. And they’ve already contributed to a public health crisis in at least one U.S. city.

“I didn’t expect the massive scale of change across the lower 48 that we found — or the magnitude of change,” says Likens, who is president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a distinguished research professor at the University of Connecticut.

Impacts

Lead poisoning was the top headline from the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan, but salt played a key role in the tragedy.

When the city switched sources of water to the Flint River, the water had a much higher salinity because of runoff from road salts, which, without proper treatment, increased the corrosivity of the water. “That change in the chemistry of the water flowing through the pipes liberated lead from the pipes or lead-soldered connections,” explains Likens. Lead was the villain, but salt was its enabler.

Flint water tower
Salt was part of the catalyst for Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. (Photo by George Thomas, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Flint isn’t the only metropolitan area at risk from salinity-induced water concerns. The researchers also studied public water supplies in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area and found “some of those areas are increasing in salt content rather seriously,” says Likens. “It’s not just some little stream in your backyard along the interstate highway. It can be very widespread.”

Sujay Kaushal found this out firsthand. Kaushal, a professor of geology at the University of Maryland and lead author of the study, turned on his tap at his Maryland home in 2015 to find a blackish-colored water coming out. He realized that increased salinity in the water was causing manganese, a neurotoxin, to leach from the pipes in neighborhood homes.

The problem isn’t isolated to a few cities either.

An earlier study by Kaushal, Likens and colleagues, published in January 2018, analyzed data dating back a century in different localities and found freshwater salinization syndrome had become widespread. The researchers found that 37 percent of the watersheds in the lower 48 had a significant increase in salinity, and 90 percent for alkalinity. Their most recent study, from December 2018, took the research even farther, looking at rivers across North America and Europe, but also a few sites around the world, including in Iran, Russia and China.

“What was surprising was that in all of these different world regions there’s well-known waterways that show this freshwater salinization syndrome occurring,” says Kaushal. “Even our Great Lakes show these patterns of increasing salts and the Great Lakes contain about 20 percent of the world’s fresh water.”

Salt on its own has been shown to be problematic. Too much of it in the water can be a health risk for someone with hypertension, says Likens. And salts washing off roadways have been shown to damage or kill vegetation. It can also seep into drinking water wells. High enough levels of salinity can be toxic to some aquatic life, too, says Likens.

Other new research has honed in on this threat from salt. “Increased salinity in freshwater systems is expected to cause extensive changes in biota and potentially in ecological function, and some losses of freshwater resources,” freshwater scientist John R. Olson from California State University Monterey Bay wrote in a recent study. His work found that by the end of the century, half the country’s streams could have an increase in salinity of 50 percent.

But that’s not the only concern.

Salts, Kaushal and his colleagues found, can liberate heavy metals and other elements in soils and concrete surfaces, which can be more dangerous when mixed together than any one of them singly. Salts can also mobilize nitrates, stimulating harmful algal blooms that threaten the health of fish and other marine organisms.

Kaushal and his colleagues analyzed streams near the University of Maryland after a snowstorm and found spikes in the concentration of metals like copper, zinc, manganese and cadmium.

And after a storm salt concentrations can stay elevated for months, increasing the amount of time that the salts can draw these chemical cocktails out of the soil and into waterways.

Sources of the Problem

Where Likens lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the roads in winter are often busy with visiting skiers traveling up from nearby Boston, Hartford or New York. To keep the traffic safely moving in wintry conditions the roads are often doused with salt — a lot of it. He’s found that at times local municipalities have used up to a ton of salt per road mile per day.

Generous servings of road salt are common across the Northeast and upper Midwest and are one of the biggest contributors to salinization of waterways in those parts of the country, but the researchers found other kinds of salts, not just the commonly used sodium chloride, also contribute to the increase of salinity in waterways — things like fertilizer runoff, water softeners, fracking brine and sewage discharges.

Sewer pipe
Untreated water goes directly into a stream. (Photo by MN Pollution Control Agency, CC BY-NC 2.0)

“There’re just a variety of things that we humans add to the surface that eventually find their way to streams and lakes and reservoirs and increase their salinity,” says Likens.

The weathering of concrete infrastructure like our bridges and roads from acidic rain (which has been reduced but not eliminated) also contributes to increases in salinity and alkalinity.

So too does building impervious surfaces, such as roads and parking lots.

The researchers found that in the Baltimore area an increase of one percent in the amount of impervious surfaces caused a 10 percent increase in salinity. Chemicals and salts that would have been absorbed by soils instead ran off those hard surfaces and into waterways.

All indicators are that the salinity problem is getting worse over time. “The graphs consistently are increasing,” says Likens. “Not every stream shows the effect, but the vast majority do.”

Solutions

The new research raises more questions than it answers, including what the impacts of these chemical cocktails may be and how we can manage them to ensure safe drinking water and a healthy environment.

The study recommends that we manage the problem by “considering chemical mixtures and potential interactive effects as a syndrome of multiple stressors instead of single contaminants.”

That’s easier said than done.

“We have regulations and management strategies which are focused on a single contaminant and it’s almost like our brain is just able to handle one thing at a time,” says Kaushal. “In reality these mixtures have interactive effects, sometimes synergistic effects, which contribute to toxicity where the overall effect of the mixture or the interaction is greater than the sum of the parts.”

But recognizing the dangers of these elements in combination is one thing. Testing for them is quite another.

Thankfully there are also other tactics that could help, including better buffers around rivers, streams and wetlands to reduce runoff. Smarter use of road salts would also be an improvement. Already some municipalities are using brines applied before winter storms to help reduce the volume of salt needed later.

“I think another approach would be to reduce impervious surfaces because we’re constantly developing new lands and putting down more roads which eventually break down and contribute to these salts,” says Kaushal. “So, I think being more judicious about creating new roads, parking lots, pavement and other development, as well as putting in regulations in place for the salts themselves.”

With a long lens on the health of our waterways, Likens sees cause for concern as scientists learn more about the impacts of salinization — and as the Trump administration attempts to roll back protections for clean water.

“At the end of November President Trump announced that our water was at ‘record clean,’” says Likens. But scientific research proves otherwise. “This idea that we can do whatever we want to the environment, to the water we all depend on, and everything’s going to be okay — that’s just not correct.”

Creative Commons

Previously in The Revelator:

Warning: A ‘Shrinking Window’ of Usable Groundwater