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:

Not drawing attention to the prevalence of energy-intensive habits;
Identifying individuals who are harmed by high levels of energy consumption; and
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.

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.).

The Trump administration is doing everything possible to shield the oil industry from the impacts of the #TrumpShutdown – yet they have no problem leaving federal workers, their families & the American people out to dry. #EndTheShutdown https://t.co/9qRCUIVFgN

— Nat Resources Dems (@NRDems) January 16, 2019

“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.

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.”

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.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Warning: A ‘Shrinking Window’ of Usable Groundwater

‘A Bright Future’ Offers a Not-So-Bright Idea for Solving the Climate Crisis

The book takes an...unusual approach, but it still contains a few worthwhile concepts.

How did countries like Sweden and France make progress moving away from fossil fuels, and can other places follow in their footsteps?

According to a new book, A Bright Future by Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist, the answer is an energy technique the Swedes call “kärnkraft,” which the book’s cover copy proclaims is “hundreds of times safer and cleaner than coal.”

What is kärnkraft, you ask? Well, the description of the book doesn’t say.

Neither does the table of contents.

You also won’t find the answer in the foreword, by the popular science writer and psychologist Steven Pinker, although he does call A Bright Future “the most important book about climate change since An Inconvenient Truth.”

How about the book itself? The first two chapters take a similarly vague approach. In fact it takes until page 27, at the bottom of a graph depicting kärnkraft capacity in the United States, to get the definition of this mystery word.

Kärnkraft, it turns out, is the Swedish word for nuclear power.

By all rights, I should just end my review here, because this is a fairly disingenuous approach. If you’re going to make a case for something like nuclear power to save the planet, you really need to say so in Sentence Number One, not 10 percent of the way through the book. Otherwise you’re not making an honest argument — you’re just playing a bait-and-switch game with your readers in hopes of giving them a sudden eureka moment.

But here’s the thing: Goldstein and Qvist have the courage of their convictions. They do spend the rest of the book building a case for nuclear power, and although I think their proposal ultimately fails they do make a handful of admirable points along the way.

Notably, they argue, quite effectively, that the world needs to get off the carbon train as quickly as possible if we hope to stave off climate disaster. “We need rapid decarbonization,” they write, especially in a world where individual and systemic energy demands are rising every single day and the world population continues to grow.

Less effectively, they argue that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar won’t accomplish that goal, at least not by themselves, because renewables, they claim, are “variable and uncertain” (a fairly standard argument that underplays the rapid advances in battery technology). Instead they call for “nuables” — nuclear power plus renewables, “both scaling up as fast as possible.”

They make a better point about coal in the context of trying to assuage fears about the safety of nuclear energy and reactors: It’s incredibly dangerous, both as an energy source and as an industry. “Coal kills at least a million people every year worldwide” from particulate emissions, workplace accidents and coal ash spills, they write — totaling “tens of millions of people” over the past 50 years. This they compare to “something like a few thousand [deaths] from nuclear power” over the same time period. Coal, by these numbers alone, should have been shut down a long time ago.

Of course, the above statement and pages of additional facts don’t exactly make nuclear feel that safe — something the authors themselves would probably agree with, since they (somewhat dismissively) call the public’s concern about nuclear power “a gut-level fear of radiation” linked to nuclear weapons and pop culture fictions like Godzilla and the Incredible Hulk.

Still, a good chunk of the book is spent dismissing fears of radiation and nuclear waste. The science is sound, but I don’t see their arguments changing many minds. And yet, as they note, the very real threat of climate change is even scarier than the possibility of nuclear accidents.

After devoting the first half of the book to making the case for nuclear energy, Goldstein and Qvist lay out their strategy for the way forward.

First, they say, we need to keep all current nuclear plants in operation, even if they are old and past their original projected lifespan (because, they say, solar can’t replace them yet and natural gas is terrible for the climate).

Second, they suggest we should create a carbon tax to pay for decarbonization (a well-argued chapter).

Third, they argue that we need to massively scale up production of new next-generation plants in the U.S. and around the world, much as China is already doing.

On that third point the authors engage in some magical thinking. They start off citing a 2015 report by James Hansen and three other climate scientists that argued the world should build 115 new nuclear reactors each year — enough to eliminate fossil fuels worldwide by 2050. Golstein and Qvist then take this even further, making the case that tiny Sweden built one reactor a year in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so the entire world today could produce an astonishing 750 new reactors a year.

There are a few major flaws in this theory.

First, the nuclear power industry can barely handle the few construction projects on its plate. Projects are prone to long delays and massive cost overruns. For example, an advanced reactor in Finland is expected to go online later this year — 10 years late and billions of dollars over budget. A plant expansion in South Carolina was shut down after construction costs pushed Westinghouse Electric into bankruptcy.

Second, who’s going to work at all of these new facilities? Here in the United States, the nuclear workforce is rapidly aging out — 39 percent of it was eligible to retire between 2015 and 2018. The industry has spent the past several years trying to fill this gap, and has made strides since I first covered this issue in 2012, but the number of people entering the profession is still way below its high in the 1970s. In fact, in 2015 fewer than 1,200 U.S. college graduates received nuclear engineering degrees, including only about 160 Ph.Ds.

Granted, not every nuclear power job needs the most advanced degrees, and the field also employs engineers from other specialties, but the fact remains: The talent pipeline for nuclear power is still too small, and the brain drain out of the industry too big, to take on much additional capacity. Achieving the authors’ lofty goal of 750 new plants a year would require a massive overhaul of the entire world workforce, and a strategy for accomplishing this is conveniently left out of the book.

All evidence suggests that if something works to combat climate change, no matter how big or how small, it needs to be on the table. Many climate scientists argue that keeping existing nuclear plants online, and maybe even adding to them, needs to be one of those choices. That may not prove to be true as renewables continue to get more affordable and efficient. But no matter what, the authors’ vision of ramping up nuclear production so much that it eclipses the need for all fossil fuels is a pipe dream. It won’t do anything to solve the nightmare of climate change.

Saving the World’s Largest Tropical Wetland

The Pantanal in South America is critical for fighting climate change and protecting endangered species. The race is on to protect it.

Most people have heard of the Amazon, South America’s famed rainforest and hub of biological diversity. Less well known, though no less critical, is the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland.

Like the Amazon, the Pantanal is ecologically important and imperiled. Located primarily in Brazil, it also stretches into neighboring Bolivia and Paraguay. Covering an area larger than England at more than 70,000 square miles, the massive wetland provides irreplaceable ecosystem services that include the regulation of floodwaters, nutrient renewal, river flow for navigability, groundwater recharge and carbon sequestration. The wetland also supports the economies of the four South American states it covers.

But as I learned working on a recent research project with the environmental nonprofit WWF, a combination of climate change, new development, expanding agriculture, urban growth and pollution are poised to transform this vast wetland — bringing drastic consequences for the environment, wildlife and millions of people who depend on the Pantanal’s natural hydrology.

Pantanal Mineiro formed by the Pandeiros River in Brazil. (Photo by Eduardo Aigner/WWF-Brasil CC BY 2.0)

Ecosystem at Risk

The biggest risk is to the Pantanal’s seasonal flood pulse, which maintains the very health of the wetland system. During the wet season from October to March, rainfall in the headwaters of the Pantanal drains down some 1,200 rivers to fill the vast floodplain, which acts as a sponge for all the incoming freshwater. The once-terrestrial landscape becomes a maze of waterways dotted with lush islands that teem with life.

Then the dry season comes, from April to September, and the floodplain acts as a saturated sponge, slowly squeezing out the water it had soaked up in the months before and supplying moisture long after the rains have gone. The result is a dynamic ecosystem that provides ideal habitat for more than 4,700 plant and animal species and sustains the livelihoods of 270 communities. The Pantanal, in fact, hosts the highest concentration of jaguars in the world and is considered one of South America’s hotspots for mammal diversity.

The Pantanal remains relatively pristine right now, but projections paint a grim picture for this region’s future unless immediate measures are taken. Presently about 12 percent of the wetland, virtually all of which is in private hands, has been deforested. That’s better than the neighboring Amazon, but by 2050 scientists predict the Pantanal’s vegetation could be devastated by the expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching.

Cattle in Pantanal — Cattle converge on a watering hole on a ranch in the Pantanal. (Photo by Kate Gardiner, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Climate change adds another threat. Regional temperatures could increase up to seven degrees Celsius by the end of the century, say scientists. The potential consequences of a warmer climate are disastrous: more extreme droughts and floods, the reconfiguration of species distribution, impaired plant function and the Pantanal shrinking in size.

And then there are the dams. The region already has 40 of them, and a whopping 101 additional dams are planned for its headwaters in the Upper Paraguay River Basin. The private sector is financing the construction of most of the dams for the purpose of energy generation, and little is understood about the cumulative impacts of so many hydropower projects on the watershed.

This combination of development, natural habitat conversion and climate change could not only disrupt the ecosystem’s natural rhythm but also result in costly and deadly floods for the millions of people living in the downstream countries of the basin, namely Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. Forming part of the headwaters of the Rio de la Plata Basin — the second largest watershed in South America and fifth largest in the world — the Pantanal functions as a natural reservoir for the flood waters draining the upper basin.

A Search for Solutions

How do we counteract the cascade of threats and ensure the Pantanal remains a viable ecosystem?

Along with The Nature Conservancy, WWF published a report in 2012 identifying the risks confronting the Pantanal as a first step toward evaluating the region’s vulnerability to climate change.

And there’s been some important action in the years following. Since 2015 the governments of Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay have been working on a transboundary effort called the Trinational Initiative for the Integrated and Sustainable Development of the Pantanal, which entails sustainably developing and conserving this globally unique wetland. The initiative seeks to reduce pollution, strengthen water governance and expand scientific knowledge on the Pantanal, while protecting the rights of traditional peoples. In doing so the three countries would help protect the regional biodiversity, ecosystem functions and the natural flow of the Paraguay River’s tributaries — all of which are vital for ensuring the future resilience of this landscape in the face of climate change.

In a milestone in the progress of the initiative, ministers from all three countries at the 8th World Water Forum in Brazil on March 22, 2018 signed a trinational declaration for the conservation and sustainable development of the Pantanal.

Though the signing is a significant step for conservation, more funding is needed to help enable state governments, local leaders and stakeholders to translate the initiative’s policy stipulations into concrete actions. And more support from the international community is required to further strengthen political will and the policy implementation process.

The Pantanal’s future may also be further jeopardized by recent politics. The October 2018 election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who threatened to pull the country out of the Paris climate agreement and roll back national environmental protections, has raised alarm bells in the international environmental community. His political ideology and that of his supporters reflect the line of thinking that natural ecosystems, like the Amazon and the Pantanal, are impediments to development.

Yet Brazil’s own Agricultural Research Corporation has estimated the annual value of the Pantanal’s ecosystem services at $112 billion.

The loss of the Pantanal could eradicate habitat for myriad species, including jaguars, hyacinth macaw and capybaras, while also changing hydrodynamic patterns in the Rio de la Plata Basin, upsetting the local economies of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, as well as the other countries downstream of the basin.

We know the threats and the consequences of inaction, not only from scientific studies on the Pantanal but from the stories of other major ecosystems threatened or destroyed by lack of protection. The Pantanal is an international litmus test for our environmental values and priorities.

Do we want to witness the destruction of a major ecosystem and home to a diverse community of people? Or do we want the conservation and sustainable development of the Pantanal to become a model for similar future projects around the world?

To most people, the Pantanal is an unknown. That needs to change, and the world needs to step up to conserve it — now.

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.

Could Trump’s Government Shutdown Cause Outbreaks of Wildlife Disease?

Experts warn that the shutdown has furloughed or hobbled personnel responsible for diagnosing and detecting wildlife diseases.

The current U.S. government shutdown could worsen ongoing wildlife disease outbreaks or even delay responses to new epidemics, according to federal insiders and outside experts who work with federal wildlife employees.

The shutdown — initiated by the Trump administration on Dec. 22 over a financing dispute for the president’s promised southern border wall — has already gone on to be the longest federal shutdown in U.S. history. It has halted virtually all work by federal employees in several agencies, including those tasked with caring for the nation’s wildlife.

When the government is functioning normally, wildlife biologists on national parks and wildlife refuges investigate unusual wildlife deaths and send samples to federal labs that specialize in testing deceased animals for several types of disease. During this shutdown, however, monitoring and testing capabilities have been limited. Following federal shutdown contingency plans, the four major agencies tasked with testing for, responding to and monitoring wildlife disease outbreaks have significantly cut their staff, response and research activities. These agencies include the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey and National Park Service.

In particular, experts warn the absence of monitoring could have long-term consequences if an outbreak occurs or a new disease arrives in the country.

“If it’s a novel introduced pathogen, the lack of timely testing could result in more deaths and potential spread of disease,” according to a federal employee who spoke to The Revelator on the condition of anonymity, because they are not permitted to discuss their work during the shutdown.

A Major Outbreak in California

Rhode Island State Veterinarian Scott Marshall, who works with the USDA to address outbreaks of disease in domestic animals — including those transmitted by wildlife — says government shutdowns are probably not likely to specifically cause wildlife disease outbreaks. Instead, he says, shutdowns are probably more likely to affect the government’s ability to respond to such outbreaks if they occur during a period when fewer personnel and resources are available.

That has the potential to happen during the current shutdown, as the U.S. is currently in the midst of a major avian disease outbreak spread by wild birds and infecting large numbers of domestic fowl.

The outbreak began last May, when the National Veterinary Services Laboratory confirmed a case of fatal Newcastle disease in a small flock of backyard chickens in Los Angeles County. The virus can cause neurological, respiratory and digestive systems failure, and sudden death, with a mortality rate of 100 percent in unvaccinated fowl.

The disease spread quickly, first to hundreds of backyard flocks and now to laying hens on three large commercial poultry operations in Southern California. The California state veterinarian, Annette Jones, has mandated euthanasia of all poultry in Los Angeles, Mira Loma/Jurupa Valley, Muscoy and Perris counties. About half a million birds have been, or are expected to be, euthanized as a result of the outbreak. It’s a large number that continues to grow, despite government and state intervention.

“For the first time since 2003, we have confirmation of virulent Newcastle disease in a commercial poultry operation,” Francine Bradley, poultry specialist at UC Davis Department of Animal Science Extension wrote online in December following the first diagnosis on an industrial farm. “Already, some of our international trading partners are refusing to import and poultry or poultry products from California.”

“This is serious,” she wrote.

Despite the still-worsening problem, the shutdown has forced the Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to deploy significantly fewer employees than it has in previously outbreaks. The Revelator has verified with USDA-APHIS that the agency had just 33 employees in California on January 10 working to respond to this still-developing outbreak of deadly Newcastle disease. The agency had another eight working virtually, alongside 105 California Department of Food and Agriculture employees.

This mobilization pales in comparison to a previous outbreak that cost the country billions of dollars.

A Viral History

To see how the current Newcastle case is affected by the current shutdown, it’s important to look back at a previous outbreak that occurred while the government was fully funded.

In December 2014 the worst-ever U.S. epidemic of highly lethal avian influenza hit the nation after wild birds from Asia spread the disease to their counterparts in the Americas, which then spread the disease to farmed poultry. The deadly outbreak lasted six months and led to the combined deaths and euthanasia of more than 50 million chickens, turkeys and other domestic fowl. The outbreak cost the U.S. economy more than $3.3 billion in lost revenues and sent the price of eggs skyrocketing.

According to USDA documents, more than 3,400 personnel — including 250 USDA-APHIS employees — were on the ground at the height of the 2014 outbreak. That’s 100 times more than are deployed during the current outbreak and government shutdown.

Federal employees’ jobs at the time included running disease tests on deceased wild birds, as well as testing, euthanizing and disposing of diseased domestic fowl. The outbreak response, which ended up costing the government $850 million, was the most expensive animal health event in American history.

Luckily no humans were affected by the disease in North America — quite likely because the government was functioning properly at the time.

A Less Effective Response

Diseases can also solely strike wild populations — and monitoring some potential causes of those situations is another critical government function hobbled by the shutdown.

Marshall, the Rhode Island state veterinarian, says controlling disease in wildlife is naturally challenging and relies on monitoring trade — legal and otherwise.

“The main governmental tool to stop spread of disease is regulation of animal movement, both internationally and interstate,” he says.

If activities to prevent the smuggling of wildlife into the United States are reduced or eliminated during the shutdown, the lack of resources could increase risks of foreign diseases spreading, Marshall notes. Ongoing efforts to prevent the spread of foreign wildlife, insect and plant diseases into the continental United States have continued since the shutdown began, but on a more limited basis with fewer staff at work, according to federal contingency documents.

Meanwhile tens of thousands of government workers directly involved with the wellbeing of the nation’s wildlife, spanning multiple federal agencies, have been forced to cease all “nonessential” activities — those unrelated to human life or property. Federal employees are not allowed to go to their offices, use government equipment, answer emails or discuss the shutdown. This involves personnel responsible for running tests that could preemptively detect diseases in wildlife and hasten the response to any diseases that are detected, according to federal contingency documents.

Additionally, public affairs officials we reached out to say they have been forbidden to reply to media requests. If the shutdown continues, experts warn that lack of communication could slow public response to any emerging threats.

A Lack of Monitoring and Research

Despite the risk that wildlife diseases like Newcastle and avian influenza pose to farm animals, and in some cases also humans, the government has not dedicated any personnel to monitoring for possible disease during the shutdown.

Similarly, nearly all of agencies’ long-running research projects, even those with both government and nongovernment partners that offer insight into wildlife health and could detect disease, have been put on hold. Notably, the world’s longest-running monitoring program of a predator-prey relationship, the Isle Royale Moose/Wolf Project, is currently at risk of being completely scrapped this winter season due to the shutdown, according to news coverage of the issue. This monitoring project helped document a major decline in wolves during a parvovirus disease outbreak in the early 1980s.

Kira A. Cassidy, a research associate with the Yellowstone Wolf Project, which falls under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, says all of her agency’s ongoing research projects — including those involving disease — have been put on hold. In Yellowstone the only activities now performed by federal employees include law enforcement, emergency dispatch and responders, and maintenance staff for roads, according to Cassidy.

“A position is considered essential if their duties include the protection of life or property,” she says. “None of the biologists are considered essential.”

Calling for Federal Help During a Shutdown

Other diseases have also started to emerge during the shutdown. For example, since last November Texas biologists have found about a dozen dead freshwater turtles belonging to three species — red-eared sliders, Texas river cooters and spiny softshells — in Tarrant County. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department press office manager Steve D. Lightfoot reports that state biologists have also noticed between 30 and 40 turtles showing signs of illness in the same area, though there have been no dead or sick fish or birds observed. The cause of the sick and dead turtles remains a mystery.

“At this time we do not have a definitive cause,” says Lightfoot. “Diagnostics to date indicate a combination of bacterial and viral infections may be implicated. Parasitic infection may also be contributing.”

He confirmed that there are about a half-dozen state employees working on the case, but that the number of on-call federal employees permitted to help is unknown. Normally state employees have unrestricted access to the appropriate federal employees, who can further investigate disease outbreaks in well-equipped federal laboratories. In the case of a wildlife disease “emergency” during a shutdown, standby federal employees who have the knowledge and experience to diagnose disease outbreaks are notified and are required to work with no pay.

We asked Lightfoot if the government shutdown continues to affect his state agency’s efforts to get to the bottom of this turtle mystery.

“Definitely,” he replied. “We are currently submitting samples to a state lab to evaluate. Getting samples to the [federal] lab and getting lab results completed is a challenge.”

Experts warn that similar situations could play out across the country if the Trump administration and Congress continue to insist on keeping the federal government from operating.

Trump’s Border Wall Threatens Rare Butterflies and Native Bees

New photographs reveal that the National Butterfly Center in Texas is also home to an amazing array of 200 bee species — some of which exist nowhere else in the United States.

The list of environmental impacts from President Trump’s proposed border wall keeps growing.

Numerous experts have expressed fear that the wall would have devastating effects on birds, jaguars, fish, butterflies and potentially thousands of additional species.

Now a new research project reveals that dozens of beautiful native bee species, most of which are rarely seen in the United States, could also be hurt or wiped out by the border wall. Bees perform crucial work as pollinators of plants that feed birds and other animals. If their numbers are reduced or species are lost altogether, it could cause a cascade of harmful environmental impacts.

The bees, identified by nature photographers Paula Sharp and Ross Eatman along with a team of scientists, were found at the National Butterfly Center, a nonprofit that works to conserve and study wild butterflies in Mission, Texas. The Trump administration plans to build the border wall through more than half of the privately held 100-acre property.

With an uncertain construction date looming, Sharp and Eatman made their first trips to the National Butterfly Center in September and November 2018. Almost instantly they started encountering bees that few other photographers or scientists had ever seen.

They have now documented the bees that they found on a new website, Wild Bees of Texas, which went online this week.

“A large proportion of the species we’ve documented so far are rarely seen within the United States, or they are found in this country only in southern Texas or along the Rio Grande border,” says Sharp. “One species we stumbled on in September had never been documented before within the U.S.” That particular bee, a red-legged leafcutter, might even end up being a species new to science, although examinations are not yet final.

Another incredible species documented by Sharp and Eatman is the Aztec cuckoo leafcutter bee (Coelioxys azteca), which has previously been seen north of the Mexican border only a handful of times. Sharp says it “looks a little like a miniature lobster.”

Other notable species include the dwarf Epeolus bee (Epeolus pusillus), “which has lavender eyes,” and the Aztec sweat bee (Augochlora azteca), “which resembles a flying emerald.”

Throughout their time at the Center, Sharp and Eatman did more than just photograph the bees: They also documented the insects’ behavior — information necessary for their conservation.

“Our favorite so far is a chimney bee with a hairy orange face called Melitoma marginella,” Sharp says. “This bee hides in the deep throats of yellow esperanza blossoms during rainstorms. When the blossoms fall during cold snaps, the bees stay inside, riding them like escape pods as the wind carries them off. If you find esperanza flowers on the ground at the National Butterfly Center in November and peel back the petals, you’ll find the chimney bees still inside, their orange faces peering up at you.”

Even people who work at the site were pleasantly surprised by the number of bee species found by Sharp and Eatman. “Working with Paula and Ross was eye-opening, to say the least,” says Marianna Trevino Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center. “I will never step on fallen blossoms again now that I understand even these are shelter for bees.”

As with their previous project, Wild Bees of New York, Sharp and Eatman made sure they photographed the Texas bees alive, healthy and in their natural habitats. In the process they created stunning visuals that are much more vibrant than traditional scientific illustrations.

“Native bees are often dazzlingly beautiful,” Sharp says. “They can have eyes that are bright green or red or violet. They can curl their long antennae into elegant spirals, hold their tails high like scorpions, or load up their electrostatically-charged hairs with so much pollen that the bees look as if they’ve been dipped in yellow flour.”

So far the website showcases about 40 native bee species, but Sharp and Eatman hope to expand it to about 100 by the end of the year. Based on previous surveys, they estimate, their photo gallery could eventually contain as many as 250 species.

That’s assuming they have enough time to complete their work, of course, as virtually all of these species would be affected once construction on the border wall begins.

“Many of these bees range no more than a few hundred yards from their nests in a lifetime, and so the National Butterfly Center is the only home they’ve ever known,” says Sharp. She adds that the ecologically pristine facility serves as a safe zone from the pesticides, erosion, invasive species and habitat destruction that plague other nearby areas of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

All of that would quickly come to an end if construction crews arrive. The wall and relate infrastructure would not only be built on top of key habitat where Sharp and Eatman observed the bees, it would also create barriers too high and too solid for insects to pass through. That would have a cascading effect on the entire region.

“Bees are central to every habitat because they are the pollinators that sustain the plants that feed birds, mammals and other creatures,” Sharp says. “If you destroy the bees, you do irreparable harm to the environment.”

Sharp also offers blunt criticism of the border-wall plan. “To destroy regional treasures like the National Butterfly Center is extravagantly wasteful from an economic perspective,” she says. “Restoring what’s lost as a consequence of the wall — either by shoring up new areas or by attempting to repair environmental damage caused by the wall — will be prohibitively costly, and much of the damage will be irreversible.”

Can the planned construction be stopped at this point? As of this writing, President Trump’s government shutdown continues to place a chokehold on many of federal activities that would protect the environment, but nothing appears to be slowing the administration’s plans for the border.

“As we brace for the bulldozer ahead of the border wall, it’s disheartening to know that so much will be lost,” says Trevino Wright, who’s testifying to Congress about the border wall this week. “Humans are terribly shortsighted and foolish, and probably will not learn many important lessons until it’s too late.”

New Year, New Books: The 14 Best Environmental Books of January

Books coming out this month look at saving snow leopards and killer whales, Buddhist and Muslim solutions to climate change, and new ways to grow food.

It’s a new year, and many of us have made our resolutions for the months ahead. Well, here’s one more for you: Resolve to read about the critical environmental issues that will affect us not just this year but in the years to come.

Publishers have you covered for that resolution this month, with a wide array of interesting new books about climate change, wildlife, environmental history and sustainable food. Check out the list below for our picks for the 14 best eco-books of January 2019, with titles for everyone from wildlife-loving kids to professional conservationists. As usual our links are to publishers’ or authors’ websites, but you can also find any of these titles at your favorite bookseller or library.

Wildlife and Endangered Species:

The Snow Leopard Project and Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation by Alex Dehgan — A stunning true story about efforts to protect these endangered cats and other rare species while also helping to defend the human culture around them — and strengthening the bond between people and nature in the process.

Make a Home for Wildlife: Creating Habitat on Your Land by Charles Fergus — Whether you’ve got a tiny backyard or several acres, this could be a great book to make the most of the land around you.

A Puget Sound Orca in Captivity: The Fight to Bring Lolita Home by Sandra Pollard — If you want to understand the current plight of Southern Resident killer whales, it helps to start with their history. This is an important piece of that story, by the author of 2014’s Puget Sound Whales for Sale.

Rotten! Vultures, Beetles, Slime and Nature’s Other Decomposers by Anita Sanchez & Gilbert Ford — A fun kids’ book about gross stuff like maggots and fungi, because what better way is there to get kids interested in nature?

Climate Change:

The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption by Dahr Jamail — A former war reporter takes his journalism skills to a new battle, traveling around the world to see the impacts of climate change firsthand.

Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South by Rick Van Noy — Tales of people and places already adapting to climate change — to help show the rest of us what we need to do sooner rather than later.

Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere edited by Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah — Famed biologist Edward O. Wilson provides the foreword to this massive new book addressing how climate change will impact extinction risks, food webs, invasive species, migration routes, forests and much more — and how conservationists and policymakers can respond.

The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World by Patrick Nunn — This isn’t specifically about climate change, but it’s still an important look at how traditional and indigenous folk stories and knowledge are full of valuable science about floods, shifting coastlines and other changing environments — in other words, information that can help us learn to adapt to future threats.

Climate Change and the People’s Health by Sharon Friel — An academic book providing a framework for addressing both climate change and social inequality, since the former drives the latter and harms peoples’ health in the process.

Paying for Pollution: Why a Carbon Tax Is Good for America by Gilbert E. Metcalf — Can market principles get us out of this climate change mess? An economist argues that they can. (Or, I don’t know, we could just stop emitting carbon?)

Eco-Religion:

Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis by David Loy — An important and thought-provoking call to action for Buddhists to save the planet, reflecting not just on the history of Buddhism but what it can do in the future.

Signs on the Earth: Islam, Modernity and the Climate Crisis by Fazlun Khalid — A religious case for an end to consumerism and industrialization, written by the founder of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Science.

Sustainable Agriculture & Food:

One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture by Stephanie Anderson — We all want farming to be green and planet-healthy. Anderson explores farms around the country that are using nontraditional agricultural techniques and are giving back to the land in the process.

Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It? by Eric Holt-Giménez — That’s a good question! This short book (really a long essay) digs into the issues and argues that we already produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we’re just growing and distributing it all wrong. Moving away from the existing exploitative system, Holt-Giménez argues, will both feed the planet and protect it from climate change and related threats.

That’s our list for this month. For dozens of additional recent eco-books, check out our “Revelator Reads” archives.

Did we miss any of your recent favorites? Post your own candidates in the comments.

Warning: A ‘Shrinking Window’ of Usable Groundwater

New analysis reveals that we have much less water in our aquifers than we previously thought — and the oil and gas industry could put that at even greater risk.

We’re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That’s probably not news to everyone, but new research suggests that, deep underground in a number of key aquifers in some parts of the United States, we may have much less water than previously thought.

“We found that the average depth of water resources across the country was about half of what people had previously estimated,” says Jennifer McIntosh, a distinguished scholar and professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.

McIntosh and her colleagues — who published a new study about these aquifers in November in Environmental Research Letters — took a different approach to assessing groundwater than other research, which has used satellites to measure changes in groundwater storage. For example, a 2015 study looked at 37 major aquifers across the world and found some were being depleted faster than they were being replenished, including in California’s agriculturally intensive Central Valley.

McIntosh says those previous studies revealed a lot about how we’re depleting water resources from the top down through extraction, such as pumping for agriculture and water supplies, especially in places like California.

But McIntosh and three other researchers wanted to look at groundwater from a different perspective: They examined how we’re using water resources from the bottom up.

The study may help close the gap about what we know and don’t know regarding how much water is available deep underground, as well as its quality.

It also rings some alarm bells.

A Different Approach

Instead of examining how fast water tables were falling, as in previous studies, the researchers looked at water chemistry to determine how deep underground you could drill for freshwater or brackish water before that water became too salty to use.

“We looked at the bottom limit of groundwater resources,” says McIntosh.

The researchers used information from the U.S. Geological Survey on the quality of groundwater across the country and looked specifically at salinity — how salty the water is. “We looked basin by basin at how that depth of fresh and brackish water changes across the United States,” says McIntosh.

The results were about half as much usable water as previous estimates. That means that deep groundwater reserves are not nearly as plentiful as we’d thought in some places.

That’s important because when shallow groundwater reserves become depleted or polluted, the strategy so far has been to drill deeper and deeper wells to keep the water flowing.

But we may not always be able to drill our way out of water shortages. “Tapping into these deep waters works for now, but the long-term prospects for using these waters are quite concerning,” says the report’s lead author, Grant Ferguson, an associate professor in the department of Civil and Geological Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan.

The problem isn’t evenly distributed across the country. While a number of aquifers in the West have deep freshwater reserves, the water in parts of the eastern and central United States becomes salty at much shallower depths. “Drilling deeper water wells to address groundwater depletion issues represents no more than a stopgap measure in these areas,” the researchers concluded in their paper. One area of particular concern the researchers noted was in the Anadarko and Sedgwick basins underlying parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, which has particularly shallow freshwater reserves.

Map of water depths — Depth to water with total dissolved solids (a) <3000 and (b) <10 000 mg l−1 based on median values in 100 m bins. (c) TDS distribution relative to the 50th and 95th percentile of water well depths.

Oil and Water

The study looked at a total of 28 sedimentary basins across the United States that were chosen because they’re known to contain oil and gas reserves.

The researchers found that the oil and gas industry uses fresh and brackish water, both of which are drawn from the bottom up. And that’s another element of the research that could raise concern.

In some cases the industry pumps out brackish water as part of its drilling operations. Industry waste is then injected back underground into deep aquifers. As a result, water reserves are depleted from pumping and possibly contaminated during re-injection, the researchers found.

Graphic of injection wells — Deep groundwater resources can be threatened by oil and gas production or injection wells.

The depth between oil and gas activities and drinking water reserves varied greatly across the country. Wyoming and the Michigan basin were two places where oil and gas activities are relatively shallow and in close proximity to fresh and brackish water, which could increase the chances of contamination of water resources. Water contamination from oil and gas activity has already been documented in Pavillion, Wyoming.

The authors suggest that carefully monitoring for potential contamination or overexploitation of water reserves may be crucial in these areas with minimal separation between groundwater and oil and gas wells used for either production or disposal.

The Future Is…Saltier

While brackish water can be used for some types of agriculture and by oil and gas activities, it hasn’t been used much yet for drinking because it requires desalination (although not as intensively as seawater). But as water resources become more constrained, particularly in the arid West where some communities and farms rely exclusively on groundwater, brackish water may be a more valuable future resource and a larger part of the water supply.

“I think of it in terms of water security. Both fresh and brackish aquifers are part of our potential water source into the future,” says McIntosh.

But further utilizing these deep-water resources will have “all kinds of policy and economic consequences because they aren’t going to be replenished as quickly as other waters” closer to the surface, says Ferguson. And that may mean better monitoring of oil and gas activity is needed in those regions, along with a possible rethinking of how we permit and manage drilling into those deep waters. “That would change the nature of how we’re using water in a lot of places,” he says.

While this research adds to our growing knowledge of groundwater resources, there is still a lot we don’t know about the chemistry of these deep aquifers beyond just salinity, says McIntosh. Addressing that knowledge gap, she says, will be important as we work to match water resources to our varying needs for drinking, industry and agriculture.

“This ‘bottom up’ approach is a novel one and will find great utility, but it does depend upon the availability of deep groundwater data,” says Michael Campana, a professor and hydrogeologist at Oregon State University who did not participate in the study. And the deeper we go, the less data we have, says Ferguson.

Both the researchers and outside experts suggest that more research is needed. This is particularly true in areas not associated with oil and gas activity that weren’t part of the study, points out Campana. But the authors say their results may still show the need for important changes on policy or behavioral levels regarding how we use our nation’s groundwater.

“There was this idea that deeper groundwater would be more pristine, and it is to a point, but there are all kinds of natural salinity and hydrocarbon problems once you get into deeper and deeper groundwater systems,” says Ferguson. “So we’re working with that idea that maybe the window of freshwater is not as big as we thought and it’s probably getting even smaller in a lot of areas.”

In an age of climate change, that’s something that may play out sooner rather than later.

Previously in The Revelator:

2019 Will Be a Big Year for Water