The documentary looks at how to turn the tide on petrochemical companies that are driving a boom in plastic production — just when we don’t need it most.
Prigi Arisandi, who founded the environmental group Ecological Observation and Wetlands Conservation, picks through a heap of worn plastic packaging in Mojokerto, Indonesia. Reading the labels, he calls out where the trash originated: the United States, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Canada. The logos range from Nestlé to Bob’s Red Mill, Starbucks to Dunkin Donuts.
The trash of rich nations has become the burden of poorer countries.
We all know by now that plastic waste is a problem — it’s washing ashore on beaches, swirling in giant ocean eddies, gumming up the insides of whales and seabirds, and embedding itself in the farthest reaches of the planet. But most media coverage focuses on the end of the line — where plastics end up — and not where they came from or why.
The Story of Plastic fills that void.
The film, which made its world premiere on Sunday, takes viewers on a global journey to Pennsylvania, Texas, California, the Philippines, Indonesia, China and India, among other places. It’s a trek through the supply chain that begins with fracked natural gas in the United States and ends with literal mountains of plastic waste on the other side of the world.
“I don’t think most people know that if you want it to stop plastic from going into the ocean in Indonesia you need to ban fracking in the Ohio River valley,” Stiv Wilson, the film’s executive producer, told The Revelator in an interview earlier this year. “So our intention with the film is to show the entire system of plastic and that includes every stage and also that upstream the human health concerns are way more significant than eating fish that’s eaten plastic — living next to a refinery for plastics is going to be far more dangerous.”
The film exposes the flawed and failed prophecy of recycling, which works well for glass and metals but fails miserably at dealing with plastics. Only 14 percent of plastics are recycled and only 2 percent effectively, the film explains. Most plastics degrade when recycled and don’t end up made into something as useful the second time around.
Heaps of useless plastic are then shipped abroad to countries like China, Indonesia and India, where much of it ends up polluting waterways and endangering drinking water and wildlife. Or it’s burned next to communities and farms. Local people are left to deal with the health implications — respiratory problems, skin rashes, shorter life expectancy, cancer.
All of that makes it a “life and death issue for most people — at least in this part of the world,” says Von Hernandez in the film. He works with the global collective Break Free From Plastic in the Philippines, where a local fisherman reports that these days, plastic makes up 40 percent of his catch.
As the film hops around the globe it relies on the voices of people working in their communities toward solutions to the plastic pollution problem. Shibu K. Nair, a zero-waste champion in India, has one of the most poignant lines. The “entire economy we have around recycling is possible because we have poverty,” he says. Waste pickers, mostly marginalized women, work for low cost.
But even this exploitative economy is starting to unravel as more and more countries follow China’s lead in refusing to take the waste of wealthier nations, and as more and more local groups unite internationally to tackle the problem at the source.
One of the key narratives of The Story of Plastic is tracking the timeline and talking points of the petrochemical industry, which produces some 400 million metric tons of plastic each year. And since 99 percent of plastic is fossil fuels, the folks behind plastics are the same as those digging for oil and gas: Exxon, Shell, Conoco Philipps, Dow Dupont.
We see how they cleverly market their products, push for personal responsibility in the face of corporate malfeasance, cheerlead for doomed taxpayer-funded recycling programs, and dole out piddling contributions for beach cleanups. All the while, they’re distracting the public from the true answer: the fact that we don’t need so much plastic crap.
While the industry pushes its plastic products as lifesaving (like medical devices and bike helmets), the bulk of it is stuff we didn’t have a few decades ago and don’t need now — things like plastic straws and single-serving packets of soy sauce. “We only use them once and they stay forever,” Tiza Mafira, a policy expert and lawyer in Jakarta, says in the film. “They’re not something that we need as an essential part of our lives and yet here we are — stuck with it.”
Watching The Story of Plastic is liable to make you take a (likely shameful) look at the ubiquitous presence of plastic in your own life. But the film’s message isn’t for each of us to ditch straws — the problem is far too systemic for that. Rather it’s a call for producer responsibility. Ramping up fossil fuel production, as the petrochemical industry’s doing right now, is the last thing we need as we attempt to manage our climate crisis. Companies instead need to design their products with a plan for how they will be reused, composted or effectively recycled. And we need to focus way more on reducing and reusing.
“The industry is out there pushing the idea that this is all because of bad management — that the waste is here because the government isn’t putting enough funding into proper waste management,” says Mafira. “But they’re distracting from the truth, which is that there’s no way you can manage this waste — it’s not meant to be managed.”
She adds, “I think we should ban together and have a serious discussion on a global scale because these companies are operating on a global scale.”
The Story of Plastic is currently making its way to film festivals around the country. Find a local screening and more information about the movie and its messages here.
Who needs vampires or serial killers? These new books offer horrifying information — and thrilling solutions — on endangered species, sea-level rise, food security and corporate pollution.
“Horror,” wrote novelist and critic Douglas E. Winter, “is not a genre. It is an emotion.”
You know what else generates some horrifying emotions? Topics like climate change and extinction.
As we approach the Halloween season, let’s dive into those fears with a batch of new books about those most fright-inducing of environmental topics.
These books will scare you — honestly, you should be scared — but they also provide the information, ideas and potential solutions we need to get to a less frightening future.
In other words: We can defeat the monsters.
We’ve combed through publishers’ October catalogs and picked the nine scariest (and most informative) new environmental books coming out this month. Check out our list below and pick the best ones for your scary late-night reading.
The ubiquitous MSNBC host takes a deep dive into the many ways Big Oil threatens democracy around the world, most notably Russia’s interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election (although that’s far from the only example). This must-read book gets our vote for the scariest subtitle of the month: “Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth.”
When people get hungry, they start to fight. When societies go hungry, they get desperate, sometimes leading to conflict, forced migration or war. Is that our future, in the world of climate change and food instability? This new book looks at issues of sustainability, identifies geographic areas of risk, examines how access to food can bring peace, and lays out a series of recommendations for the future.
We’ve eaten species out of existence and — like any good horror-movie monster — we can expect to repeat the pattern in the inevitable sequel. (Too bad those lost species won’t get resurrected for the next chapter.)
This memoir provides a harrowing account of the author’s decades-long legal battle to hold the (in)famous chemical company responsible for covering up of one of the world’s worst cases of environmental pollution. It’s a terrifying true tale. (In addition to the book, Dark Waters, a movie version of this story, starring water defender Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, opens Nov. 22.)
The long-necked African icons face such an increasingly lengthy list of threats that some giraffe populations and subspecies now face the truly terrifying possibility of extinction. This new book, written for high-school-age readers, looks at the problems and introduces kids to the monster-fighters — er, scientists — leading the effort to save giraffes from disappearing.
Many island nations around the world fear for their future under the threat of sea-level rise. For some islands the future is already here. Money Island off the coast of New Jersey, once an economic powerhouse, now serves as a storm-ravaged example of what’s to come for islands and other coastal communities.
There’s absolutely nothing scary about this book…unless you have a snake phobia. But even then, Steen’s fun and informative tome will do much to calm those fears.
Land can erode, but so can a sense of self and a belief in our collective needs. Is that what’s happening to our country, and to the protections afforded to our vital public lands? The award-winning author (a board member of the Center for Biological Diversity, publisher of The Revelator) examines the state of the country, our political establishments and her own life. This book captures a lot of fearful emotions and realities, but it counters them with beautiful writing, insightful commentary, and a sense of solace and spirituality that comes from life in nature.
Why aren’t supposedly God-fearing people more terrified about the dangers of global warming? This book upends previous theories that linked their skepticism to anti-science attitudes or apocalyptic beliefs. Instead it reveals how, over the past few decades, evangelical religious leaders and media outlets have selectively used the Bible to inaccurately portray climate science as an attack against religion and a way of life. Scary stuff!
That’s our list for this month, but don’t stop here: You can find dozens of other far less horrific eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.
Revoking California’s ability to set stricter air-pollution standards also misses three important benefits to California and the nation.
For five decades California and the federal government have worked together in an innovative exercise in federalism aimed at achieving cleaner air. California has played an important role in controlling greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, particularly from motor vehicles.
But now, contrary to law and in a massive departure from past practice, President Donald Trump has announced that his administration is pulling the rug out from under California’s feet by divesting it of its longstanding authority to adopt auto emission controls more stringent than the Environmental Protection Agency’s.
The action, implemented jointly by the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Administration, couldn’t come at a worse time. Less than a year ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called “ambitious mitigation actions” indispensable to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoiding the most disruptive and potentially irreversible effects of climate change.
California, supported by more than 20 other states, is already challenging the administration in court. But if the administration’s effort succeeds, the world will be deprived of California’s vital leadership, and the Trump administration will have shelved another important tool for combatting climate change.
Because of the severity of California’s pollution problems and the state’s early environmental leadership, the Clean Air Act specifically allows the state to apply for a waiver of the prohibition on state auto-emission standards more stringent than the federal government’s. California has sought waivers more than 100 times, and with one short-lived exception, EPA has granted every request — precisely as the law anticipated. Once EPA grants a waiver, any other state may follow California’s ambitious lead by adopting its standards.
The result is that more than a dozen states follow California’s more stringent standards, which is why many cars sold outside the state bear a sticker that says the car has met California’s standards. The auto industry has long since adjusted to these dual standards, not wanting to ignore such a huge market for its products.
But the president’s announcement amounts to a sharp deviation from established bipartisan practice by first revoking previously approved waivers for California, purportedly to achieve nationally uniform emission controls and eliminate “duplicative” regulation. This is likely to be followed by the adoption of rules that backtrack on the Obama EPA’s push to reduce greenhouse gas auto emissions — creating a double whammy in the fight against climate change.
In addition to being of questionable legality, EPA’s decision completely overlooks the most important advantages of the current system, as well as the waiver revocation’s significant downsides. To be sure, centralization may promote uniformity, and reducing overlapping authority may modestly decrease some administrative costs.
But the EPA’s analysis completely ignores the considerable downsides of revoking California’s authority both for the state and the entire nation. By granting a measure of standard-setting authority to California, the Clean Air Act neatly balances three important dimensions of regulatory authority which, unfortunately, are often misunderstood and conflated.
First, by granting authority to both the EPA and California, the Clean Air Act decentralizes power over standards, thus encouraging the states to act as “laboratories of democracy” that can test out regulatory approaches and standards which, if successful, can be adopted by other states and the federal government. And indeed, more than a dozen states have followed California’s lead.
On the other hand, by allowing only two sets of standards — the EPA’s and California’s — the law prevents automakers from being subjected to a welter of conflicting standards and overregulation that might prevent them from manufacturing cars to varying regulatory specifications. With two standards in place, both commanding significant market share, the auto companies are eager and able to manufacture and sell their products.
Second, by requiring that the EPA review and approve California’s waiver requests, the law requires some coordination, fostering efficient pooling of expertise and resources between the two levels of government.
But it also cultivates innovation by ensuring that California can act relatively independently of the EPA as long as it can show, as it has more than 100 times already, a compelling need for more stringent regulation. California’s persistent air-pollution problems provide plain evidence of such a compelling need. The allocation has allowed the state to engage in innovative regulation, such as its trailblazing requirements that automakers market low or zero-emission vehicles in the state. In fact several large automakers recently agreed to conform to the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas controls, notwithstanding the EPA’s effort to bury them.
Third, the waiver repeal ignores how the law’s modest overlap in authority creates a safety net and guards against undue industry control of regulatory agencies — a manifestation of “agency capture” by industry that is all too rampant under the Trump administration. As we describe in our book Reorganizing Government, distinguishing these discrete dimensions of authority and weighing the different tradeoffs involved are the keys to designing effective governance, but the EPA completely misses these considerations.
From a governance perspective, the agency’s revocation promises to wreak havoc with the Clean Air Act’s careful balancing of the tradeoffs associated with alternative regulatory allocations. From an environmental perspective, it would gut the strongest set of auto emissions standards in the nation, standards in use in more than a dozen states. And it sacrifices those standards for no better reason than to satisfy the administration’s unquenchable thirst for deregulatory pelts to put on display.
Right now we need to embrace bold efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — California’s innovation and leadership must be fostered, not squelched.
Congress should restore California’s emission-control authority to preserve a powerful weapon in the fight against climate change and deadly air pollution.
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.
Mounting evidence proves that natural-gas and oil extraction threatens wildlife and ecosystems — much as it harms human health.
In January 2015 North Dakota experienced one of the worst environmental disasters in its history: A pipeline burst, spilling nearly 3 million gallons of briny, saltwater waste from nearby oil-drilling operations into two creek beds. The wastewater, which flowed all the way to the Missouri River, contained chloride concentrations high enough to kill any wildlife that encountered it.
It wasn’t the first such disaster in the state. In 2006 a spill of close to 1 million gallons of fracking wastewater into the Yellowstone River resulted in a mass die-off of fish and plants. Cleanup of that spill was still ongoing at the time of the 2015 spill, nearly a decade later.
Spills like these highlight the dangers that come with unconventional fossil-fuel extraction techniques that go after hard-to-reach pockets of oil and gas using practices like horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing (otherwise known as fracking).
But events like these massive spills are just the tip of the iceberg. Other risks to wildlife can be more contained, subtle or hidden.
And while many of the after-effects of fracking have grabbed headlines for years — such as contaminated drinking water, earthquakes and even flammable faucets — the consequences for wildlife have so far been left out of the national conversation.
But those consequences are very real for a vast suite of animals including mussels, birds, fish, caribou and even fleas, and they’re as varied as the species themselves. In some places wildlife pays the price when habitat is destroyed. Elsewhere the damage occurs when water is sucked away or polluted. Still other species can’t take the traffic, noise and dust that accompany extraction operations.
All this damage makes sense when you think about fracking’s outsized footprint.
It starts with the land cleared for the well pad, followed by sucking large volumes of water (between 1.5 and 16 million gallons per well) out of rivers, streams or groundwater.
Fracking trucks and equipment in Doddridge Co, West Va. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
Then there’s the sand that’s mined for use during the fracturing of underground rock to release natural gas or oil. There are also new pipelines, compressor stations and other related infrastructure that need to be constructed. And there’s the truck traffic that surges during operations, or the disposal of fracking wastewater, either in streams or underground.
The cumulative footprint of a single new well can be as large as 30 acres. In places where hundreds or thousands of wells spring up across a landscape, it’s easy to imagine the toll on wildlife — and even cases with ecosystem-wide implications.
“Studies show that there are multiple pathways to wildlife being harmed,” says ecologist Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College who has worked for a decade compiling research on the health effects of fracking. “Biodiversity is a determinant of public health — without these wild animals doing ecosystem services for us, we can’t survive.”
Losing Ground
The most obvious threats fracking poses to wildlife comes in the form of habitat loss.
As rural areas become industrialized with each new well pad and its associated infrastructure, vital habitat for wildlife is altered or destroyed.
Habitat fragmentation in North Dakota’s Bakken shale. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
And it’s not just the area containing the well. The land or water just outside of the operation, known as “edge habitat,” also degrades with an increase in the spread of invasive plant species, among other concerns.
And large-scale development, such as miles-long pipelines, can change the way species move and hunt, often resulting in an increase in predation. The oil and gas development in Alberta, Canada, for example, created “wolf highways” that gave the predators easy access to an endangered herd of woodland caribou.
Roads, another kind of fragmentation, can be particularly dangerous for wildlife. A single fracked well can be responsible for 3,300 one-way truck trips during its operational lifespan, and each journey can injure or kill wildlife large and small. After all, it’s hard to get out of the way of a tanker truck carrying 80,000 pounds of sand.
And then there’s the big picture. Drilling within large, “core” forest areas previously located far from human development can be permanently detrimental for species such as migratory songbirds.
In one study, published in Biological Conservation in 2016, researchers examined the effects of unconventional gas drilling on forest habits and populations of birds in an area of West Virginia overlaying the Marcellus and Utica shales. The area has been at the center of the shale gas boom, with the number of unconventional wells in central Appalachia jumping from 111 in 2005 to 14,022 by the end of 2015. The study found that shale-gas development there during that period resulted in a 12.4 percent loss of core forest and increased edge habitat by more than 50 percent — and that, in turn, changed the communities of birds found in the forest.
The areas near well pads experienced an overall decline in “forest specialists” — birds that prefer interior forest habitat, among them the hooded warbler and Kentucky warbler, which are of high conservation priority, as well as cerulean warblers. These sky-blue endangered migratory songbirds have been dropping in numbers for decades, but researchers noted that the decline was 15 percent higher in their study area than in the greater Appalachian Mountains region during the same period.
Kentucky warblers prefer large core forest habitat and researchers have found they decline in numbers around shale gas development. (Photo by Andrew Weitzel, CC BY-SA 2.0)
“For migratory songbirds, large blocks of forest are very important,” explains Margaret C. Brittingham, a professor of wildlife resources at Penn State University who has studied the effects of fracking on wildlife. The birds do best in interior forest habitat with mature trees. They also serve as an important part of the forest ecosystem, helping to prevent or suppress insect outbreaks that can damage trees. “They’re co-evolved with the forest, feeding on insects and keeping those forests healthy,” she says.
Not all species declined in numbers from fracking development. The study found an increase in the kinds of birds that do well among humans and in developed areas — “habitat generalists” such as the American robin, blue jay and brown-headed cowbird, the latter of which are notorious brood parasites that leave their eggs in nests of other birds.
“I think the most alarming thing about all of this is what bird declines may indicate about the declining health of overall ecosystems,” says Laura Farwell, a postdoctoral research associate in the department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the Biological Conservation study. “I know it’s a cliché, but forest interior birds truly are ‘canaries in the coal mine’ for Appalachian forests experiencing rapid loss and fragmentation.”
Farwell adds that many other kinds of development contribute to habitat loss that result in biodiversity declines. Fracking is one more added pressure, but the consequences are quite significant.
“It just happens to be disproportionately affecting some of the largest remaining areas of undisturbed, mature forest left in the eastern U.S., and these forests are incredibly valuable for biodiversity,” she says.
Out West the industry is carving up a different kind of habitat, and that has other species on the ropes. Greater sage grouse, for example, depend on large home ranges composed of intact areas of sagebrush. Cattle ranching and development of all kinds have pushed the grouse near extinction, and continued unbridled oil and gas extraction in its remaining habitat could tip it over the edge.
A 2014 study co-authored by Brittingham found that oil and gas infrastructure and related disturbances to sage grouse can cause the birds’ populations to decline — or even disappear in areas with particularly high levels of oil and gas development.
Sage grouse have also been shown to exhibit high levels of stress from noise.
Noise poses additional risks for birds that depend on their hearing. A study published in Biological Conservation in 2016 found that noise from compressor stations, which run 24 hours a day, reduced the ability of northern saw-whet owls to catch prey. The researchers found that for owls and other “acoustically specialized predators,” noise can cause significant negative impacts on behavior, like a decreased ability to hunt, and that can ripple through the ecosystem.
Lights on a drilling site in West Virginia can affect nocturnal wildlife. (Photo by Tara Lohan)
Light, too, can be a problem. Oil and gas operations in some places have turned once-dark rural areas into blazing mini-cities in quick time. A 2012 photo revealed that gas burned off from wells in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale was so bright it was visible from space — something not seen just six years before. Light pollution like this can be deadly for migratory birds and disrupt other nocturnal animals.
It’s in the Water
The fracking process uses a lot of water and much of that contaminated H2O returns to the surface, bringing with it heavy metals, radioactivity, toxic chemicals (many of which are industry trade secrets) and high levels of salinity. Disposing of all that wastewater has created headaches for the industry and in some cases it’s now proving to endanger wildlife.
Spills or intentional dumping of wastewater or fracking fluid released 180 million gallons into the environment between 2009 and 2014, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. Unsafe levels of some contaminants have been found to persist for years, as was the case in North Dakota.
Not all spills and intentional releases of wastewater in streams create noticeable impacts like fish going belly up — some are more subtle and harder to see — but they may still take a real toll on aquatic life.
A 2019 study in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety looked at what happens when crustaceans called water fleas encounter a fracking-fluid spill. Researchers found that even when the fluids were diluted in a stream, their high salinity could decrease insect mobility and survival. The Canadian province of Alberta, the researchers noted, has recorded 100 such large-volume spills.
Lowly water fleas — in this case a species called Daphnia magna — may not seem like animals we should worry about, but like so many small creatures, they occupy an important niche.
“They are the basis of the freshwater ecosystem,” Steingraber explains. “When the water fleas are gone, the guys that feed on them are gone — frogs and fish die, and those that feed on them die and suddenly you have a biodiversity problem because you’ve knocked out a species at the bottom of the aquatic food chain.”
Some of this may already be playing out in other locations. A 2016 study published in Ecotoxicology that found a decrease in biodiversity of macroinvertebrates in Pennsylvania streams where fracking was occurring in the watershed — and, even worse, “no fish or no fish diversity at streams with documented frackwater fluid spills.” In some cases streams that once contained large numbers of brook trout had none left. The researchers concluded that “fracking has the potential to alter aquatic biodiversity…at the base of food webs.”
Brook trout have disappeared from some streams in central Appalachia following fracking spills. (Photo by USFWS)
Elsewhere, it’s possible that contamination of surface waters has already taken a toll on the Louisiana waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla), a bird that breeds along forest headwater streams and feeds on macroinvertebrates. A 2015 study published in Ecosphere found that shale gas development had negative effects on the nest survival and productivity of waterthrushes and the researchers posited that “indirect effects on stream and terrestrial food webs from possible contamination” by the oil and gas industry could be to blame.
The research, which looked at sites in both the Marcellus and Fayetteville shale regions, showed that the birds’ feathers contained elevated levels of barium and strontium — two heavy metals associated with the drilling process — in areas where fracking had taken place. Much like when lead shows up in a human’s hair, the presence of these metals in the birds’ feathers is a sign that contaminants in the environment are making their way into animals’ bodies.
And that raises even bigger concerns.
As the researchers concluded in their paper: “Our finding of significantly higher levels of barium and strontium also suggests the possibility of surface water contamination by any of the hundreds of chemicals that may be used in hydraulic fracturing, including friction reducers, acids, biocides, corrosion and scale inhibitors, pH adjusting agents and surfactants.”
A similar line of inquiry is being pursued by other researchers. Nathaniel Warner, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State University, has been using the shells of freshwater mussels to read the changes in water chemistry in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny River. Mussels record environmental conditions in their shells each year — much like tree rings.
Warner and his colleagues have also found elevated levels of strontium in the shells of mussels living downstream from a site where treated fracking wastewater was discharged. Strontium, which is found in high concentrations in oil and gas wastewaters, is a naturally occurring metal with some medical benefits but which in large exposures can cause bone loss and other side effects.
But Warner says they are still trying to determine what the impacts are for mussels and aquatic ecosystems — not to mention the people who get their dinner from the river.
“We haven’t really gotten to the point where we can say this is harmful or not,” he says. “We really focused on the hard shell itself. But now we’re looking more at what happens in that soft tissue because muskrats and fish don’t really eat the shell that much, but they eat the soft tissue. And so what levels of contaminants or pollution ended up in that soft tissue compared to the shell?” He says that’s probably more important for determining what this really means for wildlife or even human health.
University of Wisconsin’s Farwell says that she’d also like to see more research on what the accumulation of contaminants in the bodies of waterthrushes means for other wildlife and for humans. “Air pollution is another important issue to consider,” she adds. “I’m not aware of any current studies that have looked directly at impacts of fracking air pollution on wildlife.”
You can add these topics to the long list researchers are hoping to explore, but there will still be a lot about how fracking and other extraction technologies are affecting wildlife that we don’t know. And with natural gas still projected to be one of the fastest growing energy sources in the United States, the time to understand its impacts on wildlife grows short.
“The industry boomed at such a rapid pace, researchers and policymakers could barely keep up,” she says. “And in most cases, we don’t have baseline data at impacted sites to compare with current numbers. Unfortunately, most of us studying fracking impacts have been playing a game of catch-up since the beginning.”
But not without consequence. A new special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that in a vicious feedback loop, this vital life-support system is under threat as the planet warms. As we feed our addiction to fossil fuels, levels of carbon dioxide continue to skyrocket, causing the ocean to become more acidic. As it acidifies, its capacity to act as a carbon sink falls.
And that’s very bad news. We need our oceans to help stabilize the climate. A healthy ocean, teeming with plant and animal life, fixes and stores carbon — a key survival tool for all of us.
A transect line runs over purple rice corals at Lisianski Island that have bleached from warming waters. (Photo by Courtney Couch/ Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, CC BY-NC 2.0)
A Paris Agreement for the Ocean
Climate change isn’t the only crisis affecting the oceans. Since industrial fishing began in the early 1950s, 90 percent of the world’s large ocean fish — such as sharks, cod and swordfish — have been lost. And 90 percent of the planet’s fish stocks are now either fully exploited or overfished, according to the latest report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
Researchers say we’ll need to safeguard at least 30 percent of the oceans by 2030. But our track record so far is pitiful: Less than 4 percent of the ocean is protected. On the high seas, which lie beyond national jurisdiction, industrial exploitation continues almost entirely unchecked. These waters are home to some of the world’s most extraordinary wildlife — from the blue whale to the vampire squid — yet just 1 percent is protected.
This lack of regulation and transparency allows the lawless plunder of the oceans to continue, often driving with it the horrific abuse of fishing vessel crews — far from land and unable to escape.
But change could be on the way. As I write, the United Nations is hashing out the details of a new Global Ocean Treaty — due to be agreed in 2020. This legal framework would allow for the creation of high seas sanctuaries — a move that would be nothing short of essential for the future of our oceans and the survival of humanity.
Researchers have already supplied a protection plan that would work. By analyzing each hundred-square-kilometer area, of the 25,000 of these that make up the high seas, they have found the 30 percent that would be best for conservation and would help build the healthy and resilient sea that we need for the future of the planet.
Environmental Justice at Stake
There is, of course, much political maneuvering going on at the U.N. negotiations — who gets what and how each country can maximize their slice of the pie. But the truth is that proper protection for the high seas is the only fair solution.
Just as rich nations have reaped the benefits of carbon-fueled development, and now suffer fewer of the consequences of climate change, out on the high seas just 10 rich nations, including Japan, Korea, and Spain, take 71 percent of the catch.
Climate and ocean injustice again go hand in hand. For every degree Celsius of warming, caused mostly by wealthy industrialized countries, global fisheries catch potential will fall by more than 3 million metric tons. The impacts of this will be worse nearer the equator, where some countries may see their annual catches fall by half. Once again poorer countries will suffer —those more reliant on seafood protein, who have done far less to destabilize the climate and destroy ocean ecosystems.
Protection of the high seas is desperately needed for both ocean health and human well-being. It would mean havens for ocean wildlife that sustain and replenish the waters closer to shore. This would enhance fish stocks and food security, providing resilience to the challenges of a changing climate.
Time is of the essence. Change is already upon us. All around the world people are being forced from their homes, losing their livelihoods. The ocean does much to protect us from our own greed and insatiable need for growth; we need to protect it in return. This proposal would see just 30 percent of the ocean freed from the pressures of fishing, mining and pollution — surely the least we can do.
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.
The public has long supported a state program to provide water for wildlife, but now human threats, including border-wall construction and climate change, are making a bad situation worse.
August is normally Arizona’s wettest month.
Not this year, though. The usual monsoon season failed to arrive, and just 1.5 inches of rain fell sporadically on the state throughout the month — the same period that the city of Phoenix experienced record high temperatures of up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit.
The soaring temperatures and specter of drought have left many Arizona residents worrying about their access to water.
It’s also driven wildlife managers to fret over whether the state’s abundant wildlife — which rely on infrequent rains — will have enough water to survive.
“As the drought has deepened, the waters that wildlife traditionally used are going away or have completely disappeared,” says Kevin Woolridge, a teacher at Blue Ridge High School in Arizona who, with his students’ help, has collaborated with the Arizona Game and Fish Department to monitor the drought and its impact on wildlife.
Meanwhile a new manmade threat to Arizona’s water has cropped up. The Trump administration has begun construction on a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border wall at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a UNESCO biosphere reserve. As part of construction, the Trump administration plans to pull up some of Arizona’s precious groundwater — not to hydrate people or animals, but to mix with concrete to build a 44-mile section of the border wall.
While the federal government spends billions on its wall across the border and sucks up some of Arizona’s last remaining ancient groundwater in the process, Arizona wildlife officials are asking the public for millions of dollars in donations to fund the delivery of water to animals in parched areas across the state.
A History of Water Capture Turns to Delivery
Beginning in the 1940s, long before the world was aware of climate change, ranchers in Arizona made the arid landscape more hospitable to their cattle by building concrete rain catchments.
At the same time, Arizona wildlife officials began doing the same thing to provide supplemental water to game birds such as quail and dove. When they noticed that all kinds of wildlife — including insects —were also drinking from catchments, they built more. In total 3,000 units for all species have been constructed across the state.
Arizona’s first efforts to collect water for livestock and wildlife date back to the 1940s. (Photo by Arizona Game and Fish Dept.)
For decades rainwater was enough to fill the catchments regularly. But as the global climate has continued to warm, Arizona fell into a long-term drought, and many catchments are now dry. With natural water sources also drying up, and animals going thirsty, officials with the Arizona Game and Fish Department have resorted to trucking out water to fill these catchments at a rate of 1.5 million gallons annually. They rely on donations from the public to keep the $1 million-a-year water deliveries going.
Experts say humans are the clear culprits for this water loss and need for water delivery.
“It’s hard not to see the effect of urban development on natural streams in Arizona,” says Hector Zamora of the University of Arizona, who has studied watersheds in southern Arizona. “Rivers that used to freely flow in the 1900s — such as the Gila River, the Sonoyta River and the Santa Cruz River — are now bone dry. Climate change will likely further degrade these already stressed systems.”
And Arizona is not alone. Similar situations are playing out around the country and the world. Wildlife officials are trucking in water to animals in southern Nevada, where the Bureau of Land Management has had to deliver water to feral horses in order to prevent their certain death. Water deliveries to wildlife are becoming more common in fast-warming areas, such as southern Australia, where without aid the country’s iconic koalas would die of dehydration, and in Kenya where elephants have also been spared by truckloads of water.
Across the world wildlife officials say rivers are drying up, and they are increasingly being forced to transport water to wildlife by truck and monitor catchments by helicopter, two costly and carbon-intensive modes of transport.
“My assumption is that burning fossil fuels to deliver the water to the catchment areas is impacting and exacerbating the overall situation,” says Woolridge, who is overseeing a catchment-sensor project developed by one of his students that could make it easier for Arizona to monitor water levels. “However, the cost of doing nothing is potentially catastrophic.”
Joseph Currie, habitat-planning program manager for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, agrees. “At present there is no relief in sight from the drought conditions and reduction in free surface water.”
It’s not a stretch to think humans might be next: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, population growth, increased development and intensifying climate changes will lead to “greater water demand in growing cities and reduced water availability could also affect [residents’] access to drinking water” throughout Arizona and the Southwest.
The Wall: Making Things Worse
Arizona Public Media reports that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates building along Organ Pipes Cactus National Monument will require at least 84,000 gallons of water per day pumped from the ground around Quitobaquito Springs and other natural water sources along the border.
Such springs are uncommon, according to Zamora, who adds that besides serving as important sources of water to wildlife, they are also culturally important.
“Quitobaquito Springs has been visited since prehistoric times by Native Americans and is considered sacred by the Tohono O’odham Nation,” he says. They were also visited by missionaries and the Forty-Niners during California’s Gold Rush.
Ancient waters feed the springs, meaning that they’re not currently being recharged, says Zamora. Once the water’s gone, it’s gone.
Working for Solutions
With waters around Arizona drying up, Currie is leading a long-term project updating existing water catchments across the state with troughs and tanks that are more smartly designed and placed.
One way he’s boosted the catchments’ design efficiency is to increase the size of the rainwater collection aprons, allowing for more rain to be caught and less to evaporate, and spacing catchments at least two miles apart — increasing the availability of water to a larger number of wildlife.
But replacing catchments is a slow process. The department is currently on track to replace just 20 a year. At that rate it would take 150 years to upgrade the entire system.
A big horn sheep visits a water trough in Arizona. (Photo by Arizona Fish and Game Dept.)
Historically the use of catchments to provide water for wildlife has been a controversial subject because of their potential to stagnate and spread disease, and possibly lead to deadly predator-prey interactions where water is made available. However, a small but growing body of recent research — including in California’s Mojave Desert — suggests that presence of manmade water catchments appears to increase biodiversity more than natural precipitation.
While the scientific consensus on water catchments is currently unsettled, Currie says he’s observed what appear to be positive effects of providing water for wildlife. Water catchments in Arizona bring a resurgence of mule deer, javelin, quail and other species in former ranching areas where they’d disappeared, he says. His team monitors catchments with trail cameras, which reveal that virtually every native species in Arizona — from chipmunks to eagles to elk — does indeed drink from troughs across the state.
He adds that building well-planned water catchments can make it possible “to better distribute wildlife in usable habitat so that certain areas are not over grazed by wildlife,” helping preserve the integrity of Arizona’s wild landscape. In his 22 years working with water catchments, Currie says the spread of disease hasn’t been a problem, and water quality in Arizona Game and Fish Department’s catchments remains high.
While Arizona’s water catchments and deliveries may help keep wildlife hydrated, a better strategy — not just in the state but worldwide — would be to more intelligently plan water use, says Benjamin I. Cook, climate expert at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“It’s less about humans needing to proactively provide water for wildlife and ecosystems,” he says, “and more about managing human water withdrawals and water consumption so that enough is left for natural systems.”
As for the situation at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, sucking out Arizona’s natural groundwater to build the border wall, Zamora says, is probably an unwise use of water that will leave Arizona’s fauna — including its people — high and dry.
In a warming climate, some bat houses could be death traps. But community-level bat boxes can help give bats more room and options to raise young safely.
From Batman to Bat Week, Stellaluna to FernGully’sBatty, bats — both fictional and real — capture our imagination. But their plight is becoming increasingly desperate because of the spread of deadly white-nose syndrome, increasing habitat loss and other environmental pressures.
That’s led to a new interest in constructing bat boxes — the bat equivalent to a bird house. Even “Shark Tank,” the entrepreneurial-themed reality show, is fronting the idea of building artificial homes for bats. While it’s good to see interest in helping our night-flying neighbors, there are important factors to consider before you dig out the wood and screwdriver or purchase a pre-fab bat box.
Recent observations suggest possible problems with bat houses, and a need to revisit artificial roost structures. In fact, existing approaches may only meet some of the varied needs of bats and could, in some cases, create death traps in a rapidly warming climate.
First we have the problem of too much of a good thing. Bats, particularly reproductive females and their offspring, need a warm environment to roost in during the day. Without it, reproduction is unlikely to be successful. But not too hot! Bats have small bodies with large wings of skin, making them susceptible to overheating and dehydration.
After an overheating event at this bat box, when bats succumbed to the heat, this landowner installed an awning (mounted at peak of roof) that he opens and closes daily during peak afternoon heat, enabling bats to warm, but not overheat. (Photo by S. Dulc)
Bats dying from overheating has become a real concern around the world, with temperature records being broken and heat waves lasting longer every summer. What once looked like an inviting sunny location may now be a deadly hot spot.
When bats take up residence in an old building attic, they will move around inside the space to find just the right temperature to raise a pup, just like Goldilocks testing each bowl of porridge. In a bat house, this option is far more limited, meaning bats have a harder time finding a roosting spot that is “just right.”
In the wild, bats often move between rock or tree crevices that may be just right in the spring but too hot in summer, or too cold in spring but just right in summer. As outside temperatures fluctuate, bats move around to find just the right temperatures — whether in large attic roost spaces, between rock crevices or among tree bark cavities. Individual bat houses pose the same challenge.
Finding just the right temperature is important for bats because as our only flying mammal, they face a unique challenge — flying is energy-intensive.
Instead of burning fat to stay warm, reproducing female bats rely on surrounding air temperature to maintain body heat. Their warm bodies develop a fetus in a short period and produce ample milk for nursing their young. A roost that is warm ensures they don’t burn through too much fat and keeps their pup’s little body warm so it can grow and fatten fast, ready for winter. Roost temperature plays a critical role in determining whether a mother bat successfully raises her pup.
Bat “boxes” provide valuable shelter to a small but important subset of bats that are very important for helping control insect pests in our community gardens, farms and backyards. As older buildings give way to new tightly-sealed structures, roost sites grow scarcer. Long-lived females may be surprised to discover that the roosts to which they faithfully return each year are gone, with no other local options.
Bat boxes can help, but bats need more than a solitary outpost. Instead of just one box in one back yard, consider a few in different climatic corners of our neighborhoods — sunny, mixed sun and shade. Giving bats accommodation options that are all a short flight away is a great way to help them avoid problems with overheating and overcrowding. And a community approach is pretty much guaranteed to succeed because even though not everyone’s bat boxes will be occupied all of the time, or every year, each box plays a role in helping your local bats over time. This may be a better way to get to know your neighbor than asking to borrow a cup of sugar!
But as anyone who has dragged a stroller up the steps of a bus can attest, moving young can be difficult and energy draining. So keeping some boxes close together is an important tactic to provide passageways between boxes for females with young to move to cooler or warmer areas as needed. Building boxes back-to-back with passageways between is one option.
At the community level, green spaces can make an excellent location for a “mini-attic” built especially for bats. These provide more temperature and humidity options than a single bat box — more closely simulating old building attics. Constructing these “bat condos” can help any neighborhood become bat-friendly because what bats really need is not just a house, but a community.
This large “bat condo” built to house thousands of building-roosting bats provides a large range of microclimates, ideal for female bats to raise pups. (Photo by S. Dulc)
Fortunately, community bat programs, like those in British Columbia, Alberta, Alaska and Vermont are starting the work of talking to people about creating better conditions for bats across wider areas.
As white-nose syndrome spreads across the United States and Canada, bats need a helping hand more than ever. We are working hard to figure out how to do this in urban landscapes where our dependence on bats has largely been taken for granted. We recently piloted a promising new white-nose syndrome prevention tool, adding probiotic dust to some bat boxes in Metro Vancouver, with the goal of arming bats with the ability to fight off the deadly disease. This could give us another reason to erect bat boxes in our urban landscapes, but we won’t know how well this tool works for at least another year, as we test bats coming back from hibernation.
Overall bat boxes can be great tools for bat conservation, but if we want to help bats survive and reproduce by building artificial roosts (or protecting natural ones), it is important that our neighborhoods and local governments work together to ensure a wide range of nearby roost options for bats to move — so they always have the opportunity to find conditions that are “just right.”
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.
The decline of a rare cactus in a national park epitomizes the Trump administration’s failure to protect endangered species along the border.
Construction is underway on a 30-foot-high steel wall along Arizona’s southern border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. As several reports have recently warned, the wall will hurt many endangered desert species, from Sonoran pronghorns to cactus ferruginous pygmy owls. To understand how the wall will further fragment habitats for these already-declining plants and animals, let’s go deep with one rare species that’s at grave risk: a cactus called the night-blooming cereus.
Sacamatraca, a beautiful and rare cereus known as Peniocereus striatus, has declined markedly over several decades and is highly threatened in much of its range, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Its scattered populations are often small — roughly 50 to 200 plants — and widely separated from each other. An important population of about 200 of these cacti finds its home on the southern border of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
The night-blooming cereus in Sonora, Mexico. (Photo by Sue Carnahan, CC BY-SA 3.0)
This binational cactus patch was even in trouble before Trump’s call for a wall.
Why? The answer lies in the border that fragments nature’s cohesiveness. In 1849, when the Gadsden Purchase drew a line through the middle of the Sonoran Desert, roughly half of the cereus cacti along the Organ Pipe border became U.S. citizens, while the others still lived under the flag of Mexico. Over the past few decades, construction of roads in the United States and irrigated farms in Mexico have destroyed about one-tenth of the original population. Even more habitat has been degraded. Wood-cutting by Mexican families to heat their homes and cook food triggered further cactus declines by eliminating host plants the cereus cacti needed to survive.
When I first noticed the mortality 25 years ago, I asked the brilliant Mexican ecologist Humberto Suzán Azpiri to help me study this threatened borderline cereus population. At that time we had full cooperation from both Mexican and U.S. officials, including the biologists and law-enforcement staff inside Organ Pipe. With their permission we spent hundreds of hours in the field on both sides of the border, detailing the causes of the decline and planning possible solutions.
Each night we surveyed opposite sides of the border as darkness fell to catch sight of the gorgeous, ghost-white blossoms of the cereus emanating from what otherwise looked like dead sticks.
The night-blooming cereus in bloom. (Photo by Dr. Juergen Menzel, CC BY-NC 3.0)
We passed our research equipment back and forth over the waist-high vehicle barrier and collected data on floral blooms, visiting pollinators and seeds. We learned that on any single night, each cereus flower had fewer than a dozen potential sources of pollen from neighboring cacti on either side of the border. We learned that moths would fly up to 300 yards between flowers to gather nectar and deposit the pollen essential to fruit set.
Out in the stinkin’ hot desert, that’s a pretty long distance for pollen to travel from mate to mate.
When our technical paper on the effects of habitat fragmentation on the cereus cacti came out in Conservation Biology, we concluded that international cooperation would be critical to preserving host plants and allowing for pollination by sphingid moths — the two key factors for the survival of the cactus.
Now our capacity for transborder monitoring of this binational population has been fragmented. Though we remain fast friends, Humberto and I will never be able to replicate our first study with an impenetrable wall and two sparring government bureaucracies between us.
But it’s not just the collaborations of transborder conservation researchers that have been lost. The true danger is to the plants and animals that live there.
Border-wall construction will clear more landscape along the border and inevitably knock out more cacti. For each mile of wall, more habitat will be bulldozed for “enforcement zones,” then paved with high-speed patrol roads, staked with sensors and blasted with 24-hour flood lighting.
Both the 30-foot steel bollard wall and the flood lights will doom “collaborations” between hawkmoths — the co-evolved pollinators of the cacti — and the cereus themselves. Hawkmoths spend most of the night flying at heights of 9 to 30 feet, trying to sniff out cactus floral scents. For the moths that can make it over the 30-foot barrier, their perception of the flowers and their attractive scents will likely be disrupted by lights, noise and dust from construction.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is not the cereus’ only habitat, but similar situations will play out throughout their range and across the length of the border. New walls will disrupt ecosystems, stop wildlife migrations and push dozens, if not hundreds, of species in the borderlands closer to extinction.
And so the sacamatraca cactus has become “the canary on the border line,” foreshadowing localized extinctions as an immediate example of how border walls will harm plants and animals.
This unprecedented, lit-up, 30-foot monstrosity is a nightmare in the making, but it’s not one that either the Park Service or local Customs and Border Protection has recommended. There are already “Normandy barriers” that effectively block vehicle passage into the United States but do not fragment habitat or stop wildlife migration. Border Patrol has hundreds of cameras and sensors scattered throughout the wilderness, amounting to a complex network of surveillance technology. We already have a virtual wall — and one that’s far more effective than a medieval bulwark.
So what is the true price we’ll pay for an unneeded, frankly absurd wall in a national park that’s being built only to fulfill an uninformed political promise?
For one, it’s 624 million taxpayer dollars, and that’s just for the stretch along the park border.
But the true cost also includes things that are priceless: a cactus with a brilliant night blossom that makes a sphinx moth swoon; disrupted relationships among plants, pollinators and seed dispersers; and a half-century of cooperation among Mexican and U.S. biologists who now fear that their collaborative conservation efforts are all for naught.
The story of the sphynx moth and the night-blooming cereus is just one small tale in this looming national tragedy. From the desecration of Indigenous sacred sites to the scar it will cut across our public lands, the border wall will leave devastation in its wake.
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.
Successful conservation means more sharks, which is great for the health of the ocean but could also be problematic in a few important ways. Here’s how experts say we should prepare.
For decades scientists and environmentalists have been sounding the alarm about shark population declines and calling for new and stronger laws to help sharks and related elasmobranch species recover from overfishing.
While globally many shark populations are still imperiled, efforts are starting to pay off as science-based management is leading to some shark population recoveries. Great white sharks on both coasts of the United States are starting to recover, as are leopard and soupfin sharks off the West Coast and seven species of sharks off the Southeast, for example.
In what has in some places become a “dog that caught the car moment,” many are wondering what we should do now that we’re starting to succeed. Or, as the title of a new paper published in the journal Environmental Conservation on this topic boldly asks, “Are we ready for elasmobranch conservation success?”
Shark conservationists have long touted the ecological benefits of healthy shark populations — predators help keep the food web in balance by eating sick and weak members of prey species — but the success of shark conservation means, quite simply, that there are more sharks around. That’s great for the health of the ocean, but it can lead to new conflicts if we don’t properly plan and prepare. The authors of the Environmental Conservation paper highlight three ways that increased shark populations can lead to new conflicts and suggest ways we can prepare.
Grey reef sharks swim in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. (Photo by Kydd Pollock, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Conflict With Fishers
Higher populations of marine predators mean that fishers trying to catch the same prey are having more competition.
“Sharks are consuming fish that are of importance or high value to communities,” says Michelle Heupel, director of the University of Tasmania’s Integrated Marine Observing System and a coauthor of the study. Shark consumption of fish can lower their abundance, leaving less for fishermen to catch. Or sometimes sharks directly “steal” catch from fishermen by consuming fish caught in fishing gear.
Another new study in the journal Ecology and Evolution has shown that shark population recoveries result in declines in the population of mid-level predatory fish such as those commonly fished by humans like snappers and groupers. Researchers found that “The eradication of illegal fishing allowed numbers of sharks and other large predatory fishes to rebound, which in turn resulted in lower numbers of smaller predatory fishes due to an increase in predation pressure,” says Conrad Speed, a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the lead author of that study. “In other words, the recovery of sharks and large fish suppressed the abundance of smaller predatory species.”
Speed noted that this change in ecosystem structure represents a success in terms of ecological restoration, but it is undeniably a major change in the type and number of fish.
More Shark Bites
While the risk of a shark bite remains extremely low, simple math indicates that having more sharks in more places means that the risk will likely go up — especially as recovering shark populations move into areas where there haven’t been large sharks in decades.
“In general, people are happy to see wildlife conserved when it doesn’t inconvenience them in any way, and feelings are more mixed when we have to share space with wildlife and assume the risks that can entail,” says Catherine MacDonald, a lecturer in marine conservation at the University of Miami and the director of research and education organization Field School, with whom I’ve collaborated on several past research projects involving human perception of sharks.
For example, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, great white shark populations are beginning to recover, but Cynthia Wigren, CEO of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, says that even though it’s a conservation success story, they aren’t popping the champagne cork just yet.
In an act of good will toward the species, beachgoers there helped rescue a stranded great white in 2015 and the chance to see sharks is even attracting some tourists to the area, but after a swimmer died in 2018 from a shark bite on the Cape, public feelings are mixed.
“People no longer feel like they can enter the water without thinking about sharks and the need for heightened awareness about safety,” Wigren says. “For some in the community, having to change their behavior when recreating in the ocean is a hard pill to swallow. We believe that conflict related to negative human-white shark interactions is the greatest threat to the continued conservation of the species.”
And then there are also economic considerations, too. While there’s a financial value to be gained from sharks aiding diving and wildlife tourism, preventing negative interactions between sharks and humans also takes resources. Money is often spent on “spotting planes, beach closures, boat patrols, and netting or fishing to reduce the size of local shark populations,” says MacDonald.
Protected Species at Risk
While the risk of humans being bit by sharks remains low, other species may not be as lucky.
A great white shark attacking a sea lion. (Photo by Greg Schechter, CC BY 2.0)
More sharks means more sharks eating other animals, and sometimes those other animals are also threatened species we’re trying to manage and recover. “For example, increased shark predation on seals based on increased numbers of sharks can cause concern for the status of seal populations, ultimately leading to conflicts over protection of both sharks and seals,” Heupel says.
Sea otters in California are also threatened by rebounding populations of white sharks, although the otters are usually an accidental victim, as the sharks prefer meatier prey.
Sometimes sharks and their relatives are also the victims of this same problem. In Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, recent research finds that a unique population of winter skates, which may represent a yet-unidentified new species, is now at risk of localized extinction because the nearby population of grey seals has recovered.
Beyond Conservation
For good reason, most conservation programs focus on stopping the decline and promoting the recovery of imperiled species, and don’t necessarily have the time or resources to think about what happens next.
“The implications of recovery happen after the initial goals are achieved, so in some ways they’re beyond the scope of the conservation program,” Heupel says. “However, if we don’t consider the factors around recovery from end to end, we may overlook competing or complicating factors that arise after conservation goals are achieved and which have the capacity to undermine conservation efforts.”
Fortunately increased public education to help people know what’s happening in their environment, and understand how to safely use the ocean as things change can go a long way toward making conservation truly successful.
“Proactively communicating with the public and stakeholders about the objectives of conservation efforts and hearing their perspective is key to formulating decisions that can suit as many needs and priorities as possible to avoid scenarios that undermine conservation efforts,” says Heupel.
Wigren agrees. “Our role is to increase knowledge and understanding of white sharks through research and to share that information with the public and beach managers,” she says. “Our hope is that informed decisions will be made based on data and facts rather than fear, and that the conservation of the species will remain a priority.”
It’s important to consider that the success of some conservation programs may lead to complications in the future, but that doesn’t mean that conservation isn’t good.
“We’re not claiming that recovering shark populations is a bad thing, despite some [potential] negative impacts,” says John Carlson, a research biologist with NOAA Fisheries and a coauthor on the Environmental Conservation paper. “But we do want the public to recognize that alternative management policies may be needed in the future.”
With more sharks around, we’re going to need to change how we fish, how we spend time at the coast for recreation and how we manage other species — all of which will require public education efforts.
And this gets to the heart of why conservation efforts are so important in the first place. The real question, MacDonald says, comes down to “whether we’re willing to accept some inconvenience and risk in order to live on a wild planet where other species can thrive.”
People displaced by drought, sea-level rise, wildfires and other environmental threats are not currently considered “refugees,” like people fleeing violence or oppression. That needs to change.
“God knows what will happen. We know the end is coming.”
These were the words of Saber Saladas, a Bangladeshi fisherman and farmer, after his village, home and livelihood were destroyed by floods last year.
Saladas is just one of 8 million people in Bangladesh who have become climate refugees in their home country — forcibly displaced by flooding, river erosion and saltwater intrusion.
“Once, [my] village was green with paddy fields,” he told the Environmental Justice Foundation from an inland shelter after he and his family had fled their home. “But now the water is salty and the trees have died. We can only farm shrimp… We just want to breathe, to live a long life.”
As it stands there’s no clear-cut legal definition for people like Saber Saladas. Although they’re unable to stay in their homes due to both immediate danger and/or an inability to survive there (as is the case when food sources and livelihoods are ruined by inhospitable conditions), they’re not covered by the global “traditional refugee” model.
This model was established by the 1951 Refugee Convention, which states that people may claim their right to asylum if they have a “genuine and well-founded” fear of being persecuted to the point that their life and safety are threatened. This persecution can be for any reason, but common grounds tend to be based on religion, sexuality, political belief or gender identity.
The issue with this longstanding definition of a “refugee” is that the environment does not personally persecute people or communities. There are certain demographic groups, such as working-class and poorer communities, that are more prone to being environmentally displaced, but nature itself is arbitrary. Because of this, legally defining displaced people becomes difficult.
Some arguments suggest that even the term “climate refugees” is problematic. Dina Ionesco, the U.N.’s head of Migration, Environment and Climate Change, suggested earlier this year that displaced people should be categorized as “climate migrants” instead.
But the term “migrant” implies some element of choice, which forcibly displaced people don’t have. Those who are forced to flee their homes by environmental problems find themselves in a very similar position to those who are forced to flee their homes by persecution. Many of them face danger or destitution. People who migrate voluntarily are not usually in this position, as they leave their home countries to pursue careers, start businesses or join a partner or family member.
Even Ionesco recognized that. She argued that reopening the 1951 Refugee Convention to include victims of displacement could “weaken the refugee status” in its current form, risking those who already qualify for protection under it.
But the difficulty of defining displaced people has weakened and delayed their very necessary protection. While steps have been taken by bodies like the United Nations and G7, which have held discussions and commissioned research in efforts to address the issue of environmental displacement, an objective immigration category has yet to be set up for those who are affected.
According to a report commissioned last year by the European Parliament, 26.4 million people have been displaced by floods, windstorms, droughts and earthquakes every year since 2008. Notably, this period has seen the fastest acceleration in recorded global temperatures, marking a clear link between climate change and environmental displacement.
And the situation is only going to get worse. According to NASA the planet’s global temperature has risen by approximately 0.9 degrees Celsius over the past century, which is primarily attributed to an increase in CO2 emissions and other human activity. This has led to the melting of ice caps in the Arctic ocean and rising sea levels, in turn causing increased flooding, erosion and salt-water intrusion. Droughts, wildfires and storms have also become more common, with countries and communities across every continent feeling the effects.
These kinds of conditions threaten people’s homes and lives both directly and indirectly. Aside from the explicit danger and threat to life posed by powerful windstorms, earthquakes or floods, adverse conditions come with other risks. Droughts kill crops, salt-water intrusion wipes out species of freshwater fish, and wildfires obliterate rainforest. All these factors help contribute to the millions of people being displaced across the world.
Climate change and the impact it has on sea-levels, weather systems and natural disasters are a serious cause for concern. If the Earth continues to heat up, irreversible damage will be done to its ecosystems, and destructive and inhospitable conditions will increase. While this happens more communities will become displaced. More people will be unable keep their jobs, feed their families and stay in their homes. And more will be forced to flee from their home countries.
It is of course important that we do not allow the ongoing displacement debate to distract too much from the goal at hand — to make considerable, united efforts to tackle and overturn climate change and its effects on the planet’s ecosystems. In the words of Saladas, “we know the end is coming,” and we cannot ignore this any longer.
But even as we do that, it remains essential that displaced people be granted lawful status within global immigration and asylum policy. This could be achieved by expanding existing laws and practices, such as in human-rights and humanitarian-protection laws, or by creating a new global migration or asylum category to ensure the protection of displaced people. Whatever approach is chosen, policymakers must act quickly to close the protection gap for displaced individuals, families and communities. Until then they remain in a legal gray area, unable to be defined and, as a result, unable to be protected.
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.
Blowout
Food or War
Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food
Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed and One Lawyer’s Twenty-year Battle against DuPont
Giraffe Extinction: Using Science and Technology to Save the Gentle Giants
Secrets of Snakes: The Science Beyond the Myths
Erosion: Essays of Undoing
The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change
