The government shutdown could have long-lasting environmental effects, as could several other actions taken by the administration over the holidays.
President Trump didn’t exactly lie low over the holidays.
The battle over border-wall funding and the announced departures of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis stole most of the headlines, but they were hardly the only events of the Trump administration’s Christmas.
We kept a close watch on news affecting the environment, health and wildlife, and there was plenty to keep us busy. From new developments on plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to attacks on air-pollution regulations, here’s a blow-by-blow account of what you may have missed:
Dec. 14: Trump tapped his budget director and notorious climate-change denier Mick Mulvaney as his new chief of staff. The former South Carolina Congressman has a 6 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, and when asked about funding for climate programs in 2017, he said, “We consider that to be a waste of your money.”
Dec. 18: Thirteen species being considered for Endangered Species Act listing were all denied protection by the Trump administration. The ill-fated species include the Cedar Key mole skink, Florida sandhill crane, Fremont County rockcress, Frisco buckwheat, Ostler’s peppergrass, Frisco clover, MacGillivray’s seaside sparrow, Ozark pyrg, pale blue-eyed grass, San Joaquin Valley giant flower-loving fly, striped newt, Tinian monarch and Tippecanoe darter. (One of those species, the Ozark pyrg, won’t get protected because it’s been declared extinct — after waiting decades as a candidate species for the Endangered Species Act.)
Dec. 19: Trump’s Department of Energy helped grease the wheels for the natural gas industry by speeding up the export-approval process for liquefied natural gas.
Dec. 19: The administration released a plan to reduce children’s lead exposure, but it got mixed reviews, with many concluding it lacked teeth to make any significant difference. “This plan does not actually promise to take specific regulatory or enforcement action within any specific time,” said a statement from Erik Olson, senior director of Health and Food for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Dec. 20: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced his resignation. In a rare exception to Trump administration denialism, Mattis spoke about the threats of climate change and their potential impacts on national security and global political stability.
Dec. 20: The Bureau of Land Management released its “draft environmental impact statement” for opening up the famed Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. Sticking to a rushed timeline, the agency said it intends to start lease sales later this year.
Three polar bears in Barter Island, Alaska. (Photo by Arthur T. LaBar, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Dec. 21: The federal government is still fighting protection for grizzlies. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service filed a notice that it will appeal a decision by a judge in Montana that reinstated Endangered Species Act protection to grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area after the agency moved to delist them in 2017.
Dec. 22: A partial government shutdown began after Trump refused to sign a continuing resolution over demands for funding for a border wall that would devastate wildlife, public lands and regional economies. The shutdown furloughed biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service, climate-change researchers from NASA, rangers and other staff at national parks, weather forecasters and a host of other government employees working to protect and steward our public-trust resources.
Dec. 25: Within days of the shutdown, access to online information from various federal agencies was reported missing, including public documents from the Department of the Interior related to a controversial plan to change conservation rules that would threaten sage-grouse habitat. Online tools and information sites from the ENERGY STAR program and other government agencies were also shut off.
Dec. 28: In a move that could affect future public-health rules, the Environmental Protection Agency released a draft rule that would change the way the government determines the cost and benefit of harmful air pollutants. Critics point out this would hurt both humans and wildlife. “EPA’s proposal to undermine the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards is one of its most dangerous efforts yet,” said a statement from Harold P. Wimmer, chief executive of the American Lung Association.
Dec. 29: The impacts of the partial government shutdown reached the Environmental Protection Agency, which finally ran out of funds and furloughed staff whose jobs include, “answering Freedom of Information Act requests, inspection of power plants and reviews of toxic substances,” Mother Jonesreported.
What will January bring? We’ll undoubtedly see more similar attacks on the environment, and the effects of the government shutdown will continue to build. But House Democrats are already planning to introduce a new spending bill that could, in theory, reopen the EPA and other agencies, and the new wave of recently elected pro-environment Democratic candidates is about to take office. Whether that leads to progress, or if we’ll keep getting coal in our stockings, remains to be seen.
Climate change and the extinction crisis resonated with our readers this year — as did steps toward solving these problems.
Oh, what a year it’s been. This year at The Revelator we’ve covered everything from the current and future effects of climate change to several painful extinctions — as well as a few species at imminent risk of disappearing. We’ve also dug into solutions and talked to the people helping to make a difference for wildlife and the planet.
Here are our 10 most-read articles for 2018, as clicked by our valued readers:
Of course that barely scratches the surface of what we published last year. What were your favorites? Did anything you enjoyed reading on The Revelator this year not make the list? Let us know in the comments. And stay tuned for even more great articles — good news and bad — in the New Year to come.
Beavers, sharks, whales and the Trump administration — our writers took on some heavy topics this past year.
The Revelator is more than just a news site. Every week we also publish powerful essays and op-eds from experts around the globe who contribute their knowledge and opinions about some of the most important environmental issues of the day.
Over the past year our guest writers have addressed some pretty heavy topics and shared new ideas to protect the environment, information on looming threats that deserve our attention, details about the latest scientific research, and a whole lot more. They’ve tackled the Trump administration, poachers, oil drilling, attacks on science and roadmaps to prevent species from going extinct.
Here are ten of their most thought-provoking contributions from the past year, in the order they were published:
There’s a lot more beyond this list. For all of our experts’ recent contributions, check out our full lists of essays and op-eds.
Interested in joining the conversation? We’re always open to submissions from experts in their fields. Read our essay guidelines to find out what we’re looking for in 2019.
This year the Trump administration and its corporate cronies seemed determined to roll back every environmental protection, but next year may be the start of a new story.
This has been one hell of a tough year for the planet.
It’s not just the Trump administration. We also got the news that worldwide greenhouse gas emissions have dramatically risen over the past year, despite urgent warnings about climate change. And we saw the international climate conference in Poland feature nonstop promotion for coal, even though the industry itself is dying.
Honestly, I could have made this list about 127 times longer. You just can’t encapsulate everything affecting the planet this past year in just a few pithy sentences. It’s enough to give you nightmares, assuming you can get to sleep in the first place. And personally speaking, my slumber is far from sound these days.
With so much at risk, what’s the best way to respond in the year ahead?
We need to keep fighting — and to fight even harder.
That process has already begun. The midterm elections didn’t come close to solving everything, but they were a powerful step in the right direction. It’s too early to know how all of these newly elected politicians will act during their first days in office, but early indications suggest that the gloves are about to come off. If the buzz about the Green New Deal is true, climate change and environmental justice will stand as key priorities for the new Congress.
That’s just a start. In the year ahead we all need to stand up and let our elected officials and unelected corporate power-brokers know what matters to us and to the planet. We need to demand transparency and the truth, rapid change, renewed protections for imperiled species and a commitment to sustainability on all fronts.
We need to take direct action, too. With the climate facing an absolute tipping point, every little bit helps, and every big action matters. We talked about that a lot in 2018. This was the year that teenagers mobilized for climate action, which should get some adults to get off their butts to demand change themselves. This was the year we talked about getting rid of plastic straws, which some people criticize as a minor action but which may actually serve to mobilize broader efforts to get rid of single-use plastics (much of which is generated by the burgeoning natural-gas industry). This was the year we started to recognize the insect extinction apocalypse and got angry about the impending disappearance of iconic orcas, showing everyone that we can both care and hopefully take action about the largest and smallest creatures around us.
As we take action, we need to avoid distractions. Here at The Revelator, we don’t waste our energy on President Trump’s latest tweets (although there have been some doozies). We try to look at the bigger picture — the signal, not the noise. We focus on keeping our readers informed about the big issues, on cutting through the clutter, and on examining what works and what doesn’t. Along the way we count on our readers and experts around the world to tell us what matters to them and how they’re being affected so we can stay focused.
Our team has spent the past few weeks looking ahead to the fight in the New Year. We promise to continue devoting our efforts to telling stories that aren’t being told in other settings, and to provide key insight into the issues that define our world so our readers can better understand them, talk about them and take action. We already have a lot in the works, and we’ve stepped up our efforts to bring you the essential news and context you need to understand what’s going on in the world and to make a difference.
It’s not an easy task, and the truth of the world today weighs heavily on us, but it’s a job that we take on with a great sense of respect, responsibility and duty.
With that in mind, we’re about to take a short break — like I said at the beginning, it’s been a hell of a year — but we’ll be back the first week of January with some powerful and important stories, starting with our predictions for some of the most crucial issues in the year ahead. We look forward to you joining us.
Meanwhile we’ll be revisiting some of our best and most thought-provoking articles and essays from the past year — because there’s still an awful lot to keep talking about.
Speaking of talking, please stay in touch. Our email inbox is always open, and we want to hear from you. Tell us what you want to know more about, or what you think needs to get done, and share your inside stories about how these critical environmental issues are affecting you and the planet around you.
This coming year will no doubt present its challenges, but we survived this past year and we’ll get through the next 12 months — and hopefully the decades ahead — as long as we stick together, stay strong and keep on fighting.
People often think of urban landscapes as concrete dystopias, but the future may reside in cities that can sustain both people and nature.
As much as we love and need nature, the human population is growing and moving to cities. In 1950 just 30 percent of the world’s population was urban, but that number is projected to rise to 68 percent by 2050. This phenomenon is giving rise to megacities — cities with populations of 10 million or more. In 1990 there were 10 megacities, but by 2030 there are expected to be 41. Ninety percent of this growth is occurring in Asia and Africa.
Source: United Nations
This rapid rate of urbanization, combined with the overall growth of the world’s population, will challenge our social systems, the way we manage natural resources, and the way we organize and build our cities. The question is, will the impact be negative or positive? The general perception is negative, but as someone who specializes in urban ecology I’m optimistic. Here’s why.
Perception of Cities
Urban areas have a bad rep when it comes to their relationship the environment. So much so that people generally consider cities to be the opposite of nature.
This isn’t without good reasoning. Since the Industrial Revolution, cities have been a place of concrete, glass, factories and office buildings. The first step in creating a new urban area was (and often still is) to remove all the natural environment’s features to make way for our rigid lines of zoning.
But our perception of urban life is changing. Over the past 50 years, environmental awareness has become more mainstream. From the first Earth Day in 1970 and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to the rise of environmental advocates like Rachel Carson, David Suzuki, Sylvia Earle and David Attenborough, much has been done to educate and engage the greater public. In turn we’ve been able see cities in a new light.
Cities have adopted policies to incentivize LEED building certifications, urban forestry, brownfield site regulations, renewable energy, natural heritage, carbon offsetting, floodplain development restrictions, reduction of air pollutant output, stormwater management, open-space provisions in development, and most recently green roofs. These policies have led to greener, healthier cities that are more enjoyable to live in. With the implementation of these changes, we see fewer lawns and more tree plantings, fewer concrete channels and more naturalized watercourses, fewer water discharge and more constructed wetlands, fewer shingles and more green roofs, and more LEED-certified buildings.
It’s not just the public sector squeezing industries to go green — so is the private market. The demand from investors and residents to have access to parks, green buildings and a healthy living environment has created a lucrative market. According to the National Real Estate Investor, “Renters are willing to pay an extra $27.21 a month in rent to live in buildings that have green certifications — that works out to more than $300 a year per apartment in extra income.” Planting trees alone has demonstrated to raise property value from 5 to 18 percent in the United States. Roger Platt, the former president of the U.S. Green Building Council, has pointed out that “Investors now require green buildings as an international benchmark for their global portfolios.”
These government initiatives and the private market’s demand, coupled with technological advancements, are pushing a new potential for cities.
Potential of Cities
If government initiatives and private-market demand catch up and keep up with the rate of urbanization, we may just see our cities turn from concrete jungles to green paradises. Singapore is a shining example of how this could be accomplished. Between 1986 and 2007, the Singapore population grew by 68 percent, yet green cover grew from 35.7 to 46.5 percent. Certified green buildings account for more than a fifth of the floor area in the island city-state and aims to achieve a 35 percent reduction in the energy intensity of its economy by 2030 and have 80 percent green buildings.
The Parkroyal on Pickering, a heavily gardened hotel in Singapore. Photo: Erwin Soo (CC BY 2.0)
By amplifying the blueprint of Singapore and other cities’ initiatives and bringing these models to the cities of developing nations, plant and animal communities may not only be able to survive but thrive alongside us. If this is achieved, it will be not as the result of limiting our abilities to develop but as a natural economic path to ensure cities stay livable.
Ecology and the Built Environment
Green roofs, urban forestry, green buildings, stormwater ponds, bioswales, living walls, parks, meadows and beaches will never replace the structure, quality and complexity of the ecosystems that existed before urbanization. But research has demonstrated the ability for cities to support significant levels of biodiversity (Aronson et al. 2014, Ives et al. 2015). As noted by Rosenzweig and Youngsteadt:
“Although cities are centers of consumption and land-use change, they represent a considerable opportunity for forwarding global sustainability and environmental goals. For example, cities are at the forefront in planning for climate-change adaptation and mitigation (Rosenzweig et al. 2010), and research into urban-ecosystems dynamics are revealing the potential for managing local and large-scale environmental change.” (Youngsteadt et al 2014).
Recognizing the limitations of urban ecology, there are several metrics that warrant optimism — for example, leaf-surface area. As buildings get taller and possibly more infused with vegetation, leaf-surface area may equal or exceed what’s estimated to have been present in the ecosystem that existed before disturbance on the site. To me this is an incredibly exciting prospect, as it could create a net gain of ecological services. The Bosco Verticale in Milan, Italy, is a good precedent for building that has succeeded in accommodating vegetation. This development has inspired a new generation of vegetation-infused buildings.
The Bosco Verticale residential tower in Milan, Italy. Photo: Alessandro Bonvini (CC BY 2.0)
Species diversity is another possible optimistic metric. As we manipulate plant communities that we use, we have the ability to tweak those communities based on scientific recommendation to help support more diversity in biotic communities. A short communication by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University on Promoting and preserving biodiversity in the urban forest notes:
“As our world becomes more and more urbanized, the urban forest will increasingly become an important reserve of biodiversity. We need to recognize the potential of urban areas to contain important amounts of biodiversity and work to promote that diversity.”
Species preservation is also a key potential product of urban ecology. We must remember that Ginkgo biloba went extinct in the wild but was able to survive due to human intervention. This could be expanded to species beyond trees with monitoring, habitat creation and protection. Other metrics may include greater volume of habitat, increased transpiration rates and increased biomass production, which could be achieved via vertical development.
The key benefit comes from vertical development’s ability to create more surface area, with the potential to generate more ecological productivity.
Future Cities
So will we allow cities to turn into concrete dystopias? Or will we create the green paradises that we deserve? By embracing urban ecology in the form of green infrastructure and biophilic design, we allow ourselves to work with nature, not against it.
We’re always learning about the benefits that natural features bring to the built environment, but we’re also learning more about plants and animals. Can we tailor the built environment to their needs? Can we couple our need of natural services with the needs of native ecosystems? Can we generate a net gain of ecological productivity?
Sustainability is the only way forward, and that’s why I’m excited about the future of cities for people, plants and animals. I’m grateful for all the unsung heroes who have created a foundation for green cities through science, education and implementation. I’m encouraged to be playing a part in facilitating it by working with governments, developers, architects and builders to implement green infrastructure and create green strategies. The future of urban ecology is not dark but bright.
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.
Check out this podcast for tips on protecting wildlife and plants in your community.
One of the questions people ask me most often is what they can do locally to help endangered species. Well, I recently appeared on the Green Divas podcast to talk about that very subject. We discussed the horror of lawns, the danger of cars, great ways to volunteer, and other efforts you can take to make your neck of the woods a little bit safer for rare plants and wildlife.
You can listen to the episode below:
Of course, there are many other ways to help. What other tips would you give to people in your community? Our comments section is open and awaiting your suggestions.
Paige Embry’s new book gives a rare look at the often-overlooked world of America’s native bees.
The United States is home to more than 4,000 species of native bees that display an amazing array of sizes and ecological roles, and yet non-native European honeybees, which arrived with the first influx of European colonists, tend to garner most of our attention and concern.
Embry also examines the crucial role native bees play in ecosystems, whether native bee populations are declining, and whether these wild species can take over the pollination duties currently filled by managed honeybee colonies on farms and orchards.
Along the way she looks at how climate change, pesticides and habitat loss all present challenges for bees — and how they can be resilient, especially with our assistance.
“We may think the world is falling apart and an individual can do little to stop it,” Embry writes in the book. “That is not true for bees.”
We asked Embry about how native bees are faring, what scientists still don’t know about native bees and what we can do to help them.
You write in the beginning of your book that “honeybees get all the press,” which leaves most native bee species out of the discussion. Why should we be concerned about the welfare of our native bees in the United States?
The short answer is that about 90 percent of land plants use pollinators to help them procreate. Bees aren’t the only pollinators out there — there’s an estimated 200,000 different kinds of pollinating animals — but they are the queens of pollination because the females actively collect pollen.
Our Native Bees author Paige Embry.
For pollination to happen, the pollen (a plant’s sperm equivalent) has to get moved to the female parts of a flower. A plant can be self-pollinated or wind-pollinated or animal-pollinated or even some combination. Animal-pollinated plants usually provide a bribe, delicious nectar, to entice pollinators to visit. Ideally, a nectar-seeking critter gets smeared with pollen which they carry to the next flower — but sometimes they don’t. Female bees, however, feed pollen to their babes and so they have to come into contact with the pollen, making them superb pollinators.
No single species of pollinator, not even a bee, has what it takes to pollinate all types of flowers. Variety is key — bees with long tongues and short tongues, big bees and small bees, bees that can “buzz pollinate” flowers all have a role to play.
Can you tell us about a native bee species you find fascinating, and why?
Today I’d go with certain members of the genus Diadasia because I’m enchanted by the grand entry halls some of them build for their nests.
Diadasia are ground-nesting, solitary bees. Some build these crazy chimneys or turrets at the entrances to their holes. While researching the book, I ran across a paper that talked in detail about how one species went about building these structures and was amazed by the effort it took.
What really won me over was that the researchers found that sometimes in the night a bee would add morsels to the tops of the chimney. These morsels were bits of pollen embedded in poop. Why? Decoration? A thrifty recycler? No one knows, but that’s why I like Diadasia.
Your book points out a lot of gaps in our knowledge about native bees (including that much of the research only focuses on adult females); what areas could use more resources, or what haven’t we studied yet that we should?
I think we need to keep looking for ways to bring wild bees back onto farms and methods that will make it practical and desirable for farmers to turn their fields and surrounding areas into havens for bees. This would require both more research on what works and funding to effectively get that information out to the farmers.
Also, for many kinds of bees, it’s hard to know if bees are in trouble because we don’t have old, baseline data to compare to. We need to try and get that data now, so we can track potential future changes.
How has studying bees changed you? After working on this book, do you look at the world around you differently now?
Before I started researching bees they were just little things that pollinated and had stingers. I never thought much about bees. Now that I know something about them, some of their funny idiosyncrasies — like the way the males of some species hang out together and wait for females to come by — I see them.
Knowing about bees enriches my everyday life. I walk the dog and see a queen bumblebee in a crocus and think, phew, she’s found some food. I know she’s spent the winter in a hole, living off her body fat and that flower means a potential future for her and all her offspring. It takes that everyday walk from a routine chore to an event.
How do we find out what kind of bees live in our area — and what can we do to better support them?
Each bee description includes a map showing where they’ve been found. I’d also look atThe Bees in Your Backyard by Joseph Wilson and Olivia Messinger Carrill. If you want bee facts. It’s a great book with wonderful photos and maps that show where the occurrence of different genera is high and low.
If you have a yard, helping bees is easy.
Lay off the pesticides. Plant flowers that bees like throughout the entire growing season. Make the plantings good-sized (3-4 feet). Provide nest sites. Seventy percent of bees nest in the ground. Tilling and covering every inch of soil with mulch and plants makes it hard for those bees to make a home. Pithy stems and old trees with lots of holes provide good sites for bees that nest above ground. Be forgiving of blemishes. Those leaves with nice semi-circular holes are likely contributing to the nests of leaf-cutting bees — rejoice and don’t bring out the spray gun.
Tensions are high as wolves begin to wander the country for the first time in 200 years. Now some scientists have a possible solution.
JUTLAND, Denmark— A patchwork quilt of green-and-brown agricultural fields and small gray cities unfurls across the flat, sprawling landscape of Denmark’s largest peninsula. It’s April 2018, and an adult female gray wolf — believed to be the first female wolf to come to the small Nordic country in more than 200 years — lopes along the perimeter of a farmstead that abuts a brush of forest in Jutland’s west-central region.
Woodland is a rarity in Denmark, a country largely cultivated by humans. The small forest, owned by a local farmer, accommodates a large herd of red deer — a steady source of energy for the wolf and others in her small pack, which began accumulating members in 2012. The forest also provides two sources of income for the farmer: Hunters pay to kill on his land, while the government reimburses him for any damage the deer cause to the forest.
The she-wolf wanders alongside a dusty field being tilled by a large tractor, till she notices a man sitting in a truck at the edge of the field. She quickens her gait, keeping her eyes fixed on the man. He, in turn, lifts a rifle and fires. The bullet hits her, and she’s later found dead, setting off a firestorm of worldwide media coverage and eventually leading to the man’s conviction for killing the protected animal.
This event, caught on camera by two naturalists, illustrates why wolves have been extirpated here and across the rest of Europe: Many people have grown to view them as adversaries, threats to their safety and way of life. They say this is a reason to kill them.
But there are signs that the tide is turning. The European Union is now strongly encouraging human-wolf coexistence by offering full compensation to farmers across member states for livestock lost to wolves and other predators. The EU is also funding nonlethal ways to keep wolves at bay, such as fences and livestock dogs.
This new EU-wide initiative is a step toward more nonlethal wolf management, says Dr. Hans Peter Hansen, a social scientist at Aarhus University who is studying the human relationship to wolves in rural Denmark. Nonlethal management strategies are seen as a more modern, ethical management scheme, but also as something that is difficult to implement due to wolves’ lasting, mythic legacy as an adversary of people.
“The man-versus-wolf conflict is one that’s ingrained in the human psyche to an extremely hateful and hostile extent,” he says. “Dealing with it will require more than money for lost sheep and fences.”
Hansen says Denmark, with its new wolf pack living near humans, is in the midst of an experiment that could help develop a revolutionary strategy for wolf management.
His secret: Give locals a voice.
Since August 2017 residents of a small town in West Jutland have gathered regularly to meet with Hansen and other scientists from Aarhus University as part of a project that invites townsfolk into an open dialogue about wolves in their community and how they want to live with them.
While Hansen says his sole motive has been to facilitate discussion about wolves, this project appears to have cascading effects, according to Cathrine Schrøder, who is also from Aarhus University and involved in the project.
“What we found was that residents had a generally open position on wolves, and could identify both positive and negative aspects about having them live in their town,” she says. “It created perhaps a sense of empathy and responsibility toward them.”
The most recent meeting took place during the last week of November, when I joined about 25 residents at their community center on a dark, raw evening. They had gathered that night to discuss the outcomes of the project’s previous meetings and where to take it next. As they arrived each scientist greeted them personally, with more hugs doled out than handshakes in what appeared to be a mutually trusting relationship. “An increased trust in scientists was a major outcome of our project,” Schrøder told me.
Hansen, Schrøder and two other experts sat down with the residents to a hearty meal of roasted turkey legs, gravy and potatoes, chatting about their families and jobs and Christmas plans. Once they filled their stomachs, the group was joined by two wolf biologists and began figuring out where to take the project next. They also tried to determine if there’s any hope they can develop a useful strategy for wolf coexistence in Denmark, tailored to the needs of their heavily rural community of farmers, hunters and families.
Farmers and hunters have traditionally opposed wolves’ presence because of the potential for financial losses from predation on livestock and game. Families, especially mothers, also tend to have a negative view of wolves because they fear the animals may harm their children or pets. Perceiving wolves as a threat often leads people to kill them illegally — even though scientific studies have largely suggested that wolves pose a fairly low threat to human lives and livelihoods in most places. In fact, killing wolves can possibly lead to more livestock deaths, as I have previously reported for The Revelator.
“People have legitimate concerns about the wolves,” Hansen told me over coffee at a food market in Copenhagen a week prior to the November meeting. “At our first meeting many people came as stakeholders, defending their interests. But I think this is a fundamental problem in society in general: We’ve cultivated stakeholders so deeply that we’ve eroded the commons.” What’s happened, he says, is that there are so many divisions that a society cannot properly identify common ground or its responsibility for protection.
Other scientists across Europe agree that public support and cooperation are key in creating and implementing effective, science-based wolf-management strategies that minimize killing and conflict. “Without public support or at least an approach in which you work together with those most affected by the presence of large carnivores,” keeping the population of wolves healthy throughout Europe will remain difficult, says Katrina Marsden, a biodiversity expert at adelphi, an environmental public policy consultancy in Berlin.
In most European countries — Denmark included — the lawmakers responsible for making rules about wolves across multiple countries have been informed by interest groups represented in urban capitals, despite the fact most people in major cities live far from them. Across the continent a wildlife-protection measure called the EU Habitats Directive provides varying levels of protection for wolves and other wildlife across their ranges. In Denmark wolves are assigned the highest level of protection under the law, and killing them is prohibited unless they create an emergency situation.
What’s lacking in Denmark and many other European countries are clear management plans with set goals and repercussions for illegal wolf kills, says Hansen. As one part of management, Danish biologists highly recommend tracking the wolves with GPS collars. They say that could help them to better monitor the animals’ movement and behaviors — allowing them to better prevent and respond to human-wolf interactions. The biologists been able to secure funding and permitting for the tracking project, and are in the midst of planning capturing activities, Aarhus University wildlife biologist Peter Sunde told me.
Some other aspects of wolf management have yet to be resolved, most notably how to punish people who strike out against them. According to news reports, the man who killed the she-wolf in May received a light prison sentence and had his guns confiscated.
“Many people, including me, are surprised that he was allowed to keep his hunting license,” Hansen says. “The revocation of which would send a clear message to others about breaking the rules.”
As the community meeting wound down after nearly four hours of discussion, residents brought their visions of a Danish wolf-management plan to the fore. One proposed regulated wolf-based tourism that could prevent harm to both wolves and people while creating a revenue stream for the community. Another proposed further investigation into innovative, nonlethal wolf-attack prevention measures, in addition to further investment in existing measures like livestock fencing.
As the residents aired their ideas around the room, one thing was clear: They had warmed up to wolves, no matter their starting position, and wanted the meetings to continue.
“While the idea of living next to wolves sometimes scares me a bit, I have gained a lot of respect for them,” one woman told me at the end of the evening. “And I think we can find a good way to live with them if we stick to this project in the years to come.”
Two western states have launched new challenges to the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which helps protect some of the country’s most important public lands.
Millions of acres of relatively untouched national forest protected through a Clinton-era regulation could be opened up to road building and logging in two western states.
The forests are currently shielded from new road building, road reconstruction and timber harvesting by a policy known as the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protects nearly 60 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in national forests across the country in order to safeguard wildlife, water supply and recreation opportunities.
Some of that protection could soon be at risk. This year Alaska and Utah have begun the process of creating state-specific roadless policies in place of the federal rule, which could mean new roads, logging operations and other possible development.
Many experts fear this could have devastating environmental consequences and inspire additional states to ask the Trump administration for similar changes.
The Importance of Roadless Areas
The federal roadless rule may not be well known to most Americans, but it’s vitally important. “It protects some of the wildest places left in the United States,” says Travis Belote, a research ecologist with the Wilderness Society.
The original Forest Service rule identified roadless areas as having several important ecological values, key among them the ability to provide Americans with clean drinking water. In this case, a little goes a long way: Inventoried roadless areas account for just 2 percent of the country’s land base but are located within 661 of the country’s 2,000 major watersheds.
“A lot of the best quality drinking water is coming from roadless areas and wilderness areas,” says Mike Anderson, a senior resource analyst with the Wilderness Society. “I see the roadless rule first and foremost as being a key environmental safeguard to protect our nation’s purest water.”
Roadless areas also protect threatened and endangered species, provide recreation opportunities and scenic values, and safeguard traditional cultural areas and sacred sites.
Bobcat lurking in the Ashley National Forest. Photo by U.S. Forest Service
Additionally, as the country’s population grows, we continue to encroach on once-remote places. “In an increasingly developed landscape, large unfragmented tracts of land become more important,” the Forest Services explained in its 2001 rulemaking.
Roadless areas have an additional value — they act as a crucial protective zone around other public lands and help to connect wildlife habitat. Just over 60 percent of roadless areas are within about 6 miles of a national park or wilderness area, says Belote. “They have this really critical role of buffering iconic protected areas.”
As important as the ecological considerations are, they weren’t the only impetus for the roadless rule. Economics played a big part, too.
Maintaining and building roads in national forests, it turns out, is expensive. When the roadless rule was written, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had a backlog of $8.4 billion in deferred maintenance on forest roads, and the agency only received 20 percent of the annual funds it needed annually to meet the costs of maintaining its existing roads. At the time the Forest Service itself admitted “it makes little fiscal or environmental sense to build additional roads” in roadless areas when the agency couldn’t even afford to maintain the roads already under its purview.
State Pushback
The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule sought to resolve decades of controversy over subsidized logging and road building on national forests. The fight to establish the rule took years of hard work.
“It all came to a head in the late 1990s when Michael Dombeck was the chief of the Forest Service,” says Anderson. “He felt very deeply that the Forest Service roadless areas were just too important for water quality and fish habitat to allow them to be roaded and logged as the agency had been doing for many years.”
The rule was finalized in the waning days of the Clinton administration after significant public input — including hundreds of public meetings and 1.6 million comments — but the incoming George W. Bush administration put the brakes on it and attempted to replace the rule, an effort that ultimately failed. Some states issued legal challenges, which also took years to resolve.
In the decade after the roadless rule was enacted, two states, Idaho and Colorado, worked with the Department of Agriculture to develop state-specific plans, which both build upon and supersede the federal regulations.
Idaho’s rule, enacted in 2008, added stronger protections to a third of its 9 million roadless acres but permitted logging to reduce wildfire risks in half the roadless acreage. It also removed 400,000 acres entirely from roadless designation, opening the door to mining and other development there.
Similarly Colorado’s roadless rule, finalized in 2012, increased the number of acres covered under the rule, but bolstered development interests, too. It permitted the possibility of future of ski-area expansion on 8,000 acres and allowed for the construction of temporary roads for coal-mining-related activities in certain areas.
Arch Coal’s West Elk mine in Colorado. Photo by WildEarth Guardians (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In January 2018 Alaska, following the same regulatory process as Colorado and Idaho, petitioned the Department of Agriculture to permanently exempt the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest from the federal roadless rule.
Alaska’s elected officials have lobbied to exempt the Tongass since the roadless rule was written on the grounds that it limits economic development, including efforts by mining, energy and logging companies. In June Sonny Perdue, President Trump’s secretary of agriculture, responded to this petition by tasking the Forest Service with beginning the process of creating a state-specific roadless rule for Alaska, which means the state must work with the Forest Service to come up with a new rule for the Tongass. The agency is expected to finalize the new rule by June 2020 after environmental analysis and public comment.
It’s expected to include “appropriate exceptions to address essential infrastructure, timber, energy, mining, access and transportation systems necessary to further Alaska’s economic development interests,” the Forest Service explained on its website.
With Alaska paving the way forward, Utah has now jumped on the bandwagon. This October Gov. Gary Herbert put into motion plans to petition the federal government for a state-specific plan in early 2019. The rule currently covers 4 million acres of national forest in the state.
The move surprised Utah environmental groups. “We’ve seen a lot of reversals of protective policies across the state in this administration,” says Carl Fisher, executive director of the Utah-based nonprofit Save Our Canyons. “But we thought we had a good collaborative relationship as it pertains to taking care of our watersheds and national forests in the state.”
Battle Over the Tongass
Despite all of the Roadless Rule’s proven benefits, officials in Alaska are intent on removing all or part of the roadless protections for the Tongass. There’s a lot at stake.
The Tongass National Forest is regarded as some of the country’s most beautiful wild landscape. It’s the largest national forest in the United States and the world’s largest expanse of intact temperate rainforest. In today’s climate change age, its old-growth forests are also widely recognized as an important for sequestering carbon.
Just over half of the Tongass’ 17 million acres is protected by the current federal roadless rule.
The region is home to fjords, forested islands, glaciers, undammed rivers and rich biodiversity, including five species of Pacific salmon, humpback and orca whales, brown bears, bald eagles and Alexander Archipelago wolves.
The Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Photo by Alan Wu (CC BY-SA 2.0)
But it’s not all pristine habitat anymore.
The Tongass’ old-growth forests have long been heavily logged. Timber sales that began in the early 1900s ramped up in the 1950s and continued at a record pace for decades. At its peak in the 1970s, the logging industry was pulling nearly 500 million board feet a year from the Tongass. That had fallen to around 33 million board feet by 2014.
“The sad story on the Tongass is that there’s been 60-plus years of pretty intensive logging of these huge old-growth forests that are globally rare and there’s not much timber that’s left,” says Andrew Thoms, executive director of the local environmental group Sitka Conservation Society.
He’s part of a 12-member Alaska Roadless Rule Citizen Advisory Committee, composed of representatives from different stakeholder groups, which recently submitted recommendations to the governor to help shape Alaska’s new regulation.
“The timber industry wants to continue what they’ve been doing, but they’ve just run out,” he says. “The timber that’s left is in really ecologically sensitive areas that are important for salmon production and areas that are important for the people who live here.” That’s why Thoms says he doesn’t want to see more logging in what’s left of the Tongass’ most sensitive roadless areas.
Timber sales have been a losing bet economically for the federal government and taxpayers, too.
A 2016 Government Accountability Office report found that from 2005 to 2014 the Forest Service was spending about $12.5 million a year to “prepare, manage, and oversee timber sales and to conduct required environmental analyses” in the Tongass. But it was making, on average, just $1.1 million a year in revenue from timber sales there. That’s an annual loss of $11.4 million, and it doesn’t include millions more spent each year in building and maintaining roads.
It’s also taken an ecological toll on the forest.
For decades, Thoms says, the timber industry displayed little environmental awareness. “They drove their tractors right up the salmon streams, they pulled the wood out of the streams that create the spawning habitat for the fish and there were no buffers on the streams whatsoever,” he explains. “After those past generations did so much damage to the ecosystem here, it really reduces our ability to do any sustainable logging now, and especially with old-growth timber.”
The forest still supports the economy of the region, but these days most of the money comes from tourism, recreation and fisheries industries, which make up a quarter of the region’s employment. Timber, by contrast, is now less than 1 percent of employment. And these new leading industries require a healthy ecosystem.
But proponents of changing the roadless rule think that new roads through the forest can help drive other kinds of industries including mining, renewable energy projects and economic opportunities driven by broadband internet, Heidi Hansen, deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, explained in an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News.
There are other considerations for southeast Alaskans, too.
“Subsistence salmon harvest for rural residents and Alaska natives is a huge part of life up here,” says Thoms. “And all of those salmon are born and start their life and end their life on the Tongass National Forest. So we want to see the watersheds that are the biggest producers of salmon kept intact and kept roadless.”
Thoms isn’t alone in his views. Local media reported that most residents speaking up at community meetings support keeping the federal rule in place.
“Even in Ketchikan, which was traditionally the heart of the timber industry, over half the audience came out and said to keep the roadless rule,” says Thoms. People come up to Alaska from the lower 48 and “they want to see a pristine Alaska with all of the ecosystem parts functioning where there’s fish and bears and deer and eagles and not rows of development and clear cuts,” he says. “That message came from all the communities that the meetings were held in.”
A New Fight in Utah
The primary driver for a rule change in Alaska is for more economic opportunities associated with resource extraction and road building. In Utah, which has 4 million acres of inventoried roadless areas, the state has said it’s motivated by wanting to address wildfire concerns, but Fisher thinks economic interests are playing a role, too. At a recent public event Gov. Herbert said the state experienced more than 871 wildfires this year and blames much of the destruction on the roadless rule.
“The idea behind a petition for a new state-specific roadless rule would be to give local forest service professionals a few more tools to do active forest management and restoration in certain roadless areas,” says Jake Garfield, general counsel of Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, who claims the roadless rule leaves the Forest Service “a little bit hamstrung” on some forest-restoration work.
One of the changes the state is seeking, he says, is the right to build a “temporary administrative road in roadless areas to address the threat of wildfire.” Although the current rule allows for road construction to protect public health and safety, including for threats of wildfire, Garfield says it’s limited to immediate threats and doesn’t allow for more proactive measures.
The Tank Hollow fire in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Photo by U.S. Forest Service
But roadbuilding to protect against wildfires in remote areas seems contrary to the Forest Service’s own analysis from the 2001 rule which found that, “Building roads into inventoried roadless areas would likely increase the chance of human-caused fires due to the increased presence of people.”
Wilderness Society’s Anderson contests Utah’s reasoning, saying the issue was “pretty well analyzed back when the roadless rule was initially adopted and the conclusion at that time was to allow for fuel-reduction thinning off existing roads but not to invite more human-caused ignitions of wildfires by putting new roads into places.”
Also, the Forest Service typically uses its limited resources to fight wildfires that are closer to more populated areas and not in remote wilderness areas.
Salt Lake City Mayor Jacqueline M. Biskupski was also not convinced of the state’s argument and said she thought the Forest Service already had the tools it needed to address wildfire concerns, including prescribed fires to help manage vegetation and reduce the buildup of fuels in the forest.
“The current roadless rule puts no limits on the use of prescribed fires,” she wrote in a letter that recommended the state leave the federal roadless rule intact. “Also, it already contains an exemption to its prohibition on road construction and reconstruction where needed to protect public health and safety.”
Garfield denies that increasing logging is the main purpose of the rule change, but adds that there may be times when the Forest Service doesn’t have the budget to do large-scale restoration work and a private timber company would be needed. In some cases it may also be necessary to “cut down larger diameter timber to restore forest health and reduce wildfire risks,” he says.
But Fisher thinks the roadless rule change is waste of state and federal resources. He says a recent presentation to the state by the forest supervisor of Utah’s Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest showed there was 1.3 million acres of shovel-ready forest treatment projects ready to go, but the agency was short around $340 million in funds. That wouldn’t change if the roadless rule were amended in Utah.
“So we don’t think we have a policy hurdle, we think we have a funding hurdle,” he says. “That’s why we don’t think the efforts should be focused on some blanket rollback on a policy that is actually doing its job.”
The efforts to change the roadless rule in Alaska and Utah will still take months to resolve and will involve both state and public input.
Meanwhile Anderson says he’s worried that other states could follow them in seeking state-specific rules. “We’ve been hearing rumors of maybe Wyoming, maybe Nevada, maybe Arizona,” he says.
But even just Alaska and Utah’s departure from the federal roadless rule is significant. “If we were to lose the protection in those two states alone, we’re talking almost a quarter of all the national forest roadless areas in the whole country,” he adds.
After decades of rumors and searches, the existence of a two-foot-long amphibian called “the reticulated siren” has finally been confirmed.
Sometimes you go into a Florida swamp to study turtles and end up encountering a two-foot-long salamander previously undescribed by science.
That’s what happened to biologist David Steen back in 2009 when he pulled up one of his turtle traps from the swampy waters around Elgin Air Force Base. The trap didn’t contain turtles, but he did find a giant, eel-like salamander resting comfortably inside.
“It was just kind of sitting on the bottom of the trap, waiting patiently,” Steen says.
Steen was a lot more excited than the animal in front of him. He knew he was looking at an amphibian few people had ever seen before.
Steen says he first started hearing rumors of a massive undiscovered salamander species during his graduate-student days at Alabama’s Auburn University in early 2007. “My advisor, Craig Guyer, was showing me around their Museum of Natural History and he kind of tapped his knuckles on this big specimen jar,” Steen recounts. The contents were labeled as another large salamander species, the greater siren (Siren lacertina), but Guyer suggested that it didn’t look quite right. “He said it’s probably a new species just waiting for someone to describe it.”
Others, it turned out, had also suspected the presence of an unknown species. Locals have long spoken of a mysterious creature they called a “leopard eel,” and Robert Mount’s 1975 book TheReptiles and Amphibians of Alabama mentioned an unnamed siren, but no one had been able to prove its existence. For more than a decade, people had stopped looking.
Steen and another graduate student, Sean Graham, immediately started dreaming of solving the mystery. “We were scheming — how can we find one of these things?”
Easier said than done. They knew roughly where to look because of the museum samples and other accounts, but it still took more than two years before Steen found the single live salamander in 2009. Several failed attempts followed before they finally found three more specimens in 2014. Studying those four animals took a few more years, all work done on their own time and without an official research budget.
The hard work paid off, though. A paper by Steen, Graham and other researchers published today in the journal PLOS ONE describes the new species and names it the reticulated siren (S. reticulata). According to the paper the completely aquatic salamander lives in northwest Florida and southern Alabama and has a slimy, eel-like body with irregular spots on its skin, two forelegs, no back legs, and a set of gills just behind its head. It’s about the length of North America’s largest salamander, the Hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis), but much slighter of build.
The reticulated siren, courtesy of Pierson Hill
That all adds up to a highly unusual animal — and one of the largest vertebrates described in the United States or Canada in the past few decades.
“It was surreal to see after years of talking about this creature — it was kind of a mystical, mythical beast,” Steen says. “It’s so unlike most other creatures that we share the planet with.”
Why did it take so long to discover a two-foot-long salamander? “I think it’s a combination of things,” says Steen, who is now the research ecologist at the George Sea Turtle Center and executive director of The Alongside Wildlife Foundation. “One, this creature is completely aquatic. It lives in swamps and mud. These are not really places where people spend a lot of their time. It’s also superficially similar to another species, the greater siren, so unless you knew what you were looking for you would probably assume it was something we already knew.”
The paper aims to change that. Although Steen acknowledges there’s still a lot to learn about the new siren, he says it was time to bring its existence to the world’s attention. “We could wait another 10, 20, 30 years to figure out all the details about the species but we felt it was important to document it. Maybe that will provide some incentives for people to do formal studies and surveys. As you know, you can’t afford formal protections to a species that people don’t even know about or don’t even recognize.”
That possible future protection could be important. The paper doesn’t get into the reticulated siren’s potential conservation status, but a press release about the discovery calls it “at least vulnerable to population declines.” That’s because its habitat in the U.S. Southeast is increasingly under pressure from a growing human population, development, agriculture, logging, climate change and other threats.
At the same time, the new siren represents the Southeast’s amazingly diverse treasure trove of species, says amphibian biologist Karen Lips from the University of Maryland, College Park, who was not affiliated with the study. “Every time I talk about salamanders, I put up a global map of salamander biodiversity and it just glows red in the southeastern U.S. It’s ground zero for salamander diversity.”
Many of those species are endangered or at risk, so Lips calls the discovery of the reticulated siren a “little ray of light.” Although she expects the species might eventually be listed as endangered due to the relatively few encounters over the past decade, she’s glad that it has now been described and named. “In the amphibian community, we all have undescribed specimens on our shelves for which we can’t find the populations anymore. Even if this species is rare and endangered, it exists. That’s good news.”
And believe it or not, it might not be alone. Genetic tests conducted for the paper suggest that other undescribed giant siren salamander species may also be out there in the Southeast, waiting to be discovered. “We really need a formal revision of this entire family of salamanders so we can figure out their biology and their conservation status and bring them into the 21st century,” Steen says.
That echoes Steen’s final message about the siren: There are still numerous species yet to be discovered, and like their known counterparts they’re all facing a growing number of threats. The time to save these species grows shorter with each passing year.
“We just don’t know what we’re losing because we haven’t done the formal work to figure out what species are still out there,” he says.
For at least one species, though, that first step has finally been taken.
