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.
At the same time, reporters should be cautious not to oversell small and dubious solutions, as one recent case illustrates.
Can mainstream journalism in the United States do a better job covering the climate? That’s a question I find myself pondering as evidence of a looming climate change grows stronger and the likelihood that the world will respond soon enough dwindles. I fret that the press may not be playing its historic role ringing the alarm bells.
Last October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report on the risks of letting the planet warm up more than half a degree Celsius. News outlets erupted in stories about the document’s stark conclusions: that unless humanity dramatically cuts back the amount of carbon dioxide spewed from of millions of smokestacks and tailpipes, starting now, we’ll suffer civilization-threatening climate disasters. But then the story was mostly gone from the media.
Of course “the media” is an increasingly imprecise concept. Still, as far as I can tell, within days, most outlets had moved onto the next topic du jour.
Since then I’ve noticed that much of the climate news I see is less about the dire predictions and more about fixes — large and small — that could help reduce the amount of CO2 humans let off into the atmosphere.
That’s great, but unfortunately new wind farms, better solar panels, methods of sequestering carbon underground and other topics appearing in the typical “good news” climate story will have scant practical impact: They’re too small-scale for the size of the problem. But this fact is often left out, ignoring the lopsided relationship between what we must do and what we’re doing.
The new IPPC report and federal National Climate Assessment state bluntly what experts have been saying to each other for years: What’s required to avoid catastrophe are monumental changes in almost all facets of life, with “no documented historic precedent.”
Why is there so much reporting on essentially inconsequential solutions and so little on the enormity of the problem? I recently came across a case that may shed a little light.
In late 2017 the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California announced the Harnessing Plants Initiative, a research effort to, among other goals, create crops for removing carbon from the air and sequestering it in the soil. The LA Times, San Diego Tribune, Popular Mechanics and more than a dozen other newspapers, magazines and web outlets published glowing, uncritical stories about the research.
What caught my attention was not the technique the Salk project proposed but the improbable boasts for the research’s potential that many of the stories repeated credulously. “’We did the numbers,” Joanne Chory, the initiative’s director, told Popular Mechanics. “And the numbers say you need about five percent of the world’s farmland…to fix 50 percent of all the CO2 that we’re putting up there.” Chory told the LA Times she could “pretty easily” create new plants to do the job.
Of course, five percent of the world’s farmland is a big chunk of territory. Still, if her prediction were accurate, her small lab could take the world halfway to solving the entire climate problem in only few years. “It will take roughly 10 years and $50 million,” she told Business Insider.
It sounded too good to be true. As I discovered, it was.
In order to avoid catastrophe, people must stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. But turning around civilization’s energy ocean liner will be difficult. Most experts agree that it will be impossible to accomplish the goal fast enough only by cutting back on the amount of fossil fuels people burn. We can’t replace coal power plants with windmills and solar panels or invent fossil-fuel-free alternatives for aircraft fast enough. So we’ll also have to remove a substantial amount of carbon dioxide from the air and bury it, a process called negative emissions.
In January 2018, as I explored covering the story myself, Chory explained her own negative emissions plan to me in a phone call and a series of follow-up emails. She told me her plans — which would use either traditional breeding or modern gene-splicing techniques — to create crops rich in a carbon-heavy, waxy molecule called suberin that all plants produce in small amounts in their roots. The substance decays slowly, lingering in soil long after the rest of a plant has rotted.
Plants differ widely in how much carbon dioxide they take in for photosynthesis and turn into carbon-laden molecules such as lignin and sugars. Perennial grasses — among the best domesticated plants for trapping carbon — produce 1 ton of carbon in their roots per hectare. Chory said that to achieve her goal — solving half of the climate problem by planting new crops on 5 percent of the world’s farmland — she would need to create plants 20 times more productive, able to store 20 tons of carbon per hectare. And that carbon will be mostly in the form of relatively inert suberin, unlike other plant tissues that rot quickly and turn back into carbon dioxide.
Other experts I spoke to about this were doubtful. “That’s impossible,” said Rattan Lal, a professor and director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State, of the improvement in root productivity Chory claims she’ll achieve. He said that even if Chory managed to create a plant 20 times better than perennial grasses at storing carbon in the laboratory, real-world conditions would foil her plans. “The nutrients and water required for that grass would be enormous, and where will these come from?” Lal asked, incredulous.
Keith Paustian, a soil and crop scientist at Colorado State University, said the idea of improving storage of carbon in soil by breeding plants that produce more suberin in roots is, as he put it, “sound.” But he said that Chory’s factor of 20 is “not a credible number.” Even increasing the amount of carbon plants stored in soil by a factor of two, he said, “would be a hell of an accomplishment.” Paustian is a member of a National Academy of Science committee called Developing a Research Agenda for Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration, which issued a report on negative emissions in October 2018.
Paustian says that few crops produce 20 tons of carbon per hectare, even including both the parts above and below the ground. To meet her objective, he said, Chory would essentially have to turn the whole plant into roots made entirely of suberin.
“You can’t take all the plant’s carbon and stuff it underground or you don’t have a plant,” he said. In its new report on carbon capture and storage, the National Academy of Sciences estimates a “potentially achievable” amount of carbon dioxide that could be absorbed by crops that’s just one-tenth the amount Chory says she’ll accomplish.
After I told Chory about Lal and Paustian’s doubts, she broke off our correspondence. But through a spokesperson, she acknowledged that she has no hard evidence to support the bold claims she’d made. “We cannot know how much of an increase in suberin’s root mass and carbon sequestration is possible without further data, which we will acquire in the coming years,” she wrote, admitting tacitly that her claims were unsubstantiated.
And yet her initial claims were repeated in media reports without the qualifier she begrudgingly provided to me.
Does it matter that this story was amplified in the media and consumed by hundreds of thousands of people? At best, readers will be disappointed when they eventually discover that climate change remains an unsolved problem. At worst, solutions that might actually work might be passed over or given low priority as unnecessary.
A bigger question looms: Why had news organizations gotten this story so wrong, reporting speculation as fact?
Ivan Oransky, cofounder of Retraction Watch — a blog that monitors scientific publishing — says journalists and scientists are often “incentivized to increase sexiness and hype.” Journalists, he said, must get eyeballs and scientists must get satisfied funders. “It’s not surprising,” he said, “that we get superficial and often-wrong science being published and written about.”
A 2015 paper in the British Medical Journal identified a troubling trend in science that, in part, bears Oransky out. In an analysis of millions of papers it showed that the use of 25 positive words such as amazing, encouraging and groundbreaking had increased by a factor of almost ten between 1974 and 2014. The hype has no doubt seeps into press releases and, subsequently, into reporters’ prose.
There might be another factor. Much of what makes it into headlines is depressing news of mayhem and destruction, a fact epitomized by the old saw, “if it bleeds it leads.” But journalists also look for sweeteners to temper the bitter bad-news medicine. Even TheNew York Times now publishes a “Week in Good News” department. In recent years advocates of solutions journalism have argued it’s irresponsible not to give readers reasons to believe that problems can be solved.
I understand the impetus to seek upbeat stories. I once produced a radio report about ideas for protecting Andean summits from the ravages of climate change. I profiled a Peruvian glaciologist trying to protect glaciers by insulating them with sawdust and an inventor from Lima who hoped to induce newly bare Andean peaks to grow new glaciers by painting their dark rocks white. I knew that these inane ideas couldn’t work, and my story included a touch of skepticism. But I figured those quixotic efforts might help to illustrate the profound impacts of climate change.
I worry that my clan does just the opposite: pulling their punches when discussing solutions and soft-pedaling the alarming future scientists are increasingly certain that we face.
More deeply, I worry that journalists may be subject to what amounts to a perfect storm: The increasingly dire predictions of climate change, combined with our ardent desire to offer hope, plus a rising trend in oversold research results. The Chory case suggests that we take care not to let our appetite for upbeat stories get in the way of our inbred skepticism. It also suggests the need to painstakingly vet what we’re told — even when a story’s technical nature makes fact checking difficult. If I could find the flaws, so can anyone else who takes the time and effort.
Obviously that’s a task made harder in an era of staff and budget cuts, but it can and must be done. The stakes are too high to let hype get in the way of difficult but important messages.
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.
Books coming out this month also look at the ethics of conservation, the history of water and the exploitation of the Congo.
It’s the last month of the year, which means holidays galore — and, of course, plenty of reasons to give (and receive) books. Here are our picks for the eight best new environmental books coming out in December, with titles covering a range of challenging topics, delightful creatures and painful histories. Whether you’re giving or receiving (or just buying copies for yourself), these are all books that should help to inform and energize any reader for the coming year ahead.
As usual our links are to publishers’ sites, but you can also find any of these titles at your favorite booksellers or libraries.
Wildlife and Endangered Species:
Sea Otters: A History by Richard Ravalli — Cute, beloved and once exploited for their fur, sea otters have now become an icon of conservation. How they once came close to, and then bounced back from, extinction is a five-centuries-long tale of international intrigue, trade, conservation and ecotourism.
Science Comics: Polar Bears by Jason Viola and Zack Giallongo — This graphic novel doesn’t ship until Dec. 31, but it’s still one of our most eagerly awaited books of the month. The Science Comics series has covered all kinds of great environmental topics and this latest edition tackles polar bears and climate change. Essential reading for the kids (and maybe the adults) in your life, even if it won’t be out in time to wrap up for the holidays.
Reimagining a Place for the Wild edited by Leslie Millerit, Louise Excell and Christopher Smart — Grizzlies, wolves and bison, oh my. This collection contains 17 essays by noted conservationists and nature writers, who delve deep into the role and meaning of wildlife in the American West.
Environmental History:
Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History by Sunil Amrith — Right now Asian nations are building hundreds of dams across the Himalayas, even as climate change threatens the region and the world. That makes this an important time to look to the past to see how humans and nature have clashed and coexisted.
The Environment: A History of the Idea by Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin — World War II was an age of terrible environmental destruction. The years immediately following, the authors argue, brought about an awakening of the concept of “the environment” in people, along with an understanding that we need to address the modern-day emergencies of biodiversity loss, pollution, resource extraction and climate change.
Lincoln and the Natural Environment by James Tckach — Our 16th president presided over the Civil War, but also during a time of rapid industrialization in America. Along the way he mostly failed to protect the natural environment — the same wilderness that he had treasured as a young man. He did pass a few key pieces of environmental legislation, but was that enough? This book examines Lincoln’s legacy, good and bad.
Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed by John Prendergast and Fidel Bafile with photographs by Ryan Gosling (yes, that Ryan Gosling) — The story of the Democratic Republic of Congo is, all too often, a story of exploitation of people and natural resources by international interests. This book examines the how that has devastated the country and introduces us to Congolese activists working to make a difference.
A newly discovered plant genus could be wiped out by dams and mining. Could giving it a name save it from extinction?
Martin Cheek has an unusual and important job.
As a senior researcher at Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, Cheek leads a team of people who work around the clock to identify and name new plant species from Africa and Madagascar. Over the past several years they’ve described hundreds of new species and helped to conserve thousands more.
It’s a task with a tight timeline. As Cheek says, you can’t save a species from extinction if it doesn’t have a name.
Sometimes those names come too late.
A few years ago, Cheek and botanist Matthew Jebb from the National Botanic Garden in Dublin announced the discovery of group of endangered carnivorous plants from the Philippines. One of the newly identified species, it turned out, had probably already gone extinct due to destruction of its habitat by open-cast nickel mines. The paper describing the species dubbed it Nepenthes extincta — named both for its likely extinction and to call attention to the threats facing similarly unnamed species.
Earlier this year Cheek and his colleagues described another new plant from Cameroon, one that had been partially described by scientists nearly 70 years earlier but never named. Cheek’s paper finally completed that process, calling it Vepris bali and warning that it was probably also extinct, again due to the destruction of its only known habitat.
It may be too late for those two plants, but could another species avoid their fate? A new paper by Cheek and Aiah Lebbie, head of the biology department at Njala University, describes a critically endangered new species — the only known member of its entire genus. It’s the first new plant genus to be described in Africa in 30 years. If not protected, the researchers warn, it could be wiped out in as little as two years.
The have named the species Lebbiea grandiflora in the hopes that identifying it will help to stave off its extinction.
The newly named Lebbiea grandiflora . Photo by Martin Cheek, courtesy Royal Botanical Gardens Kew
Lebbiea grows in just two sites, the fast-moving currents beneath Sewa Rapids in Sierra Leone (described in the paper) and the Koukoutamba falls in Guinea (discovered after the paper was submitted). An annual herb with unusual pillar-like structures, the plant grows on bare rocks and depends upon clear, aerated water. It thrives during the wet season, when the rivers and waterfalls are at their fastest. When conditions dry out, the plants release their seeds and die. As the seasons change, the cycle begins again.
Those necessary conditions, the researchers warn, could soon dry out permanently. For one thing, gold and diamond mining near the site in Sierra Leone have already started to choke the rapids with sediment, slowing and dirtying the waters. If the waters don’t move fast enough, the plants will die.
That’s bad enough, but now both sites are also earmarked for construction of new hydroelectric dams supported by the World Bank.
Cheek says dams in other parts of Africa may have killed off several similar plant species. He recently led a workshop that identified several critically endangered and possibly extinct species in Guinea. “They were known from single sites, subsequently blessed with hydro dams, and recent visits to re-find the species during the best season failed to locate any plants surviving at these sites,” he says.
That could happen again if the new dams are built. The water flows at each site would change permanently and the entire plant genus could be damned to extinction.
That hasn’t happened many times before, Cheek points out. “Twenty year ago we Brits let Nesiota elliptica, the St. Helena olive, go extinct. The last few plants succumbed to some bugs. There were no seeds in a seedbank and no backup plants.”
Kew plans to collect Lebbiea specimens and seeds as a stopgap in case this plant goes extinct in the wild.
Ironically, the discovery of Lebbiea grandiflora actually came about as the result of one of the dams that could destroy it. An Environmental Impact Assessment conducted for the proposed dam in Sierra Leone revealed the existence of several new plant species, including Lebbiea.
That’s more common than you might think. According to Cheek and Lebbie’s paper, the majority of recent plant discoveries in tropical Africa stem from EIA studies for mining and infrastructure projects.
“That EIA studies make such a major contribution to current species discovery points to the scarcity of resources from other sponsors to support botanical inventory at a time when species are probably being lost before they are discovered,” they write in their paper.
Lebbiea may have been revealed by an EIA study, but in general the studies do not guarantee conservation actions. “A lot of EIAs in Africa are paper exercises, sadly,” Cheek says. “I only went to Koukoutamba and found Lebbiea there because I distrusted the EIA that was supposedly done.”
Africa is not alone in this situation. A recent essay by conservation expert Bill Laurance criticized EIAs, which are frequently funded by infrastructure developers around the world, as “increasingly not worth the paper they’re printed on.” He accused the studies of “giving green lights to developments that should never see the light of day — projects that are destroying irreplaceable habitat or wiping out the last representatives of endangered species.”
Speaking of those last representatives, what’s the likelihood that Lebbiea grandiflora will survive? It’s probably too early to tell. No decisions have been made about protecting the plant in the wild. Meanwhile the fact that the two sites are 100 miles apart could mean that other populations exist between them. As to the broader plant family, coauthor Lebbie has conducted extensive surveys in Sierra Leone and found additional new-to-science plants which could even be members of the same genus, although formal identification is still pending.
Cheek acknowledges that if either of those situations ends up being true then Lebbiea grandiflora may not be so rare after all — but time is short to find out. For now he hopes the simple act of naming the plant and the genus could be the thing that spurs future discovery and conservation before this plant, too, is lost.
Sharon Levy’s new book offers a fascinating history of wetlands, their human-caused decline and our growing understanding of why we need to restore them.
“Flush and forget it” was the promise of plumbing, but it came with a cost. Homes and cities became cleaner after the invention of flush toilets in the 19th century, but in some ways that shift also caused a decline in the health of both human and local environments.
As author Sharon Levy recounts in her new book The Marsh Builders (Oxford University Press), that’s because people had not yet invented something we now take for granted: sewage treatment. Without that critical step, our waste flowed straight into rivers, the source of drinking water. So as new-fangled flush toilets whooshed waste out of the house, cities such as London, Boston and St. Louis saw a sudden surge in deaths from cholera, typhoid and other waterborne diseases.
Not coincidentally, humans were simultaneously destroying wetlands, a trend that accelerated through the 20th century. People perceived these marshy regions as wastelands, useless for building and often a blockade to human travels and commerce. They were also known to be sources of deadly diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever. Although people did not yet understand mosquitoes’ role in transmitting these diseases, they still saw swamps as unhealthy places to be avoided.
So as soon as humans had the technology and horsepower, they drained and filled wetlands, congratulating themselves for “progress” as they used the once-soggy land for agriculture, housing, airports and dumps. In the past 300 years, humans have destroyed 87 percent of the world’s wetlands, according to the Ramsar Convention on wetlands.
In the 19th century, water pollution in many places became impossible to ignore. With fish dying en masse, leaving entire watersheds void of life and tainted rivers thickening into sludge, pressure mounted to come up with a solution. As Levy vividly relates, researchers went down many false paths as they set out to discover the causes of water pollution and related illnesses. Eventually scientists discovered that microbes — including some of the same species that naturally live in the wetlands humans were so intent on destroying — break down nutrient pollution in water. They put these microbes to work treating sewage, experimenting with different models.
Despite this progress, Levy writes, American rivers and lakes by the 1950s and ’60s had become cesspools, with flaming water and floating dead rats bloated as big as dogs. Lake Erie was known as “America’s Dead Sea.” This grim reality led to passage of the Clean Water Act more than 45 years ago, and a one-time bump in federal funding helped cities comply with requirements to build improved sewage plants that delivered “secondary treatment.” Activated sludge, cultivating populations of nitrifying bacteria to break down sewage, was considered the state of the art.
Which brings us to the main storyline of the book: In the 1970s California required Arcata, a town in Humboldt County, to join a regional sewage infrastructure project. But some citizens were concerned that would lead to urban growth. They thought that building sewage lines would result in suburban sprawl covering over neighboring farmland. They were also worried about the high cost of the project and were intrigued by a cheaper way to clean wastewater, by using wetlands.
Over several years, the “wastewater rebellion” — led by Bob Gearheart, a professor of environmental engineering at Humboldt State University; local fisheries professor George Allen; and Frank Klopp, the city’s director of public works — fought multiple rounds in the courts to prove the state-prescribed industrial method wasn’t necessary in Arcata and that the town could be exempted. While this was going on, the rebels also learned more about early tests of building wetlands for this purpose and did their own trials. When they finally won in court, they built one of the world’s first constructed wetlands to treat community sewage on the bed of a damaged marsh. The result, the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, was dedicated in 1981.
Photo: Bob Doran (CC BY 2.0)
Since then a host of wildlife have flocked to this sewage treatment plant, and it has become a beloved local park for recreation — all for far less money and energy than industrial sewage treatment.
Levy braids these three threads — the destruction of wetlands and rise of water pollution, the evolution of sewage treatment, and Arcata’s fight against “Big Sewage” — throughout the book in this fascinating history.
She brings the Arcata characters to life, sympathetically laying out the political, social and psychological dynamics. The historical passages pull the reader into the past, including portraits of the North American wilderness prior to European intervention and 19th century human tussles with epic wetlands such as Chesapeake Bay and the Midwest’s Great Black Swamp. She doesn’t sidestep the science but breaks it down clearly and authoritatively.
Today water bodies in most developed countries are no longer considered open sewers and industrial waste dumps. The Clean Water Act and related international policies, coupled with scientific and engineering advances, have cleaned lakes and rivers a lot by clamping down on direct sources of pollution.
But the number of humans on the planet has more than doubled since the act was passed, and efforts to feed them, house them and sell them stuff is causing a crisis in nonpoint source pollution that runs off the land. As I’ve covered, fertilizers and animal waste running off farms and varied pollutants slipping off paved cities are causing deadly algal blooms, tainting drinking water once again (looking at you, Lake Erie), and creating seasonal dead zones in lakes and oceans.
Meanwhile climate change is warming waters, making them more hospitable to algal growth, and sea level rise is beginning to flood coastal cities such as Miami and Virginia Beach. As science advances, we are learning more and more about how wetlands filter human pollution and how they can protect against sea-level rise.
Arcata’s elegant solution to treat its sewage solely with marshes is now reaching limits. Like a traditional industrial sewage plant, it needs revamping every 30 years or so. The town’s population has also grown, and more sewage requires larger acreage of wetlands for treatment. But even in places that can’t replace industrial sewage facilities with wetlands, restoring swamps and marshes around should be a priority, Levy argues. That’s because they make so many human-caused problems better by cleaning agricultural and urban runoff, increasing habitat for wildlife, helping to control floods, and offering a better quality of life for people and other creatures.
When something dies in nature, it becomes part of a system that gives life. Can humans re-embrace the same concept?
All the world over, death is a very green thing. I see it every day here in the rainforests of coastal Alaska. There are the fallen corpses of giant hemlocks, which lie for decades sheltering wildlife and sprouting young trees from their softened bark. There’s the annual arrival of millions of salmon, carried off by eagles and bears when they die to feed a whole forest. Mildewing bones, shells, feathers and quills are also scattered about these woods. Sinking into the Earth, they are ephemeral monuments to life-giving death.
Strolling among so much that is dead, I can’t help but consider my own demise. I wonder how in repose I can join the party I see around me, where death gives rise to life.
Of course this sentiment clashes with present-day American burial practices, which almost puritanically attempt to isolate our bodies from natural systems of decay. In the process, they generate tremendous amounts of waste and pollution that live on long after we die.
Fortunately, as I found out, a revolution of greener burial options is upon us.
A Grave Subject
First, consider the waste involved in traditional American burial involving caskets and vaults. Each year at least 63,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete (a particularly carbon-intensive material) and up to 30 million board feet of lumber are brought to market only to be buried in the ground. Depending upon the product, ancillary waste may also include upholstery, brass handles, copper, bronze and of course various forms of plastic.
Cemetery in Kyoto, Japan by Luís Alvoeiro Quaresma/Unsplash
Even in death we are profligate consumers.
Pollution is another matter. Funeral homes use more than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde and other toxic embalming agents each year. Just handling these products is risky business. Even worse, as caskets degrade, each grave leaches the toxins into the soil. Additionally, typical lawn-style cemeteries require fossil fuel for mowing and harmful fertilizers for maintaining a monoculture of non-native grasses. With more than 22,000 cemeteries nationwide , the practice commits large tracts of potential habitat to a fate as biologically desolate as the suburban front yard.
Fortunately, traditional burial appears to be experiencing its own demise. The National Funeral Directors Association and others describe a sharp decline they attribute primarily to expense, with funerals now averaging over $7,000. But experts also cite our more transient and less religious culture, along with rising consumer concern over the waste and pollution of traditional burial.
As traditional burial wanes, cremation has increased from just 5 percent of U.S. deaths in 1970 to more than 50 percent today, a threshold first crossed in 2016. The association predicts cremation will surpass 80 percent in the next decade.
But cremation comes with its own environmental problems. While it eliminates the need for embalming and is less wasteful than being buried in an ornate box, it remains a surprisingly high source of pollution. According to the Funeral Consumer Alliance, each cremation requires burning 28 gallons of fuel, which emits 540 pounds of carbon dioxide. It’s roughly the equivalent of a 500-mile car ride. Gaseous emissions are another concern, especially for neighborhoods downwind of crematoriums that may be exposed to various toxins and carcinogens, including mercury from incinerated dental fillings.
Greener Solutions
A more promising development is the rapid growth in various shades of “green,” or natural, burials. Requests are now so mainstream they occupy a solid niche in the funeral industry. Common options include non-toxic embalming methods, biodegradable shrouds or caskets, and cemeteries offering environmentally sound practices.
Unfortunately, some of it is mere greenwashing. For instance, some providers offer sustainability packages that are nothing more than quaint lists of feel-good actions such as carpooling to the cemetery (it’s not clear if this includes the hearse).
Fortunately the Green Burial Council has been providing some oversight since it formed in 2005. The organization’s mission is “to inspire and advocate for environmentally sustainable, natural death care.” Today they offer recognized sustainability certificates to funeral homes and cemeteries. Certified homes must offer nontoxic alternatives to embalming and council-approved burial containers, including biodegradable caskets or shrouds.
For cemeteries, the council offers certifications in three categories. Hybrid cemeteries are those that continue hosting traditional burials but also accept forms of natural burial, including embalmment-free interment and biodegradable containers. A step up from the hybrid is the natural burial ground, which prohibits toxic embalming fluids and burial containers not made from natural or plant-derived materials.
The council’s gold standard is the conservation burial ground, which meets all the requirements of a natural burial ground, but also must “specifically and exclusively” designate its lands in perpetuity for conservation. Such cemeteries must be under a conservation easement or similar deed restriction.
An example is the Glendale Memorial Nature Preserve, which offers natural burial among 350 acres of fields, streams and woods in the Florida panhandle. Brothers John and Bill Wilkerson established the preserve to prevent their family’s former farm from ever being subdivided for development. The preserve operates as a nonprofit and ensures eighty percent of the estate will “remain forever wild and free of development.”
Marker at Glendale Memorial Preserve. UF/IFAS photo by Tyler Jones (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Like other natural options, entombment at Glendale costs a fraction of a traditional burial and avoids the waste and pollution of modern burial practices. Small, simple markers indicate each grave, and the area has trails for walking. A quarter of all burial receipts support the area’s conservation, including restoration of its long leaf pine forest. In this way the land promises connectivity with other wild habitats in Florida’s quickly developing landscape, a vast improvement over traditional cemeteries.
John Wilkerson, who describes himself as “steward and part-time grave digger” at Glendale, says a host of species use the preserve, including deer, black bear and the eastern indigo snake, a key predator with Endangered Species Act protection. Wilkerson says endangered Florida panthers have also passed through, illustrating the preserve’s value for habitat connectivity.
“We’ve contributed to the conservation of life on this planet,” Wilkerson says of the preserve. “And we’ve saved tons and tons of concrete and steel from being buried in the ground.”
While conservation burial grounds are the most eco-friendly option for modern burial, they are not widespread. One recent paper identified only nine sites nationwide. A challenge may be keeping such areas financially solvent if burial revenue does not keep pace with taxes or other expenses. In this way, the affordability that makes natural burial attractive may act against its feasibility for some.
Nevertheless, variations of the idea occur in both rural and urban areas and alongside public lands. The most recent example is the 112-acre Larkspur Conservation burial ground in Tennessee, which opened in 2018 and will soon be under a permanent conservation easement with The Nature Conservancy. The site is adjacent to Taylor Hollow, a 163-acre preserve already owned by the conservancy.
“This a very special place,” says Gabby Lynch, director of protection at the conservancy’s Tennessee chapter. “It has the feel of a haven, with hills and creeks running through an oak-hickory mixed hardwood forest, and in spring there is this fabulous wildflower display that includes a number of state-listed endangered plant species.”
Habitat connectivity was a central motivation for the conservancy. Lynch explains that the area lies within a ring of topographic variation known as the Highland Rim, which surrounds the greater Nashville area. Modeling by the conservancy shows it is a key “climate flow corridor” capable of supporting species migration.
“It is exactly the type of landform that plants and animals need to respond to climate change,” says Lynch.
Looking to the Future
Other ideas are also gaining in the move away from traditional burial. Alkaline hydrolysis, also called water cremation or resomation, is a water-based alternative to cremation by fire. It is much less energy-intensive and produces “ash” that can be contained in an urn. Another option is Recompose, a Seattle experiment in human composting. It entails a facility where bodies are placed in individual vessels and treated with wood chips and aeration, producing soil in about 30 days. The goal is environmentally sound burial that simultaneously addresses a dearth of urban cemetery space. Recompose hopes to take its first customers in 2019.
The new and more natural approaches to burial reflect truly traditional ways that humans have contended with mortality in the past. Simple inhumation, where the deceased are rested in a trench with stones and other natural materials, was practiced by Vikings, early Alaska Native groups and others. Tibetan sky burial, where a body is placed on a mountaintop to be consumed by birds of prey, is an ancient tradition dating back 11,000 years and is still common today.
Today’s trends shows burial in America headed in the right direction. And it has to, as dying is on the rise due to an aging population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, deaths will increase 35 percent in the next 20 years as Baby Boomers reach their life expectancy. The anticipated 3.5 million annual deaths will require smart use of space and resources.
A move toward greener burial answers that need. Experts say it also grants us, and our loved ones, the peace that comes from supporting the natural world.
They tried to bury the report by releasing it on Black Friday, but the threats we face — and possible solutions we can take on — are still very real.
Climate change “presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” and the United States will need to make monumental efforts to mitigate and adapt to those threats, according to a detailed federal report quietly released by the Trump administration over Thanksgiving weekend.
This report is clear:
It’s real
It’s us
It’s here
It’s bad
It’s getting worse
But our choices can and do make a difference.
So: act now.
The 1,656-page peer-reviewed report — the latest edition of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, authored by officials from 13 federal agencies and numerous independent researchers — was released at 2pm EST on Black Friday when few people would likely notice. Many advocates, including several of the report’s authors, accused the Trump administration of attempting to bury the report.
That’s a dangerous ploy on the part of the administration, as threats identified by the report include life-threatening air pollution and heat waves, worsening wildfires, destructive storm surges and sea-level rise, drought, infectious disease outbreaks, and agricultural declines affecting both crops and livestock.
Most notably, the report showcases hundreds of pages of evidence that these threats are already happening, with detailed chapters on 10 regions throughout the United States. Existing effects include constrained access to fresh water, lengthening warm-weather seasons, shifts in animal populations, coral bleaching events, the spread of invasive insects, declines in snowpack and sea ice, increases in heavy rainstorms and floods and a surge in destructive wildfires.
The report primarily focuses on the effects of climate change on the United States, but as it notes, the “cascading impacts of climate change threaten the natural, built and social systems we rely on, both within and beyond the nation’s borders.”
The costs from these threats are already on the rise and will soon reach potentially crippling levels. “Annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states,” according to the report, which found that under the worst-case scenario climate change would wipe out more than 10 percent of the country’s GDP — more than double the losses of the recent recession, according to The New York Times.
Buried Report
The report, which contrasts heavily with the Trump administration’s ongoing deregulatory agenda, was issued just two days after the president mocked the very idea of climate change during a climate-change inspired cold snap that affected the American Northeast last week. “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS — Whatever happened to Global Warming?,” tweeted President Trump.
Many experts and officials questioned why the report was released on Black Friday — much earlier than the originally planned release date of mid-December. Even journalists couldn’t get an answer.
Federal officials refused to answer my questions on climate report in press conference about timing of report & why it contradicts President Trump? Other reports try again, they still dodge those questions. NOAA pr person not allowing experts to talk
But others said they knew exactly why the report was issued the way it was. Steve Milloy, publisher of the climate-denying website JunkScience and a member of Trump’s EPA transition team, told The New York Times that the strategy was to release the report “on a day when nobody cares, and hope it gets swept away by the next day’s news.”
Did that strategy backfire? The National Climate Assessment ended up being the lead story on many newspapers the next day, and may continue to do so.
Meanwhile, others in government pledged to stand up to Trump’s attempts to minimize or further bury this report. “No matter how hard they try, the Trump administration can’t bury the effects of climate change in a Black Friday news dump — effects their own federal government scientists have uncovered,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D—RI) said in a statement. Others from the incoming “blue wave” of new elected officials echoed that sentiment.
People are going to die if we don’t start addressing climate change ASAP.
It’s not enough to think it’s “important.” We must make it urgent.
That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy. https://t.co/bn6NloGlaY
As to the actual content of the National Climate Assessment, the report, like the United National climate report issued earlier this year, says we must continue efforts to mitigate the release of greenhouse gases causing climate change and remove what’s already there.
That won’t be enough on its own, though, as the effects of the emissions we have already placed into the atmosphere will be felt for many years to come. “It is very likely that some physical and ecological impacts will be irreversible for thousands of years, while others will be permanent,” the report warns. Those permanent risks include the extinction of species and irreversible damage to the land.
That’s why a big section of the report is about adaptation — the changes we’ll need to make “at the individual, local, regional and national levels” in order to deal with the effects of climate change.
Some of those adaptations are relatively simple. For example, individuals in flood-prone areas can seal their basements, elevate their furnaces, water heaters and electric panels, and start to keep supplies of food, drinking water and candles.
Most others are much more complex and may require public-private partnerships to address the specific needs in each community, such as anticipating the future flow of water supplies for hydropower and irrigation. The report contains a framework for conducting these assessments by examining risk, allocating resources, and monitoring and adjusting efforts over time.
Of course, many adaptation steps are already increasingly underway around the country, but the report warns that climate change is already outpacing them, putting too many communities behind the eight ball. Taking things to the next level will be costly, but the report says adaptation “can generate significant benefits in excess of its costs,” including hard-to-quantify benefits “such as economic revitalization and other social benefits.”
What’s Next?
Many states and cities are already taking on the challenge of addressing climate change, but will the recommendations made in this report fall on deaf ears on the federal level? It seems unlikely that much mitigation or adaptation will take place under the current administration, which is already trying to discredit the report by saying, incorrectly, that it is based only on “the most extreme scenario.” The report actually models the future based on all available scenarios, including the potential development of new sustainable technologies.
I wrote the climate scenarios chapter myself so I can confirm it considers ALL scenarios, from those where we go carbon negative before end of century to those where carbon emissions continue to rise. What WH says is demonstrably false. https://t.co/aTkrBNh9IL
Even more telling: President Trump on Monday responded to questions about the report by saying “I don’t believe it.”
Regardless of the president’s denial, what’s obvious from this and numerous other reports and studies is that immediate action is necessary on all fronts if we hope to avoid both short-term and long-term disaster. As noted ocean conservationist Sylvia Earle put it last week, “The next 10 years will be the most important in the next 10,000 years in terms of shaping a future where humans can have a hope for an enduring place within the natural systems that keep us alive.”
It’s the last month of the year, which means holidays galore — and, of course, plenty of reasons to give (and receive) books. Here are our picks for the eight best new environmental books coming out in December, with titles covering a range of challenging topics, delightful creatures and painful histories. Whether you’re giving or receiving (or just buying copies for yourself), these are all books that should help to inform and energize any reader for the coming year ahead.
It’s a task with a tight timeline. As Cheek says, you can’t save a species from extinction if it doesn’t have a name.
As author Sharon Levy recounts in her new book 
