It’s Time for Journalism to Ring the Alarm About Climate Change More Loudly

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 The New 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.

© 2018 Daniel Grossman. All rights reserved.

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.

Otters, Polar Bears and Abraham Lincoln: The Best New Environmental Books of December

Books coming out this month also look at the ethics of conservation, the history of water and the exploitation of the Congo.

revelator readsIt’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 ottersSea 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.

The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction and the Ethics of Conservation by Ben A. Minteer — How far should we go to prevent extinction? Minteer examines some tough ethical questions in this short book of essays.

polar bearsScience 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.

lincolnLincoln 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.

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

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

You Can’t Save a Species If It Doesn’t Have a Name

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.

extinction countdownIt’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.

Lebbiea grandiflora
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.

The Marsh Builders: How One Town Fought ‘Big Sewage’ and Built Treatment Wetlands That Inspired the World

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.

© 2018 Erica Gies. All rights reserved.

Make Death Green Again

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
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.

“It’s a great ending to a life,” says Lynch.

© 2018 Tim Lydon. All rights reserved.

The Climate Report the Trump Administration Didn’t Want You to See

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.

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.

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.

Adapt or Die?

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.

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.”

An Ax, Not a Scalpel: The Dangers of Trump’s Deregulations

Trump’s “take no prisoners” deregulatory strategy carries big litigation risks.

Some people prefer using an ax to a scalpel. The Trump administration, for instance. And the ax strategy may work fine on trees, but it doesn’t work so well in surgery. Plus there’s always the chance of cutting off your own foot.

In many environmental domains, the Trump administration seems set upon going as far as it possibly can with its regulatory proposals. And then perhaps a little further. This is a high-risk strategy: It’s as if instead of adopting the Clean Power Plan to ratchet down emissions from the power industry, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency had tried to ban coal and oil entirely. Here’s how the Trump approach works:

  • Don’t just slow down increases in national MPG standards for cars and provide an off-ramp. Instead, freeze the standards completely and then for good measure try to overturn California’s established power to impose its own standards.
  • Don’t just water down the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s effort to reduce carbon emissions by electricity generators. Replace it with a mandate so weak that it could actually increase carbon emissions. And then give states the ability to opt out of even that. And allow industry to evade rules governing new power plants.
  • As for WOTUS, the Obama administration’s rule governing federal jurisdiction over wetlands and streams, don’t just repeal the rule. And don’t fine-tune it to lighten its impact. Instead, adopt an interpretation of the Clean Water Act that appeals courts across the country have rejected — an interpretation that would take away jurisdiction even the Bush administration never challenged.
  • Not to mention the strategy for dealing with unfavorable science. Rather than trying to find flaws in individual studies, propose an exclusionary rule that would prevent key scientific studies from being considered as evidence. Basically, any study using confidential health information would be excluded at EPA’s discretion. That proposal was so egregious that it has now been put on the back burner by even the Trump administration.

High-risk strategies are always trade-offs: worse odds but bigger reward. The Trump administration seems unwilling even to pretend a serious effort to carry out its statutory mandate of protecting the environment.

This unwillingness to maintain a façade of environmental concern may be appealing to the base. But it’s bound to make it harder to persuade judges that its actions are reasonable. The odds are that many judges will find this multi-front assault on environmental protection hard to swallow. And losing cases can have a snowball effect, as judges acquire a sense of lawless behavior by the government.

Maybe the administration is gambling that it will win these cases because of its Supreme Court appointments. But some of these measures may go too far even for Chief Justice Roberts, the new swing vote. And in any event, the Supreme Court hears very few cases a year, and it’s going to have a lot on its plate besides environmental regulation. By proceeding on so many major actions at once, the Trump administration is probably guaranteeing that some won’t get Supreme Court review.

In case you think that the Obama administration did the same thing but in reverse, I beg to differ. Obama’s EPA spent a lot of time worrying about the feasibility of its efforts. For instance, the Clean Power Plan offered states options for complying and were calibrated on a state-by-state basis depending on the local electricity mix. Major rules like the Clean Power Plan and WOTUS had last-minute changes to soften their impact and make them more acceptable. One of the “building blocks” of the original Clean Power Plan proposal was dropped because of legal concerns, and safe harbors were added to WOTUS. This was quite different from what we’re seeing now.

The Trump administration’s dramatic efforts to gut environmental protection may trigger Newton’s Second Law. In case you’ve forgotten, Newton said every action has an equal but opposite reaction.

Radical actions on Trump’s part may lead the other side to take bolder steps than they would have taken otherwise, as soon as they can do so. The Trump approach can also reach the point where ordinary voters, who generally favor the environment but don’t see it as a priority issue, start paying serious attention. Scorched earth tactics can cause great harm, but they can also fuel rebellions and counter-attacks.

This story first appeared on Legal Planet.

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.

Forests and Biodiversity Need Indigenous Stewardship

Protecting the planet from climate change and extinction depends on similarly protecting indigenous peoples, according to several new reports.

Around 2011 or 2012, indigenous villagers outside Manu National Park, an internationally renowned biodiversity hotspot in southwestern Peru, noticed that bananas were mysteriously disappearing from the trees that ringed their huts. At the same time, they found that their huts were being ransacked while they were out. They only understood what was happening when they finally caught glimpses of their rarely seen neighbors, uncontacted Mashco Piro tribespeople who lived deep within the park.

Soon after, passing boats saw these isolated Mashco Piro peoples on the banks of the Madre de Dios River in 2013, causing a worldwide sensation. That’s when the reasons for the missing bananas became clear. The villagers, who spoke a dialect similar to their isolated “brothers,” conveyed a message to outsiders that hunger had forced the tribespeople out of the park.

The Mashco Piro are one of four isolated tribes living on untitled land in the park whose conditions are termed “stable.” But stable may not fully characterize their situation. Despite the park’s bountiful and lush resources, the Mashco Piro are malnourished and highly vulnerable, the news site Mongabay reported last year.

“That’s because the park disregards the fundamental rights of the tribespeople,” Julio Cusurichi, president of the Native Federation of the Madre de Dios River, tells The Revelator. “It’s typical of the type of nature conservation that confines indigenous peoples to subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering and does not allow them the right to other economic or productive activities like sustainable harvests.”

This is a form of what’s sometimes called “fortress conservation,” a model where protected areas are established that ban or limit human disturbance. Similar models that can discriminate against indigenous peoples include total exclusion from conservation areas with rangers patrolling and enforcing park boundaries, and allowing tourism, safari hunting and scientific research only within protected areas. Hungry peoples who return to hunt or gather food from the only land they know are later called “squatters, poachers and criminals.”

Cusurichi says the solution is to secure indigenous peoples’ “free, prior, and informed consent, and to recognize and protect our rights to our lands.”

Fortress conservation is also condemned by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, and numerous indigenous and human-rights organizations and their allies. A recent report co-authored by Tauli-Corpuz and the Rights and Resources Initiative, titled “Cornered by Protected Areas,” is highly critical of these types of conservation models.

They are based, according to the June 2018 report, on a belief that local peoples will use natural resources in irrational, destructive ways that promote biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. That clashes with indigenous ways of knowing, practices and cultural values.

Indigenous peoples, the report points out, have managed traditional territories in the Amazon for many thousands of years in ways that have preserved biodiversity and kept their environments pristine. It’s modern civilization that has come in with an unquenchable thirst for resources.

amazon river
Indigenous family in the Amazon. Photo: Cesar David Martinez/Avaaz (Public domain)

This issue takes on even greater urgency with two additional new studies. The first is a widely reported map by researchers from the University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conservation Society that shows a mere five countries are home to more than 70 percent of the world’s last undisturbed wilderness areas. These include Canada, Brazil, Botswana and Australia — all countries with significant indigenous populations.

An accompanying article in the journal Nature states that stopping industrial development to protect the livelihoods of indigenous peoples can conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services just as well as strictly protected areas. As such, the authors wrote, “the recognition of local community rights to land ownership and management could be a key way to limit the impacts of industrial activity.”

The other report, the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, drives home the message that if we don’t take dramatic steps to hold temperatures to a rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next 12 years the world will start to see catastrophic effects from climate change, from more violent weather events, searing heat waves, wildfires, droughts and mass extinctions.

Just prior to the report’s release the scientist signatories issued a statement that concluded, “Our planet’s future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forests.”

As to those forests, indigenous peoples represent just 5 percent of the world’s population, but they own, occupy or use a quarter of the world’s surface area, and they safeguard 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity on their ancestral lands, according  to the World Bank.

Landmark, a global platform that maps indigenous lands, found the best guardians of the forests are forest peoples themselves, and recent research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that titling lands to indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon significantly reduces both disturbances and clearing.

According to Tauli-Corpuz, research by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the World Resources Institute shows that in countries with secure legal protections for community land rights, deforestation rates are significantly lower in community-managed forests than outside them.

“When our rights are respected, deforestation can be reversed, and forest health restored,” Tauli-Corpuz tells us. “In Niger, for example, the government’s conservation policy for much of the 20th century prohibited indigenous peoples from using the forests they had been protecting and managing for generations, resulting in widespread deforestation and land degradation. In the 1990s the government reversed course, recognizing and strengthening communities’ forest rights. By 2010 communities were able to regrow some 200 million trees, absorbing 30 million tons of carbon.”

In the Brazilian Amazon, the deforestation rate is 11 times lower in indigenous and community forests. In the Guatemalan Petén it is 20 times lower, and in the Mexican Yucatán it is 350 times lower.

Indigenous rights, as we see from all of these recent reports and studies, are the proven best managers of many of the world’s most intact and biodiverse ecosystems and are the key to preserving forests. Twenty-two percent of the forest carbon found in the world’s 52 tropical and subtropical countries is stewarded by indigenous and local communities, and one-third is in areas where indigenous peoples and local communities lack formal recognition of their tenure rights — putting them, their lands and the carbon stored there at risk.

“Many of the issues confronting indigenous peoples, such as climate change and our disappearing forests, affect all of us,” Tauli-Corpuz says. “Standing in solidarity with those who are the proven best protectors of the world’s forests is not just an indigenous rights issue, but a human rights issue that will affect the world’s vital resources for all of us for generations to come.”

© 2018 Terri Hansen. All rights reserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

Endangered Languages, Endangered Ecologies

Introducing ‘The Wild 5’

Sign up for our newsletter for new content and insight you can’t find anywhere else.

Do you get our weekly email newsletter? If not, this is the perfect time to sign up: Subscribers now receive exclusive access to our new feature, “The Wild 5.” Each week — in addition to our latest articles and essays — we’ll bring you links to five additional stories from around the web that will provide important insight into critical environmental issues. You’ll find a mix of politics, science, activism and the arts — and even a touch of the weird.

Don’t miss out — sign up for our newsletter using the form below.

Species Conservation in a Patchy World

What happens when a patch of habitat is lost? Our new research finds that loss of only the smallest patches could affect species diversity in the landscape.

Like it or not, we humans seem determined to keep clearing nature out of our way, leaving little room for biodiversity. Land clearance transforms what was once a more or less continuous ecosystem to a kind of landscape mosaic. Any bits of nature we’ve overlooked become a little like islands, immersed in a sea of human activities.

In these situations biodiversity has to cope as best it can. Some species can do okay in human-dominated parts of the landscape, but many do not. In fact the successful conservation of most native species depends wholly on their ability to exist within the newly fragmented patches. As a result, individual plants and animals die off, and total biodiversity is reduced.

With ever-expanding human populations, this is of great concern. But if isolation into patches is so bad for biodiversity, what does that say about naturally occurring patchy habitats like island archipelagos? Or networks of ponds and lakes? Or the high-elevation “sky islands” of mountaintops?

islands
Islands of Honda Bay, Palawan, by Angelo Juan Ramos (CC BY 2.0)

Around the 1970s scientists became interested in the apparent similarity of naturally and artificially patchy habitats, and they’ve been comparing ecological processes between them ever since. As every separate patch of habitat (natural or not) differs in size, shape and proximity to other patches, ecologists are interested in how these factors affect the number of species they support.

Probably the thing that has received the most attention is the size of the patch, and with good reason. First, larger patches can hold a lot more individuals of any species present — the more individuals you have, the less likely it is they will all die at once, with the species ending up locally extinct. So that’s one reason: more stable populations. Second, larger patches also tend to have a wider range of environmental conditions, different soil types and so on. That means they should support more species because there’s a greater chance the resources that each species needs to make a living will be found somewhere in the bigger area.

Amazon rainforest
Aerial view of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest by Neil Palmer (CIAT) (CC BY-SA 2.0)

On the other hand, what if you don’t like the neighbors in a large patch because, say, they eat you? Or they grab all the resources you both need to live and force you out (i.e. they’re better competitors)? Or the food you need just happens not to be there? Then maybe you’ll do better in a small patch, with more accommodating neighbors. Or perhaps your species just never made it to a large patch when the landscape was divided up. While patch size gives us some idea how many species we will find, it doesn’t say as much about which species these will be. This is important to know, because the more that the species composition differs among the patches, the more important every patch may be if your aim is to keep all those species present in the landscape.

If larger patches are more valuable habitat, but some species are found only in small patches, we might ask what the loss of only those smaller patches would mean for species diversity? It could be an important question to ask because the smaller a patch is, the greater the risk that it could be destroyed — and with it the loss of all native species. With a climate that’s increasingly throwing out unprecedented droughts, floods, storms and wildfires, the potential to lose a few small patches in a short time starts to look like a realistic possibility. And let’s not forget that small patches are also more likely to be intentionally cleared, as they are less visible, not as highly valued and often lacking formal protection. If small patches contain only species that are also found in their larger cousins, then we probably need not be too concerned. But if some species are found only in these small patches — either because they prefer them or simply due to chance — then those species will be lost even if all the largest patches are preserved.

Alaskan wetlands
Alaskan wetlands with discrete patches of habitat by Daniel Dignan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

So ultimately, how important are these patches? We wanted to put that question to the test. Our recent analysis of more than 160 published datasets simulated what would happen if various types of patches were destroyed and how that would impact the “network” of other patches that surrounded them. Surprisingly, we found that if only the smallest patches in a network were lost, it would still reduce overall species diversity in about 80 percent of patchy habitat networks.

Although large animals like mammals were at lower risk than insects and plants, relative species loss was pretty much the same regardless of whether the patches were natural or a result of fragmentation. And the proportion of species removed was rather high: Even if those smallest patches destroyed represent only 10 percent of the total area contained in all the patches, on average between 7 and 9 percent of species would be lost. By way of comparison, the most widely used species-loss model based on reductions in area (described here) would predict about 3 percent species loss for a 10 percent loss of area.

What then are the practical implications of this for species diversity in these patchy habitats? Well, it’s worth noting that maintaining species representation in a landscape is only part of the conservation story; their populations also need to be viable, and this study doesn’t speak to that. But on the face of it, we should perhaps expect the destruction of only the smallest patches to result in the loss of at least some species from most landscapes for most patchy habitat types — which, increasingly, is typical of almost all broad habitats these days.

If that happened because of some extreme climatic event, I doubt there’s much that could be done — but our research suggests that we should surely avoid the intentional destruction of any natural habitat patches wherever possible.

I prefer to think of the results as supporting the idea that any patch of natural habitat could be making a tangible contribution to regional species diversity. You never know what you might find in them, and that means they’re worth preserving.

© 2018 David Deane. All rights reserved.

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.

Previously in The Revelator:

Conservationists: Don’t Give Up on the ‘Living Dead’