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.
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.
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.
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.”
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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 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.
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 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.
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.
Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson talks about how climate change threatens our oceans, the implications for environmental justice and the most promising solutions.
Oceans stretch across 70 percent of our planet, and the vast majority of the world beneath them is unmapped and unexplored. Their depths may still hold many secrets, but we know they face serious risks from overfishing and pollution. The biggest threat of all is climate change, which could affect billions of people in coastal communities, says marine biologist and conservation strategist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
Johnson is the founder and president of Ocean Collectiv, a strategy consulting firm that looks at conservation solutions through a social-justice lens. Developing those solutions has never been more necessary. As Johnson says, “The lack of public and corporate reaction and response to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report — which tells us we have 12 years maximum to avoid catastrophic climate change — is terrifying.”
We talked to her about what’s at stake and the types of solutions she thinks are most promising.
In order to protect our oceans, what policy changes do we need at the national and international levels?
The top three are ending the use of fossil fuels, closing the high seas to fishing and protecting 30 to 50 percent of the coastal ocean.
Beyond policy, what else should we be focusing our efforts on? Enforcement? Public engagement? Technology?
We need to be pressuring corporations to adopt sustainable practices ASAP and to raise the bar for what qualifies as sustainable. For example, some of the fisheries being certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council are far from deserving of that label.
Community consultations for ocean zoning in Barbuda with the Blue Halo Initiative. Photo by Will McClintock
From an environmental-justice standpoint, who stands to lose the most if we fail to adequately protect ocean and coastal ecosystems?
Poor people and people of color in coastal communities will be most at risk. Sea-level rise, overfishing, pollution and coastal development affect them first and worst, and they have the fewest options for alternative livelihoods or relocation.
What ocean-related issues did you follow in this year’s election cycle?
Climate change! I’m excited that Andrew Polis has been elected governor of Colorado on a platform of getting Colorado to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040, the most ambitious goal yet for any state.
On the flip side, ballot measures across the country to restrict drilling and accelerate shifts to renewable energy failed amidst heavy oppositional funding from the fossil-fuel industry.
What’s one of the best solutions you’ve seen used to combat an ocean-related problem or to help people who depend on the ocean?
Ocean farming. Regenerative ocean farming, as pioneered by Greenwave and others, means growing seaweed and shellfish (oysters, mussels, clams) — not constructing more salmon farms. Seaweed and shellfish don’t need to be fed; they grow with just sunlight and the nutrients and plankton already in seawater.
As pioneering ocean farmer Bren Smith put it, “the real kicker” is that these low-maintenance ocean plants and animals “require no fresh water, no deforestation and no fertilizer,” plus they improve water quality and create habitats for other species.
Because seaweed grows so quickly (kelp can grow over one foot a day) it can provide healthy food and clean biofuels while being a significant part of the climate solution. And developing this industry creates good jobs. (There’s more about this in my recent article in Scientific American, co-authored with my mom: “Soil and Seaweed: Farming Our Way to a Climate Solution.”)
Also, Mr. Trash Wheel. It collects trash from rivers or harbors before it ends up in the sea. So practical and effective — solutions don’t need to be high-tech.
“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” tells the tale of a boy whose warning of danger is met with disbelief because of past lies. The familiar moral of this story is honesty — don’t lie, or one day you won’t be believed when it’s really important.
That ancient fable has modern relevance to climate change, about which we know at least two things: First, global warming is largely responsible for acute disasters — drought, superstorms, extinction and more. Second, without immediate action, those disasters will only worsen. We know that climate scientists are not “crying wolf.” So why is that what so many people hear?
The response to the boy’s claims holds an often overlooked second lesson of the wolf fable: We let past events cloud our assessment of novel warnings, even if a wolf really is at the gate. Climate change is here, it’s dangerous, and if we don’t address the threat we’re in trouble. But when you’re told that fact over and over again, it’s easiest to become apathetic, fatigued and disillusioned — we continue to disbelieve or disregard the warning while the wolf draws blood.
The Wolf
Last month the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an alarming report: Without immediate, dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, we’re headed for unprecedented and dangerous changes to the world’s climate in the next two decades. In order to limit global warming to a 1.5 degree Celsius rise (we’re already at 1 degree), we have to achieve a 45 percent emissions reduction from 2010 levels by 2030 — and reach net zero global emissions by 2050.
A “safe” 1.5 degree rise poses its own dangers, but a 2 degree rise increases the chance of mass extinction, drought, famine, massive sea-level rise and many of the most catastrophic impacts of a warming world on humanity.
Predictions of global warming’s impacts are largely statistical, aggregated and probabilistic. That’s scientifically sound, but it creates some emotional distance between the problem and us as the people who need to learn about it. When we hear about catastrophic impacts we expect a monster named “climate change” to do some cinematic city destruction — King Kong, The Day After Tomorrow, Michael Bay stuff.
While the intensity of hurricane Harvey, food shortages in East Africa, and coral-reef bleaching events have all been made worse by global warming, science cannot definitively label these the Climate Monster. Accusations of “doom and gloom” and (reasonable!) scientific fear of conflating climate with weather beleaguer any connection between disasters and global warming with statistical language and caveats of scientific uncertainty. As such, many people don’t see the wolf’s teeth. After all, despite 30 years of warnings from climate scientists and environmental activists, to most people going about daily life in America the world seems okay. Right?
The Doorway (of the Mind)
This is actually a common thought process. An availability heuristic is a mental shortcut — and often a logical fallacy — whereby we judge the probability of an event based on examples that readily come to mind. For instance, we express a greater fear of flying in the wake of high-profile aviation accidents that garner attention in the news, even when driving is statistically far more dangerous.
The availability heuristic works in the other direction, too, when we struggle to link experience with concern. This can be described as an unavailability heuristic: If we do not have clear examples of danger — or if safe experiences like driving feel readily available — then it is tempting to ignore legitimate warnings. For example, our first reaction to the sound of a fire alarm is that it must be a drill. After all, we have all experienced many fire drills, but fewer real fires.
Remember the frog in water that didn’t realize the temperature was being slowly turned up and eventually boiled to death? Climate science tells us we’re starting to boil, but we are the frog, unable — or refusing — to see it. We hear a boy who cried wolf through the filter of our unavailability heuristic.
Opening the Door
So what do we do when the wolf is real? We have to start shouting better, not just louder. While climate science requires a statistical and probabilistic approach, good communication requires clarity and definitive policy goals. Will smoking definitely give you cancer? No, but strong statistical evidence from medical research justifies us in saying, “smoking causes cancer.” Global warming and its effects have been here for decades. We have ample evidence that acute natural and human disasters result from global warming, and we are justified in saying so.
Every time climate scientists have shouted “wolf!” global warming has taken another bite. The IPCC report showed that if we act now, we can stave off the worst and heal our wounds. But it warns that if the climate wolf takes another bite, it may be untreatable. If an unavailability heuristic tricks us into ignoring danger, then we need readily available examples of global warming to provide a better heuristic in public discourse. It’s time for scientists (when possible), activists and the media to drop probabilistic language and tell the story of global warming as the story of the hurricanes, droughts, famines, extinctions, floods and fires alreadyhere. Some ambitious, compellingprojects are doing exactly this: establishing a new global warming heuristic.
The wolf is eating us. Let’s say so clearly and unequivocally, while we can still fight it off.
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.
Widely reported studies this year and last led to headlines globally of an “insect Armageddon.” The real story is more nuanced — but probably just as unsettling.
When Susan Weller traveled to Ecuador to study tiger moths in the 1980s, she found plenty of insects. A decade later, Weller, now director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, returned to conduct follow-up research. But the moths she was looking for were gone.
“Just in that time frame, areas I had collected had been transformed. Forests had been taken out… brand new cities had sprung up. I tried to go back and collect from other historic collecting sites, and those sites no longer existed. They were parking lots,” she says.
Around the globe, scientists are getting hints that all is not well in the world of insects. Increasingly, reports are trickling in of unsettling changes in populations of not only butterflies and bees, but of far less charismatic bugs and beetles as well. Most recently, a research team from the U.S. and Mexico reported a startling decline between 1976 and 2013 in the weight of insects and other arthropods collected at select sites in Puerto Rico.
Some have called the apparent trend an insect Armageddon. Although the picture is not in crisp enough focus yet to say if that’s hyperbolic, enough is clear to compel many to call for full-scale efforts to learn more and act as appropriate.
“I would say the insect decline in biomass and diversity is real because we see things repeated across different sites across different groups,” says Weller. “But is it an Armageddon? That part is more difficult to tease out.”
“We do know we have some declines, some very worrisome declines,” echoes David Wagner, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut and author of a chapter on insect biodiversity trends in the 2018 Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. “The bigger question is, ‘Why?’” he says. “And that’s so very important. You can’t fix something until you understand what the problem is.”
Unsung Heroes
Many people tend to think of animals as large, furry, likeable creatures. In reality, insects are the dominant form of animal life. Close to a million species have been described to date — compared with a paltry 5,416 mammals. And depending on who you ask, entomologists suspect there could be two to 30 times as many actually out there.
Not only that, but insects are linchpins of the living world, carrying out numerous functions that make life possible.
Insects pollinate a spectrum of plants, including many of those that humans rely on for food. They also are key players in other important jobs including breaking dead things down into the building blocks for new life, controlling weeds and providing raw materials for medicines. And they provide sustenance for a spectrum of other animals — in fact, the Puerto Rico study showed a decline in density of insect-eating frogs, birds and lizards that paralleled the insect nosedive.
“They’re the unsung heroes of most ecosystems,” says applied entomologist Helen Spafford, who helped write Entomological Society of America’s 2017 position statement on endangered insect species.
Real Problems
It’s unsettling, then, to imagine that insects might be in trouble. But a spectrum of studies, combined with anecdotal evidence, increasingly suggests that things are, in the words of Harper Adams University entomologist Simon Leather, “not how they should be.”
In the 1990s, reports started cropping up around the world of disappearing pollinators. In 2006, researchers reported dramatic declines in counts of moths attracted to light traps in Great Britain. A 2010 international gathering of firefly experts reported unsettling downward trends. In 2017, scientists reported a decline of more than 75 percent in insect biomass across 63 nature areas in Germany between 1989 and 2016. A 2018 census found an ominous drop in monarch butterflies along the California coast. Anecdotal evidence from Australia earlier this year indicates insect declines there as well.
“The vast majority of studies that have come out in the last decade are showing a decline in populations or insect species or biomass, and we’re seeing that consistently whether in Germany or equatorial areas or the United States,” says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation nonprofit. “I think all the indicators point to real problems with insect and invertebrates in decline across the world.”
Fly on a leaf. Photo by Guy Renard via Flickr
Mixed Picture
Although these results are disturbing, they’re not definitive. In some cases, they could indicate issues facing specific insect species or characteristics of specific locations rather than an overarching trend. It’s entirely possible that some don’t even prove a local problem: The paucity of moths attracted to lights, for example, could be a matter of selective pressures that favor individuals that aren’t attracted to light.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of reasons to expect declines. Widespread use of insecticides is one obvious one. Others include habitat loss and degradation; declines in or disappearance of plants or animals that specific insects depend on for food and shelter; displacement by nonnative species; air, water and light pollution; the global spread of insect diseases; climate change; and even, says Wagner, nitrification due to fossil-fuel burning.
That said, as humanity’s footprint grows, in some places some insect populations are going up. For example, Leather reports increases in recent years in numbers of moths associated with trees in the United Kingdom, where tree planting has been underway. Changing environmental conditions have led to a proliferation of tree-harming insects such as the mountain pine beetle in North America. And nonnative species such as Japanese beetles in the U.S., Asian hornets in Europe and the polyphagous shot hole borer in South Africa tend to show rapid population rises as they invade new territories.
“It’s quite a mixed picture,” Leather says. “Some insects do seem to be in trouble. Other insects aren’t.”
Spafford, who recently left a faculty position with the Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences at the University of Hawaii to pursue graduate work in public administration, is less equivocal.
“There is some good evidence coming out that there are large-scale declines in numbers of insects and insect diversity,” she says. “My short answer is yes, I do think there’s enough evidence now that we really should be concerned.”
What to Do?
Pedro Cardoso of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and colleagues have pinpointed seven impediments that limit our ability to conserve insects and other invertebrates and suggest a variety of strategies, from improved research protocols to better marketing, to overcome them.
First and foremost, many scientists say, we need to get a better handle on what’s currently out there in terms of species and numbers so we have a baseline for measuring change and a notion of what might need protecting.
Scientists are calling for developing a better sense of trends in abundance and diversity through studies that are repeated over time at the same location.“Insects are both exceptionally diverse and poorly known,” says Trond Larsen, director of the Rapid Assessment Program at Conservation International. His organization is trying to do its share by working to assess insect biodiversity in tropical areas around the world — discovering hundreds of species of insects not previously known to science — which then influences the organization’s priorities around conservation.
Second, scientists are calling for developing a better sense of trends in abundance and diversity through studies that are repeated over time at the same location, resampling in areas where baselines were established decades ago.
“We have estimates, but there hasn’t been a full assessment or even identification of all the insect species out there,” Spafford says. “If a place has not been well studied over a long period of time, we don’t really have good data to be able to draw conclusions.”
Where declines are documented, the next important step is to figure out why they’re occurring. Because insects reproduce quickly and can be affected dramatically by shifts in environmental conditions, it can be a challenge to tease out long-term trends from temporary fluctuations in local populations.
“[We need to] identify where it’s happening, the magnitude of change, who exactly is declining and what the causal factors are,” Wagner says. In fact, he’s planning to shift his own research program to focus more on finding historical data sets and repeating surveys to assess changes over time.
Public Role
Meanwhile, conservationists are also calling for boosting awareness of the value of insects in the eyes of everyday people.
First grade students at the Salish School of Spokane study insect behavior. Photo by USDA ARS
To many of us, insects’ downsides — bites, stings, disease, crop loss — have led to a “good riddance” mentality. We need, advocates say, to recognize the overarching ecological benefits insects offer, and work to protect them in the same way we protect rhinos, grizzlies and backyard birds. Strategies such as providing habitat corridors and “stepping stones” and managing public lands in ecologically friendly ways, for instance, can help relieve other stresses on insects as climate change adds challenges due to changing environmental conditions.
“One thing about insect or invertebrate conservation that’s pretty neat and one of the reasons I’m heartened [is that] anyone can take action,” Black says. “We should be conserving polar bears and Bengal tigers and wolves, and people should fund groups that do that — these charismatic megafauna are really important as well.
“But the neat thing about insects is, anybody can help them. If you have a little yard, if you’re a farmer, if you’re a natural area manager, if you work at a department of transportation, you can work to manage plants for pollinators. We can do this across the landscape and we need to.”
In the long haul, Spafford sees education as critical. “I think training teachers to better understand the role of insects in systems and such would be really helpful, and then teachers would hopefully share that information with students,” she says. “And then just helping the general public to understand the importance of insects in their daily lives, not just [as] pests but as important service providers.”
Wagner says there is a “huge, huge” role for citizen science to contribute to assessing the status of insects around the world, especially species that are seen as desirable or attractive, which are most likely going to be of interest to (and identifiable by) nonscientists.
“It’s clearly one of the largest data generators,” he says. “There’s no way the scientific community can fund studies all the way across the planetary surface and monitor all insects. The only way we can hope to get reasonable data on the poster children type of insects — bees, butterflies, moths, some of the more charismatic species — would be to harness citizen scientists.”
Some such efforts already exist. The Xerces Society lists several citizen scientist opportunities, including tracking bumble bees or dragonflies in North America, counting overwintering monarch butterflies in California, and watching for breeding monarchs in the western U.S. Firefly Watch also welcomes citizen participation in firefly counts.
“If people have the skill set and the time and the passion,” Spafford says, “I think it really could help fill a critical gap.”
Even as further reports of declines emerge, Black emphasizes, so do opportunities for doing something.
“This can be doom and gloom,” he says, “[but] if we can start to curb climate change, we can do everything possible to maintain biodiversity, get out there and plant flowers, stop using pesticides, talk to your parks department and get them to change their practices and plant habitat — if we all work together, I’m hopeful that we can make a real substantial difference.”
The state is ramping up efforts to protect people and the economy as southeast Virginia faces one of the fastest rates of relative sea-level rise in the country.
What will future sea-level rise look like in coastal areas? For many people, it can be hard to visualize on-the-ground impacts from scientific projections. But people in southeast Virginia have a good idea of what to expect. The sea isn’t just lapping at the heels of communities there, residents are already regularly knee-deep in floodwaters.
Due to both rising seas and sinking land, Virginia has the fastest rate of relative sea-level rise on the East Coast. Add in flat topography and increasing rainfall, and what’s commonly referred to as “nuisance flooding” has become more than just an inconvenience — it’s now a national security risk and an economic threat.
The Hampton Roads region of southeast Virginia is home to the largest active naval base in the world, more than a dozen military installations, one of the biggest ports on the East Coast and a robust tourism economy — all of which are threatened by too much water.
As state and local governments wrestle with how to solve the problem, Virginia is emerging as an important case study in dealing with climate impacts that may be years or decades away for other coastal communities.
The state took two important steps forward recently. On Nov. 2 Gov. Ralph Northam issued an executive order to increase Virginia’s resilience to natural hazards and extreme weather. And earlier this year the state legislature mandated the creation of a new cabinet-level position to advise the governor on sea-level rise issues — the first such position in the country.
The two actions “establish the state leadership that we need to address the regional threats posed by sea-level rise,” says Elizabeth Andrews, director of the Virginia Coastal Policy Center at William and Mary Law School.
The Problem
Virginia missed the worst of hurricane season this year as Florence lashed neighboring North Carolina and Michael pummeled nearby Florida. And while Virginians may have breathed a collective sigh of relief, the state still has to grapple with a slower-moving and longer-term disaster.
The first part of the problem is rising seas. In Hampton Roads, water levels have increased 1.5 feet in the past century, according to a report from the University of Virginia.
One of the biggest contributing factors is climate change, which is melting ice caps and glaciers. The warming of ocean water is also causing it to expand. “Together these processes are believed to have added over half a foot to ocean levels in the past century,” according to a scientific report on recurrent flooding submitted to the Virginia General Assembly in January 2013. “Both of these processes have increased recently, and now are adding to the oceans’ volume at about twice the former rate.”
Another factor is that the land in coastal Virginia is sinking. Some of this is human-influenced in areas where communities have over-pumped groundwater, causing the aquifer to compact and the land above to subside. But another factor is natural — the Earth’s crust is continuing to adjust after glaciers melted during the last ice age, and it’s causing a sinking in coastal areas of the mid-Atlantic.
The problem is further compounded by changing ocean dynamics, including a slowing of the Gulf Stream, another impact of rising global temperatures. For the mid-Atlantic states this means there’s less pressure to help move water away from the coast, and it’s contributing to higher water levels in the area.
Hampton Roads Sea Level Rise/Flooding Adaptation Forum held on Oct 18, 2018. Photo by Aileen Devlin, Virginia Sea Grant. CC BY-ND 2.0
This combination of factors is already making coastal flooding worse. Roadways near the shoreline in southeast Virginia used to be inundated with floodwaters a couple of times a year due to high-tide events, but now it’s closer to 10 times a year, says Jon Derek Loftis, an assistant research scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Nuisance tidal flooding has shot up 325 percent since 1960.
Another factor is an increase in the amount of rain. Extreme precipitation events have increased 33 percent, and these severe storms are now dumping more water. Seven out of 10 of the most significant storms affecting Virginia since 1933 have occurred in the past 13 years. This means that even inland streets are now flooding as the ground becomes too saturated to absorb water. In some cases, higher water levels are pushing tidal water up through sewer systems into city streets instead of moving water in the opposite direction out to sea.
As bad as things are now, they’re only expected to get worse. By 2050 sea level is likely to be another foot higher, according to recent estimates from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. By the end of the century, predicts the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seas could be four feet higher in the region, but with unchecked climate change that could be eight feet or more.
What’s at Stake
Sit in a beach chair facing the water at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach and the drivers of the region’s economy are on full display.
Cargo ships lumber by, heaped with coal or stacked containers heading from the Port of Virginia, the sixth biggest port in the country. Flip-flop-clad tourists amble up and down miles of beaches, contributing $1.4 billion annually to the economy of Virginia Beach alone.
Military jets thunder overhead during training exercises. Every branch of the U.S. military, including the world’s largest active naval base, is here, making it “the largest federal presence outside of Washington D.C.” and the source of 40 percent of the region’s employment, says Ann C. Phillips, the retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who just filled Virginia’s newly created coastal adaptation and protection position as special assistant to the governor.
Sea-level rise threatens all of this.
The economic damage from annual flooding and coastal storms is anticipated to triple by 2060. A 2017 report from the Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flooding Resiliency found that the region’s “tourism industry is highly vulnerable to recurrent flooding, severe coastal storms and hurricanes due to the infrastructure’s proximity to the coast.”
And it’s not just visitors; 164,000 people living in the region are at risk from coastal flooding impacts. That number is expected to nearly double by 2050, according to an analysis by Climate Central.
When it comes to safeguarding military interests, that means protecting bases, but also “making sure there is access to the base for employees who work there and for the utilities that have to run there,” says Andrews. The federal government will need to ramp up coastal resilience efforts, but so too will municipalities.
State Action
Many of the crucial solutions to combat rising seas and recurrent flooding will need to come from local governments, and a number of projects are already underway, but there’s a key role for the state to play, too.
The interest of state legislators was first piqued in 2013 with the report on recurrent flooding. “That got everyone’s attention in the legislature,” says Andrews, who added that officials realized the issue was serious and that it was only going to get worse.
Following the report, state legislators took a number of steps, including the creation of Phillips’ position.
It also created a joint coastal flooding subcommittee to address coastal flooding issues and the need for potential new legislation. The Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flood Resiliency, a partnership among Old Dominion University, the College of William and Mary, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, was also established to consolidate research efforts and funds.
Maura Boswell does living shoreline system research in Norfolk, Va. Photo by Aileen Devlin, Virginia Sea Grant. CC BY-ND 2.0
Then in 2016 a law was passed to create the Virginia Shoreline Resiliency Fund, which will provide low-interest loans to help make coastal properties more resilient. “We think it’s one of the first to allow funds to be used to mitigate against future flood risk and not just to make repairs after a house has been damaged,” says Andrews. A good idea, but two years later the fund still remains empty without any money appropriated for it.
“We have a real opportunity and we must seize that opportunity and take action,” says Phillips, who believes the state can become a leader in coastal adaptation. “Or we’ll find ourselves with a decreased range of choices, and higher and higher costs.”
Skip Stiles, executive director of the Virginia nonprofit Wetlands Watch, believes Virginia is far behind on what it should be doing but expects more statewide efforts will ramp up soon under the leadership of Gov. Northam, who took office in January. “He has made the issue of sea-level rise a big part of his administration,” says Stiles.
The most promising development so far has been November’s executive order, which includes the creation of a Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan to help local government better plan for flood protection and initiate adaptation strategies. The order also taps the state’s secretary of natural resources to serve as the chief resilience officer and oversee a broad range of resilience strategies.
This includes encouraging nature-based solutions and land conservation where possible. The order also directs the state to aid municipal governments with technical assistance for planning, zoning and funding to increase local resilience and pre-disaster mitigation efforts.
“I am particularly encouraged by the executive order’s call for the creation of a Virginia coastal resilience master plan, which will enable us to better define and plan for the future risks,” says Andrews. “Too often in our world of fiscal limitations, tomorrow’s problems are overshadowed by today’s — but flooding in coastal Virginia is already happening now, and will only get worse.”
Stiles believes that this momentum to tackle sea-level rise and coastal adaptation issues won’t end with Northam’s four-year term. Increasingly the issue is receiving bipartisan support, something that has been tough to achieve in other states where climate change is a political lightning rod. “I think the expectation is that there will be some changes at the state level and the expectation is being held by both Democrats and Republicans,” says Stiles.
As the situation visibly worsens and impacts are hitting home, legislators are being forced to reckon with climate change, even if they don’t name it outright. Stiles says it’s gone from being an ideological issue to a constituent issue. “That’s what’s really started to accelerate progress on this,” he says. “And I don’t see that going away because I don’t see sea-level rise going away.”
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When tigers are reintroduced into an area where they once lived, people need to learn to live with them all over again.
Last year Cambodia announced a bold plan to reintroduce new populations of critically endangered tigers, which had been declared functionally extinct in the country the previous year. Other tiger reintroduction efforts are also in the planning stages in other parts of Asia, and all of them are looking to Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, India, for important lessons on how people and reintroduced big cats can live together.
Sariska Tiger Reserve was originally established in 1955, but all its tigers were poached between July and December 2004. In 2005 the park was declared tigerless, but that didn’t last long. Tigers were quickly reintroduced to Sariska in 2008 and 2009 — the world’s first wild tiger reintroduction.
When new tigers were released by the Forest Department, a very interesting problem emerged.
While the reintroduction came just three years after the official admission of complete species loss from the park, tigers had not been a dominant force on much of the landscape for more than a decade. The big cats had been on the decline long before the last tigers were killed.
According to my research, as a result of this long period of decline the local people in Sariska now understandably see the reintroduced tigers as outsiders. Even worse, they interpret the new tigers’ behavior — which is different from that of their predecessors — to be outright disrespectful.
You see, what locals refer to as the “old… original tigers” of Sariska understood the rules: where and when tigers could go, and where and when humans could go. Historically, these spatial agreements kept human-tiger conflict to a minimum.
Local people perceive conflict levels to be much higher with the new tigers compared to the old. Across the vast landscape of Sariska Tiger Reserve — totaling more than 460 square miles (1,200 square kilometers)of national park, tiger reserve and buffer zone — local people now get emotively defensive if you refer to the new tigers as “Sariska’s tigers.”
Indeed, there is a stark difference between the old and the new. This difference is described in many ways, but perhaps most unsettlingly by a metaphor told to me by a local farmer: “An illiterate daughter can make the butter and feed us. It’s better than nothing…new tigers are better than nothing. But an educated daughter is like the old tigers.”
Essentially, the people who live in and around Sariska believe the new tigers are a shadow of the old tigers, providing some benefits like an “illiterate daughter,” but overall not comparable to the advantages of the old tigers.
My study looking at this dichotomy of people’s perceptions of the old vs. new tigers of Sariska, published this year in the journal Society and Animals, found it to be a central narrative to the way people interpret the conservation plans, laws and management of Sariska Tiger Reserve — and it offers lessons on how reintroductions in other regions might play out.
Over the course of several months, I interviewed 384 people in nearly three dozen focus groups, who collectively made more than 600 comparisons between the behavior of “old” and “new” tigers. From those narratives, two clear dichotomies emerged: The old tigers were perceived as politely “giving way” to humans, posing little to no threat, while the new tigers were seen as a bunch of “vagabonds,” continually out of place and a menace.
“…new tigers are like vagabond, they have no idea about this jungle… these tigers are not fixed to their respective positions [like the old tigers]… they roam from one place to another.” — Male interviewee, about 1.2 miles from Sariska
Previous researchers have found Sariska’s second wave of relocated tigers (those that arrived in 2009-2011) had large home ranges — double that, in some cases, of established tigers reintroduced just a few years earlier. This was attributed to their initial habitat exploration. In other words, when tigers first arrived they checked out a huge territory and then finally settled down into a more manageable one. In Sariska the first batch of reintroduced tigers settled down quickly because the next batch of tigers created more competition; those that came later kept moving around.
For example, two sub-adult tigresses were released into Sariska in 2013. Participants described their wandering as ongoing in 2014 and 2015. The villagers still remember this, even a couple of years after those tigresses finally settled down. Participants interpret wide-ranging tigers moving through villages and other human areas as dismissive of coexistence. Conversely Sariska’s’ original tigers were understood as co-creators of an agreed upon landscape with combined human-only, tiger-only and human-tiger areas.
“New ones are not good… When we went in the jungle, old tigers used to see us and give way, to move on or pass on, but new tigers, when they see people, they never give way.”— Male interviewee about 2 miles from Sariska
“There is a big difference that new tigers don’t respect humans and don’t leave path for humans, as our elders use to tell us that whenever old tiger see humans on their path, they respect them and leave a path for humans, they never attacked.” — Male interviewee about 1.2 miles from Sariska
These collective perceptions of Sariska’s original tigers across this varied and vast landscape speak to the complexity of the present negotiations and enduring human-tiger history. While it’s unlikely that all tigers before 2004 “gave way,” there is a permeating perception of such behavior that has consequences in today’s human-tiger landscape. Belief and or reality that the old tigers “gave way” allowed local people to feel safe in “human zones,” such as roads, walking paths and villages — and allowed them to generally support tiger conservation. Now, the new tigers’ lack of “giving way” means people are not only fearful as they navigate the roads and villages on foot, but they are less trusting of the forest department, less tolerant of coexisting with tigers, and more resistant to complying with restrictions of use and collection of natural resources from Sariska, such as fire wood and fodder for livestock.
Moreover, this case study highlights the need for agencies handling reintroductions to appreciate the variation of human perceptions of wildlife instead of just assuming that interactions are determined by the animals themselves. This finding challenges dominant conservation practices that operate at the species level without considering major behavioral differences between different populations of the same species, such as the “old” and “new” tigers of Sariska, as a hindrance to rewilding.
Sariska is now home to 17 tigers, including three new cubs spotted in September 2018, a major success story for this endangered species. As Cambodia and other countries plan tiger reintroduction, they are looking to Sariska Tiger Reserve for key lessons, paramount of which is the understanding that reintroducing new tigers isn’t reestablishing an old human-tiger relationship but starting a new one. These growing pains are real, but we’re starting to understand them.
A Sariska tigress and her cubs. Photo: Rajasthan forest department
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.
As state and local governments wrestle with how to solve the problem, Virginia is emerging as an important case study in dealing with climate impacts that may be years or decades away for other coastal communities.
Do you get our weekly email newsletter? If not, now’s the perfect time to sign up. This week subscribers can receive a free eBook edition of Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology and Politics in Science, the must-read new book by Hugo Award-winning author John Grant from publisher 
