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.
An expanding petrochemical industry, thanks to fracked shale gas, could have big consequences for a warming planet.
The petrochemical industry anticipates spending a total of more than $200 billion on factories, pipelines and other infrastructure in the United States that will rely on shale gas, the American Chemistry Council announced in September. Construction is already underway at many sites.
This building spree would dramatically expand the Gulf Coast’s petrochemical corridor (known locally as “Cancer Alley”) — and establish a new plastics and petrochemical belt across states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
If those projects are completed, analysts predict the United States would flip from one of the world’s highest-cost producers of plastics and chemicals to one of the cheapest, using raw materials and energy from fracked gas wells in states like Texas, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Those petrochemical plans could have profound consequences for a planet already showing signs of dangerous warming and a cascade of other impacts from climate change.
The gathering wave of construction comes as the Trump administration works to deregulate American industry and roll back pollution controls, putting the United States at odds with the rest of the world’s efforts to slow climate change.
Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States had halted all implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement and intends to fully withdraw. America is now the world’s only state refusing participation in the global agreement to curb climate change (after Syria, the final holdout, signed in November 2017).
This petrochemical industry expansion — much of it funded by foreign investors — makes America’s refusal to participate in the Paris Agreement all the more significant, because much of this new U.S. infrastructure would be built outside of the greenhouse gas agreement affecting the rest of the globe.
If American policymakers approve this wave of new plastics and petrochemical plants with little regard to curbing climate change and reducing fossil fuel use, environmentalists warn, they’ll be greenlighting hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into projects at risk of becoming stranded assets.
From Rust Belt to Plastics Belt
Some of the largest and most expensive petrochemical projects in the United States are planned in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, a region that has suffered for decades from the collapse of the domestic steel industry but that has relatively little experience with the kind of petrochemical complexes that are now primarily found on the Gulf Coast.
In November 2017 the China Energy Investment Corp. signed a “memorandum of understanding” with West Virginia that would result in the construction of $83.7 billion in plastics and petrochemicals projects over the next 20 years in that state alone — a huge slice of the $202.4 billion U.S. total. Those plans have run into snags due to trade disputes between the United States and China and a corruption probe, though Chinese officials said in late August that investment was moving forward.
The petrochemical industry’s interest is spurred by the fact that the region’s Marcellus and Utica shales contain significant supplies of so-called “wet gas.” This wet gas often is treated as a footnote in discussions of fracking, which tend to focus on the methane gas, called “dry gas” by industry — and not the ethane, propane, butane and other hydrocarbons that also come from those same wells.
Those “wet” fossil fuels and chemical feedstocks are commonly referred to as “natural gas liquids,” or NGLs, because they are delivered to customers condensed into a liquid form — like the liquid butane trapped in a Bic lighter, which expands into a stream of flammable gas when you flick that lighter on.
Ethane can represent a surprising amount of the fossil fuel from a fracked shale well, particularly in the Marcellus. For every 6,000 cubic feet of methane (the energy equivalent of the industry’s standard 42 gallon barrel of oil), Marcellus wet gas wells can produce up to roughly 35 gallons of ethane, based on data reported by the American Oil and Gas Reporter in 2011.
And U.S. ethane production is projected to grow dramatically. By 2022 the region will produce roughly 800,000 barrels of ethane per day, up from 470,000 barrels a day in 2017, according to energy consultant RBN Energy.
That supply glut is driving down ethane prices in the Rust Belt.
“The lowest price ethane on the planet is here in this region,” Brian Anderson, director of the West Virginia University Energy Institute, told the NEP Northeast U.S. Petrochemical Construction conference in Pittsburgh in June.
Chemicals and the Climate
The petrochemical and plastics industries are notoriously polluting, not only when it comes to toxic air pollution and plastic waste, but also because of the industry’s significant greenhouse gas footprint — affecting not only the United States, but the entire world.
“The chemical and petrochemical sector is by far the largest industrial energy user, accounting for roughly 10 percent of total worldwide final energy demand and 7 percent of global [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the International Energy Agency reported in 2013. Since then the numbers have crept up, with the IEA finding petrochemicals responsible for an additional percentage point of the world’s total energy consumption in 2017.
Fracking trucks and equipment in Doddridge Co, West Va. Photo by Tara Lohan
Carbon emissions from petrochemical and plastics manufacturing are expected to grow 20 percent by 2030 (in other words, in just over a decade), the IEA concluded in a report released October 5. A few days later, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030, the world needs to have reduced its greenhouse gas pollution 45 percent from 2010 levels, in order to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to a less-catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The petrochemical industry has so far drawn relatively little attention from oil and gas analysts and policymakers. “Petrochemicals are one of the key blind spots in the global energy debate, especially given the influence they will exert on future energy trends,” Dr. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said in a statement this month.
“In fact,” he added, “our analysis shows they will have a greater influence on the future of oil demand than cars, trucks and aviation.”
The new investments, which will rely on decades of continued fracking in the United States, offer the oil and gas industry a serious hedge against competition from renewable energy, even in the event that climate policies push fossil fuel energy to the margins.
“Unlike refining, and ultimately unlike oil, which will see a moment when the growth will stop, we actually don’t anticipate that with petrochemicals,” Andrew Brown, upstream director for Royal Dutch Shell, told the San Antonio Express News in March.
The planned infrastructure could also help bail out the heavily indebted shale drilling industry financially by consuming vast amounts of fossil fuels, both for power and as a raw material.
The American Chemistry Council has linked 333 chemical industry projects, all announced since 2010, to shale gas — that is, gas that is produced using fracking. Forty-one percent of those projects are still in the planning phase as of September, according to the council, and 68 percent of the projects are linked to foreign investment.
State regulators in Texas and Louisiana have already issued permits that would allow a group of 74 petrochemical and liquefied natural gas projects along the Gulf Coast to add 134 million tons of greenhouse gases a year to the atmosphere, an Environmental Integrity Project analysis found in September. The group said that was equal to the pollution from running 29 new coal power plants around the clock.
The expansion of plastics manufacturing in America also has environmentalists worried over a plastics pollution crisis. “We could be locking in decades of expanded plastics production at precisely the time the world is realizing we should use far less of it,” Carroll Muffett, president of the U.S. Center for International Environmental Law, told The Guardian in December 2017.
Petrochemical Paradox
The petrochemical industry transforms ethane and other raw material into a huge range of products, including not only plastic, but also vinyl, fertilizers, Styrofoam, beauty products, chemicals and pesticides.
The petrochemical industry itself straddles an uncomfortable fence when it comes to renewable energy and climate change. A significant portion of its revenue comes from “clean” technology sectors, as it provides materials used to make batteries and electric cars.
One report last year concluded that roughly 20 percent of the industry’s revenue comes from products designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the American Chemistry Council cited the industry’s role supplying “materials and technologies that improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions,” as it opposed Trump’s decision to drop out of the Paris climate agreement.
A natural gas processing plant under construction in Penn. Photo by Tara Lohan
But petrochemical manufacturers are also heavily reliant on fossil fuels. They need them to power and supply a dreamed-of “manufacturing renaissance,” as the ExxonMobil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute explained as it pushed for Trump to abandon the Paris agreement.
Plans to use American shale gas would also link petrochemicals to the expansion of fracking, which carries its own environmental concerns. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark study on fracking and drinking water concluded in 2016 that fracking has led to water contamination and poses continued risks to American water supplies.
In addition, though conversations about climate change usually focus on carbon emissions, the gas industry has such a bad methane leak problem that using natural gas can be even worse for the climate than burning coal.
“We share IEA’s view that the production, use and disposal of petrochemical-derived products present a variety of environmental challenges that need to be addressed,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement sent to DeSmog, which also cited the use of petrochemical products in the renewable energy industry and the manufacture of products that raise energy efficiency like home insulation and lighter auto parts. “We are committed to managing energy use in our companies and manufacturing facilities.”
Pittsburgh and Paris
Climate implications make a petrochemical build-out risky, not only from an environmental perspective but also from a fiscal perspective, Mark Dixon, cofounder of NoPetroPA, which opposes fracking-based petrochemicals projects, told DeSmog.
One plant, Shell’s $6 billion ethane “cracker” plant currently under construction in Beaver County, Penn., has permits to pump 2.25 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year into the air near Pittsburgh, roughly equal to the annual carbon pollution from 430,000 cars.
“We’re trying to drop our emissions 50 percent by 2030,” Dixon said, referring to Pittsburgh’s highly touted plans to comply with international climate targets despite the federal government’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. “The Shell cracker alone will decimate that.”
Stranding Assets
International negotiators met in Bangkok in September to hash out details on how the Paris agreement will be implemented. The United States, which participated in talks despite the Trump administration’s intention to withdraw from the accord, faced criticism over working to delay clarity over the agreement’s financing (nonetheless, a top U.N. negotiator praised “good progress” from the talks).
While the Paris agreement is not directly binding, globally there has been discussion of using trade agreements and tariffs to pressure countries that fail to keep up with their carbon-cutting commitments.
In February the European Union declared that it will not sign new trade agreements with any country that refuses to get on board with the agreement.
“One of our main demands is that any country who signs a trade agreement with E.U. should implement the Paris agreement on the ground,” France’s foreign affairs minister Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne told the French Parliament. “No Paris agreement, no trade agreement.”
“They’re already shooting across the bow, saying look, you’ve got to implement the Paris climate agreement,” Dixon told DeSmog. “We could very well spend 10 years building an infrastructure to support fracking all over the region, crackers, ethane, plastics, everything, then have Europe say, ‘Sorry, you can’t do that. You have to shut it down.’ ”
In other words, whether or not the United States puts its signature on the climate pact’s dotted line, the pressure from trading partners to reduce greenhouse gas pollution — and the underlying concerns about the rapidly warming climate — could remain the same.
That said, while the United States is the only country rejecting Paris on paper, it is far from the only country on track to miss its targets aimed at warding off catastrophic climate change. Only Morocco and Gambia are projected to hit “Paris Agreement Compatible” targets, according to the Climate Action Tracker (whose rating tracker includes many major polluters but not all countries worldwide).
The E.U. itself currently earns a rating of “insufficient” from the group (China is ranked “highly insufficient,” while the United States and four other nations earned the worst “critically insufficient” grade).
Closing Windows
The next several years will determine the future of petrochemical production for decades to come, crucial years when it comes to the fate of the climate, if industry gets its timing right — particularly in the Rust Belt.
“The window to make this all work is not forever,” Charles Schliebs of Stone Pier Capital Advisors told the NEP Northeast U.S. Petrochemical Construction conference in June. “It’s maybe two to five years.”
That means key decisions may be made while Donald Trump remains in office — though state and local regulators will also face important calls over permits and construction planning.
For some living near the center of the planned petrochemical expansion, the problem is readily apparent.
“We’re not going to be able to double down on fossil fuels,” Dixon said, “and comply with the Paris climate agreement.”
Candidates promising action on climate change and public lands won many victories, but several important ballot initiatives were defeated.
This week’s midterm elections didn’t quite deliver the expected “blue wave,” but they did bring some welcome news for the environment — and the planet.
The most notable progress occurred on the state and local level, where several new progressive candidates will now take office and successful ballot initiatives will help preserve habitats and support clean energy.
With the Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, President Trump has at least one major barrier to accomplishing his pro-business, anti-environmental agenda. Congress won’t have the ability to block many of his attempts at deregulation, which don’t require congressional approval, but they could help hold the line on harmful legislation such as the barrage of attacks against the Endangered Species Act that the Republican-led Congress has pushed over the past two years.
Photo: Element5 Digital/Unsplash
Of course, the likelihood of the Democrats in Congress passing any new environmental legislation in 2019 seems slim, as Republicans have increased their control of the Senate. And locally, several important ballot measures failed to pass, including a much-watched carbon pricing proposal in Washington, pushing back critical potential to protect the climate.
But still, the next two years will likely see progress on several environmental initiatives, while several anti-environmental initiatives pushed by the Trump administration will probably be slowed, at the very least.
Here are some results from notable elections around the country — and what they could mean for the future of the planet.
Congress
Several progressive victories took place on the congressional side, perhaps most notably the election of 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, whose climate-change platform included “transitioning the United States to a carbon-free, 100 percent renewable energy system and a fully modernized electrical grid by 2035.”
Minnesota and Michigan, meanwhile, elected the first of two Muslim women ever to serve in Congress. Ilhan Omar campaigned on a platform that addressed clean energy and environmental justice, while Rashida Tlaib promised progress against pollution and for the EPA.
Congress also gained its first two female Native American representatives, Sharice Davids in Kansas and Deb Haaland in New Mexico. Each campaigned on a number of environmental issues, including climate change and clean water.
For the first time in more than 30 years, Democrats flipped a House seat in South Carolina. Former ocean engineer Joe Cunningham won an upset victory over Republican Kate Arrington. Cunningham campaigned on a platform opposing offshore drilling. Opposition to offshore drilling on the East Coast appears to be mounting throughout the Southeast, with Floridians taking a decisive stand on the issue as well.
Florida did not reelect Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a leader on the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, which has never accomplished much but did at least embrace Republicans who took moderate stands on climate change. All told the caucus lost about a third of its 45 Republican members.
Beyond the individual races, the Democratic wins will cause a shift in priorities for the entire Congress. Nancy Pelosi, who seems poised to regain her previous position as speaker of the House, told The New York Times she plans to revive a committee on climate change and seek legislation on energy conservation and other climate-change mitigation efforts.
The EPA could also get renewed support in Congress. Rep. Frank Pallone, who is expected to take over leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Washington Examiner, “We have serious concerns with how Trump’s EPA has consistently sided with the special interests over people’s health and the environment and we will look to restore the environmental protections that have been gutted over the last two years.”
Democrats will also take leadership of the House Scientists and Science Committee, which has been chaired by notorious climate denier Lamar Smith (who is retiring, only to be replaced in the House by another climate denier, former Ted Cruz chief of staff Chip Roy). The committee’s likely new chair would be Texas Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson, who said her priorities will be acknowledging and mitigating climate change and “defending the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks, and challenging misguided or harmful Administration actions.”
If you’re not a science journalist you probably can’t appreciate the sheer and utter trash that has come out of the House Science Comittee for the last decade but I’m here to tell you changing that leadership is *huge*. https://t.co/bZfwZxGhop
Finally, the House Natural Resources Committee — currently chaired by Republican Rob Bishop of Utah, who consistently votes against endangered species and public lands — is likely to have a new chair, re-elected Arizona Democrat Raúl Grijalva, who has said he wants Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to testify before the committee next year. “We will conduct oversight and we will hold Interior accountable,” Grijalva told Outside magazine last month.
Senate
Shockingly, Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had been heavily criticized for his mishandling of the state’s red tide crisis and other environmental issues, appears to have won his bid for the Senate, potentially defeating incumbent Bill Nelson, who called Florida “ground zero” for climate change. (The race is currently headed for a recount, although Scott has declared victory.)
The Senate did lose North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, who never had a very good environmental record, but gained Republican Kevin Cramer, who helped shape President Trump’s energy-dominance agenda and has one of the worst environmental records tracked by the League of Conservation Voters.
In one of the few bright spots in the Senate, Nevada elected Democrat Jacky Rosen, who campaigned on issues related to protecting public lands. She defeated Dean Heller, a foe of wilderness and national monuments.
Governors
The nation’s governors will now include three new candidates who made commitments to 100 percent renewable energy — Jared Polis of Colorado, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois. Polis’s plan is actually the most ambitious in the country.
New Mexico, meanwhile, elected Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has spoken out against President Trump’s attacks on public lands. She defeated Steve Pearce, who advocated for transferring ownership of federal lands to the states. Lujan Grisham also pledged to make her constituency “the clean-energy state of America,” possibly by regulating methane emissions. She has, however, also promised to work with the state’s powerful oil and gas industry.
These races could have potential impacts on the policies pushed by the Western Governors’ Association, which includes Colorado and New Mexico. The Association frequently takes on policies considered favorable to extractive industries.
Maine elected its first female governor, Janet Mills, who as the state’s attorney general stood up to Scott Pruitt’s deregulation at the EPA (but who has also been criticized for attacking tribal water and fishing rights). She will replace climate denier Paul LePage, who blocked new wind-power projects and repeatedly claimed that existing windmills used motors to turn their turbines. LePage says he plans to move to Florida, which seems appropriate.
Speaking of Florida, voters elected as their next governor Ron DeSantis, who famously said “I am not a global warming person.” He won over opponent Andrew Gillum, whose eight-page environmental agenda would have tackled renewable energy, climate change, sea-level rise, nutrient runoff and other topics.
One last piece of good news amidst the governor’s races: Climate skeptic Scott Walker of Wisconsin has lost his bid for reelection to Democrat Tony Evers, who campaigned against Walker’s poor environmental record.
Ballot Initiatives
There was more bad news than good on the environmental front when it came to voting on ballot initiatives.
The biggest environmental win that happened through the ballot initiative process came from Florida. Voters there approved Amendment 9, which covered two unrelated issues, banning offshore oil and gas drilling in state waters and banning the use of electronic cigarettes in workplaces. The drilling ban was supported by environmental interests as well as the tourism industry, both of which would like to keep Florida’s waters and beaches clean.
In another win for the environment, Nevada voters passed Question 6, which seeks to increase the amount of energy the state’s utilities need to get from renewable sources such as wind, solar and geothermal. Question 6 increases the renewable portfolio standard to 50 percent by 2030.
Photo: Tara Lohan
Arizona had an identical measure, Proposition 127, on the ballot, but it was soundly defeated after an outpouring of $30 million from its opponents, including the state’s biggest utility.
In what was likely the most-watched environmental ballot initiative race, Washington’s Initiative 1631 was defeated. If it had passed it would have been the first state-wide initiative to put a fee on carbon pollution. Environmental supporters hoped Washington would be a good proving ground to inspire more carbon pricing programs across the country, but voters didn’t go for it this time and have defeated similar measures in recent years.
While Colorado voted in clean-energy enthusiast Jared Polis as governor, voters defeated Proposition 112, which would have increased the buffer between oil and gas drilling operations and occupied homes and businesses.
Two other ballot measures sought to protect clean water. Montana’s Initiative 186, which would have set stricter standards for the mining industry, was defeated. And so was Alaska’s Measure 1, which would have protected salmon habitat.
Other Races
Congress and the Senate tend to get the most attention, but local candidates also deserve attention.
Several states got new attorneys general in the midterms, most notably New York, where Letitia “Tish” James will succeed acting Attorney General Barbara Underwood. The office, somewhat tainted by former AG Eric Schneiderman’s abuse and assault scandal, has nonetheless done admirable work on climate for years, something likely to continue under James.
In Utah, San Juan County Commissioner Rebecca Benally — who opposed Bears Ears National Monument and who actually said “national monuments kill people” — was defeated by Bears Ears supporter Kenneth Maryboy.
Another land commission race went to Democrat Stephanie Garcia Richard in New Mexico, who campaigned on promises to regulate polluters, including some natural gas fracking operations.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, as local shifts in power have been reported all over the country. Those city, county and state governments could hold the true power for moving on climate change even as the Trump administration continues to drag its heels.
Everybody is upset about high level losses but the truth is we’re getting tons of tiny wins all over the country and these positions in local politics will make a huge and direct difference in people’s lives. https://t.co/I3sieEQSrz
To many, the election illustrated how deeply divided the country has become. As The Washington Postput it, “Red states got redder, and blue states got bluer on Tuesday.”
Is that entirely true, though? Red states like Texas and Florida actually experienced incredibly competitive campaigns, with narrow losses by Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Gillum. The political divisions in this country are quite evident, but so in many ways are the connections.
So, too, is the shift toward progressive ideals. Democrats won over more independent and undecided voters this year, a change from the 2016 and 2014 elections.
Still, the divide does exist, and we can almost certainly expect big fights on environmental issues — if not all political issues — on the horizon. President Trump has already declared that he’s ready to come out swinging as soon as the Democrats try to stand in his way, and especially if they move to investigate any of the many issues tainting his administration. Meanwhile he’s attacking the press and cleaning house of his less-than-enthusiastic supporters, including Jeff Sessions.
But with Democrats now in control of the House and heading up key committees, it’s at least a fairer fight.
The age of big money, however, will continue. Billions of dollars were sunk into this election, and big spending by energy companies almost certainly tanked several of this year’s ballot initiatives. With that unlikely to change any time soon, political progress on climate change and other issues will have a tough road ahead.
The path, though, is somewhat clearer than it was just a few weeks ago, and that’s likely to continue — at least until the 2020 election season ramps up.
Experts fear oil and gas development could permanently damage millions of acres of ecologically and culturally important public lands.
Millions of acres of ecologically and culturally important public lands could face permanent damage or destruction under President Trump’s energy-dominance agenda, experts warn.
“The Trump administration’s ‘energy dominance’ agenda is prioritizing oil and gas development above all other uses of public lands,” says Laura Peterson, attorney with Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a nonprofit organization that seeks to protect Utah’s red rock wilderness. “In pursuit of that quixotic goal, it is sacrificing Utah’s wildest and most remote lands.”
Earlier this year the Department of the Interior ordered the Bureau of Land Management to simplify and streamline the oil and gas leasing process to lessen what it called “unnecessary impediments and burdens” on developers. The Trump administration says this is critical to America’s energy independence. Environmental experts, however, have sounded alarm over drilling in close proximity to national parks, national monuments and other areas with significant cultural, ecological and historical resources.
In Utah hundreds of thousands of acres of land previously closed to development are being auctioned off for oil and gas leasing.
The most recent leases took place this past September, when 109 oil and gas leases consisting of more than 200,000 acres of federal public land were up for grabs. Some of the parcels were less than two miles away from Horseshoe Canyon near the Canyonlands National Park and a few miles further from the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Horseshoe Canyon contains, according to the National Park Service, some of the most significant American Indian rock art in North America, including the Great Gallery — a world-renowned panel of well-preserved, life-sized figures with intricate designs.
Some of the September leases covered small territories, while others were quite large. Seventy-two leases spanned 158,944 acres in the remote San Rafael Desert, a scenic area with mesas, cliffs and canyons, as well as the northern Dirty Devil River area, an 80-mile tributary of the Colorado River.
San Rafael River. Photo: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
All told the September oil and gas lease sale fetched over $3.3 million. The biggest buyer was a Canadian company, North American Helium, which submitted the month’s highest bid of $435,591 for a 1,970-acre lot in northwest Colorado.
Interestingly, despite being publicized as a successful sale, the September lease didn’t actually generate the anticipated interest. Only 69 out of 109 parcels were auctioned off, and many of the sites leased for bargain-basement prices. More than 40 lease parcels sold for as little as $2 per acre, while 40 parcels didn’t receive bids at all.
Peterson says the lack of infrastructure in Utah’s remote areas kept many developers at bay.
“There is little to no existing infrastructure for development and there is not a significant amount of oil and gas resource there,” she says.
But lack of oil doesn’t always translate to “no sale.” Dave Nimkin, senior regional director for the southwest region of the National Parks Conservation Association, says buyers often purposefully tie up large swaths of land without prior analysis or scrutiny. Companies and individuals then hold on to the purchased land for years, hoping it will become an asset when oil prices go up.
Utah is a prime example of this “lease and hold” strategy. At the end of the 2016 fiscal year, approximately 2.9 million acres were leased to oil and gas operators, but only about 1.1 million acres were in production.
The companies leasing the lands “are not necessarily in business of energy development,” Nimkin says. “They are really speculators looking to sell that asset for greater value than what they paid.”
Whether the sites are oil-rich or not, both recent and proposed future lease sales in Utah have included lands rich in cultural, historical, ecological and biological resources.
For example, Peterson says a March 2018 lease sale included parcels near Bears Ears, Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients national monuments, as well as in the Alkali Ridge and along the Green and San Juan rivers.
“That lease sale was especially egregious,” Peterson says, “because of the parcels that are incredibly rich in cultural resources — in areas like Recapture Canyon, Mustang Mesa, Alkali Ridge and Montezuma Creek. The sites in that area include ancestral Puebloan habitation sites, structures, storage facilities, short term camps, limited activity areas, petroglyphs and pictographs and artifacts.”
Drilling and a Return to Deregulation
Environmental regulations that govern oil and gas leases are an important determinant of how much drilling is allowed in a given area. These regulations have undergone significant changes over the past decade, culminating with the recent rollbacks by the Trump administration that aimed to facilitate oil and gas development in the areas that have previously been off the table.
The issue dates back to an earlier era. During the Bush administration, six “resource-management plans” — land-use plans that provide a framework for managing BLM-administered lands over the next 15 to 20 years — were completed in Utah in August 2008, sparking protests from environmental groups. Some alleged that the timing of the release was politically motivated, as the Bush administration was about to leave office, making it difficult to review the six massive documents.
The plans were ultimately pushed through in the same year, which critics say in many ways emboldened oil and gas development that had previously been subject to review and assessment.
That slowed, temporarily, under the Obama administration, when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar put a moratorium on 77 oil and gas leases that the Bush administration had granted on the doorstep of the Arches National Park.
Salazar introduced leasing reform to address a system that was close to the breaking point, with nearly half of all proposed parcels receiving community protests and a substantial proportion resulting in litigation, according to the BLM. As a result, a new tool called “master leasing plans” was launched by the agency in 2010. The plans served as guide to facilitate balanced leasing and development of energy resources on public lands while protecting wildlife, natural resources and outdoor recreation.
The lease plans engendered a stakeholder process that assessed potential impacts before formalizing the leases.
However, the Trump administration ditched master leasing plans along with all of the preliminary steps that were required before gas and oil lease sales could take place with a single goal to expedite oil and gas leases.
Compounding the problem, the BLM has recently reduced its public comment period in the lease sale process.
Before the September lease sale in Utah, the agency didn’t allow the public to comment on its environmental analysis and allowed only written “scoping comments” — a much more limited form of comment that prioritizes “substantive comments” regarding a project’s impact and ignores opinion statements — during a 15-day period in July. During that time the public had no information beyond the location of the lease parcels, according to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
It’s not just the public that’s been cut off. Nimkin says the National Park Service, the BLM’s sister agency, is now consulted only “marginally,” and even local BLM managers and state directors are often disconnected from the process.
“The ability of BLM local officials to make decisions based on their own discretion has now been taken away from them,” Nimkin says. “We are being told that virtually every deferral choice for any lease sale is being made at the highest level in the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C.”
This lack of public comment has already proven, at least in part, to be illegal. On Sept. 21 a federal judge temporarily blocked a Trump administration policy that would have drastically limited public involvement in oil and gas leasing decisions. According to the preliminary injunction order, issued by U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Ronald E. Bush, lease sales scheduled for December in greater sage-grouse habitat spanning hundreds of thousands of acres across the interior West must now include 30-day public comment and administrative protest periods. The injunction stemmed from a lawsuit by the Western Watersheds Project and the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator).
The December lease sale was supposed to be conducted in accordance with the BLM’s Instruction Memorandum 2018-034, similar to the September lease sale, which severely limited public involvement.
The BLM’s Utah office didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment seeking to find out how the agency plans to handle the December lease sale in light of the ruling.
No matter how they move forward, however, the December lease sale is poised to be the largest in Utah in more than a decade, with 225 parcels encompassing 329,826 acres of federal public lands.
Green River, proposed BLM wilderness, Labyrinth Canyon. Photo: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
Other parcels are located in or near culturally rich landscapes, including Nine Mile Canyon and the Alkali Ridge Area. In addition, there are 159 parcels in the Uinta Basin, a geologic structural basin in the eastern part of the state that already suffers from some of the worst air quality in the nation because of increased oil and gas development. Environmental experts are worried that those problems will only worsen with expanded energy development.
In addition, tourism and outdoor recreation, which generate $12.3 billion a year in Utah, could be at risk. Peterson fears that tourists and outdoor recreation enthusiasts are not going to come “to explore pump jacks and pipelines.”
Just Warming Up
Looking further ahead, the BLM recently released a draft “resource management plan” that would open to development 2 millions of acres in southeastern New Mexico, where deposits of oil are said to be second only to Saudi Arabia.
While the plan would allow developers to tap large deposits of oil in the region, which includes part of the Permian Basin, critics say the passage of this first major resource management plan under the Trump administration could also pave the way for the unrestricted energy development in other western states.
The BLM’s Carlsbad field office, the busiest in the nation for oil and gas drilling, is in the middle of the resource plan revision process. A draft published Aug. 3 would determine how the region’s resources will be managed for the next 20 years. The draft features four alternatives for development of oil, natural gas and mineral extraction with the overarching goal of balancing the extraction industries with preservation of natural resources and public lands, according to the Carlsbad Current Argus.
Judy Calman, staff attorney at New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to protection of New Mexico’s wilderness areas, says there’s a lot of pressure on the Carlsbad field office from the Trump administration and from the companies who want to develop the area.
“I think the field office is seeing a lot of direction from D.C. about what kind of decisions to make, and I think it’s like a microcosm of the Trump administration’s energy policy,” she says.
The draft covers numerous ecologically important regions, including more than 130,000 acres bureaucratically defined as “lands with wilderness characteristics,” which have been documented during separate inventories conducted by the BLM and the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.
Although these lands have been determined to meet the BLM’s wilderness characteristics criteria, this alone does not guarantee they will be preserved. The agency can formally recognize these areas and can also decide to manage them for preservation. Without recognition, these lands will be up for grabs for oil and gas companies, according to the Wilderness Alliance website.
Separately the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance has proposed four new Areas of Critical Environmental Concern — units of public land spanning over 550,000 acres that protect important grassland habitat for birds of prey, riparian ecosystem components, nest colonies for great blue heron and culturally significant salt playas from fast-track oil and gas development.
In certain situations this type of designation can provide additional protection for lands that do not qualify as having wilderness characteristics but nonetheless are important for their wildlife, cultural or other resource values, according to the Wilderness Alliance website.
Of special concern is Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which famously boasts more than 100 miles of caves. Oil and gas development can already be seen from the park, and research is still being conducted on the network of caves inside and outside the caverns regarding the potential impacts that oil and gas development may have on the park.
Calman says while the proposed plan is still under review her organization is trying to protect whatever little is left undisturbed.
“The Trump administration has this energy dominance thing and it seems like it’s playing out here in southeast New Mexico,” Calman says.
Unlike the oil and lease sales, the proposed resource management plan still had a public comment period, which closed on Nov. 6. The BLM also held eight public meetings across New Mexico in September.
The plan was in actually the works under the Obama administration for eight years, but the Trump administration has proposed to include areas that were previously closed to development.
According to a report by High Country News, the Carlsbad Field Office initially planned to protect certain areas for wildlife scenic or cultural values that are not included in the new version. For instance, maps drafted in 2016 show that the BLM’s preferred alternative included more extensive protection for grasslands west of Artesia, a town with a population of 12,000 people.
The BLM’s New Mexico office also didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment regarding how the organization plans to address environmental concerns and when the agency plans to finish the proposed resource management plan.
Some worry that with its passage the agency will prioritize oil and gas development over managing the area for multiple use, meaning the country will see a major shift in public-land management.
The 90-day public comment period on the draft resource management plan started Aug. 3 and closed Nov. 5. Calman says throughout that period, her organization was still trying to convince the BLM to make changes to the document and prioritize conservation over development.
“This is the first one,” Calman says. “I think it’s a good opportunity to stop it before it gets rolling too much.”
But other projects loom not far behind, and that could have a lasting impact. “In its quest for energy dominance, the administration is leasing more remote, wild and sensitive areas,” Peterson says. “That push is both unnecessary and misguided. Once these sensitive landscapes are gone, we cannot get them back.”
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