Farming While Black: Growing Food and Community While Saving the Earth

We asked Leah Penniman, cofounder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black, about the healing power of soil and ending an unjust food system.

In the introduction to her book Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (Chelsea Green, 2018), author Leah Penniman quotes Toni Morrison as inspiration: “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

the askSo she did.

Penniman describes her newly released book as “a reverently compiled manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim our rightful place of dignified agency in the food system.” The book covers all the practical aspects of building a farm, from finding funding to saving seeds to raising animals. But it’s also a guide to growing community and uprooting racism.

She has put it all to practice as cofounder of Soul Fire Farm, near Albany, N.Y., where she helps grow food and train activist farmers. The farm delivers weekly shares of freshly grown food at sliding-scale prices to families around the region, many of whom live in areas without access to affordable, nutritious groceries.

We talked to Penniman about the ecology and politics of growing food.

What do you love most about being a farmer?

Cover of Farming While Black book.There is so much to love about being a farmer. Today I am in love with the opportunity to be close to the source of all wisdom, which I believe is the living Earth. And by having contact with the soil, there’s abundant communication that comes from the Earth about how we can best live in human community. For example, the mycelium connects the trees and transports sugars and minerals between them, weaving together life across divisions of species and geography. When we have contact with that, I believe that wisdom seeps into our consciousness and helps us know how to better be fully part of the interconnected web of life on Earth.

What is it about your crops and farming techniques that make them healthier for the soil and planet?

At Soul Fire Farm we use almost exclusively Afro-indigenous farming technologies. Examples of that include semi-permanent raised beds fashioned after the Owambo people in what is now Namibia; the fanya juu terraces that are originally found in Kenya; a polycropping system of trees integrated with herbs and vegetables from Haiti; cover cropping, which George Washington Carver taught us with legumes. We also use animals integrated into our systems in a rotational grazing method that comes out of many places across sub-Saharan Africa. And there are more.

When we got here in 2006 our topsoil was just a few inches deep, with hardpan clay underneath and severely eroded. Since then our soils have more than tripled in depth. We’ve seen the pollinators coming back and a return of biodiversity to the land from these practices.

You write in your book that you initially thought “organic  farming  was  invented  by  white  people”  and  worried  that  your “ancestors  who  fought  and  died  to  break  away  from  the  land  would  roll  over  in  their  graves  to  see  me  stooping.” What did you learn that made you realize that was wrong, and who were the people that inspired the path you’re on now?

It was during a Northeast Organic Farming Association conference as a teen. I’d been farming for a couple years, ready to make it my life’s work, and I was, as you mentioned, feeling disillusioned about the fact that it seemed like a really white community, a white movement. I wondered about my place in it.

I went around and handed out little slips of paper to anyone who appeared Black, Latinx or indigenous to me and asked them to meet. And we shared really common feelings about being one of the few [people of color] in this movement.

Karen Washington was there at the time, who went on to become a farmer at Rise and Root Farm and the founder of the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference. She said to hang in there — we’re going to claim space in this movement. And that was a turning point for me because it gave me a hypothesis that maybe I didn’t know the whole story.

I started investigating the origins of different sustainable-agriculture techniques and found out that of course everyone from Fannie Lou Hamer to Booker T. Whatley to the Sherrods to the Haitian peasant movement had all made these monumental contributions to sustainable agriculture and sustainable businesses. Those just aren’t talked about in the white-dominated food and land spaces. And so it was time to write a new narrative.

Your work helps to bring food to communities that lack access. What is “food apartheid,” that you reference in the book, and how widespread is it in the United States?

Leah Penniman
Farming While Black author Leah Penniman works at Soul Fire Farm. Photo by Jonah Vitale-Wolff

Last I checked there were about 12.5 million people who live in food deserts.

Food apartheid is a concept that Karen Washington taught me. As opposed to a food desert, which you could see as a natural ecosystem and something that has an inevitability to it, food apartheid is more accurate in that it talks about a human-created system of segregation that relegates certain people to food opulence and others to scarcity.

These divisions are often right down the lines of race and very much determined by zip code, which is in turn determined by a history of redlining and the exclusion of people of color from desirable neighborhoods.

What it results in is that black and brown communities are disproportionately impacted by hunger, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and all these other diet-related illnesses. And that is a tragedy for our physical health and it’s also a tragedy for our democracy because folks who are not feeling well cannot participate in civic life.

It’s really incumbent upon all of us to reconsider and reframe how we think of food, not as a privilege reserved for the few, but as a basic human right for all of us.

What can we do as individuals to increase the number of Blacks, Latinx and indigenous people who own land and grow food? What do we need at a policy level to help resource and scale these efforts?

Some of the most important things we can do are to engage in reparations work to fix the harm that’s been done. The land that we stand upon that we farm — it’s stolen land. It rightfully belongs to indigenous people, but it’s been stolen from other communities after that too, including the black community who’s been dispossessed of over 14 million acres of land since 1910. Not through choice, but through legal trickery, through racist violence and through governmental discrimination.

So we really need to look at actually giving that land back and that can be done through a number of channels, like the Land Loss Prevention Project and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

I think also at the policy level, we need to look at the way our governmental supports are distributed. Right now they disproportionately benefit row-crop farmers of commodity crops. They benefit corporate farmers and certainly white farmers. We still haven’t remedied that discrepancy in terms of who has access to those resources. And so programs like the 2501 Program [The Outreach and Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Grant Program] need a complete overhaul and also an increase of funding to make sure that it’s getting to those who need it most.

Our Votes for the Best New Environmental Books of November

Books on our ballot this month look at wolves, turtles, animal activism, the psychology of climate change and a lot more.

revelator readsIt’s election season, and we all need something to read after we’re done combing through our midterm voters’ guides. Here are our votes for the 16 best environmental books coming out this month, covering everything from wolves to wolverines and climate change to animal rights. Some of these books are intended for professional conservationists, while others may appeal to kids, mystery lovers, history buffs or fans of wildlife. And while many of these books are admittedly dark and depressing, you’ll find more than a few solutions in the mix as well. We hope you enjoy them. (Now if we can just get our politicians to read some of these books, too…)

Wildlife and Endangered Species:

Keepers of the Wolves by Richard P. Thiel — The first edition of this classic book, originally published in 2001, was a first-person account of the early days of wolf recovery in Wisconsin. Thiel’s update takes us to the present, including the start of wolf hunting in 2012, and looks to the future of this embattled species.

In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World by Lauren E. Oakes — Climate change has started killing off Alaska’s old-growth yellow cedar trees. The author, an ecologist, examines the threat in her new book, and in the process uncovers reasons for hope.

Dreaming in Turtle: A Journey Through the Passion, Profit, and Peril of Our Most Coveted Prehistoric Creatures by Peter Laufer — An examination of endangered turtles around the world and the people who both value them and are failing them. Oh, and the ones who are helping them, too.

The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals by Torill Kornfeldt — A worldwide look at the scientists behind the de-extinction movement, which seeks to resurrect the mammoth and other long-gone species.

No Place for Wolverines: A Jenny Willson Mystery by Dave Butler — The murder of a wolverine researcher kicks off this ecological crime novel, which pits a poacher-hating Canadian national park warden against an American corporation and the shadowy political puppets pushing to create a ski hill in an important wildlife habitat. Just like real life!

Climate Change:

Urgency in the Anthropocene by Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland — Most people describe the Anthropocene as an apocalypse in the making. But what if it’s the opposite, and it’s actually an age of enlightenment and emerging coexistence with nature? Either way, we’d better learn the answer to that question pretty darned quickly (hence the title).

The Psychology of Climate Change by Geoffrey Beattie and Laura McGuire — Why do some climate initiatives fail? The authors examine the mental factors that cause people to deny climate change and prevent global action, while also illustrating how to overcome these issues and create positive action.

Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States edited by Michael B. Gerrard and John C. Dernbach — The full book by this title, coming up in early 2019, promises to provide the “technical and policy pathways for reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.” There’s no need to wait until next year, though, to take action. This month’s shorter edition provides easy (and early) access to the main volume’s key recommendations and summarizes its 35 chapters (a third of which are already online). Both books will be must-reads for the lawyers helping to save our planet from climate change.

Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy by Hal Harvey — Why wait for new technologies when communities can start taking action now? This book offers “policymakers, activists, philanthropists and others in the climate and energy community” a guide of proven solutions to help fight climate change, with case studies on previous success stories.

Food and Agriculture:

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman — A how-to guide for ending racism and injustice in our country’s food system, both on farms themselves and in nutrition-starved Africa-American communities. Bonus: The same techniques improve the soil, treat livestock humanely, preserve rare plant varieties and provide benefits for the climate.

Pollution:

River of Redemption: Almanac of Life on the Anacostia by Krista Schlyer — A photographic look at a terribly polluted and neglected river in Washington, D.C., and a reminder that watersheds are an important and vital part of our social and ecological communities.

Fossil Fuels and Energy:

Oil, Power and War: A Dark History by Matthieu Auzanneau — An in-depth history of the fossil fuels that are robbing us of our future.

Farewell, King Coal: From Industrial Triumph to Climatic Disaster by Seaton Anthony — A history and obituary of the coal industry detailing the closure of Britain’s last deep coal mine in 2016 and looking ahead to our future health threats under the effects of coal-driven climate change.

Culture and Society:

Earth-Friendly Engineering Crafts by Veronica Thompson — Here’s a fun book for the science-minded kids in your life, offering tips on turning your recycling into interesting projects like airplanes and wind socks. The physical book is just 32 pages, but it comes with supplementary digital content to help keep the projects (and the learning) moving along.

The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump by James Morton Turner — Not a horror novel, but it sure sounds like one.

Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism by Mark Hawthorne — The heavily updated tenth anniversary edition of this classic text offers guidance on taking direct action to save species and speak out for animal rights.

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

Did we miss any of your recent favorites? Post your own candidates in the comments — but only after you’ve voted in the midterms!

Drought Detective

Drought can lead to anger and even violence. Climate change will make things worse. One cop is on the beat.

CORTEZ, Colo. — Dave Huhn usually is off work on Sundays, but when the phone rang one Sunday during the height of irrigation season a few years ago, he picked up.

The woman on the other end was frantic, screaming as she watched from the window as a neighbor, age 86, beat her husband, 82, with a shovel. The fight was over water, the most valuable resource in much of the West. One neighbor accused the other of taking more than his share from their irrigation ditch, leaving less for everyone else. The situation escalated to the point that farm tools became weapons.

“It was a situation where you had two old-timers that were very stubborn and very hard-headed,” says Huhn, a sheriff’s deputy for Montezuma County. “They were bound and determined to do it their way. And the other party was saying, ‘No you won’t.’”

Montezuma County is a stretch of sagebrush mesas and sandstone cliffs bordering Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, home to Mesa Verde National Park, where the cliff dwellings of ancestral Puebloans still stand. Unlike most local law enforcement throughout the West, Huhn specializes in the complex world of water law.

For the past nine summers, he has crisscrossed the county, seeing up close the conflict that chronic aridity creates. In 2009, when Huhn took over as the sheriff’s department’s water enforcer, word spread quickly.

“The very first month of the very first year, I had almost 450 calls that one month,” Huhn says. “That was just extraordinary.”

These days, depending on the severity of arid conditions, Huhn says he averages 60 to 100 water-case calls per month.

Water disputes — both violent and nonviolent — sometimes get the attention of local law enforcement, but because of an ignorance of what the law actually says, many deputies will simply tell the parties to hammer out their differences in state water court.

Huhn says the common refrain is that conflict over water is a civil matter, that no criminal statutes have been broken.

But in some cases, Huhn says, that’s incorrect. Local law enforcement can issue citations for water violations and police how people use and abuse the scarce resource.

On the beat for nearly a decade, Huhn says he’s known for fairly and thoroughly investigating water cases. His reputation precedes him to the scene.

“I’ll walk up to the front door or out in that field to talk to whoever I need to talk to, and they’ll turn around look at me and give me a funny look and say, ‘You’re that water cop, aren’t you?’ So I’ve kind of gotten used to that.”

The majority of calls he receives are claims of water theft, Huhn says.

There are a few methods to steal water. One popular method, he says, is to simply drop a pump into an irrigation ditch. Throughout the county, ditches run through private properties on an easement, meaning the residents see the water on their land, but they have no rights to it. If they turn that pump on and divert from the ditch without the water rights to do that, it’s a crime.

Huhn started confiscating dozens of pumps, storing them in the evidence room, “and as they started to pile up, I was told not to do that anymore.”

Disputes among farmers are sometimes harder to prove, he says.

One party might have rights to some water but take more than its share. After consulting the local water commissioner and documents related to a water-rights decree, Huhn can issue either a warning or write a ticket, just like at a traffic stop.

“First, people were shocked. They were like, ‘You’re kidding me right? You’re going to cite me over water?’ I say, ‘Yes, it’s a valuable commodity in this state.’”

Another common citation is for failing to have a measuring device on a ditch, like a weir or a flume. Those who divert from a stream are required by state law to measure the flow of what they take.

Enforcement of that requirement varies across Colorado, but not in Montezuma County. No measuring device? That’s either a warning or a citation, Huhn says.

Farmer Bob Schuster, 76, has called on Huhn to help resolve water disputes among his neighbors a few times.

At dispute is water in a ditch that irrigates farmland in the county’s McElmo Canyon, a narrow, picturesque reach of sandstone with a series of vineyards and pastures that stretch across the Utah line.

Schuster grows wine grapes and hay, and he runs a plumbing supply store in the county’s biggest city, Cortez. Schuster says water conflict is a constant fact of life in the county, but droughts like the current one make people desperate.

“People are basically — and these are good people — basically dishonest,” he says.

Schuster’s farm sits at the end of an irrigation ditch with a handful of users upstream. If they’re taking more than they’re entitled to, the ditch goes dry before it reaches his fields.

“They look out their fields, they see they need water, and they take the water going through that’s not theirs,” he says. “They don’t consider their neighbor needs his water.”

Because livelihoods here are so dependent on water, emotions run high when accusations get thrown around. In true Hatfield and McCoy fashion, Schuster says, people have pointed guns at him, swung shovels at his head and sucker-punched him during fights with neighbors over water.

When water deliveries are cut because of drought restrictions, everyone’s on edge.

“Water is more scarce,” says Mike Preston, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District. “And so you get the same demand, less water. And so that heightens the potential for conflict.”

Huhn’s role — enforcing water law and interacting with the county’s agricultural community — is unique in the state, Preston says.

“To tell you the truth, I can’t believe that other counties aren’t doing the same,” Preston says. “Once this kind of program is put in place, if it’s done with a well-trained person, they’re never going to want to go back to the bad old days.”

Back at the sheriff’s office, Huhn says violent skirmishes over water have been on the decline since the county started enforcing water law. But the continued dry years add pressure on farmers and ranchers trying to make ends meet.

“Historically, we’ve had people killed over water in the state of Colorado. We have in this county,” he says.

Huhn’s job has all the makings of a tall tale from the Wild West, with sweeping desert vistas and shootouts with outlaws. But his role seems more futuristic. The most recent science on climate change predicts the Colorado River Basin, which includes all of Montezuma County, will be hotter and drier as decades pass.

“We don’t want the violence,” Huhn says. “We don’t want the fighting between families and between friends. We want to be able to resolve it in a nonviolent way.”

This story is part of Elemental: Covering Sustainability, a new multimedia collaboration between Cronkite News, Arizona PBS, KJZZ, KPCC, Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS SoCal. 

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.  Connect with us on Facebook.

Trump, Zombie Deregulation and the Hawaiian Hawk

A bid to remove the bird from the Endangered Species Act has emerged once again — long after the disappearance of the organization that proposed its removal.

The National Wilderness Institute no longer exists. Its website has disappeared, its phone number has been disconnected, and its founder has moved on to become a senior advisor for the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation.

But the legacy of the organization, founded in part to attempt to repeal the Endangered Species Act, lives on. Back in 1997 the National Wilderness Institute petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the Hawaiian hawk, or ‘io (Buteo solitarius), from the Endangered Species Act. That petition has never achieved what it set out to do, but it keeps rising from the grave like a bad horror-movie zombie. The latest resurrection occurred this week and could end up being the final chapter in a very long, very strange saga.

The Twist of History

The only hawk species native to Hawaii, the ‘io once lived on six of the archipelago’s islands. Today it can only be found on the Big Island, Hawaii. The original causes of its decline are not known, but they appear to be linked to the original settlement of Hawaii by Polynesians.

The hawk continued to suffer once Westerners arrived, bringing with them loggers, livestock, invasive species and disease. By the time the Hawaiian hawk joined the endangered species list in 1967, six months after passage of the original Endangered Species Preservation Act, the species’ population was estimated at just a few hundred birds with a very limited range on a tiny portion of the island.

Legal protection and decades of recovery efforts helped the Hawaiian hawk. In 2014 the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the population at close to 3,000 — a number that seemed to have been stable since 1998. As their population has grown, the hawks have also spread their wings and now range across nearly 60 percent of the island.

That population increase is a big part of the delisting push. When the Service published its Hawaiian hawk species recovery plan in 1984, researchers suggested that a population of 2,000 birds would be enough to consider downlisting the species from “endangered” to “threatened.” They wrote that because of the hawk’s “high breeding success, the relatively low levels of predation and human disturbance, and the absence of environmental contaminants affecting the ‘io, the population appears to be in a more secure condition than previously thought.”

With that in mind, the Service itself first proposed reclassifying the hawk as “threatened” in 1993. That initial proposal kicked off a few years of meetings, demographic studies and reviews. In 1997 a working group that was formed to study this possibility passed the issue back to the Service, saying that a simple population count was not enough to reevaluate the species’ status and suggesting that trends and other threats should also be considered.

At about the same time, the National Wilderness Institute filed its petition to delist the hawk. The Service declined to act on the organization’s petition for more than a decade, saying that other species took priority over the agency’s scant resources.

Then, in 2009, the agency formally proposed not just reclassifying but removing the Hawaiian hawk from the endangered species list. That proposal initiated a public comment period, a normal process under the Endangered Species Act. Those comments yielded new information, which, according to a February 2014 filing in the Federal Register, showed “negative habitat trends due to urbanization and nonnative plant species invasion” but also identified several ongoing reforestation projects that would benefit the hawk.

The Sequel

The 2014 bid to delist the Hawaiian hawk eventually failed, but now it’s back again. This past May President Trump’s massive “Unified Agenda” of planned deregulatory measures once again proposed delisting the hawk. That proposal came one month after the Heritage Foundation issued a report claiming many species — including the Hawaiian hawk — were only protected by the Endangered Species Act due to supposed “data error.”

The author of that Heritage Foundation report? You guessed it: Robert Gordon, cofounder of the defunct National Wilderness Institute.

Now the Fish and Wildlife Service has taken things further. This week the Service announced a new plan to consider delisting the Hawaiian hawk. The Federal Register listing cites no new population counts for the bird but does mention several new and ongoing habitat restoration efforts that have benefitted the species. A new public comment period runs through November 29. The agency seeks any additional information on the hawk and either its recovery or threats, including the bird’s ecology, population trends and positive or negative effects of land-management practices, as well as any potential impacts of the recent Kilauea Volcano eruptions.

So what happens next? This story has already stretched on for decades, and the Hawaiian hawk’s protected status has outlasted the organization that sought to remove it, if not the person behind that push. That history could repeat, but with the bird now also in the crosshairs of President Trump’s deregulatory agenda, it’s hard to say how this long, strange saga may finally conclude.

A version of this article was originally published in 2014 by Scientific American.

Shock as China Legalizes Medicinal Trade in Rhino Horns and Tiger Parts

Conservationists fear this will stimulate demand for poached animals while making it harder to enforce existing laws.

In a move that shocked and horrified many conservationists, China this week opened up two legal markets for rhino horns and tiger body parts. Under China’s new rules, which overturn a 25-year-old ban, farm-raised tiger and rhino “products” can be approved for use in medical research or by accredited doctors in hospitals, despite the fact that the body parts have no known medicinal value. China also approved limited trade in antique tiger and rhino products.

China didn’t throw the door open for all trade in these products, and in fact banned all other sales of rhino and tiger parts. The announcement says the two new legal markets will be highly regulated and controlled and adds that illegal items will be confiscated. China also banned the sale of any tiger or rhino products currently in personal collections.

Still, environmental groups say this change will actually create additional consumer demand for all tiger and rhino products. The Environmental Investigation Agency called the new rules “a brazen and regressive move that drastically undermines international efforts for tiger and rhino conservation” while stimulating China’s growing tiger-farm industry. Thousands of tigers live in the country’s many breeding facilities, where they often end up being slaughtered for meat, skins, tiger-bone wine or other products.

There is no comparable market for rhino products yet, but evidence suggests efforts to import rhinos into China for similar breeding and distribution.

While some argue the use of captive-raised animals helps reduce pressure on wild species, the markets for both farmed and antique animal products have frequently been used to “launder” poached animals. Meanwhile the two-tier legal system of allowing some products to be sold while banning others also makes enforcement of trade laws more difficult, as it is almost impossible to visually distinguish parts from farmed and wild animals. This has been most notably the case with elephant ivory.

“China’s experience with the domestic ivory trade has clearly shown the difficulties of trying to control parallel legal and illegal markets for ivory,” Margaret Kinnaird of the World Wildlife Fund said in a press release.

A similar problem has been reported with numerous other species, especially those used in traditional medicine, which values wild animals more than farm-raised for their supposed higher potency.

WWF and other organizations have called for China to close its tiger farms, but this seems increasingly unlikely in the face of the new markets.

Climate Change Really Gets This Researcher’s Goat

Will mountain goats be able to shed their thick winter coats in time for earlier warm seasons? The Mountain Goat Molt Project wants your help to find out.

Picture your favorite winter coat. Something warm and cozy, perfect for bundling up in when the temperature dips. Come January, you reach for it every morning and wouldn’t think of leaving home without it.

Now imagine being forced to wear that coat during a heatwave. For animals that grow a shaggy winter coat in the fall and shed it in the spring, climate change could make that uncomfortable situation a reality.

With climate change already creating new risks for mountain species, researcher Katarzyna Nowak wondered how earlier spring warmings might affect animals that grow and shed heavy coats each year. Earlier this year she launched a project to collect photographs of mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) taken during their annual molt to track whether or not its timing is changing.

If so, it could create a number of problems for the animals. “If they can’t sync, then their thick winter coats will become a liability in summer,” says Nowak. “They’ll have to seek shade and water and be more active at night, and they could potentially be more vulnerable to predators because of how they’re changing their activity patterns.”

The first key source of data? Members of the public, or “citizen scientists,” who have been invited to share their photos of mountain goats. Nowak turned to the app iNaturalist, which lets users upload photos of plants and animals, including metadata about the date and place where they were observed. Nowak’s iNaturalist project page allows users to contribute their photos for the research.

“It’s just been a really cool way of conducting the project,” she says. “We’ve had some emails from rangers who say, hey, can I hang your mountain goat project poster at the start of this trail, because there’s a mineral lick and people take photos there.” The project has also gotten a boost from the #MountainGoatMoltProject hastag on Twitter.

But recent photos taken by citizen scientists aren’t enough; to track whether molt is changing through time, Nowak needs older photos for comparison. Archived images from Glacier National Park showed plenty of goats, but they didn’t always include the dates the photos were taken, so Nowak’s search for pictures with the necessary dates has led her to some sources she didn’t expect. “We met a reporter from a newspaper near Glacier called Hungry Horse News, and he did a piece about the project and shared some photos with us from the newspaper’s archives, which do have exact dates,” says Nowak. “So it seems like some newspapers — and I never even thought of this initially — may have better-maintained archives than some national parks and even museums when it comes to dating their images.”

So far Nowak has amassed around 520 photos of molting goats, more than 70 percent of which came from citizen scientists. She also made a trip to the Yukon over the summer to photograph mountain goats at the northern end of their range. She and her colleagues use Photoshop to analyze each individual photo, cropping the animal from the background, painstakingly delineating the shed and unshed portions of its coat, and counting the pixels in each area. They’re currently applying for funding to develop machine learning algorithms that can automate this.

mountain goat
Mountain goat molt, pixel by pixel.

Nowak’s analysis of the photos she has so far hasn’t revealed much evidence about changing molt dates, at least not yet. That could be because she simply doesn’t have enough older photos yet to document long-term changes. She hopes that anyone with mountain goat photos they’re willing to share — especially photos with dates from years or decades ago — will consider uploading them to iNaturalist or the project’s other citizen science portal, CitSci.org.

And while Nowak’s focus is on hooved mammals, climate change’s effects on the timing of plants’ and animals’ annual cycles — what scientists call “phenology” — goes beyond overheated goats.

“Something analogous happens with alpine plants — warmer temperatures can mean earlier snow melt, but because very cold frosts happen earlier, the likelihood of getting your flowers zapped by an early frost increases,” says the University of Washington’s Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, who has studied the effects of climate change on the plant communities of Mount Rainier National Park (home to its own population of mountain goats) for the past decade.

Other animals could be affected, too. Some, such as snowshoe hares, change color with the seasons, turning from brown to white and back again as snow accumulates and then melts. Scientists have started to study how being mismatched with their environment due to earlier spring warming could affect them, with early results indicating they could lose their camouflage from predators during important months when their fur doesn’t match the color of their ground cover.

“I wish people appreciated how large the effects of climate change are going to be on the plants and animals with which we share our planet,” says Hille Ris Lambers. “I think in general folks might assume that warmer temperatures will be good for all kinds of animals — after all, you don’t need that winter coat anymore! — but it’s obviously more complicated than that.”

If it turns out that mountain goats can’t adapt to the shifting timing of the seasons, Nowak and her colleagues have thrown around some fanciful ideas for how to keep the animals from overheating, like providing them with extra shade or even artificial snow. And it isn’t just goats that could be affected — other animals from musk oxen to moose also grow and shed shaggy coats every year, and Nowak hopes more researchers will begin looking at how climate change could disrupt their annual molt cycles.

Nowak believes that thinking about climate change in terms of when you need to take off your winter coat is something everyone can relate to.

“My grandmother in Poland used to wear fur coats, but she doesn’t wear them anymore because it just doesn’t get cold enough to need them,” she says. “Even for people who don’t follow climate science or who have their doubts about our influence on the climate, the fact that your heavy coat has been in the closet for the past five years, that’s something you notice.”

© 2018 Rebecca Heisman. All rights reserved.

Helping Plants, Healing People

In his new book, ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan chronicles the efforts of “plant midwives,” women who are working to restore edible plants and healing herbs.

In ethnobotanist and author Gary Paul Nabhan’s newest book, Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities (Island Press) he writes about communities engaged in the radical restoration work of connecting culture, food and place. His stories range from bees to bison, soil to sturgeon. In this excerpt, readers get to meet the women who practice “plant wifery,” helping to protect and restore species that have medicinal and cultural importance.

Have you ever been hiking and stopped in your tracks to gaze at wildflowers so vibrant and abundant that you couldn’t keep your eyes off of them? Did their delicate petals bring out the color in other lives found around you — the deer, the seed-eating sparrows, the other hikers making their way along the trail?

And was it just their beauty or also their scent — exuded for bees and butterflies — that told you that one day you too might taste this sweetness?

In late May 2017, ethnobotanist Joyce LeCompte offered me an opportunity to see such a sight and take a deep whiff of such a delectable fragrance. We hightailed it out of Seattle early one morning to rendezvous with others at the Glacial Heritage Reserve in the South Puget Sound area of western Washington.

There, the native plant in lavish bloom was the blue camas lily — Camassia quamash — the signature flower of wet prairie meadows in the Pacific Northwest. That spring, camas seemed to be blooming and blanketing the entire meadow in every direction we turned.

As far as our eyes could see, their six-petaled flowers added hues of pale lilac, violet blue and deep purple to the vivid greens and subtle tans of the open prairie.

If you happened to arrive at the reserve unfamiliar with the restoration project happening there, you could easily assume it was first and foremost about the restoration of beauty. After all, who could object to preserving the jaw-dropping, heart-pounding natural beauty of this world we live in?

The beauty of camas lilies was not ignored by previous generations of both residents in and travelers to western Washington. As early as the 1850s, camas lily bulbs were being dug up and shipped everywhere from the Atlantic seaboard to England to grace ornamental gardens.Book cover: Food from the Radical Center

But don’t get me wrong: This camas lily is not just another pretty face to be sent off to Some Place Else. Its ultimate value may lie in its ability to combat adult-onset diabetes among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. The complex carbohydrates in camas roots slow the digestion and absorption of glucose, flattening blood sugar levels and potentially reducing stress on the pancreas.

In addition to being a traditional food of great significance to First Nations communities along the Pacific North Rim, it may be a key factor in their future health. More than 20 indigenous cultures in western Canada and the United States still tend, collect, clean and pit-roast its bulbs for special seasonal events. Many of these communities hope that camas can help keep their children free of diabetes.

Of course, some of these intertribal “root festivals” have been taking place for centuries and millennia. But now the bulbs are being dried and stored for families to eat year-round as one more means to deal with nutrition-related diseases.

Camas is just one of those “cultural keystone plants” that is both deeply intertwined with both indigenous health and the environmental health of the wet prairies. Thus the restoration of camas in wet prairies is linked to the restoration of human health for native communities who live in or near those landscapes.

And that is exactly why Joyce LeCompte of the University of Washington wrote an incubator grant to the Center for Creative Conservation: to bring together amazing women with diverse skills — Frederica Bowcutt (botany), Taylor Goforth (environmental communications), Valerie Segrest (native nutrition) and Sarah Hamman (restoration ecology). Their own goal was to provide technical as well as social support to leaders interested in camas that are emerging in Coastal Salish tribal communities.

The multicultural team set out to restore this landscape with the appreciation that indigenous knowledge, stewardship and use of these plants matter deeply to neighboring communities.

I doubt that it has escaped your notice, but historically, most “environmental remediation” projects were dominated by men — albeit well-intended men — who inadvertently practiced a top-down management style that echoed the military as a whole and the Army Corps of Engineers in particular.

Under the auspices of “improving the environment” to control floods and stream flow, the Army Corps drained marshes and wet meadows while planting shrubs for game birds and to stabilize soil. That’s exactly what plants like camas lilies do not need.

Few of these environmental engineers were even aware that local women were continuing to take their families out to harvest camas in places like the South Sound Prairies. As shrubs and Douglas firs moved in, camas lilies began to fade away, and harvesting became less frequent.

To reverse historic declines in camas and their traditional uses, Joyce and the other women who cohosted me have formed a multicultural “community of practice” for the edible plants and healing herbs of the South Sound Prairie.

I was heartened to see that these restoration and recovery efforts now involve dozens of indigenous harvesters, healers and herbalists as well as land managers, botanists, wildlife biologists, fire ecologists, nutritional scientists and ethnobotanical educators. They exemplify a trend that even the higher-ups in the U.S. Forest Services now embrace: that diverse membership in scientific communities fosters innovation and problem-solving more effectively than communities with a narrow range of knowledge, skills and experience.

In fact, many of the practitioners are women with a set of technical and experiential skills that ethnobotanist Kay Fowler calls “plant wifery.” Elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, ethnobotanist Madrona Murphy might be considered one of those “midwives.” As she herself has documented, “Tribes cultivated [camas] in large gardens, subdivided into family-owned plots passed down through the generations. These were fertilized with seaweed, cleared of weeds and stones, and burned to control brush and grass.”

Building on these ancient practices, the women in Joyce’s entourage have initiated what they call “the Camas Prairie Cultural Ecosystems Incubator.” They are like traditional midwives who use plants to help “bring out of the incubator” and into full light fresh ways of engaging with other people and with the land.

Excerpted from Food from the Radical Center by Gary Paul Nabhan. Copyright © 2018 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Previously in The Revelator:

What Is the Fate of the World’s Plants?

The Last Lions of India

Disease has struck the rare Asiatic lions of Gujarat, and other new threats have put their recovery in jeopardy. What will it take to save them?

When most people think of lions, they probably think of Africa. But another, lesser-known subspecies of lion actually lives in India, where they represent a major conservation victory — for now, at least.

Asiatic lions are a distant cousin of the much bigger African lions that diverged from the African continent over 100,000 years ago. They once roamed throughout the Middle East, including Mesopotamia, Syria, Iran, Palestine, Arabia and Balochistan, along with much of Northern India to the Bay of Bengal. Sadly hunting caused the lion’s numbers and territory to shrink, until they were only found on the Indian subcontinent. After that, trigger-happy British colonialists and Indian maharajahs shot practically all of India’s lions except for a handful in the Gir deciduous forests in Junagarh, a district in Gujarat in western India.

By the beginning of 20th century only an estimated 20 Asiatic lions remained in the wild. Their fate would have been sealed forever if not for the timely act of the nawab of Junagarh who offered immediate sanctuary — from a king to the king of the jungle — and the lions finally found a safe haven. The nawab was succeeded by his son, an even bigger animal lover, who in 1922 totally banned hunting of lions in Gir and declared the region as a protected area.

Over the next 100 years, as colonial rule gave way to an independent democratic country, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries started sprouting across India especially to save the national animal — the tiger. Gir became a government-protected reserve and, as the last bastion of Asiatic lions, has continued to play a vital role in the conservation of the species.

New Troubles

The last census of the cats’ population in 2015 showed 356 Asiatic lions living in the Gir National park and another 167 in the unprotected forest and revenue areas of Gujarat state.

The lions owe their survival and recovery to the assiduous efforts of India’s Forest Department, the state and central governments, and the local communities who have revered the lions as the true king of their last abode. It came as no surprise when, in 2015, the Asiatic lions became the first big carnivores to be downgraded from “critically endangered” to “endangered” on the IUCN Red List of threatened species. They’re a rare conservation victory any nation would be proud of.

But is it all good news for Asiatic lions? Perhaps it seems that way when you look at their rising numbers, but it appears less so when you look at the bigger picture of a shrinking habitat. With more than 500 lions in the 8,494-square-mile park (22,000 sq. km), many experts feel there’s just not enough room for their population to continue to grow. Meanwhile, keeping them all in one place also leaves the lions vulnerable to the ravages of a future natural or man-made disaster like fire or floods, which could spell doom for the whole species.

In fact one of those disasters may have now arrived, as at least 23 Asiatic lions have died in the past few months. About half of the deaths have been linked to an outbreak of canine distemper virus, an infectious disease that has also threatened other wild cat populations. In response, the Gujarat State Forest and Animal Husbandry departments have started a program to vaccinate local cattle and dogs, from which the disease probably spread to lions, but it’s as-yet unknown how many lions remain at risk.

The People Problem

Meanwhile, there’s another threat: With millions of tourists flocking to see the animals each year, the villagers living on the fringes of the forest have found a new way to earn quick bucks by showing off “their state’s pride” to passing tourists.

In May this year seven people were arrested in Gujarat for planning an illegal lion show, where a somewhat tamed lioness was lured out of the forest with live chicken bait. The viral video — and many other such episodes of locals abusing wild lions through staged hunts and wild chases that surfaced one after the other — burst the bubble for the custodians of the forest, who had until then believed they were doing everything right to protect the lions.

The Gujarat state government immediately took stern steps. New rules include a ban on taking videos of the wild lions, which will now amount to hunting. Any individuals shooting a lion with a camera could get seven years of imprisonment and will be booked under section 9 of the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972.

Other initiatives suggested are radio collaring each of the wild cats to track them constantly and the enrollment of local guardians into a troop called SinhMitras (Friends of the Lion) who, accompanied by dogs, would roam the forests to keep a watch not on the lions but the tourists and ensure no one uses any illegal means to get a glimpse of the lions. The state is also intent on adding two additional safari parks and turning them into protected areas to reduce the tourism pressure on the current safaris.

The Missing Step

However, a step the Gujarat government is reluctant to take is to give away its pride — or at least to share the responsibility of conservation by extending the lion’s territory to a neighboring state and thereby improving the lions’ chances of survival in the face of unexpected disasters like the current disease outbreak.

Five years ago the Supreme Court of India, the nation’s highest judicial body, issued an order to move some lions from Gir national park to Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, but to this date no lion has been moved.

Gujarat claims that the translocation will happen only after 33 studies have been conducted in Madhya Pradesh under the IUCN guidelines. The Madhya Pradesh government, on the other hand, says it is ready for the lions, having expanded the size of the Kuno protected area from 133 square miles (344 square km) to 270 square miles (700 sq. km). They have also spent Rs. 90 crore (U.S. $13 million) for relocation of 24 villages in the core area, development of prey base and other infrastructure needs. Ravi Chellam, a member of an expert committee formed by the Environment Ministry, believes it is the complete unwillingness of the governments — both central and the states — to deal with the complexity and the urgency of the problem that is delaying the shift of the lions.

What is worrying is Gujarat’s unflinching belief that it is the only state in India capable of protecting the cats; this could turn catastrophic. A recent study showed that of the 184 deaths recorded of lions in 2016 and 2017, 32 were due to unnatural causes like falling into open wells, being hit by trains or vehicles, electrocution and poisoning. The presence of six highways, a railway line and about 18,000 open wells only increase the danger of continued accidents. “At the moment, all our eggs are in one basket and that is a huge risk,” warned Chellam.

Even the recent canine distemper outbreak has not swayed the government’s position. This month Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani emphatically stated that the lions were “completely safe in the forest” and “will not be relocated.”

The lions of Gujarat are admittedly doing relatively well overall despite the current threats, but Asiatic lions are still endangered and need a contingency plan that ensures they can roar beyond the boundaries of their lone territory. While at one time the resolute action of a nawab saved the lions by closing the boundaries of the state, what would do greater good today is to open dialogues, share expertise, encourage development of more secure habitats through translocations and give the kings of the jungle a chance to spread their kingdoms.

© 2018 Atula Gupta. All rights reserved.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

New Green Strategy: Change the Electorate, Not the Election

It turns out that many people who care about the environment never vote. One organization is working to change that.

How little do elected officials care about climate change? Look no further than a recent U.S. Senate hearing about the biggest threats facing the country, where lawmakers asked a single question about global warming during the entire three-hour event.

Sadly, this hearing occurred just days after the world’s leading scientific body on climate change warned that the world has a mere dozen years to avoid catastrophic impacts.

Despite the urgency of the climate crisis, getting elected officials in the United States to commit to genuine solutions has been slow going, to say the least.

Nathaniel Stinnett has some idea of why and what to do about it.

Stinnett worked for years as a consultant and advisor on political campaigns and for advocacy nonprofits. A few years ago he noticed that polls showed that climate change and environmental issues were usually last among priorities for likely voters.

But that’s not because Americans don’t care about those issues, he says. Polls of American adults show that tens of millions do care deeply about those issues. They’re just not good voters compared to people who vote on issues like immigration, which is the top priority among voters in this year’s midterm election.

So in 2015 Stinnett launched the Environmental Voter Project with the goals of identifying environmental advocates who don’t vote and then turning them out for any and all elections.

The group calculated that close to 16 million environmentalists didn’t vote in the 2014 midterms, and around 10 million didn’t vote in 2016’s presidential election.

It’s hoped that the more people vote, the more action will finally be taken by the politicians who get elected. “More facts or fancy arguments are not going to convince politicians to lead on climate change,” he says. “All they care about is getting enough votes, so that’s all we care about.”

In just a few years of effort, the results are already encouraging.

The Strategy

Most other voting-oriented initiatives follow two typical strategies. Some groups focus on registering people who have never voted. Others, including nearly everyone running a political campaign or advocating for an issue, focus on turning out likely voters who align with their candidate or cause.

That means that very few organizations (if any) end up talking to people who are registered but simply don’t show up on Election Day. There’s a reason for that: “If I’m trying to elect you governor of California, I’m not going to spend your money talking to people I know aren’t going to vote,” says Stinnett. “That’s how I get fired.”

And that’s where the Environmental Voter Project’s mission differs. They don’t endorse candidates or lobby for issues. They aren’t trying to win any elections. They don’t even try to convince people to care more about climate change and the environment.

Instead they find people who already believe in the cause but don’t currently vote.

“And instead of changing their minds, we change their behavior and turn them into more consistent voters,” he says. “We don’t focus on elections. We focus on changing the electorate.”

In other words, the Environmental Voter Project plays the long game.

That’s because politicians are only interested in issues that are important to voters, not nonvoters. “Nothing motivates a politician more than winning or losing an election,” says Stinnett. “If you get more environmentalists to vote, you’re going to get more politicians leading on environmental issues. Our goal is to have real environmental leadership not just at the federal level, but also at the state and local level.”

The organization uses extensive polling and publicly available data to build predictive models that can identify people who are likely to say that climate change and environmental issues are one of their top two priorities. Then they check that list against voting records to find their targets.

After that staff and 1,800 volunteers use a combination of contact methods including calling, texting, door-to-door canvassing, direct mail and digital advertising.

It’s hard work, and while some people may be frustrated by the sheer number of people who care about the environment but don’t vote, Stinnett sees a tremendous opportunity.

“We live in a world where it’s increasingly hard to get people to change their minds, especially when we’re talking about climate change and other environmental issues,” he says. “But if we’re talking about finding people who are already with us and slightly tweaking their actions, it’s a little bit easier.”

The Results

The Environmental Voter Project tested out its methods for the first two years in Massachusetts before expanding last year to Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

How effective have their efforts been? The group reported that by using mail and digital advertising, it was able to increase turnout between 2.8 and 4.5 percent. In-person canvassing bumps up turnout by 4.9 to 6.9 percent.

And because the group was focusing on every single election, big or small, there were some people who got contacted for four elections in a single year. “By then end of the fourth election there were people that were voting at a 12.1 percent higher rate than our control group,” Stinnett says.

The reason that number is so high, they believe, is that others took notice of their results. It only takes two months after you vote for your name to show up on voter records, so after nonvoters start turning out for elections, other campaigns begin to identify them as likely voters.

“It was like the cavalry would come in and we were sending this signal to the marketplace that these people were now voters,” says Stinnett. “And then all these well-funded campaigns were coming in and turning out these people at no cost to us.”

The Lessons

And here’s the unexpected thing about EVP’s strategy and success: Even though it’s targeting environmentalists, its messaging rarely ever mentions the environment. Instead it plays on people’s desires to fit in with their peers.

This kind of social-norms messaging is used a lot these days. There are apps that motivate you to work out by comparing your run to your friend’s or get you to save electricity by telling you how much energy your neighbor uses.

The Environmental Voter Project employs similar tactics to turn out voters.

For example, a target might receive a mailing letting her know how many people in her building voted in the last election. “Sometimes we remind them that whether they vote or not is public record, sometimes we’ll even send them copies of their voter records and tell them we’ll follow up after the election,” says Stinnett.

The Project also uses voter pledges, which he says work surprisingly well in convincing people to keep their promise and vote. “Most people want to be known as honest promise keepers,” he says. And that relates to another concept they employ: expressive choice theory.

Instead of rationally trying to convince someone of the importance of their vote (which would be rational choice theory), EVP focuses on changing the person’s behavior to take advantage of how they want to express themselves or how they want to view themselves, Stinnett explains.

While that all may sound a bit pushy, Stinnett doesn’t care. “It isn’t like the climate crisis is a small thing,” he says. “If getting a little aggressive with social-pressure techniques can dramatically increase the number of environmentalists that vote, you better believe we’re going to do it.”

Right now people in the United States are fixated on November 6 and what the midterm election may bring, but Stinnett and his colleagues are already shifting their focus to the mayoral elections of spring 2019.

Every election, he believes, is an opportunity to change behavior and eventually policy.

“The climate crisis is not some disease for which we have no cure,” he says. “All we’re missing is political leadership. We already have all the policy solutions. We just don’t have people willing to enact them.”

Stinnett believes that voting, which takes the average American just 14 minutes, is one of the most significant actions you can take to save the planet.

“Simply by becoming a voter on public voter records you become a part of the (unfortunately very small) group of Americans who drive policy,” Stinnett says. And while some people who care about the environment have made lifestyle changes to tread more lightly on the planet, they still haven’t shown up to vote en masse.

“But once we start doing that, it’s amazing how quickly things can change,” he says.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Environment Is on the November Ballot — Here’s Where and What’s at Stake

The Trump Administration’s ‘Dishonest’ Attack on Fuel-economy Standards

A former EPA engineer calls it “the most spectacular regulatory flip-flop in history.” Other experts say the resulting emissions increase would bode ill for the planet.

The Trump administration’s plan to freeze fuel-economy standards is “the most spectacular regulatory flip-flop in history,” says a retired EPA engineer who helped to develop the standards under the Obama administration.

“These standards weren’t going to be the ultimate solution for solving the climate problem, but they were a very, very important first step,” says Jeff Alson, who retired this past April after a 40-year career at the EPA. “That’s why this delay is so risky to us.”

The Obama-era fuel-economy rules for cars and trucks — which former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced the Trump administration would “revise” this past April — would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 540 million metric tons and oil consumption by 1.2 billion barrels.

The previous rules were developed over a period of seven years by the EPA and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Passed in 2010 and 2012, the standards required automakers to continuously increase their vehicles’ fuel efficiency and decrease their emissions through the year 2025. Alson says the effort — which involved “hundreds of meetings” — resulted in a plan to effectively double fuel efficiency over that time period while allowing automakers to incrementally improve their technology.

Since 2012 the rules have saved drivers “tens of billions of dollars on fuel and cut hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions,” according to a recent Union of Concerned Scientists blog post by retired General Motors engineer Greg Kempf.

The Trump plan, however, would put that savings on hold and flatline further fuel-economy improvements for six years. If passed, it would result in a 500,000 barrel-a-day increase of oil consumption in the United States, according to S&P Global Markets. The rules, according to the August 24 announcement in the Federal Register, are actually designed to increase fossil-fuel consumption, saying the country has increased oil production enough to reduce “the urgency of the U.S. to conserve energy.”

By contrast, the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the world must, among other actions, rapidly switch to electric vehicles powered by renewable energy if it hopes to avoid a climate-change catastrophe.

A Change in Plans

Although the automotive industry publicly supported the old standards, experts say they also advocated for slowing them down, as evidenced by a letter a trade group called the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers sent to President Trump shortly after his inauguration.

“The industry is more concerned with their quarterly profits than long-term greenhouse gas emissions,” says John M. DeCicco, research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute. “The Obama-era standards would have been a move in the right direction for the climate, but now we’re regressing.”

The Trump administration’s freeze may appeal to corporate supporters, but they are not popular with the public. Alson testified at a public meeting about the plan last month and says “five or six of the 150 people attending supported some kind of rollback, some kind of weakening of the standards, but everybody else didn’t.”

More broadly, a recent survey by the Consumer Federation of America found that the public, regardless of political affiliation, overwhelmingly approves of both current fuel-economy standards and the previous plan to improve them.

That’s no surprise, says DeCicco. “Such support has been consistently strong since the 1970s,” he says. “Consumers instinctively know that stronger vehicle standards have been good for them in many ways.”

Good for the Planet and the Bottom Line

“Making cars more fuel efficient not only reduces the carbon they emit but it reduces the amount of gasoline you got to buy,” says Alson. “Every mile per gallon higher you have in your car, that’s more money in your pocket.” In fact, he says, fuel-economy standards typically save the average car owner twice money as much as they spend on the cost of fuel-efficient technology.

“I’d call it a free-lunch regulation,” he says. “Economists don’t like the concept of free lunch, but if these standards force new technological innovation and automakers bring it to market, consumers are actually going to save more on gasoline in the long run than they’re spending on the technology.”

Interestingly, Alson says the Trump administration’s move is actually proving unpopular with automakers themselves. “The automakers are nervous right now,” he says. “They wanted a little bit of relief, a little bit of flexibility, but they had no idea that the libertarian ideologues within this administration were going to go for an eight-year rollback. This has actually surprised the automakers and Ford came to the hearing I attended and said were opposed to this rollback, and Honda has also said that publicly.”

That’s in part because the industry always has a multiyear plan for developing and implementing new technologies. “They make decisions today about the billions of dollars they’re going to be spending on new technology over the next five or 10 years,” he says. The Trump administration’s announcement has thrown a monkey wrench into those carefully established plans.

Unfortunately, those plans actually involve selling more trucks and SUVs instead of lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles, which are less profitable. DeCicco points out that recent emission gains from sales of electric vehicles have been “more than offset” by the increased sales in small trucks and SUVs. He says while consumers do recognize the need for fuel-efficiency standards, “they want bigger cars, and that’s what the companies are offering.”

Still, the tide toward electric vehicles continues to slowly rise around the world, and activist Bill McKibben says that puts the Trump administration effectively “alone” in wanting the new standards. “Even the auto industry realizes they don’t really want to go back to the bad old days, and most Americans perceive, if dimly, that their next car or the one after that is going to be electric,” he says. “At the very least they understand that we’re handing the future of a key industry to the Chinese and the German manufacturers with Trump’s idiocy.”

So what happens next? Alson has a prediction: If the Trump administration successfully freezes standards, even for a short time, “there’re going to be lawsuits, no question,” he says.

That eventuality seems especially likely given the circumstances behind the freeze. The EPA itself did not participate in the efforts to roll back the regulations, the details for which instead came from the Department of Transportation. Alson says he and other experts from the EPA were not even allowed to consult on the changes.

“For 18 months, they refused to have a single technical working meeting, and from a process standpoint that’s just indefensible,” he says. “The taxpayers were paying people like me to use my expertise, and the Department of Transportation — which doesn’t even have a lab that can test for fuel economy or greenhouse gas emissions — said ‘we are doing it our own way.’ That’s the most dishonest technical analysis I’ve seen in my 40 years. They basically cooked the books.”

And in the process, experts warn, they might be helping to cook the planet.

The EPA plans to finalize its new rules by March 2019. No further public hearings on the matter are planned, and the public comment period ends October 26.