Strengthening Mussels for Cleaner Rivers

A hatchery program puts freshwater mussel benefits on center stage.

When Danielle Kreeger works in the small, glass-walled hatchery at the Fairmont Water Works in Philadelphia, she feels she’s on display. “Come see the scientists raising baby freshwater mussels,” she jokes. “It’s like working in a bubble.”

And that’s exactly the point, says Kreeger. She’s senior science director at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, a nonprofit organization designated by Congress to protect a three-state area where the freshwater of the Delaware River meets saltwater of Delaware Bay. The demonstration hatchery lets the Fairmont Water Works’ 100,000 annual visitors witness the complex process of raising freshwater mussels and explains why anyone would want to raise them.

“This freshwater mussel recovery program is designed to restore mussels for various ecological benefits, and in particular, for clean water,” Kreeger says.

As she explains, a freshwater-mussel bed covering a stretch of river bottom a bit smaller than two football fields will filter 10 million gallons of water a day and remove 10 tons of suspended matter, such as silt, algae and bacteria. “Those are real numbers,” based on surveys of healthy freshwater mussel beds, she says.

There are other programs that restore oysters and marine mussels in saltwater habitats. And there are other programs hatching freshwater mussels to save them from extinction — they’re one of the most endangered groups of animals in the world. But the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary has the country’s only program raising relatively common freshwater mussel species to put them to work as nature’s own water filters.

Photo: Lance Butler, Philadelphia Water Department. Used with permission.

It’s no accident that the demonstration hatchery is in a water-treatment plant. In theory, healthy populations of freshwater mussels in rivers and streams can reduce the cost of water treatment. Kreeger doesn’t want to oversell their benefits as water purifiers, though; she says freshwater mussels can’t clean up every mess. They’re sensitive to toxins, metals and acid mine drainage.

But they still clean up a lot. As visitors tap and swipe the interactive displays outside the hatchery’s glass walls, they learn that freshwater mussels filter out particles and let enough sunlight reach the bottom of rivers and lakes so that submerged aquatic vegetation can grow. These underwater plants provide oxygen and food for other water-dwellers, such as fish. Together, the freshwater mussels and the underwater plants engineer healthier aquatic ecosystems.

adult mussels with fish — Photo courtesy Partnership for the Delaware Estuary. Used with permission.

“Absolutely, it’s a good idea,” says Teresa J. Newton, a fishery biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in Wisconsin, who researches the ecosystem services of freshwater mussels. “How practical it is, time will tell.”

Once upon a time, natural populations of freshwater mussels filtered sediment out of rivers and lakes. Then pollution, development and dams wiped out some of their populations and reduced others. Today 95 percent of Pennsylvania’s rivers and streams that were once home to freshwater mussels no longer have them, Kreeger says.

Raising freshwater mussels is complicated by their strange life cycle. Larval mussels spend a few days to a few weeks living as parasites on the gills of specific species of fish; many mussel species rely on just a single fish species for this parasitic relationship.

For a short time each spring, visitors to the Water Works see blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis), American eels (Anguilla rostrata), sometimes largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), banded killifish (Fundulus diaphanus) and white perch (Morone americana) swimming in buckets or tanks in the hatchery as they serve as hosts for the newly hatched mussels. A larger facility in Virginia, the Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery, bred mussels from the same local stock and sent the young mussels back to the Delaware estuary program.

In the program’s first year, in 2017, it raised mostly one species of freshwater mussel, the alewife floater (Utterbackiana implicata), along with a few eastern elliptio (Elliptio complanata). This year it added tidewater muckets (Leptodea ochracea), eastern pondmussels (Ligumia nasuta) and yellow lampmussels (Lampsilis cariosa), bringing its stewardship up to five species.

The work has been a long time coming. “We’ve only gotten really good at propagating freshwater mussels in the last decade,” says Caryn C. Vaughn, a freshwater mussel researcher and professor at the University of Oklahoma. “We not only had to figure out the fish hosts, but also how to rear the young freshwater mussels.”

That second step requires some complex procedures. The young mussels babied at the Water Works hatchery require research by Kreeger and other staff to find the perfect water sources to circulate through their small tanks, as well as the best-sized food to dribble into the water through an automated system of tubes and holding tanks.

When the young mussels are about half a millimeter in size, they are moved out of the limelight at the hatchery to rearing ponds, where they live protected in floating baskets until they grow to fingernail size — too big to be a snack for every creature out there.

This month, a year and a half after they hatched, the first 30,000 freshwater mussels from the program will start to leave their ponds and be released into their permanent homes. Some, Kreeger says, will become part of a living shoreline project on the Christina River in Delaware. Others will provide the start for freshwater mussel gardens tended by schools and nonprofit organizations.

The rest will be placed in rivers and streams that Kreeger has been studying for years. At first, she’s targeting middle quality streams — not impaired streams where the mussels might quickly die out or high-quality streams that already have mussels.

Kreeger expects the project to enter a new phase this month when it gets the funding to build a larger hatchery. “For 30 years, I’ve studied the ecosystem benefits of filter-feeding bivalves,” Kreeger says. “Now I’m seeing my dreams come true.”

The demonstration hatchery at the Fairmont Water Works was built with a $300,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts and run in partnership with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia Water Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Its main function is education, with research coming second and the propagation of mussels third.

Kreeger says the planned production hatchery will cost $7.9 million to build and $400,000 to $500,000 a year to run. The dollar value of the mussels’ ecosystem services hasn’t been calculated in a scientific way yet, but Kreeger’s past research leads her to believe the hatchery is a bargain.

The new hatchery will raise a half-million to a million new freshwater mussels each year. That’s how many it takes to make a real difference in river health, Kreeger says, and also where ethical issues may come up.

Will these common species compete with rarer species? Should lower-quality streams that can’t sustain freshwater mussel populations naturally be restocked periodically, the way hatchery trout are restocked? To guide the way, Kreeger is putting together an advisory council of researchers and conservationists.

“I think that the Delaware estuary program can serve as a pilot that can demonstrate to other areas of the country that this is worthwhile,” Vaughn says. The eastern United States have the bulk of the freshwater mussel species diversity and numbers, but much of the country has at least a few species whose numbers can be enhanced for cleaner water.

Newton says she’s heard real interest in freshwater mussel restoration for clean water from cities in the upper Mississippi watershed. But will cities see a calculable benefit from restoration, or are they better off spending their money on new water treatment plants?

She says it will take economists crunching numbers from projects like Kreeger’s to know for sure. “Until we try it in a few places, as Danielle is doing, we won’t know.”

Thirty years ago the benefits of freshwater mussels were hidden beneath the surface of rivers, lakes and streams. Kreeger has put them on display at the Fairmont Water Works. With the new, larger hatchery and a return to their original habitat in the lower Delaware River watershed, they may star on an even larger stage.

Prickly But Unprotected: 18 Percent of Cactus Species at Risk

A new study — the first of its kind — finds that the world’s conservation areas fail to protect hundreds of rare cactus species.

Nearly a fifth of the world’s cactus species are unprotected by the world’s national parks and other conservation areas, making them one of the most at-risk groups of species on the planet, a new study finds.

The study, published in the journal Conservation Biology, maps out where each cactus species grows and how those ranges compare to protected areas. The results were not good: 261 cactus species, or 18 percent, only grow outside of protected areas.

Many other species have only a portion of their ranges protected. All told the study calculates that 80 percent of cactus species are either completely unprotected or only partially sheltered by the world’s network of protected areas.

This is the first time an entire plant group has been assessed with a “gap analysis” — in conservation science, a measure of how much of the range of a particular species, taxonomic group or other form of biodiversity is formally protected by the nation or government that controls it.

“We should care about cacti,” says the study’s lead author, Bárbara Goettsch of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, “because they’re very important species in arid environments, providing, food, water and shelter for many species. This is also a plant group that’s heavily utilized by people for food, medicine, construction or ornamental purposes.”

The IUCN previously assessed 1,400-plus cactus species and found that 31 percent were threatened with extinction due to illegal trade and agriculture. Even with that knowledge, Goettsch says the results of the new study surprised her. “We found that more threatened cactus species lack protection by the current network of protected areas than amphibians, birds or mammals,” she says. Similar analyses have found that 9.7 percent of all mammal species and 5.6 percent of birds exist completely outside of protected areas. Of species already assessed as being endangered, 32 percent of cacti have ranges outside of protected areas, compared to 26.5 percent of amphibians, 19.9 percent of birds and 16 percent of mammals.

As an example of where cacti are at risk, Goettsch points to Mexico, a country where a lot of cacti species have very limited ranges. “The level of microendemism of cacti there is very high and therefore there are many gap species,” she says, although she points out that Mexico “is also the region with some of the highest proportions of species appropriately covered by protected areas.”

Conservation biologist Stuart Pimm, president of SavingSpecies, who was not affiliated with the research, says the study provides a significant contribution to conservation. Pimm was the lead author of a paper, published last month in Science Advances, which found that the world’s largest protected areas are located in arid or places, where they safeguard a relatively low number of mammal, bird or amphibian species.

“The topic is vitally important,” Pimm says, adding that he’s especially enthused to see the threats facing an entire group of plants tackled in this manner. He points to a 2013 paper he coauthored about the challenges of conserving plant species. “Most data on plant species are too coarse,” he says, meaning does not provide enough guidance for protective efforts.

Despite this latest bad news for cacti, the study also presents opportunities for hope and a strategy for action. The paper’s supplemental data provide information on each cactus species, its range and what percentage of that range is protected — information that can help countries improve their conservation efforts. Some priority areas identified by the study include the Sonoran Desert, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Andes and the Atlantic Forest region of Brazil.

“The next steps would be to look at these results at the regional level in order to develop conservation action plans,” Goettsch says. Plans would need to involve national or regional stakeholders who could establish their efforts based on what each species needs and the threats it faces.

These actions should come quickly, says Michiel Pillet, a conservation ecologist with the University of Arizona who studies endangered cacti. “While research of this type highlights where efforts should be concentrated, it is clear that for successful conservation of this many species — especially given additional threats of climate change — only immediate international efforts will suffice,” he says.

Is the United States About to Lose Its Best Conservation Program?

For 50 years the Land and Water Conservation Fund has helped support thousands of projects across the country, but its funding may be gone by the end of the month.

Time is running out for one of the United States’ most successful — and least-known — conservation programs.

Virtually every county in the United States has benefited from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, signed into law in 1964 with the goal of protecting natural areas and cultural resources and increasing recreational opportunities. In its more than 50-year history, the fund has helped 42,000 projects across the country, ranging from wilderness areas and historic battlefields to local tennis courts and trails.

“It’s an amazingly unknown program for all that it has accomplished,” says Kathy DeCoster, director of federal affairs at the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that helps acquire and protect natural spaces.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund was originally authorized for 25 years and then extended another 25 years. When expiration loomed again in September 2015, Congress gave it a short three-year extension, which is now about to expire. If legislators fail to reauthorize the program before September 30, the fund will immediately run dry and will no longer be able to dole out money, which in recent years has averaged about $450 million annually.

Proponents of the fund like to highlight that it does not rely on taxpayer dollars. Virtually all of the money for the fund comes from revenue generated by offshore oil and gas leases on the Outer Continental Shelf. A small fraction of the money comes from a tax on motorboat fuel and sales of surplus federal property.

“It’s a balance, if you will,” says DeCoster, “an asset-for-asset arrangement when you deplete one natural resource, then take some of those revenues and make sure the American people get something permanent back from that.”

But if the fund isn’t reauthorized and that dedicated source of funding is no longer available, it could have both ecological and economic impacts affecting local, state and national parks, as well the outdoor industry, an economic driver in many communities.

“It would be a threat to some of the major ways that people engage everyday with the outdoors and wildlife,” says Mike Saccone, associate vice president for communications at the nonprofit National Wildlife Federation.

Far-reaching Impacts

Even ardent supporters of the fund have a hard time pointing out their favorite projects, because there are so many and they’re so varied.

The money from the fund serves two main purposes. The first is to enable federal agencies such as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and Forest Service to acquire more public lands for recreation.

One of the big things these acquisitions accomplish is to secure “inholdings.” These are areas of privately held lands that are within or adjacent to federal public lands and have high conservation or recreation value. The fund is used to protect these areas from development when there’s a willing seller.

It’s helped to bolster projects all across the country, including in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in Maine, the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, Everglades National Park and Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado and California Coastal National Monument, to name just a few.

cape may — Shorebirds at Cape May National Wildlife Refuge. The Land and Water Conservation Fund protected 5,486 acres of this important bird habitat. Photo: USFWS

The second aspect of the fund is a matching-grant program that helps states enhance their recreation facilities and planning. Local recreational opportunities have gotten a big boost from the fund, helping to support new hiking and biking trails, baseball and soccer fields, tennis courts and parks in urban communities and underserved neighborhoods.

“People think getting outdoors and engaging kids with nature always involves wilderness, when in fact, for the vast majority of families it’s urban parks, trails, etc. — and those are the things that the Land and Water Conservation Fund supports,” says Saccone.

Since 1998 some funds from the program have also gone to related federal programs, including the Forest Service’s Forest Legacy program, which helps to preserve lands through conservation easements, and the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which helps to protect vital habitat for critical wildlife.

It also has helped acquire and protect areas of historical importance like the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in New York, the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Kansas and the Martin Luther King. Jr. National Historic Site in Georgia, as well as battlefields in Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

“The Flight 93 Memorial was also funded through the Land and Water Conservation Fund,” says DeCoster. “History doesn’t stop being made, and the fund is the premier source of funding for that kind of work.”

Legislative Hopes

While hailed by many as an incredible success, the fund has also not been able to live up to its full potential. The Congressional Research Service reported last month that the fund has accrued $40 billion in revenue since its inception, but only $18.4 billion has been appropriated by Congress. The fund can accrue up to $900 million annually, but none of the money gets distributed until it’s appropriated by Congress, and Congress does not have to appropriate all the money. In recent years about half has been appropriated, and the rest remains part of the general treasury to be used by other programs.

“Despite this history of underfunding, [the Land and Water Conservation Fund] remains the premier federal program to conserve to our nation’s land, water, historic and recreation heritage,” said a March 2018 letter from more than 200 members of Congress, which was sent to the chairman and ranking member of the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies.

The fund has always had bipartisan support, even from the beginning. When the act authorizing the fund was passed in 1964, just one member of each house voted against it, according to a report issued last month by the Center on Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation organization.

In the five decades since, Americans have embraced outdoor recreation activities with gusto, which has meant big business. The trade group Outdoor Industry Association reported that each year the outdoor recreation economy rakes in $887 billion in annual consumer spending, creates $124.5 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue, and supports 7.6 million jobs.

great dismal swamp — Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, nearly nearly 47,000 acres of which were conserved by the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Photo: USFWS

The Trust for Public Lands has shown the fund is also a good investment. The organization’s research found that for every $1 invested by the fund on acquiring federal public lands, $4 in economic value is generated over the next decade.

When it comes to the politics of the moment, the fund still has huge bipartisan support, with over 230 cosponsors to legislation in the House and substantial support in the Senate as well. But action to reauthorize it has still stalled.

“It boils down to a bit of a bottleneck in the House Natural Resources Committee, where the chairman and some of the members don’t see the Land and Water Conservation Fund as being as much of a positive as pretty much everyone else does,” says DeCoster. “They control that agenda.”

The committee’s chair is Congressman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), who has a notorious record of voting against environmental issues. In 2015 he called the fund a “slush fund” for the Department of the Interior.

One of the biggest champions of the fund has been Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who has been placing holds on other pieces of legislation, trying to rally action from his colleagues or stall other legislation until action is taken on the fund.

“I’ve proposed numerous times this year that the Senate take up this issue to give it the fair consideration that it deserves,” says Burr. “However, we’ve been denied a vote, even while bending over backward to accommodate my colleagues’ objections.”

Jonathan Asher, senior representative of government relations at the environmental nonprofit The Wilderness Society, explains that some Congress members are opposed to the idea of the federal government growing its landholdings. “Those voices, especially in the current administration where there is a big of a vacuum of leadership on land conservation issues, have gained prominence,” he says.

In 2016 the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a report arguing that the Land and Water Conservation Fund should be retired, explaining that over the years it has been used to “grow the massive landholdings of the federal government.” It advised directing federal dollars to maintenance of existing federal public lands.

“Congress should allow the [Land and Water Conservation Fund] to expire and enable more state and local government and private control of America’s land and water,” advocated the foundation report. “Sunsetting the fund will result in more efficient and accountable land management, creating and preserving opportunities for economic development, outdoor recreation and environmental protection.”

Despite this opposition, environmental groups seem cautiously optimistic. While Saccone says he’s “reasonably confident” Congress will do something before the fund expires at the end of the month, it’s not clear what exactly that may be.

It’s possible Congress will punt again on the issue and only reauthorize the fund for a short period.

Conservation groups are pushing for as much certainty as possible for the program, with the best result being full funding and permanent reauthorization. Second best would be a long-term extension, like another 25 years, and a high level of dedicated revenue for the fund.

“We’ve had pretty good appropriation numbers in recent years, but they can come and go and are always based on the whims of members of Congress,” says Asher.

It’s unlikely that a standalone piece of legislation would be passed at this point, but action on the fund could be included in another big legislative item that also needs to get passed. And there’s one more avenue, which would be a potential “grand bargain,” explains Saccone. The biggest win for conservation groups would be a package that addressed three related issues — the Land and Water Conservation Fund extension, funding for other wildlife conservation issues and addressing funds needed to remedy the backlog of maintenance on public lands and parks.

While that best-case scenario may not come true, proponents are still pushing hard for the fund.

“It is my sincere hope that we can reauthorize the Land and Conservation Fund before the end of the month to give vital conservation projects currently underway, and those in the planning process, the certainty they need to carry out their essential work,” says Senator Burr.

What Whooping Crane Reintroductions Tell Us About Animal Culture

Humans famously used ultralight aircraft to teach cranes to migrate. What has happened since then may offer clues about how to reintroduce other species back to the wild.

An adult whooping crane (Grus americana) is an amazing thing to see. Standing 5 feet tall, with a 7-foot span of black-tipped white wings, these enormous birds are easy to distinguish even from hundreds of feet away.

As impressive as these birds are in their own right, the story of their near-extinction and reintroduction may be even more striking — and as my colleagues and I recently found, the results may offer lessons to help other endangered species.

Migratory whooping cranes had disappeared from eastern North America by the middle of the 20th century, and their numbers migrating in the west had dwindled to just a few individuals. Captive breeding helped the species avoid extinction, and in 2001 a coalition of scientists began reintroducing the birds to a few states in their former eastern range. Techniques used to prepare the birds for life in the wild again included rearing them in costume (to prevent imprinting on humans) and famously training them to migrate behind an ultralight aircraft. Between 2001 and 2015, more than 200 juvenile whooping cranes performed their first southward migrations by following an ultralight from Wisconsin to Florida.

Whooping cranes ultralight — Heather Ray/Operation Migration. Via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

As impressive as it is to imagine a flock of cranes following an aircraft, the ultimate goal of reintroduction is to create a self-sustaining population that persists without scientists’ constant interventions. So, along with these aircraft-trained birds, another group of captive-reared cranes was released on its breeding grounds and allowed to follow the ultralight-trained cranes southward in autumn. We call this technique, in which animals observe and learn behavior from others of their species, conspecific training.

The dual approach appears to have worked well. Ultralight-led migrations ceased in 2015, and the population continues to migrate without further human assistance.

However, something unexpected happened. Since the beginning of reintroduction, the whooping crane population has dramatically changed its migration patterns. Many birds now spend the winter as far north as Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana — more than 310 miles (500 km) north of their “trained” overwintering sites on the Gulf Coast.

This shift in behavior, which began while aircraft training was still in place, exemplifies cranes’ behavioral flexibility, as well as their ability to learn and adapt to an environment that has changed dramatically since they were extirpated over 100 years ago.

Whooping cranes are highly social birds that migrate in groups, so my colleagues and I wondered if this shift in migration patterns was any different between cranes trained to migrate by aircraft and those that released on breeding grounds that followed other cranes in their first year. After all, aircraft training is based on the premise that early-life experiences can have dramatic effects on behavior. On the other hand, social learning and animal cultures are important in determining the behavior of social species, as animals learn from one another and information propagates through social groups.

To explore this question, we used tracking data to compare the migration distances of aircraft-trained and conspecific-trained birds across years. The results of our research, published recently in the journal Conservation Letters, were a bit surprising. We found that training initially has a strong impact on migration distances, where the aircraft-trained birds migrated more than 300 miles farther than conspecific-trained birds in their first year. However, this difference disappeared as the birds grew older — and the two groups converged more rapidly than we expected. By age 6, we found, the groups both migrated the same distance.

This convergence in the behavior of two very different groups suggests that, while management actions have an initial impact on behavior, we cannot assume that training prior to release will determine behavior in the long term, particularly for social species such as whooping cranes.

This finding is important because we still have a long way to go in the conservation of whooping cranes. The breeding success of the population remains incredibly low, meaning that even though they migrate successfully, the eastern population is not self-sustaining. At the same time, our research shows that understanding the relative roles of training and culture in determining migration patterns can give us clues about how to best manage both whooping cranes and other social species. For instance, as we saw with the cranes, it is possible that introducing a suite of multiple potential behaviors, and allowing the most adaptive to take hold, could be more effective than training the entire population to perform what we see as the optimal behavior. This may help us to design better management techniques in the future.

After all, in the changing landscapes of the modern world, animals will need to use their social and cultural knowledge to adapt to new conditions — and their adaptations may be even more effective than human interventions.

Previously in The Revelator:

Whooping Cranes Could Be Wiped Out by Climate Change

New Tree Species Discovered — and Declared Extinct

Researchers have identified a new tree species in Cameroon, but it only grew in a landscape that has now been destroyed by agriculture.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

In 1951 a member of the Nigerian Forestry Service collected specimens of a rare tree in the highlands of northwestern Cameroon. It was soon identified as a member of the Vepris genus, a group of 80 or so large tree species that range throughout the African continent and the islands of Madagascar and Zanzibar. Unfortunately the specimens were incomplete, and full identification of the species was not, at the time, achieved.

Vepris bali — A drawing of the new species by Hazel Wilks from Willdenowia, used under CC BY 4.0 license.

Now, nearly 70 years later, the species has been named — just in time to etch that name on its tombstone. A paper published Aug. 24 in the journal Willdenowia identifies the species as Vepris bali and declares its likely extinction due to agricultural development in the tree’s only known habitat, the Bali Ngemba Forest Reserve. Researchers examined the original specimens and used molecular phylogenetic studies to identify the new species.

The authors — from Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew and the University of Yaoundé I — note that previous attempts to locate this species and complete the 1951 specimen, including “repeated targeted efforts” between the years 2000 and 2004 and at least six other studies, failed to turn up any sign that the tree still exists.

That doesn’t mean they’ve completely given up hope, though. In 2011 the same authors rediscovered another tree species, Ternstroemia cameroonensis, which had previously been declared extinct.

Can the same thing happen with Vepris bali? As the authors write in the paper, “It is hoped that naming this species will relaunch efforts to rediscover and protect this species from extinction.” For now they’re officially declaring it as critically endangered, although they acknowledge that “the reality is that V. bali may already be extinct.”

Even if it is gone, the authors use their paper on Vepris bali as an opportunity to call for action on other plants, especially those, like this tree, that exist in small ranges and habitats. In particular they expect several other Vepris species — which are currently being studied for the antimicrobial and antimalarial applications of their essential oils — to be identified and named in Cameroon yet, hopefully before they also disappear.

Worldwide, thousands if not millions of plant species face similar risks. According to the International Plant Names Index, about 2,000 new plant species are named ever year, but relatively few — about 5 percent of all known species — have ever been formally assessed for their extinction risk. As the authors write in their paper, “this makes it a priority to discovery, document and protect such species before they become globally extinct.”

Supreme Danger: Environmental Protection Laws Risk Potential Upheaval

A change in the way the Supreme Court thinks about the role of the EPA and other agencies could dramatically weaken environmental protections.

Legislators and law scholars last week began officially picking through the legal life of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to determine whether he’ll fill the Supreme Court seat left by retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. Despite vocal opposition from Democrats, Kavanaugh has strong Republican support in a Senate controlled by Republicans.

“It’s his to screw up, I guess, and I don’t see him doing that,” says Patrick A. Parenteau, a professor of law and senior counsel in the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic at Vermont Law School.

Trump Kavanaugh — President Trump announces Kavanaugh’s nomination. White House photo.

Parenteau is among those in the environmental-law field who believe that the potential addition of Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court could have a major impact on crucial environmental decisions. Environmental groups will need to change their legal strategies, believes Parenteau, to find success with the court’s new likely composition.

And others also believe that a shift may be coming in the Supreme Court in a key area that could make a lasting mark on environmental regulation.

A Monumental Shift

Kavanaugh’s past decisions have been heavily scrutinized by experts around the country to better understand how potential future Supreme Court cases could be shaped. One analysis, by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, found that he voted or wrote decisions against “public interest” 87 percent of the time in decisions involving the environment, consumer protections and worker rights.

More broadly Kavanaugh’s leanings, in concert with some of the other justices’, could also shift the court away from long-held thinking on the role of the government’s administrative agencies, which could significantly alter the interpretation of laws on the environment and public health.

“What affects environmental law, public lands and natural resources law the most is the way the judges understand the power of administrative agencies in our government,” says Sean B. Hecht, who’s co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and a professor at UCLA School of Law.

Typically, laws having to do with the environment, public lands and natural resources at the federal level are written by Congress but implemented by administrative agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. In some cases what Congress directs the agencies to do is very specific, such as regulating a list of chemicals in a particular way, says Hecht. “But much more often, Congress writes the laws more broadly and flexibly than that and it is the job of an agency like EPA to give life to what Congress has suggested,” he says.

So, for example, when it comes to something like the Clean Air Act, it’s Congress’s job to provide broad authority and the EPA’s job to use scientific evidence to determine what pollutants endanger public health and welfare, what kind of harms they cause and at what level of concentration, and then to act on that information.

When an agency’s actions are challenged in court, whether by industry or environmental groups, it’s the job of the court to decide whether the agency acted in keeping with the confines of the law. And these are important decisions, Hecht says. “They cut to the core of our regulatory system and our public-lands management system. The way that judges approach these issues is crucial to the ability of administrative agencies to work effectively.”

However, when it comes to the way Kavanaugh has ruled on these types of principles, Hecht says, the judge appears to take an approach that would narrowly restrict the role of administrative agencies. In a 2012 case that came before the D.C. Circuit, he wrote in the majority opinion that the EPA had overstepped its authority in regulating air pollution that crossed state lines — a decision that was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

In another example last summer, Kavanaugh and the D.C. Circuit ruled that in 2015 Obama’s EPA overstepped its bounds under the Clean Air Act in trying to regulate some hydrofluorocarbons.

“However much we might sympathize or agree with EPA’s policy objectives, EPA may act only within the boundaries of its statutory authority,” Kavanaugh wrote in the decision. “Here, EPA exceeded that authority.”

Hecht says that’s a big worry for those who think the federal government should be empowered to take those types of actions. “I think the concern that a lot of people have is that there are justices like [Neil] Gorsuch, and potentially a new Justice Kavanaugh, who might start from that much more narrow view of what agencies are empowered to do, which would hamper efforts to protect the environment,” says Hecht.

And that would be a big change. “We expect Congress to shift as the political winds shift, but I don’t think we should expect for our courts to adopt a dramatically different view of the balance of power,” Hecht says.

There is a long legal precedent of Congress empowering agencies to regulate. “There is this vision that has been applied for the last 40 or 50 years, which is that it is constitutionally sound to empower agencies to use their judgement based on the laws that Congress has written,” says Hecht. For decades this was an idea shared by both conservative and liberals. Justice Scalia, known for his conservative views, wrote the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the 2001 case Whitman v. American Trucking that reaffirmed the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate pollutants that endanger public health and welfare.

The much newer conservative viewpoint, which seems to be shared by Kavanaugh, is that Congress must explicitly tell an agency what to do, and even then, the directive should be to only do that one thing.

“You can probably see that would be a pretty dramatic change in the way that agencies operate,” says Hecht. “At its extreme it could invalidate some of the laws that we rely on to protect the environment, like parts of the Clean Air Act.” Congress has given the EPA broad instruction in the Act to figure out which pollutants are bad for people’s health and how to best regulate them. But under this narrower version of agencies’ power, Congress would need to be much more precise in dictating the EPA’s specific actions for each type of pollutant.

Parenteau points to Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 case in which Justice Kennedy cast the deciding vote, giving the agency authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. The ruling has been crucial in helping to shape laws addressing climate change.

“Kavanaugh has all but said out loud he thinks it was wrongly decided,” says Parenteau. “If he gets a chance to examine whether the Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the EPA to adopt this broad sweep of regulation of a substance that was not even yet considered a pollutant in 1970 — how could it be? —he would say that looking at the way the statute is worded and the original intent the EPA has no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon.”

What the Future Holds

The first case on the Supreme Court’s docket when it reconvenes Oct. 1 is Weyerhaeuser Company v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which involves a clash over endangered species and private property.

Parenteau says the case, which involves the fate of the endangered dusky gopher frog (Rana sevosa), will show early signs of the impact of both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on the court. (The dusky frog was protected following a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, publisher of The Revelator.)

Other important environmental decisions are looming on the horizon, including the question of how far the Clean Water Act goes in protecting streams and wetlands and a legal ruling on whatever’s left of the Clean Power Plan. One of the big future issues will be whether EPA has the authority under the Clean Air Act and other laws to address climate change.

Parenteau says we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface, as a society, when it comes to regulating carbon pollution. But he admits he’s optimistic that Kavanaugh’s opinions might evolve over time if he’s confirmed. “You’ve just got to hope that he can be persuaded that the courts really do have a legitimate role in democracy to assert themselves when they see abject failure of government to address these problems,” he says.

The future, though, is by no means a rosy picture for those seeking stronger environmental protections — and that, Parenteau believes, should also change the game plan for environmental groups.

“We’re going to have to be really careful with the language we use, the cases we pick, the face of the case, and who’s bringing the case,” he says. “We are going to have to stay out of the Supreme Court as much as we possibly can.”

Although he explains that environmentalists shouldn’t give up fighting bad projects and bad agency decisions, he feels they need to devote more resources to electoral politics, starting at the grassroots.

But when it does come to legal challenges, those litigating on behalf of the environment need a different set of tactics.

“I’ve read his opinions. They’re masterpieces of facile legal thinking,” says Parenteau. “You can’t beat him with stock kinds of arguments and appeals to what’s right and what’s the best policy. You’re going to have to get down into the weeds of the language of statutes and the language of the Constitution. You are going to have to do a lot of homework parsing the way he thinks to figure out how can you get to him.”

Whether or not Kavanaugh gets confirmed, he likely fits the model of any other potential Supreme Court nominees under the present administration, which has routinely sought to roll back environmental protections. It’s all but guaranteed that with Justice Kennedy’s swing vote gone, the court will reliability tip conservative — and that all but ensures an upheaval in the nation’s environmental laws and protections.

Endangered Languages, Endangered Ecologies

Populations of the green sea turtle, or honu, increased as the Hawaiian language made a comeback. Saving other languages from extinction could help protect biodiversity.

Stanley Rodriguez holds the painted gourd rattle in his hand. Lifting the instrument with its wooden handle, worn smooth from hours of use, he shakes it to create a rhythm and begins to sing. He’s joined by other singers from his culture in offering prayer for the day, for a fruitful discussion and, later, a safe journey home for all in the conference room overlooking the Pacific Coast at the University of California at San Diego.

Rodriguez and his group, which gathered on July 12 at an indigenous coastal-management conference, are singing in Kumeyaay, one of the world’s most endangered languages. There’re fewer than 150 speakers of Kumeyaay and its sister tongues, Ipaay and Tipaay, out of a total population of 4,250 members of the Kumeyaay bands that originally spoke them.

Kumeyaay is just one of the approximately 40 percent of the world’s nearly 7,100 languages, as catalogued by Ethnologue, that are threatened, endangered or on the verge of extinction. Similarly, UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger places that number at 43 percent. Although the exact number of endangered languages differs depending on how they’re measured (some counts include dialects), the statistics tell the same story: A large portion of the world’s human languages are endangered, just like the species these Indigenous peoples have nurtured.

However, there’s also a movement by indigenous peoples, nonprofits and academics to reverse this trend. They assert that keeping these and other languages alive not only protects cultures, it also supports biodiversity and could hold the key to at least mitigating, if not reversing, climate change.

“The loss of biodiversity is related to the loss of languages,” says Luisa Maffi. She’s the director of Terralingua, a nonprofit based in British Columbia that raises awareness of the concept of biocultural diversity — the link between language, culture and the environment. “Language is not just communications but a repository of knowledge, thinking, ways of life and cultural values of a particular group,” she says.

This focus on biocultural diversity, according to Maffi, helps to preserve both culture and the natural world.

Maffi is one of the 39 authors of The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages (2018, $175), a new book showcasing the latest research in preserving languages. The handbook brings together the latest researchers into language loss and its cultural and environmental consequences. Several contributors, including Maffi, discuss the intersections between peoples, ecologies and endemic species.

Maffi says linguists have been concerned about losing languages for decades, but many are only now coming to the realization — “at the last possible moment,” she says — that linguistic diversity loss occurs in the same areas as biological species decline.

To help address this problem, Terralingua has developed a resource it calls the Index of Linguistic Diversity, which helps researchers track where both languages and biodiversity are challenged. “Language, culture, and the environment are inextricably interrelated,” Maffi writes in the introduction to the Index. “In each place, the local environment sustains people; in turn, people sustain the local environment through the traditional knowledge, values, and practices embedded in their cultures and their languages.”

Terralingua has also published a biocultural diversity map showing the correlation between loss of languages and loss of endemic species.

For instance, the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), or honu, declined in Hawaii as Hawaiian language fluency plunged due to a now-repealed law barring its use in schools. However, as Hawaiian has made a comeback since the 1980s, so has the honu’s nesting rate — a 53 percent increase over the past 25 years, although it’s still a federally listed endangered species.

The Americas and Australia — both areas with high numbers of endangered species — have suffered the greatest language losses. Maffi says 64 percent of languages in the United States, 50 percent of Australian languages and 30 percent of Pacific Islander languages have disappeared in the past 45 years. This loss indicates the “mark of colonialism’s effort to erase Indigenous languages in North America and Australia,” she says.

Terralingua’s maps also show how language loss leads to species loss. For example, “Just look at what has happened in Yosemite,” Maffi says. Before Europeans first visited the iconic valley nestled in the western Sierra Nevada, the indigenous Paiutes and Miwoks managed the land to provide food and habitat for several animal and plant species. John Muir admired the park-like setting, which he wrote were “diversified like landscape gardens with meadows and groves and thickets of blooming bushes,” not realizing that these ecological riches were due to human activity and not just an accident of nature.

The Miwoks’ and Paiutes’ careful husbandry over millennia, supported by the languages that detailed techniques and terrain with no direct English translation, fell into disrepair after the people were forced out of the valley. The open groves of oak, willow and sedge gave way to crowded stands of coniferous forests, which grew rank with dead needles, grass and undergrowth. Plants endemic to the valley declined due to decreased sunlight and competition with both endemic and invasive species. Some plants like the Yosemite woolly sunflower (Allium yosemitense) and Tompkin’s sedge (Carex tompkinsii) are now listed as “imperiled” by the California Native Plant Society. Animals such as the Sierra Nevada red fox (Vulpes vulpes necator) have also declined in number.

The loss in language proficiency paralleled Yosemite’s biodiversity decline: Currently, just 400 speak the Northern Paiute language spoken in Yosemite, and only three people speak Southern Sierra Miwok.

The decline of biocultural diversity also works counter to evolution. “Just as with life and nature, the tendency of humans is to diversity,” Maffi says, “but by reducing linguistic diversity, we’re countering that evolutionary tendency.” Just as commercial agriculture relies more on monocultures, which leave the world’s food supply vulnerable to blights, fewer languages create “monocultures of the mind,” she says. “It’s changing the way we think and act.” Commercial pressures are also contributing to “homogenizing” the world, says Maffi.

Other experts support this concept. “Preserving language diversity is an important counterforce to homogenization of the world,” says Teresa L. McCarty, a professor in education and anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a researcher in language education and preservation methodologies. She’s also a contributor to the Oxford book, as well as an author and editor on several other books related to language preservation and education. “Diversity of all types is what enables the human race to survive and thrive,” she says. “It’s part of our humanity.”

One group that’s cognizant of the link between language and ecology is the Kumeyaay, whose bands traditionally inhabited a range of climates including valley, mountain, river, desert and oceanfront — Rodriguez even notes that some Kumeyaay villages now lie underwater. “Our songs tell the story of our history, and our language celebrates the environment,” he says. That history is now disappearing.

“If we can’t explain these concepts in our language, we lose the context,” Rodriguez adds. Losing the context, meanwhile, creates a loss of information about past climate and how cultures can adapt to future climate change. One example of that celebration is the Kumeyaay Maat’aam, or year. Each month describes the seasonal change, tracking both solstice and equinox closely. There’s also a mini-season known as Kli’a ‘Emull, the acorn harvest, which occurs during the fall equinox. As the language disappears, so does the knowledge about those ecosystems.

“Language and culture support each other,” Rodriguez says, who adds that the environment is a critical component of both. “Culture and climate are interconnected.”

Can this loss be reversed? The movement to preserve languages, and through them, biodiversity, is a worldwide phenomenon, says McCarty, and the Oxford book is just the latest chapter in an ongoing effort to preserve languages and the information they contain. “To lose language diversity seems totally against everything that supports the survival of humanity,” she says.

Endangered Lions, Climate Justice and Towering Trees: The 15 Best New Eco-books for September

Books coming out this month also examine the dangerous world of wildlife trafficking, the history of poisonous chemicals and new ideas in agriculture.

It’s September, which means summer vacation is over, the kids are back in school and it’s time for everyone to learn something new. Here are a ton of new, thought-provoking new books that publishers have scheduled for release this month, with titles covering lions and other endangered species, an important era in environmental history, vital new ideas in agriculture, an iconic tree and a whole lot more.

Here you’ll find our pick for the best 15 books of the month, with a selection of titles for wildlife lovers, dedicated activists, treehuggers, farmers, kids, history buffs and everyone in between.

Wildlife and Endangered Species:

Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking by Rachel Love Nuwer — Few journalists cover the poaching and wildlife trafficking crisis as well as Nuwer, whose work frequently appears in The New York Times and other publications. Now her first book takes us on a journey around the world, covering everything from the “killing fields” of Africa to the seedy Asian markets selling wild meat and live animals. This gets our vote as the must-read book of the month.

When the Last Lion Roars: The Rise and Fall of the King of the Beasts by Sara Evans — Africa’s lions are rapidly disappearing, and many experts fear the big cats won’t survive the 21st century. Evans travelled across Africa, visiting the continent’s shrinking lion populations to see why they’re in conflict with humans and what’s being done to prevent their possible extinction.

Big Lonely Doug: The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees by Harley Rustad — A single, 20-story-tall Douglas fir tree looms over an ex-forest on Vancouver Island, where every other tree that once grew around it has been logged. Now known as “Big Lonely Doug,” the tree has become a touchpoint for conservation, First Nation rights, ecotourism and the importance of old-growth trees, as Rustad recounts in this powerful new book.

Vaquita: Science, Politics, and Crime in the Sea of Cortez by Brooke Bessesen — An updated edition of Bessesen’s book about Mexico’s vaquita porpoise, one of the most endangered species on the planet, which may go extinct in the next couple of years. What lessons can we learn from this crisis to help prevent other species from suffering the same fate?

A Cast in the Woods: A Story of Fly Fishing, Fracking, and Floods in the Heart of Trout Country by Stephen Sautner — You can’t enjoy life on a river if waterways are threatened by fossil fuel extraction, climate change, invasive species and other dangers. Sautner provides a firsthand account of how he resisted these dangers and helped to protect the trout, trees, salamanders, bears and birds near his cabin in the Catskill Mountains.

Climate Change and Energy:

Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future by Mary Robinson —Robinson, the first woman to be elected president of Ireland and former U.N. high commissioner on human rights, travelled the world to see how grassroots efforts — often driven by women — are battling for justice in the face of global warming and often creating important change in the process.

This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes Are Converging on America by Jeff Nesbit — Okay, this is the book with the most depressing title of the month, but don’t slit your wrists quite yet. Nesbit, the executive direct of Climate Nexus, lays out why we’re all screwed, but he also presents hope: We’ve solved other problems in the past, he writes, and we can do it again.

Pipe Dreams: The Fight for Canada’s Energy Future by Jacques Poitras — We’ve all heard of the Keystone XL pipeline, but here’s the lesser-known tale of the similar Energy East pipeline, a $15 billion project that was intended to cut through 180 indigenous territories but ultimately (and luckily) went nowhere.

Unlikely Ally: How the Military Fights Climate Change and Protects the Environment by Marilyn Berlin Snell — War is about as awful as it gets, but once in a while the military does a pretty good job of environmental stewardship, writes talented journalist Snell. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from that.

Indigenous Knowledge for Climate Change Assessment and Adaptation edited by Douglas Nakashima, Igor Krupnik and Jennifer T. Rubis — This unique book stems from a collaboration between UNESCO, the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among other organizations, and includes case studies (many written by indigenous peoples) about how intergenerational traditional knowledge is already helping communities adapt to an uncertain future.

Ecology and Agriculture:

Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth by Charles Massy — If you want healthy plants (or a healthy planet), you need healthy soil. A “radical ecologist farmer” tells his story of how he moved away from chemicals and pesticides — and how others can make that move, too.

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth: Understanding Our World and Its Ecosystems by Rachel Ignotofsky — A delightfully illustrated book for teens offering accessible lessons about what makes the world work, with more than two dozen chapters devoted to some of the most important ecosystems on the planet.

Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply by Mark Schapiro — Right now about half of the world’s commercially traded agricultural seeds are sold by just three companies. But around the world, people are developing their own methods of seed cultivation and distribution, and those seeds may actually be the ones to feed the planet once climate change makes their more commercial cousins less able to thrive. This book-length work of investigative journalism digs into the movement to save our seeds — and our food.

Poisons and Pollution:

Waste Land by David T. Hanson — If you’ve ever wanted to see what a toxic waste site looks like, here’s your chance: Hanson photographed 67 of them in 45 states back in the mid-eighties. This expanded version of his earlier book includes all of his photos taken for the project — including many previously unpublished pictures — along with updated information on each soul-shuddering site.

The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum — Meat treated with borax? Milk dosed with formaldehyde? Food that could kill you and companies that didn’t care? It sounds terrible, but it used to be common — until chemistry professor Harvey Washington Wiley, journalist Upton Sinclair and other crusaders began a 30-year quest to make America’s food safe from an unregulated industry. This book is history, sure, but it offers lessons that resonate with the current push to deregulate so many industries that affect human health.

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

Did we miss any of your favorites? Feel free to post your own recommendations in the comments.

Interactive Map: Climate in 2050

How will rising temperatures affect your community? We mapped what the world will look like under current climate change projections.

The past few summers have brought some of the hottest months on record. Unfortunately, things are only projected to get worse as climate change continues to push temperatures up around the world.

The global impacts of rising temperatures — including more hurricanes, sea-level rise and drought — will probably sound familiar. But a temperature change of just a couple of degrees can also have dramatic effects locally. Studies have shown that a single-degree rise in temperature can increase local levels of air pollution, allow disease-carrying ticks to expand into an area, cause the local extinction of native species and even cause enough heat stress to increase rates of mental illness.

How bad could things become where you live if we continue on our current trajectory? Explore the map below to see how temperatures will change in your area — and around the world — by the year 2050.

Sources and methods:

World Temperature Change 2050 Scenario: CCSM4 model under Scenario 8.5 by ESRI.
Temperature change is calculated between historical levels and the year 2050 under Scenario 8.5, which represents a high-end emissions scenario if global emissions remain unmitigated. The amount of uncertainty in projections increases at smaller geographic scales. While broad regional trends can be robustly projected, some variation from these averaged projections should be expected at local levels.

Global administrative boundaries data by GADM.
Temperature change data were averaged by administrative boundaries. Abrupt changes between adjacent areas can be seen in some cases since natural gradients present in the raw data are smoothed in this averaging process.

Data were analyzed using ArcGIS Pro.

An Orca in Grief: Tahlequah’s Call to Arms

To restore Southern Resident killer whales and salmon, we need to look at our dams — and ourselves.

Early this summer, riding ocean swells just west of Washington State’s San Juan Island in a whale-watching vessel and scanning the waves for a glimpse of glistening black fins, I found myself in a difficult place.

Some chaperone-coordinators and I had brought a group of low-income, “first-generation-to-college” high-school students all the way from north Idaho to see the Southern Resident killer whales, our region’s iconic orca. The students had spent the previous two weeks learning about this unique population of whales in our program’s pilot curriculum, Killer Whales, Salmon & You. From the looks on their faces, our group of youth — many grappling with intensely stressful situations in their lives — obviously felt invested in seeing these whales.

It was not to be.

I’d been in cellphone contact that morning with orca biologist Dr. Deborah Giles, who had been hoping to join us to share her expertise with our students. But she was, at that very moment, heading north toward Canada trailing the very whales we’d come to see. It seemed the whales — known as “residents” because in years past they’d reliably feed in and around the San Juan Islands during summer months — were no longer acting so residential.

We’d all seen this change in the whales’ behavior. “Up until very recently, they’d always be here in June,” a naturalist on our ship had quietly confided to me earlier. “Always.”

My alarm bells were clanging. How do you explain to students who’ve already faced so many hardships that they may be witnessing part of an extinction event?

Stoically, the two naturalists continued spotlighting the sea lions, eagles and land masses we were privy to. But as the hours wore on, the stark absence of dorsal fins turned into a truth serum.

“So, everyone,” one naturalist said heavily, after we’d crisscrossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca. “We heard from other boat crews that many of the whales are up in Canada today. They’re near the Fraser River, about a seven-hour boat ride from here, probably looking for Chinook salmon. Having the whales roam this far out at this time of year is really, really unusual.”

Our students already knew these whales ate almost exclusively Chinook . They also knew that their own backyards — the uplands of rural Idaho — once boomed with salmon. Half our students that day were native Nez Perce, harmed by the same legacy of colonialism that broke the salmon. Both white and native students milled around the ship’s berth, wrapped in blankets. As the day wore on I could see them, one at a time, slowly giving up on what should have been the high point of our trip.

Our naturalists explained the dire plight of this beloved population of whales: That the animals are starving; that the grinding impacts of the Pacific Northwest dams have finally brought them to the brink of extinction; and that unless we quickly and radically restore Chinook, the whales will vanish.

Someone asked about other threats, like boat noise and traffic and pollution, which they heard has been known to collect in whales’ tissues.

“We still definitely need to solve those issues, but without food….” our naturalist trailed off.

I wonder how those students felt a few weeks later, during Tahlequah’s tour of grief.

Tahlequah, of course, is the now well-known Southern Resident killer whale who dominated the news in July and August as she gave birth and then carried her dead calf for 17 agonizing days. If I had known on that boat that she was nearing the end of her pregnancy, and almost certainly struggling to eat enough to keep her baby healthy, I would have had an even tougher time explaining to our students why we weren’t seeing whales.

Just weeks after witnessing my students’ numb resignation out on the water, I and many others felt Tahlequah’s vigil deeply. She refused to let her family sink away, and this has crystallized into what I deeply hope is a worldwide moment of reckoning: Not unlike my indigenous students living with the dark legacy of white colonialism, the whales suffer their own dark legacy at the hands of systemic oppression and injustice.

So what do we do with this knowledge?

We need to decide whether the orcas will be a grim reminder of our colonialist trajectory of collapse or a standard-bearer of hope for a new era.

If it’s the former, we let the rest of these whales die, one by one, until none remain.

But if it’s the latter, we intervene immediately with a full battery of restoration measures while also sharing the grim history of how this tragedy came to pass.

Because of Tahlequah’s tragic struggle, many more people realize that these whales lost up to half their population to the marine-park industry in the 1960s and early ’70s. In the days before our boat tour, our students not only saw the documentary Blackfish, about this grim history, but also had the opportunity to visit Penn Cove on Whidbey Island, Wash., the place where many Southern Resident killer whales died or were captured. There they met Howard Garrett, founder of Orca Network, who shared not only the gravity of the threats facing these whales, but also told them of the local tribes’ reverent kinship with the creatures — and all they are doing to save them and the salmon they can’t live without.

Our students heard several options during an afternoon spent with Dr. Ken Balcomb, the founder and lead scientist of The Center for Whale Research. He’s a whale biologist who has tracked the Southern Residents for more than 40 years, cataloging what is now among the most substantial and respected life-history sets for any mammal. He said much the same thing the students had already learned: We need to address all the dangers to orcas, but without an immediate influx of salmon, they’ll starve. He thinks we might have five years.

Balcomb, like Garrett and Dr. Giles, is among the few people who know almost everything about the science and history of these whales — and how to intervene to save them.

So what exactly can we do? Balcomb’s talk focused heavily on a proposal to immediately restore wild Chinoook to millions of acres of their original spawning grounds, the rural uplands of Idaho, through a simple action to open channels around the edges of four key lower Snake River dams in eastern Washington. Essentially, cutting through the dirt berms flanking the dams would open up the river while leaving the concrete dam structures in place, at a cost much lower than that of removing the actual dams. Balcomb told us this proposal had been on the table for decades. However, despite its low relative cost, and potential to save millions of dollars for taxpayers faced with the hefty price tag of bolstering the antiquated structures, a lack of political will had prevented action.

But that was before a mother whale carried her dead calf for 17 days across 1,000 miles.

Have those 17 days of grief finally created an opportunity for change?

After our class and field trip many of the students resolved to join the Free the Snake Flotilla, a “kayaktavist”-style event to draw attention to opening the Snake River uplands to salmon recovery. First held in 2015, it will take place again this year from Sept. 7 to Sept. 8 with activist Winona LaDuke as keynote speaker. This year, because of Tahlequah, many more participants are expected.

Meanwhile, more than 300,000 people have signed a petition and mailed postcards asking Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and his recently formed Southern Resident Recovery and Task Force to seriously consider breaching the four lower Snake River dams. The task force is expected to develop an action plan for Southern Resident recovery by October 2019.

Action is needed by then, if not sooner, because Tahlequah may not be the last Southern Resident to suffer. Scarlet, a three-year-old calf also known as J50, is currently struggling mightily to survive. She’s one of the last young females capable of giving this family of whales a shot at reproductive sustainability and now the unprecedented recipient of an intervention that includes antibiotic doses and live Chinook salmon hand-delivered by the Lummi Nation, who consider her kin.

Whatever actions finally come, the truth is that there’s no singular silver bullet to save these whales. There are salmon and habitat to restore, dams to breach, PCBs and pollution to cleanse, boat traffic and noise pollution to curtail to curtail and pipelines to stop — like the Trans Mountain pipeline in Canada was blocked last week, in no small part because of how it would have affected Southern Residents. There’s also climate change to solve, indigenous wisdom to adopt, and most of all, the simple, dedicated work of coming together as allies, partners and kindred spirits to do what needs to be done — for Tahlequah and for all our children.

southern resident killer whales — Rachel Clark watches Southern Resident killer whales. Photo: Avery Caudill. Used with permission.

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

Previously in The Revelator:

Killer Whales Face Killer Toxins