Biologist Carter Niemeyer says gray wolves can only survive if we embrace wild spaces and scientific truth, not hatred and fear.
What does it take to save gray wolves in the United States?
Biologist Carter Niemeyer has spent more than three decades trying to answer that question. A former federal wildlife trapper, he was instrumental in the effort to return wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. Later he coordinated the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s efforts to recover wolves in Idaho. Through all of this, he also studied wolves and their interactions with livestock, helping to dispel the myths that all too often turn ranchers and the public against these highly social and intelligent predators.
Now retired from the Service, Niemeyer — author of the memoirs Wolfer and Wolf Land — still devotes his life to wolf conservation. A frequent lecturer, he advocates for finding the middle ground where both wolves and humans can coexist on the landscape.
At a time when the federal government is once again considering taking wolves off of the endangered species list, we spoke with Niemeyer about what it takes to allow the predators to thrive and how we can dispel the myths that slow efforts to restore their populations.
Your own journey took you from wolf trapper to rescuer. Is there anything in your experience that could help others make a similar transition, for wolves or other species?
Carter Niemeyer
To understand and appreciate wolves you have to learn the truth about them — scientific truth — and put aside anecdotes and stories that are obviously conceived in fear, hate and resentment. Studying and watching wolves can teach people a lot about the animal. The fact is that wolves are shy predators that help wild prey populations remain healthy and sustainable. If people find room in their heart for wolves, then they can fully appreciate the benefits of maintaining wolves in abundance.
How do you feel about the continued expansion of wolf range? Are you satisfied, or is there still much further to go?
I’m encouraged by the way wolves have dispersed out of the core recovery areas in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Wolf numbers also continue to grow in Washington and Oregon, and recolonization may be under way in parts of Northern California. I think public education about wolves should be a top priority.
You’ve done a lot of work on the interactions between wolves and livestock. What’s the hardest thing to overcome at this point?
People working together can reduce predation by wolves on livestock, but the reality is that some livestock damage will always occur. That’s frustrating, because I want wolves to stay out of trouble. Wolves are predators that depend on large wild prey like deer, elk, moose, caribou and bison for food. In the absence of abundant prey, wolves are sometimes forced to kill livestock, and this can really create emotionally charged situations. It often results in hate and animosity toward wolves. Having been intimately involved with this over the years, I believe that awareness of wolf presence and better animal husbandry practices can minimize problems between wolves and livestock.
The on-again, off-again Endangered Species Act protection for wolves must get frustrating. How do you feel that will ultimately pan out?
The Endangered Species Act was really the only way to proceed with recovery because it guaranteed the highest protections for wolves while recovery was in progress. That protection ultimately resulted in viable, sustainable wolf populations. I think a lot people mistake an ESA listing as a permanent state of affairs, but it was never meant to function that way. Other regions that fall outside of ESA recovery areas, like Colorado, still need more time for wolf numbers to increase, and I think they will.
Wolves are prolific and resilient and I believe they will ultimately succeed in most areas where basic habitat needs, open space and abundant prey are all available — and all of this can happen even without ESA protection.
Is there anything that your average environmentalist or advocate tends to get wrong about wolves?
Wolves aren’t saints. They aren’t sinners, either. They’re just being wolves. I think people who put them on a pedestal are setting themselves up for a fall.
Also, though wolves are habitat generalists and can live almost anywhere, there are many regions of the U.S. where they will never be because there are too many people and too much livestock. Wolf advocates must first support public lands and wild places that reduce the interface between wolves and people. Wolves can only survive where human tolerance allows them to thrive.
The tiny fish doesn’t reproduce well in years when the water doesn’t flow. Several bad years in a row could push the species closer to extinction.
One day in the middle of June, heavy rains drenched Albuquerque while lightning lit up the barren mesa outlying the city. It was the rainiest June 16 on record for the New Mexico city, with almost an inch measured over the course of the day. But the precipitation didn’t do much to ease the region’s longstanding drought or recharge the dwindling flow of the once-mighty Rio Grande River.
Right now 90 percent of New Mexico is considered to be in severe to exceptional drought. Conditions are symptomatic of a growing — and troubling — trend of drying in the Southwest, where average annual temperatures have ticked upward by two degrees. The region has become increasingly prone to wildfire, and water is strictly managed, making farming everything from the state’s iconic green chile to southern New Mexico’s pistachios riskier than ever.
The effects of these changes on the climate are on full display in the Rio Grande, one of the largest and most heavily managed rivers in the United States, which spans 1,900 miles through largely arid and desert lands. This year the river is already dry along a 20-mile stretch south of Albuquerque. While the river has run dry for even 90-mile expanses in the past, what’s exceptional about current conditions is just how early the drying is happening — beginning in the first week of April instead of the typical mid-June. By summer’s end this year, 120 miles are expected run dry, exposing the sandy underbelly of the iconic, once-thriving watercourse.
This water shortage, experts say, has implications not just for humans but also for species of flora and fauna that depend upon the Rio Grande.
For one species, an increasingly dry riverbed could threaten its very existence.
The Rio Grande silvery minnow (Hybognathus amarus) has the distinction of being one of the most endangered species in the country. The small, short-lived fish began its decline in the 1960s following the advent of significant damming of the river. The population continued to suffer as the result of the introduction of non-native fish species, warming river temperatures and decreased annual precipitation. In addition to dams, the river’s ecosystem has been altered significantly over the past 100 years, and the strong flows that spur spawning and shallow eddies that support the silvery minnow during the rest of its life cycle have all but disappeared.
The consequences of drought for the species can be grave given their already abbreviated lifespans.
“Most silvery minnow die before age two,” explains Thomas Archdeacon, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who works on restoration and rescue efforts for the species. “The bulk of the population is usually made up of the youngest fish at any given time, so if you have a year of failed reproduction, the minnow can quickly go from the most common fish in the river to one of the least common.”
For the silvery minnow, sustained drought makes survival — let alone procreating — more difficult. “In a year like 2018,” Archdeacon says, “not only are the fish stressed early in the year, the adults are dying before spawning.” He points out that even in the reaches of the river that haven’t dried, water temperatures are climbing and flows are steadily dwindling, impacting the health of the fish and the likelihood that they will reproduce.
This follows trends seen in previous years. The success of fish’s population hinges largely on the spring hydrograph. “When there is poor snowpack,” Archdeacon says, “there is generally a year of failed reproduction.”
And so, in years like this, crews led by the New Mexico Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office muddy their shoes in the river, recovering stranded fish from pockets that have experienced severe drying and transferring them to more reliably full parts of the river. This year the first silvery minnows were rescued on April 2, the earliest recorded date that salvaging has taken place in the past 19 years.
Unfortunately, preliminary evidence suggests that many of the fish trapped, then released in areas of the river with perennial flow do not survive.
The office also heads up another important effort: the release of hatchery fish to boost the wild population. Each year thousands of captive-hatched fish are returned to the river, with well over a million having been released since the program started. “The number released each year scales with how good or poor the fish’s natural reproduction was,” Archdeacon explains. So once the river recovers in late fall — typically November — a large but as-yet undetermined number of hatchery fish will likely be released.
“Both these management options are reactive and not proactive,” Archdeacon says, meaning they’re more of a Band-Aid than a solution. And even though more than $150 million has been spent on such efforts since the fish was placed on the endangered species list in 1994, it’s hard to say at this point if the conservation budget for the fish will keep up with emerging climate-related threats. Archdeacon declined to comment on any future budgets for the silvery minnow.
What is certain, Archdeacon says, is that “it’s hard to get away from the reactive, labor-intensive management of the species if spring runoff continues to be poor.” In this increasingly warm part of the country, the outlook for the river — and the fish and other species that depend on it — isn’t too promising.
Broad, intensive efforts over the past two decades prevented the silvery minnow from becoming even more endangered, but as Archdeacon looks to the future he has a dire prediction for next year and beyond. “If there is a poor year again in 2019,” he says, “the clock will have reset and all progress erased.”
Drought has already killed more than 100 wild horses. Volunteers hope to prevent more deaths.
NAVAJO NATION – Glenda Seweingyawma plucked quarters from a giant pickle jar and dropped them into the water-station vending machine to fill up a large plastic barrel. It’s a common scene: About 40 percent of Navajos living on the reservation have to haul their drinking water.
But this water wasn’t for humans. It was for wild horses, which have come to depend on it.
“We took one load,” Seweingyawma said. “By the time we get back over there, it was already all gone. And then we get another load of water. And then we go back again and then it’d be gone. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we can’t keep up with these horses.’”
Two weeks ago, Seweingyawma and her friend Paul Lincoln woke up to a group of horses outside their trailer.
“When we first saw them, their heads were down and (they were) walking really slow,” Lincoln said. “They were just kind of like zombie horses. And that’s when we saw these ones drop in front of us, and then we said, ‘That’s it. We better start with buckets of water.’ ”
Last month, more than one hundred wild horses were found dead, stuck in thick mud surrounding a dried-up stock pond on the vast Navajo Nation.
The images, some of the most alarming we’ve seen of the drought, have prompted many people — both on and off the reservation — to take action.
Thanks to donations, including food and water from people all over Arizona, volunteers now are able to leave alfalfa and fill several water tanks. About a dozen people are taking care of about 200 horses.
Volunteers work to unload hay from Tracy and Buddy McDonald’s trailer. (Photo by Laurel Morales/KJZZ)
Lincoln drove his truck over dirt roads to the first stop, a clearing protected by boulders and dry scrub brush in the high desert of northeastern Arizona.
We came around a bend and there they were — a couple dozen horses that appear more spirited on this day, like the powerful symbols of freedom they’ve come to be known as. But Lincoln noticed a new one — a skinny speckled-gray stallion whose ribs you could count.
He whistled at the herd. “Hey, where you guys going? Come get some water.”
Usually they’d run from any sign of humans, but not lately, not when they haven’t seen rain in months. Navajo officials said this year has been the driest in 15 years of drought.
Bidtah Becker, director of Navajo Natural Resources, said the tribe flew over the reservation two years ago to get an accurate count and found at least 30,000 free-ranging horses in an area the size of West Virginia.
“It’s as much a range-management issue or grass-availability issue as it is a horse issue,” Becker said. “Horses compete with the livestock that Navajo people raise on the range.”
One horse eats 32 pounds of forage and drinks 10 gallons of water per day.
Wild horses normally would flee humans, but the deep drought has made them desperate for food and water. (Photo by Laurel Morales/KJZZ)
Becker has asked the tribal council for $1 million to support a plan that would partner with outside groups to round up horses for adoption, as well as administer contraception. But Becker said that would require yearly inoculations and staff or volunteers who can wrangle horses.
“Community support and getting the community not just on the Navajo Nation but surrounding the Navajo Nation to work together to address the number of feral or free-ranging horses on the nation is critical,” Becker said.
Many Navajo are concerned the horses will be taken to slaughterhouses, a method that was supported by the previous administration.
Becker said that is not part of the current plan because Navajos believe horses to be sacred.
That’s why Paul Lincoln has felt so strongly about saving them.
“They’ve been around longer than we have, so they’re sacred,” Lincoln said. “A lot of our traditions, we’re barely holding on to them.”
And, he said, he feels like the horses have come to him, asking for his help — and he’s able to give it.
Lincoln and Seweingyawma drive a second tank of water to another site next to a broken-down windmill. Tracy and Buddy McDonald show up from Flagstaff with water and hay. Everyone pitched in to unload it. They had read about the “horse heroes,” as they’ve been called, on social media.
“If you’re out here, there’s nothing to eat,” Tracy McDonald said. “And there’s thousands of horses. We need something to control these feral horses so we can continue to have them. It’s part of who we all are. But there’s such an overpopulation there’s no where near enough water or food.”
Will the infamous EPA administrator get to keep his soundproof phone booth? And will anything change at the EPA itself?
Even his soundproof phone booth, tactical pants and 24/7 security teams weren’t enough to save him. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has resigned from office — or possibly been forced to resign — following months of ethics scandals related to his profligate personal spending, secret schedules, expensive travel and cozy relationships with industry.
Pruitt’s full resignation letter was later published by Fox News. The letter praised President Trump and the “transformative work that is occurring” — and characterized the president’s election as “God’s providence.” Pruitt also claimed he was resigning because “the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.”
Speaking of a toll taken on all of us, Pruitt’s tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency saw a seemingly never-ending list of actions designed to do anything but protect the environment. Pruitt-backed actions include removing climate change from official policies (and from EPA web pages), rolling back clean-air and clean-water regulations, extending the use of previously restricted toxic pesticides, and hiring oil-industry insiders to key positions.
Reactions to his resignation were quick and brutal.
“Good bye Scott Pruitt, the worst Administrator in EPA history and perhaps the word cabinet member ever,” tweeted former White House chief ethics counsel Richard W. Painter. “Fake science, fake ethics and fake religion (complete with a cultish theology of planet destruction) all rolled into one. Good bye.”
“While he clearly violated ethical standards and bilked taxpayers, he inflicted far worse injury on American children and families by abandoning science and the EPA’s public health and environmental mission,” said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Scott Pruitt’s corruption and coziness with industry lobbyists finally caught up with him,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. “We’re happy that Pruitt can no longer deceive Americans or destroy our environment. This victory belongs to the hundreds of thousands of activists who fought to protect the Environmental Protection Agency from a corrupt crony set on destroying it from the inside.”
Ironically, Pruitt’s own last tweet from his official EPA Administrator account read “Happy Independence Day, America!” (That tweet has since been deleted.)
What Next?
Pruitt’s departure leaves a leadership vacuum — well, even more of one — at the EPA. The most likely potential nominee to replace him — and the man Trump has already announced will take over as acting administrator — is former coal lobbyist and climate-change denier Andrew Wheeler, who was confirmed as deputy EPA administrator on April 12 despite fairly vague and ineffective Democratic opposition. Wheeler’s name was bandied about earlier this year when it looked as though Pruitt was gunning for U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ job. He is perceived as a Washington insider who “has spent years effectively navigating the rules,” according to The New York Times. In the long run, this may make Wheeler a much worse threat to the environment than Pruitt.
If Wheeler doesn’t make the cut to permanently take the position as the new EPA administrator, other potential Pruitt replacements include former industry lobbyist Susan Bodine, just one of a host of people who — like Pruitt himself — made names for themselves by suing the EPA before being brought on board the agency.
What will Pruitt’s legacy be? Well, it probably won’t be good. “Sadly, the ideological fervor with which Pruitt pursued the destruction of environmental regulations and the agency itself live on in the Trump administration,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.
Others echoed that sentiment. “Pruitt was able to hang on as long as he did, amid all the mini-scandals, because Trump loved how he was working to dismantle EPA,” said Michael Gerrard, president of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “That won’t be lost on Wheeler, who will continue the wrecking, presumably without the distractions.”
Some expressed hope Pruitt will just be the first to go. Kendall, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said it’s “time for the EPA to clean house,” much as President Reagan did in 1983 after a set of ethics violations hit his agency. “The next EPA administrator needs to be someone who will uphold independent science and commit wholeheartedly to the agency’s science-based mission of protecting public health and the environment. Until then, Congress should conduct considerably more oversight because political appointees at the EPA are sidelining science and compromising the agency’s effectiveness.”
Meanwhile, experts say many of Pruitt’s environmental rollbacks may not last. As TheNew York Times pointed out a few months back, many of the deregulatory actions Pruitt has taken over the past year were handled so quickly and carelessly that they may not pass legal muster (and, indeed, have already failed in some cases).
But the damage to the EPA itself will take some time to heal. As Mother Jones writer Rebecca Leber wrote in April, “you can’t talk about Pruitt’s lasting damage without talking about how he’s attacking science and expertise, pursuing buyouts and restructuring offices, and his pulling back on state work.” And the people Pruitt brought into the EPA — many of whom share his conflicts of interest — seem likely continue his industry-friendly policies.
And what happens to Pruitt himself? Prior to his resignation, at least 18 federal investigations were looking into his reported ethical lapses. Whether or not he will be prosecuted for any of those problems — or if his wife will finally get that coveted Chick-fil-A franchise — remains to be seen.
Books coming out this month examine wildlife crime, polluted cities, the diversity of bees and how democracy can stand up to climate change.
Looking for a few new books to read during your summer vacation? Look no further than these 15 new environmentally themed titles coming out in July. Publishers have scheduled some thought-provoking new titles for just about every type of reader, from nature lovers to history buffs, and from political activists to budding young scientists and conservationists.
The Perils of Pollution:
The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy by Anna Clark — One of several books about the lead-plagued city coming out this year, this one promises to be a full account of the negligence that led to so much human suffering and death. With so many other cities poised to experience problems with their water pipes as well, learning from what happened in Flint could drive policy around the country for decades. A must-read.
Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities by Scott Frickel and James R. Elliott — Is your home, workplace or favorite restaurant built on the remains of a polluted old industrial site? This book digs deep into the histories of four major U.S. cities — New Orleans, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore. — and finds that about 90 percent of former industrial locations have been converted into parks, neighborhoods and commercial districts, rarely with environmental review. Yikes.
Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson — A celebration of the incredible importance and diversity of those classic yellow-and-black insects, covering “leafcutters, bumbles, masons, miners, diggers, carpenters, wool-carders and more.” (Honeybees, too, but less so, since they already get so much press.)
Red Alert! Endangered Animals Around the World by Catherine Barr and Anne Wilson — This beautifully illustrated kids’ book delivers portraits of 15 species on the IUCN Red List, including snow leopards, blue whales and giant pandas. In addition to fully painted art, the text contains information on why these species are endangered and how we can help them.
The Wonderful Mr. Willughby: The First True Ornithologist by Tim Birkhead — A biography of the short but influential life of Francis Willughby, the overshadowed co-author of the first encyclopedia of birds back in the 17th century.
Wildlife Crime: From Theory to Practice edited by William D. Moreto — A timely textbook for conservationists and law-enforcement students and professionals to help them understand and combat this insidious practice, which is putting so many species at risk.
Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? by Daniel J. Fiorino — Geez, I sure hope so. (Quick answer: yes it can, and it much better than — ahem — autocratic regimes.)
Climate Scientists at Work by Rebecca E. Hirsch — This looks like the perfect book for the budding young scientists in your family, showing them not only what climate scientists do, but how we all can help them right now as citizen scientists.
Incredible Ecosystems:
Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border by Porter Fox — A three-year journey along the border between the United States and Canada reveals how both countries are plagued by “climate change, water wars, oil booms and border security.” Maybe we should look toward that northward border a little more often.
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer — This newly revised and expanded edition of VanderMeer’s essential guide to crafting fantastic stories includes a great section on writing environmentally themed fiction. The rest of the book is pretty darn good, too, as are the online extras.
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.
With increased attendance and crumbling infrastructure, national parks need money. But President Trump wants to cut even more of their funding.
Crowded visitor centers, crumbling roads and aging buildings — those are the sights at some of America’s national parks lately, caused by years of chronic underfunding. Will the situation soon get even worse? The Trump administration has proposed stripping national parks’ funding even further, despite the fact that people are visiting our public lands more and more often.
John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, says the majority of national parks have been short on cash for years.
“As a general rule, parks are underfunded,” Garder tells me in a telephone interview. “The two main issues are understaffing and the deferred maintenance backlog.”
Courtesy National Park Conservation Association
The National Park Service maintenance backlog is estimated at $11.6 billion as of fiscal year 2018. Lawmakers and experts are huddling over the problem even as the president again proposes cutting the parks’ budgets.
In 2017 the National Park Service completed more than $519 million in maintenance and repair work. However, high visitation, aging infrastructure and budget constraints have kept the price for repairs high, according to the Department of the Interior.
Ironically, the very popularity of national parks is driving the unmet budget need.
“The increase in visitation just makes the problem worse,” Garder says.
Crunched Budgets
The National Park Service’s budget was $3.4 billion in 2017, $2.9 billion of which came from Congress. The additional $594 million came from other sources, including $282 million generated by user fees.
The data provided by the National Parks Conservation Association show that while discretionary funding for the National Park Service has grown since fiscal year 2009, it has still not been enough to keep up with all maintenance and repairs amid increased visitation.
Discretionary funding includes all programs for which money is appropriated by Congress on an annual basis.
Only 117 out of 417 sites in the national park system collect fees. At the fee-collecting parks, 80 percent of the funds generated by fees remain in the parks where they were collected, while 20 percent go into a funding pool for other parks.
In recent years the budget appropriation process has become even more constrained, exacerbating the challenge of providing enough money to the National Park Service.
Garder says the Trump administration provided a “very damaging” budget blueprint for fiscal year 2018, asking Congress for cuts to the Park Service. Congress refused the administration’s proposed budget, which would have eliminated thousands of jobs at the agency, and instead provided it with more money than was originally proposed.
But Trump’s $2.7 billion 2019 budget blueprint, unveiled earlier this year, calls for a 7 percent budget cut to the Park Service. This would result in a loss of nearly 2,000 ranger jobs. The proposal also includes specific cuts to cultural programs, land acquisition and the Centennial Challenge, a program that manages philanthropic donations, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.
“National parks are a victim of what has become a broken appropriations system, and they are not receiving the support they should and not being prioritized,” Garder says.
Visitation Increasing
One site typifies the budget constraints felt across the country: Zion National Park in southwestern Utah.
Zion is the only national park where management is considering a reservation system, as its visitation has been growing at a fast clip.
Just under 150,000 acres, Zion has only one main road that stretches for 6 miles. In 2017 the park had approximately 4.5 million visitors, making it the third most-visited national park in the country.
The park’s Twitter account has warned visitors often in recent weeks about parking restrictions.
A tweet on June 15 read: “Parking is full at the Zion Visitor Center and the lot has been closed. Visitors should not to go to the visitor center to park. Park in Springdale.”
Officials at Zion didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Similar situations are occurring around the country. Last year 331 million people visited the 417 National Park Service sites across the country, according to the Department of the Interior.
Grand Canyon and Great Smoky Mountains national parks were the second and first most-visited, respectively.
Dana Soehn, spokesperson for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, says park visitation has increased by 25 percent over the past decade, while staffing has decreased by 23 percent.
To counteract the impact of the increased visitation, Soehn says, park officials started to remind visitors to travel to the park during less busy times like early mornings and mid-week, and have worked to make some of its most-used facilities more sustainable, including the park’s most popular trails.
Meanwhile the total deferred maintenance for Great Smokies is more than $215 million. While deferred maintenance is spread across thousands of physical assets, more than 75 percent of the repair needs, or $167 million, is associated with the park’s road system, Soehn says.
“This is not surprising when you consider the millions who choose to experience the Smokies from behind the driver seat every year,” she says.
Aging buildings are another primary concern in the Smokies, accounting for 8 percent of repair needs, or $16 million. The current deferred maintenance backlog for the trails system exceeds $16 million, which accounts for 7 percent of the park’s total deferred maintenance needs.
In 2018 and 2019, Soehn tells me, the park is embarking on a $2.5 million public-private partnership opportunity to fund deferred maintenance needs for the infrastructure of 9 radio repeater sites, which help the park ensure a safe visitor experience for visitors and safe operations for field employees.
Grand Canyon National Park, which saw more than 6.2 million visitors in 2017, has over $329 million in deferred maintenance. That figure includes The Trans-Canyon Pipeline, which carries water to the South Rim and its visitor centers and hotels. The pipe’s condition continues to deteriorate as it leaks and breaks.
The deferred maintenance backlog at Yosemite National Park in California currently stands at over $582 million.
Scott Gediman, spokesperson for Yosemite, says the park’s critical needs include three wastewater-treatment plants.
Similarly to Great Smokies, which receives outside help, Yosemite gets help from Yosemite Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that provides grants and supports the park’s 750 miles of trails. Most recently, Gediman says, the conservancy donated $20 million toward the renovation of Mariposa Grove, a sequoia grove that reopened in mid-June.
When asked if the park has enough staff to manage all of its visitors, Gediman says they are able to operate the park with its current 700-800 employees. “We could always use more people, but we have a very talented and dedicated staff and we feel that we are able to protect the park.”
Yellowstone National Park, meanwhile, needs over $800 million to address its maintenance backlog. The most pressing issues revolve around visitors services, says park spokesperson Neal Herbert.
“Those include constant repair and upkeep to roads, historic structures, water, wastewater, trails and boardwalks,” Herbert says. “For example, thermal basins change constantly and boardwalks need to be moved.”
This year’s Memorial Day contributed to May 2018 being the busiest May ever recorded in the park.
“Visitation has increased by 37 percent over the last five years,” he says. “This increase creates challenges for park staff, facilities, visitors, and the resources people come here to enjoy. Right now we’re collecting data on visitor expectations and how they move through the park.”
Possible Solutions
Several bills aimed at reducing maintenance backlog at the National Park Service are currently making their way through Congress.
The National Park Service Legacy Act, introduced by U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), would allocate $500 million annually from revenues that the government receives from oil and natural gas royalties into a National Park Service Legacy Restoration Fund until 2047.
Rachel Cohen, communications director for Sen. Warner, says they are currently securing the steps for the bill to go forward, including discussions with the Senate Committee on Energy and National Resources.
Another measure geared toward reducing the financial woes of the National Park Service is the National Park Restoration Act, introduced by U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Michael Simpson (R-Idaho) on March 7.
Under the bill half of the excess revenue from controversial offshore and onshore drilling would be funneled to the National Park Service. The bill would create a fund for projects at national parks.
Ashton Davies, communications director for Sen. Alexander, says that there have been no hearings on the bill, but it has already received support from some Democrats. The legislation also would need to go through the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Last year a proposed fee increase at the nation’s 17 most popular national parks caused a public outcry, as it would have nearly tripled vehicle entrance fees during peak seasons. Following the uproar the Trump administration scaled back its plans and implemented more moderate $5-10 fee hikes.
Garder argues that fee hikes alone can’t solve the issue. He says any further fee increases on top of the increases that have already taken place could drive away visitors.
“While fees play an important role in supplementing federal funds, they are no substitute, and they have to remain at a reasonable rate so as not to discourage visitation,” he says. “These are lands Americans own, and they have a right to visit them affordably. What’s most needed is a more robust federal investment.”
Conservationists have helped to save North America’s largest bird from extinction, but it’s still important to give every chick a chance to fly free.
Sometimes saving a species from extinction requires a helping hand — or a jailbreak.
That may sound like a mixed metaphor, but it’s actually the case for critically endangered California condors (Gymnogyps californianus), North America’s largest birds. Every once in a while, a condor chick needs a little help getting out of its egg, and human caretakers need to step in to gently assist it on its journey out of the shell.
Take the chick known as OZ07, whose egg was laid this past February in Oregon Zoo’s condor captive-breeding program, about 50 miles south of Portland. In April, as the egg approached its hatch date, keepers could tell that the chick was active but unable to break through the shell. Condor eggs only contain enough air for a chick’s first breath, so keepers knew they needed to let in more air. They chiseled a tiny hole in the shell, giving OZ07 a source of much-needed oxygen.
That wasn’t quite enough, though. “Oz” was still stuck. Zoo staff removed another small piece of shell, hoping it would encourage the chick to hatch. Four days later, it still hadn’t budged. Finally the team opted to slowly snip open additional portions of the shell and carefully ease this tiny bird out into the world:
Photo by Liz Musich, courtesy Oregon Zoo
The de-egging — technically called a “hatch assist” — was a success, and OZ07 became the sixth out of seven California condor chicks born this year at Oregon Zoo. The zoo has now raised 71 condor chicks overall.
That’s a pretty amazing number when you consider that there were only 22 California condors left in the entire world back in 1982, following years of habitat loss, shootings, powerline collisions and poisoning (condors are particularly susceptible to lead, which paralyzes their digestive systems). The last surviving members of the species were brought into captivity over the next five years in order to save them from extinction.
That last-ditch effort worked. Today, although the species is still critically endangered, captive-breeding and reintroduction programs have helped to boost the population to more than 460, the majority of which once again live in the wild.
How has this success been possible? It helps that, other than the occasional hatch assist and other minor problems, the birds do relatively well in captivity.
“It turns out to be not too difficult to raise California condors,” says David Shepherdson, Oregon Zoo’s deputy conservation manager. “They don’t seem to have any particular disease problem. They’re relatively easy to pair up with each other. Their needs are fairly simple. You just throw some dead animals in there for them to eat and then, you know, we have a lot of eggs.”
Of course, Shepherdson says, there are still plenty of issues to deal with. For example, another chick from this year’s hatching class was, for an unknown reason, abandoned by its parents 18 days after it was born. Without mom and dad to feed it, the chick would have died. That meant intervention became necessary.
But human interaction with condor chicks is always kept to a minimum in order to prevent chicks from becoming acclimated to people, something that will help keep them safe once they’re released into the wild. To get around this problem, staff members ended up feeding the chick using a special tool — hand puppets designed to look like adult condors.
Photo by Liz Musich, courtesy Oregon Zoo
That’s actually a longstanding solution to similar chick abandonments. In fact, Shepherdson says, most problems the breeding programs encounter already have solutions. “The community as a whole has a lot of experience at this point,” he says. “We have 30-plus years of rearing them. Some of the people in these programs have been involved almost right from the beginning. So, you know, we don’t tend to come up against too many problems now we haven’t seen before in the past that somebody had to deal with.”
Another one of those problems that zoos have learned to solve was getting over a basic physical limitation. Condors, it turns out, typically only lay one egg at a time in the wild. On that schedule, boosting the condors’ population would have been painstakingly slow. To get around this, zookeepers developed a technique called double clutching. “You take one of the eggs and then you foster it with another couple of birds,” Shepherdson explains. “Then the original pair will usually lay another egg, so it’s a way of doubling production.”
Double clutching isn’t done as much anymore, though. “We’re further into the program, so the emphasis is more on producing the highest quality chicks and the ones most likely to survive and thrive in the wild, rather than just sheer numbers,” Shepherdson says. That’s another reason caretakers step aside and let young condors learn to be condors.
That doesn’t stop zoo staff from watching them. “They’re just really interesting,” Shepherdson says. “I’m an animal behaviorist by training, and I’m always intrigued about what they think and what they do. There appears to be a lot going inside their heads, and they are clearly one of the more intelligent bird species, up there with parrots and corvids. They also engage in a lot of interesting social behavior — in some ways they’re more like primate groups than bird groups in that they have such rich social interactions.”
As this year’s chicks start to grow large enough to fly on their own, Shepherdson says it’s an honor to work on such an iconic conservation program. “It’s the kind of program I dreamed about being involved with when I first started studying biology.” Meanwhile he says the entire condor recovery team is proud of its collective success and that they have prevented the California condor from going extinct.
He notes, however, that the species still has a long way to go before it can be considered recovered. In particular, lead remains a huge problem for condors in the wild. The zoo, like several other organizations, has been conducting outreach to hunters to try to get them to switch away from lead ammunition, which can leave traces of the metal in carcasses and gut piles that condors eat.
“We hope we can persuade a significant number of hunters to switch to non-lead ammunition,” Shepherdson says. “That would help condors, and it would also have a huge benefit for other scavenging birds, primarily bald eagles and golden eagles.”
One more step toward recovery looms in the near future. Over the past few years, condors have been released back into the wild in three sites southern California, plus two more sites near the Grand Canyon and in Baja California. Now, after years of work among state and local agencies and other partners, it’s possible that condors could be also reintroduced at a sixth site, the Yurok tribe’s land in Northern California. Shepherdson says that could happen as early as 2019 or 2020.
That’s just stage one. Once they become established in Northern California, it’s likely the birds could then spread their massive wings and fly over the border, bringing them once again to the skies of Oregon, where they haven’t lived for decades.
“That would be very exciting,” Shepherdson says. “We’ve always hoped that we might at one point bring them back to Oregon because it’s definitely part of their former range and there are historical accounts of people like Lewis and Clark seeing them here.”
That’s still a few years away, though. Until then they’ll keep their chisels and puppets at the ready and stay prepared to give the species every helping hand it needs.
The often-arrested social activist discusses his court case against Monsanto and the lessons it offers for other protestors.
This is a tough time to be a protestor.
Around the country a new wave of legislation has attempted to criminalize people speaking out about environmental and social issues or standing up against governments and corporations. Last month legislatures in Minnesota advanced bills that would have made it illegal for protestors to block highways or associate with people who want to damage oil pipelines. A similar bill in Louisiana also aims to criminalize “conspiracy” to trespass on pipeline property.
These most recent bills join dozens of similar legislative attempts that have been proposed in at least 20 states over the past few years. To date all of these proposed bills have either not passed or been modified to remove unconstitutional language, but one thing about them remains clear: They’re what the ACLU calls a nationwide attempt at “chilling protest.”
But that makes the need for protest even more important, says Reverend Billy Talen, the head of the singing social activist group known as the Stop Shopping Choir. Talen and his team —perhaps best known for their masks of extinct frogs or their song “Monsanto Is the Devil” — have been jailed dozens of times around the country for their bold and purposefully over-the-top protests. The arrests don’t seem to slow them down: They’ve been arrested nine times this year alone.
One of the group’s most noteworthy arrests took place in 2016 in Des Moines, Iowa, where they were protesting Monsanto’s World Food Prize and the company’s glyphosate pesticide. You can see footage of the arrest below:
That arrest — for trespassing, despite the fact that the protestors remained more than 300 feet away from the event — recently resulted in a court victory for Talen and peace activist Father Frank Cordero after the arrest was ruled unlawful. They, and dozens of other arrested protesters, received a shared judgement of $50,000 from the state of Iowa and the guarantee that they could sing and protest across the street from future events.
We spoke with the perpetually outrageous Rev. Billy, author of the book The Earth Wants You, about their First Amendment victory, the need for bold protests, and what other issues they have on their agenda.
There have been so many attempts by various states over the past couple of years to limit protest and free speech by advocates. Is this win in court a step in the right direction for everyone, or at least for activists in Iowa?
This is a small victory against a company that is a vastly scaled crime spree, protected by Clinton/Obama Democrats and Koch Republicans. These are real cowboys, from DDT to Agent Orange to PCBs to killing the honeybees. Corrupting government, placing executives in regulatory positions, is their M.O.
Did we make a difference? “A step in the right direction” is a modest enough phrase for what we’ve done.
What can other concerned citizens learn from your protests, or from this victory?
Our court decision was expected. Their position was ludicrous. The lesson here for our comrades in the Earth struggle would be that you have to be more ludicrous than the corporations. Our choir’s singing invasion of the glyphosate hearings at the EPA — we need more of this kind of thing. We have been too boring to change the world with our march-and-rally, and then another, and then another… Protesters need to remember the outright boldness of the social revolutions that worked. Think of a thousand black people walking on a highway across Alabama. Remember the Redwood Summer, the kayaktivists, Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock.
Looking more broadly, what do you feel is the continued value of protest, especially in this political and corporate environment?
We are approaching the totalitarian environment that the corporations envisioned. In New York you have to get a permit to shout a political opinion in the park. All public space is privatized. Laws govern behavior for the consumer environment, or to avoid annoying rich people. So this makes protest all the more important. We go through oppression cycles in the U.S. The right-wing libertarians of Silicon Valley have combined with the evangelicals and patriots to create a suffocating world. We have to reclaim the First Amendment, a law that makes our better angels fly.
What comes next? Will you be back at the World Food Prize again this fall?
Yes, we will return this fall. Father Cordero and his Occupy the World Food Prize friends have invited us, and we are honored to make the trip. I have family ties in Iowa. My daughter’s namesake, my great-grandmother Lena, lived in an Iowa Dutch community. And the Des Moines community of activists put us up and drove us around and waited outside the jail. We love them.
We’re also continuing to be involved in a lot of related issues. Our band of radical singers worked against toxins and their corporate suppliers all those years, and then suddenly six months ago one of our singers, Ravi Ragbir, was taken by ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement). He was taken to Miami and then flown back to New York City as lawsuits were filed. Ravi spoke eloquently at our rally at the Varick immigration jail rally on June 21 and may succeed in remaining with his family. The impact of losing our friend was so painfully clear: We turned overnight into partisans of immigration rights.
The through-line of the two causes is a strong reminder that these toxins and deportation are not such separate issues. For instance, they both harm children.
If the human race was facing its last moments and the Earth willed one last breath for us all, then it might occur to us during that final exhale that there is only one issue, and that is life itself. Facing Monsanto and facing Trump, life is the thing that is being attacked and life is our common power. Life-a-lujah!
How do you feel about Monsanto merging with Bayer and the Monsanto name going away? Do you need to rewrite all of your songs?
We’ll have to see with the songs. We sang “Monsanto Is the Devil” on our last tour in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It still works. As for Bayer, the modern company was founded by a Nazi, Fritz der Meer, who spent seven years in prison after the Nuremburg trials, because he designed the shower heads that sprayed the gas Zyklon B at Auschwitz. Der Meer’s company had a factory next to Auschwitz, where Elie Wiesel worked as a boy. Cheap labor, don’t you know. After release, der Meer was reinstated as Bayer’s president. As Bernie Sanders stated, “Monsanto and Bayer is a marriage made in Hell.”
From protesting to preaching, here’s Reverend Billy taking to the pulpit to proclaim the perils of climate change:
YouTube is inspiring viewers across the globe to protect Hawaii’s Laysan albatross — but will that be enough in the face of climate change?
It had been six weeks since Jett, a Laysan albatross, had lifted off the volcanic Hawaiian soil and soared over the Pacific in search of squid. He had not returned. His black-and-white-feathered mate, Bennie, was now their daughter’s sole caretaker, and the effort was exhausting her. Each day that passed saw the daughter, a small ball of gray fluff named Kiamanu, growing ever-hungrier from lack of food.
In April 2018 members of a Kauai seabird-rehabilitation group called Save Our Shearwaters declared Jett deceased, although exactly what happened to him remains a mystery. Perhaps he’d been snagged in an industrial fishing line or caught in a bad storm.
In Jett’s absence, staff from the group visited his nest, where they examined Kiamanu. She wasn’t gaining enough weight from Bennie’s feedings alone, so they decided it was necessary to supplement her diet.
But hiring a licensed wildlife rehabilitator to provide regular check-ups and feed Kiamanu every day with calorie-rich squid slurries would cost about $3,000 — and there was no coverage for that expense in budgets already stretched thin. Finding funding to save Kiamanu’s life became an urgent priority.
Luckily, Save Our Shearwaters knew just whom to ask for help: The tens of thousands of people all over the world who were watching Jett, Bennie and Kiamanu online through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “TrossCam,” which livestreams albatross activity daily on YouTube.
The call went out, and contributions poured in. In a matter of eight hours, Save Our Shearwaters collected $7,000 in aid for Kiamanu. According to the group, donations came from as far away as Norway. (Excess funds will go toward the organization’s seabird conservation efforts.)
It’s just one way that the TrossCam is inspiring efforts to conserve these threatened birds.
“In my mind, caring fuels learning,” says Hob Osterlund, founder of Kauai Albatross Network, who helps manage TrossCam and has received a fellowship from the Safina Center for her work in albatross conservation. “When we share images and stories, people have feelings. They won’t necessarily remember what we said, but they will remember how we made them feel.”
A recent TrossCam screen grab.
According to Osterlund, more than a million people from “virtually every country in the world” have tuned into the cam since it was set up in 2012. Viewers engage in lively conversations on Twitter and Facebook as they watch Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis) mate, nest, lay eggs and raise chicks at sites on Kauai between November and July. (Laysans spend the rest of the year living at sea.) The exact locations of the nests aren’t disclosed to keep the birds safe.
Most moments captured on the TrossCam are sweet, such as eggs hatching to reveal cute chicks and affectionate mates nuzzling on their nests. But others are more serious, such as the time two young albatross chicks coughed up pieces of plastic that had been fed to them by their parents, who may have mistaken the material for food:
After that moment was broadcast live, viewers immediately wanted to know more — and many changed their behavior. “Multiple viewers reached out following this experience to remark on how little they knew about the issue of plastics in the ocean, and that they were going to work to change their own lives to reduce the amount of plastic waste they are generating,” says Charles Eldermire, project leader for Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Cams.
Plastic, according to the Cornell Lab, is a major threat to albatrosses. More than 90 percent of the world’s seabirds, including albatross, have ingested plastic at some point in their lives. On Midway Atoll, an uninhabited former military base about 1,500 miles from Hawaii where more than 70 percent of all Laysan albatrosses nest, albatross parents unintentionally feed their chicks more than five tons of marine plastic each year.
But Lindsay Young, executive director of Pacific Rim Conservation, says while plastic is a serious threat today, it’s not nearly as concerning as the long-term effects of sea-level rise. Based on current sea-level rise trends, many experts fear that a 15-acre spit of Midway and all low-lying areas of the other two Midway Islands will be completely inundated by 2100. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimates that the Laysan albatross population, currently stable, will rapidly decline over the next 80 years as sea-level rise intensifies.
To help mitigate this risk, conservation groups on Hawaii, including Pacific Rim Conservation, are already working to establish flood-safe high-elevation nesting habitat for Laysans.
Once again, the TrossCam just might be the best tool conservationists have at their disposal to educate the public and move them to action. People exposed to both the beauty and harsh realities of life for Laysan albatrosses do appear more inspired to care. The TrossCam has saved Kiamanu’s life, and perhaps it will save many other albatrosses going forward.
“Once viewers watch the cam they almost cannot help but fall in love,” says Osterlund. “Once in love, they are eager to learn more about the birds’ life cycle and risks” — and, she adds, are more likely to contribute to and support the creation of new nesting habitat and other conservation efforts.
To avoid major losses of Laysan albatrosses, allies like Osterlund say they will have to act fast — and together. Millions of YouTube viewers just might make that possible.
If the Trump administration can show such disregard for society’s most vulnerable people, what does that mean for clean water, endangered species and other environmental issues?
The media images from the past few weeks have horrified us.
Children being torn from their grieving parents’ arms, locked in warehouses, abused and neglected, left crying and alone for the first time in their lives.
Such brutal actions showcase the stark indifference of President Trump, his administration, his cronies and his supporters when it comes to basic humanity. They don’t appear to care about individuals or families, and sometimes it looks as if they don’t care about anyone but themselves. Trump even announced this week that the U.S. would pull out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which in itself sends a pretty clear message. And Trump’s midweek executive order ending the policy of family separations does nothing to solve the problems he’s already created. He has shown no signs that he will take steps to reunite families, let alone that he feels any remorse for his administration’s actions.
In the light of Trump’s public display of inhumanity — this shameful neglect of the people most in need of support and help — it becomes increasingly obvious that the administration and its supporters pose a threat not just to immigrant children, but to everyone on the planet.
After all, if someone can order a child to be ripped away from its crying mother and locked behind a metal chain-link fence, then they also likely have the disposition to pollute a river, build a fracking operation near a school, bulldoze habitat for an endangered species, allow a species to go extinct, prioritize the burning of planet-warming fossil fuels to enrich their cronies, and so much more.
These and other actions form an ever-growing quilt of industry-friendly decisions that will hurt people, wildlife and the environment we all live in for decades — and they happened while we were (quite rightly) focused on the border and angry about the seizure of immigrant children.
And sadly, not one of these actions received much media attention.
That’s exactly the way administration wants it. Presidential advisor Stephen Miller, architect of the immigration policy, has said that he feels voters will see immigration as the only topic worth voting on, and that the anger and fear Trump has stoked will drive more wins for his team. That will just leave the administration with even more power to target additional environmental regulations and protections that hold back corporate profits — and to make the world a dirtier, sicker, less natural place.
Because after all, if you can take children away from the most vulnerable parents in the world, what’s to stop you from taking away everything else?
Now retired from the Service, Niemeyer — author of the memoirs Wolfer and Wolf Land — still devotes his life to wolf conservation. A frequent lecturer, he advocates for finding the middle ground where both wolves and humans can coexist on the landscape.
