Climate Change Is Killing These Ancient Trees — But That’s Just Part of the Story

New research shows that 2,000-year-old baobab trees are suddenly dying. New trees won’t have a chance, either.

Some of the world’s oldest trees are suddenly dying. New research published this week reveals that nine of the 13 oldest baobab trees in the world — some dating back to 2,000 years or more — are dying or have recently died.

Why are these magnificent, ancient trees suddenly perishing? Two words: climate change.

It turns out that rainfall patterns in Africa, where all baobab trees can be found, have completely changed as a result of global warming. Since towering baobab trees require and often store enormous amounts of water, this has put them into a dangerous situation at critical times of their annual cycle. As lead researcher Adrian Patrut told Ed Yong at The Atlantic, “If they don’t have enough rain when they flush their leaves or produce their flowers, they die.”

This isn’t the only climate-related threat to baobabs. Research published in 2013 revealed that global warming will soon make many current baobab habitats unsuitable for many of the big trees, and not just the gigantic elders. Not only that, the research also showed that rapid human development has already restricted where baobab trees can grow, leaving them with nowhere to go once their last-remaining habitats can no longer support them. As a result, at least one of the eight baobab species could be pushed into extinction.

My article on that 2013 research, originally published by Scientific American, follows:

The Ewe people of Togo, Africa, have a proverb: “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.” The proverb refers to the massive trees of the genus Adansonia that can live thousands of years, reach 100 feet into the sky and achieve trunk diameters of 30 feet or more. One baobab tree in South Africa is so large that a popular pub has been established inside its trunk. Many local cultures consider baobab trees to be sacred. Others use them for their nutritious fruits, edible leaves and beautiful flowers. In addition, old baobabs, like many long-lived trees, often have natural hollows in their trunks, which in their case can store tens of thousands of gallons of water — an important resource not just for the trees themselves but also for the people who live near them.

But the size and cultural value of baobab trees has not necessarily protected them. According to research published in Biological Conservation, two of Madagascar’s endemic baobab tree species will lose much of their available habitat in the next 70 years due to climate change and human development. One species may not survive to the next century. Madagascar is home to seven of the world’s eight baobab species, six of which can be found nowhere else.

The study — by scientists from the French agricultural research center CIRAD and the University of York in England — relied on satellite images and field work to develop population estimates and distribution models for three baobab species: Adansonia grandidieri, A. perrieri and A. suarezensis. All three trees are currently listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, which has not reassessed any Adansonia species since 1998. The study suggests that two of the species should now be reclassified as critically endangered.

One of those species, A. perrieri, had the lowest current population, according to the study, with just 99 trees observed during 10 years of field study. Based on its adaptation to specific geography and weather conditions, the researchers estimate that climate change will shrink the habitat of this species from about 8,000 square miles today to just over 2,500 square miles in 2080.

The second species, A. suarezensis, had a higher estimated current population of 15,000 trees but a far smaller distribution area of just 460 square miles. Based on climate change models and the species’ adaptation to high levels of precipitation, the researchers estimated that the distribution of this species will shrink to just 6.5 square miles by 2050 and could face potential extinction by 2080.

The one bright spot in their study was A. grandidieri, the largest and most populous baobab species. The researchers counted an estimated one million trees with a distribution of more than 10,000 square miles. According to their climate change models, this isn’t expected to change much by 2050 or 2080, but the team still recommends the species remain classified as endangered.

Unlike other species that may migrate or slowly move to new habitats as the climate shifts, baobab trees in Madagascar will not have that luxury. As the researchers point out, there’s nowhere left for the baobabs to go. Many baobab trees currently reside in “protected area networks” established to preserve Madagascar’s biodiversity, but the areas outside many of these networks have been almost completely converted to agriculture or cattle grazing areas, leaving no room for the trees to expand their distribution. In addition, the large animal species such as elephant birds and giant tortoises, which may have eaten baobab fruit and carried the trees’ seeds several kilometers from where they first fell, have all now gone extinct. With this in mind, the researchers assumed a “zero-colonization hypothesis” when calculating the trees’ distributions in coming decades, meaning they have little to no possibility of spreading to new habitats on their own.

Unfortunately the baobabs may not be alone in this scenario. Researchers warn that baobab trees should be considered a case study and wrote that the existing protected area network system in Madagascar “is not likely to be effective for biodiversity conservation in the future” because they will not always contain the ecological features necessary for the survival of the species that live inside them today. They suggest that the network system will need to be adapted to reflect climate change models and the ecological features that various species will need in the coming decades, but warn that the rest of Madagascar’s ecology must also be reconsidered. As they wrote, “it is only with an integration of ecological, social and economic studies, involving local communities and stakeholders, that we have a hope of restoring [Madagascar’s] ecosystem over the long term.”

Donald Trump, Corporate Profits and the Cult of Tomorrow Morning — No, Better Yet, This Afternoon

The author of Corrupted Science reveals the historical roots behind the administration’s current attacks on science, the environment and human health.

Grant’s book Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology and Politics in Science is published today.

Just a few days after Donald J. Trump was elected President, we had dinner with Republican friends whom I’ll call Betty and Barney Rubble, because those are not their real names.

My wife and I were pretty numbed in dismay, so the conversation didn’t flow as freely as it normally would. We tried our hardest to stick to the traditional “don’t talk about politics” rule, but at the same time it was hard not to talk about what we viewed as the disaster that had been dealt to the environment — and, more personally, to the future lives of our daughter and her family, particularly our grandson Tom.

President-elect Trump had bragged on the campaign trail about how he was going to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, increase coal production and make the EPA “more industry-friendly.” Even were he to be booted from office within four years, reversing the consequences of such actions was going to take very much longer. People currently of Tom’s age, we explained, were going to pay a very steep price, and quite possibly with their lives, for the recent election result.

At first Betty and Barney couldn’t understand that we weren’t talking partisan politics — that it wasn’t because, so to speak, our football team had lost to their football team that we were so demoralized. “Tell you what,” said Betty at one point. “We didn’t much like your guy the last few years, either.” They didn’t much like Trump, come to that, but they couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Finally, though, they got it, recognizing the danger imminent to the environment.

Their response, however, astonished us. “We’ll all be dead and gone by the time it matters.”

They carried this dismissive attitude, despite the fact that they too have young relatives.

Back in the balmy days of 2006 or so, I was stung into action by the war on science being waged by the administration of the re-elected George W. Bush. I persuaded one of my regular publishers that I should write the book that, the following year, was published as Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology and Politics in Science. In it I talked about deliberate attempts to corrupt either science or the public understanding of science from the earliest days until what was then the present.

In the final, long section, I discussed the political corruption of science by national regimes. I focused on Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union and George W. Bush’s America. (Despite spelling out very clearly in the text that I was in no way comparing Bush to Hitler and Stalin, I was immediately accused of doing exactly that by some critics. They then basked in the knowledge that they needn’t trouble to actually read the book.)

Corrupted Science did well, but of course it became dated. Some while later, the publisher closed its doors. The advent of Obama to the White House didn’t exactly solve the country’s science problems, but it did bring a huge improvement. The darkest days, I thought, were behind us.

Oh, boy, was I wrong.

When I suggested to the publisher at See Sharp Press that I’d like to revise and update Corrupted Science for the new era, he more or less took my hand off at the elbow in excitement.

Both of us expected that the new book would be modestly longer than the old. It would update the chapters on scientific fraud with more recent examples, add a discussion of predatory journals (which hadn’t been much of a thing back in 2007), look at the “replicability crisis,” expand the coverage of the antics of the Discovery Institute… and, of course, bring up to date the account of the mutilation of public science by America’s political leaders.

Again, I was wrong.

In the first place, I was wrong in my estimation of how much damage Donald Trump and his willing minion, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, would seek to do to American science, especially in terms of the environment. In fact, a major logistical problem for me while writing the book was that so much damage was being attempted in such a short period of time that it was well-nigh impossible for me to keep up with events. It seemed that each morning brought some new horror — often several — that demanded amendments to text I’d thought was just about ready to be put to bed.

My second error lay in thinking that the bulk of the updating of the later sections of the book would be about the Trump administration.

I soon realized that the anti-environmental and other anti-science actions were to a great extent just friend Betty’s maxim of “we’ll all be dead and gone by the time it matters” writ large.

Who cares if rising sea levels over the next few decades will exact a horrific human toll and deal devastating blows to the economy when there are profits to be made today? Who cares if many of our kids and grandkids will grow up intellectually stunted and psychologically crippled because of the lead and mercury they breathe and drink if doing anything about it now would affect the bottom line? Who cares if people starve as the seas die and the deserts expand?

It’s a cult of short-termism — tomorrow may just about matter, but what happens thereafter is someone else’s problem — and it permeates most corners of the Trump administration, including, of course, the Oval Office.

Where does this cult have its roots?

It’s easy enough to say that environmental short-termism has been a central platform of the Republican Party at least since Ronald Reagan tore Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof and installed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. (Chris Mooney’s excellent 2005 book The Republican War on Science will tell you all about this.)

But it’s actually, I think, more deeply rooted in U.S. culture. When Republican politicians pursue short-termist policies, it’s not because they regard them as especially good solutions to our ills. It’s because those policies happen to fit in with the short-termist aims of their paymasters.

The corporations.

Let’s consider those friendly folk at Big Sugar and Big Ag.

It’s only in the past few years that we’ve come more fully to recognize the damage that overconsumption of sugar does to us. We have an epidemic of obesity that has brought with it a spectrum of related diseases. Yet the evidence of sugar’s dangers has been there for decades, at least since the 1970s, when the British nutritionist John Yudkin demonstrated the connection beyond all possible doubt.

The reaction of the sugar industry was to destroy Yudkin’s reputation. With the assistance of scientists like Ancel Keys, large sugar corporations shrouded Yudkin’s work from view behind a smokescreen promoting the notion that unlimited sugar is good for you, sugar has no adverse effects on health and so on. There was even the claim at one point that sugar was innocent of causing dental cavities.

Industrialized livestock facilities, meanwhile, have been grossly abusing antibiotics. Companies employ the drugs to fatten animals faster and grow them in crowded environments where disease would otherwise be rife — or, at least, rifer than it is. The result is, as is at last now becoming widely known to Joe Public, that we’ve bred populations of bacteria — “superbugs” — that are resistant to antibiotics. Already some of the antibiotics we’ve been using as lifesavers in human medicine have become useless as a consequence of industrial agriculture’s greed and the demand of the American public for unsustainably cheap food. We’re looking at a very imminent post-antibiotic era, and it’s by no means clear how medicine is going to cope.

Public pressure has recently — far too recently — curtailed the abuse of antibiotics in livestock, and many major poultry producers now proudly boast that they forswear it. There are still outliers, though. As recently as January 2017, Sanderson Farms produced a document, “Supplemental Information Regarding Stockholder Proposal on Antibiotics,” which stated:

Numerous scientific studies have shown that the preventative use of antibiotics in food animals has not harmed human health, and that banning their use might actually be harmful to humans.

There are plenty of other examples of corporate entities and their representative associations lying about science, promoting bad science, burying good science, claiming that settled science is merely speculative, and otherwise muddying the public understanding of reality. Politicians of both major parties have served as useful idiots in this, and far too often as paid accomplices.

The asbestos industry pretended for decades that there was no link between their product and lung diseases, including cancer. (A climax came in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the George W. Bush administration and Mayor Rudi Giuliani pretended that the copious amounts of asbestos released in Manhattan were harmless, thereby causing the premature deaths of an untold number of emergency workers.)

For decades, the tobacco industry and its paid shills in the science community pretended the links between smoking and illness were not conclusively established. The chemicals industry formed a lynch mob against Rachel Carson and her efforts to alert us to the dangers of the overuse of pesticides; you can still find people online shrilling absurdly that she caused more deaths than Hitler or Stalin.

That same industry delayed international action when it was discovered that CFCs, used in industry, aerosol sprays and fridges, were the culprits in the formation and growth of the hole in the ozone layer. (And, as we’ve found out just within the past few weeks, despite the international ban on CFCs, it appears that somewhere in the world they’re being pumped out anyway.)

Oh, and did I mention how fossil-fuel companies have so effectively suppressed and corrupted the science on anthropogenic climate change? To this day, up to half the American public believe it’s unimportant, or a myth or even a “Chinese hoax.”

Which brings us back to Donald Trump and his determination to destroy environmental agencies — and the environment itself — in pursuit of short-term profits for industry.

In the longer term, of course, industry is going to have a hard time selling its products to people who’re dead.

But that’s too far in the future for Trump and the corporations that back him to take into account.

And so, to my surprise (and that of my fortunately very tolerant publisher), the new edition of Corrupted Science turned out to be nearly twice the size of the original. The bulk of the extra wordage being not so much about the anti-science activities of the Trump administration — although naturally they play an important part — as about those of the powerful corporate interests that have shaped those policies.

The two aspects are, of course, inextricably interwoven. If short-termist entities have essentially bought our government, then what else would you expect but that our government should promote short-termist policies about climate change, pollution, public lands and everything else?

But “we’ll all be dead and gone by the time it matters.”

Oh yeah?

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

Staring Into the Sun: Science Journalism, Objectivity and the African Poaching Crisis

Covering issues related to poaching, wildlife trafficking and extinction requires an unflinching look at what we’re losing and why.

As recorders of our time, journalists must always be scrupulously accurate in our reporting, in confirming our sources and data, and in delivering our understanding of the world in as compellingly truthful a means as possible.

Science and environmental journalists have accepted the burden of telling the story of our fading natural world as a necessary duty to both our profession and our planet. With regard to the African poaching crisis, which is an existential war in every sense, the time to hesitate, as Jim Morrison wrote, is through. Those who love these splendid beings — lions and rhinos, giraffes and cheetahs — must seize this last tremulous chance to act, to speak the truth in the face of extinction itself, and to do all we can, while we can, to prevent the dawning of an emptied world.

In my own writing about the African poaching crisis for a range of publications including Vice, Mongabay, Aeon and Ensia, I have been scrupulous in my reporting of the actual facts, as they’re currently understood. There’s no need to embellish the awful truth to advocate for someone to do something: It is painfully plain for all to see, and to act upon.

As professional reporters of fact, it is necessary for us to cover the blatant supremacy of Homo sapiens not as a fable of unwinding horror, though to many of us it may often seem so, but as a carefully presented, meticulously researched narrative that allows our readers to determine for themselves whether this is, ultimately and forever, the path we’ve chosen to take.

Like with other forms of nonfiction, such as documentary filmmaking, where the director makes a deliberate choice as to where and at whom to aim her camera, a journalist covering wildlife poaching and trafficking issues must make a conscious decision about what will be examined and why. Should poachers, many of whom are poor people ensnared by the promise of relative riches for a dangerous act, be given equal say? Should the market forces behind the demand for ivory, rhino horn and pangolin scales be allowed a forum for justification, an evenhanded review of the value of these trafficked products for use in traditional medicine?

Perhaps they should, I would say, but only to point out the socioeconomic necessity of making wildlife valuable to local communities, or to prove the scientific vacuity of fake medicinal properties. In my opinion this is all the objectivity that is owed as we relate the end times for these last fading remnants of the Pleistocene. As we’ve seen the in U.S. recently, the dutiful delivery of an “equal say” to all parties in a conflict, even where one side has all the available evidence behind it, can be deliberately manipulated to create a false dichotomy of equal worth to valueless claims. Does bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor prove the falsity of climate science? Does reinstating the importation of elephant parts to the U.S. help somehow to conserve elephants in Africa?

As storytellers with access to the most impeccable data available, science journalists are enormously privileged to be in a position of great public trust and responsibility. We must never distort facts or, worse yet, make assumptions that fit our preconceived notions of what a story should say. Journalism is a sacred trust, an honorable bond with the public that demands the highest moral standards. And most of us, I believe, are doing what we do out of a love for the art and craft of writing, out of a sense of urgency to relate matters of immeasurable importance and out of an inborn duty to prevent injustice and untruths from driving the human narrative.

Related to that inborn sense of urgency, several newish scientific terms and theories have gained mainstream acceptance in recent years. The first is the Anthropocene — an era of overwhelming human impact on, not only other life forms, but the fundamental fabric of the earth itself. Geologists have largely come to an agreement that the lasting effects of humanity will constitute a distinct stratigraphical layer of the planet’s surface. Scientists differ as to the so-called “golden spike” that officially launched the Anthropocene epoch. But whether it began with the Columbian Exchange — the enduring interaction of animals, plants and microorganisms back and forth across the Atlantic that began in 1492 — or with the nuclear age; or with the onset of climate change, the permanent alteration of the world by humans is largely a foregone conclusion.

The second theory, now an indisputable fact, is the Sixth Extinction — the accelerating annihilation of other forms of life through direct take, habitat loss or climate change. Not since the close of the Cretaceous and the end of the dinosaurs has the world suffered such a sweeping loss of unique life forms. And this time it’s not a comet out of the blue, but the actions of a single species that are squarely to blame.

In a July 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ecologists found that nearly one-third of the 27,600 terrestrial mammal, bird, amphibian and reptile species considered are dwindling in terms of their numbers and territorial range, what the researchers called an “extremely high degree of population decay.” Further, they found that a major planetary extinction event is currently “ongoing.” It’s now believed that three quarters of Earth’s species could vanish forever in the coming centuries — a mere blink of the eye in geologic time.

The most painfully illustrative manifestation of these new theories of extinction is direct take — the deliberate killing of rare and declining animals. From the atlas bear — a native of northern Africa last seen in Roman arenas — to the quagga — a subspecies of plains zebra last seen in1883 at the Amsterdam Zoo — the purposeful slaughter of endangered wildlife, out of conflict for resources, for bushmeat or for illicit profit, constitutes the most preventable pathway to extinction.

Objective coverage of this issue — an unflinching, staring-at-the-sun accountability of what we’re losing and why — can be taken as a kind of empirical advocacy, a fact-checked narrative description of the last days of Earth’s most majestic and irreplaceable wildlife. What the reader chooses to do with the information we provide is generally beyond our ability to assess, much less direct. An environmental journalist’s job, as I see it, is simply to ring the alarm so that others might directly advocate for change while there is time to avoid catastrophe.

Sudan northern wrhite rhino — Photo: Sudan in 2015, by Make in Kenya/Stuart Price

Recently another scientific term has been coined, the very invention of which speaks to the nihilistic nature of our time. An “endling” is the last member of a particular species whose numbers have dwindled past the point of recovery. March 19 saw the death of the last male northern white rhino at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Named Sudan, the 45-year-old giant had spent his remaining days being constantly guarded by armed rangers, shuffling about a grassy enclosure without the searing foresight to understand that he is the last of his kind. Sudan is survived by a daughter and a granddaughter. And that’s it. The story of his species is over.

As well-meaning and impressive as was Sudan’s protected status, it was plainly too little, too late. Unless urgent, decisive and meaningful action is taken, the rest of Africa’s remaining megafauna will join Sudan in a premature, undeserved and wholly needless extinction.

Sudan’s death is obviously a tragic story, and that can make stories like it a tough sell. Editors often cast about for uplifting stories of hope to punch through the numbness that comes from the constant deluge of terrible images and statistics arising from the African poaching crisis. They’re right to do so, but that hardly means that we should in any way hide or sugarcoat the brutal facts.

For most species, we still have time. This cannot be stressed enough. The window of opportunity is small and rapidly shrinking, but furnished with the facts, and driven by an unflinching refusal to turn away and succumb to despair, science journalists can — and must — make the critical contributions necessary to achieve lasting change before, as with the northern white rhino, it is irrevocably too late.

This essay was delivered in a slightly different form at the 2017 World Conference of Science Journalists in San Francisco.

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

Life in the Crossroads: A New Age for Highway Wildlife Crossings

The documentary Cascades Crossroads showcases the hard work — and compromises — necessary to protect migrating animals from deadly highways.

Since the Trump administration took office, we haven’t heard much positive news about public-lands protection. But it’s important to remember that good work is still happening. For a timely example, check out Cascade Crossroads, a recent 30-minute documentary highlighting groundbreaking wildlife crossings being built along Interstate 90 in Washington State.

Similar crossings are slowly appearing on highways across the country. Though the transition is slow, it’s encouraging. These crossings will protect wildlife, improve highway safety and connect people to the land for generations. And as the film shows, they offer inspiring tales of collaboration.

Cascade Crossroads illustrates how a diverse coalition worked with the Washington State Department of Transportation and the U.S. Forest Service to bring safe wildlife crossings to a critical section of I-90, Washington’s main east-west traffic corridor.

wildlife crossing — Snoqualmie Pass overpass, artist’s conception. Credit: WSDOT

The area of focus is a 15-mile stretch of road near Snoqualmie Pass, about 50 miles east of Seattle. It serves as a vital link between eastern and western Washington, carrying goods, commuters as well as skiers and hikers headed to the mountains. Up to 27,000 cars and trucks pass daily.

For wildlife, the road is a deadly gauntlet separating valuable habitats in the Cascade Mountains. Much of the habitat is public lands, including the Alpine Lakes Wilderness north of the highway and Mount Rainier National Park to the south. The lands are shared by an array of species that includes wolverines, bears, elk, deer, lynx, salmon and others.

Each species requires room to roam for survival — to fulfill the daily and seasonal needs of finding food, rearing young, denning and mating. These activities are necessary to keeping populations healthy. But at Snoqualmie Pass, development to the east and west confines wildlife to a narrow bottleneck, which is then sliced in half by I-90.

It is a common scenario nationwide.

At Snoqualmie Pass, biologists found some that animals are deterred by the mere sight and sound of the highway, leaving them hemmed into ecologically limited “islands” of habitat. Others are compelled to cross the road. As a result, a common sight alongside I-90 is the battered corpse of a deer, fox or other animal — each an offspring, mate or maybe a parent seeking food for its young.

The deaths are not just a casualty of Washington’s highway; they are a symptom of a national problem. Research indicates that millions of animals are killed each year on American roads. The accidents also cause up to 200 human fatalities annually and billions of dollars in property damage, not to mention the harm to individual species.

In Washington, the problem could have gotten even worse with a planned highway repair and expansion near Snoqualmie Pass. The project threatened adjacent national forest lands.

To try to mitigate wildlife deaths and advocate for safe wildlife passages, conservationists formed the I-90 Wildlife Bridges Coalition. It included Conservation Northwest, the Audubon Society and many others that had worked in Washington for decades. They engaged the public and brought together diverse interests, including highway safety advocates such as the American Automobile Association.

It did not happen quickly or easily, but the coalition, the Forest Service and the Washington Department of Transportation worked together to build trust and share knowledge. Over years, as shown in the film, conservationists learned about the realities of highway engineering, while transportation officials learned about the possibilities for wildlife-friendly roads. They were encouraged by agency leaders willing to take risks and biologists and engineers who melded their expertise into tangible proposals.

All sides compromised.

In the end, their proposal for dozens of wildlife underpasses and two wildlife overpasses garnered broad public support. Lawmakers funded the proposal after being petitioned by engineers, conservationists and highway safety groups standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

The project is now underway, and Cascade Crossroads highlights its early accomplishments. One bridge was expanded to span not just the width of a river but also 1,000 feet of surrounding wetlands biologists had identified as critical for wildlife movement. Culverts were widened to allow fish, amphibians and other animals to pass. Steel and concrete structures are taking shape to create a fully vegetated wildlife overpass.

Meanwhile, volunteers have planted shrubs and created other features that will entice wildlife toward the crossings. University students and agency biologists monitor wildlife cameras that show animals already safely using the new routes.

The work reflects promising trends. In recent years, wildlife crossings have increasingly become part of highway construction and upgrades. Along Route 93 in western Montana, dozens of wildlife underpasses and one overpass mark a 50-mile stretch with a history of wildlife collisions. Crossings recently constructed south of Bend, Oregon and north of Frisco, Colo. led to nearly 90 percent declines in collisions. The Sonoran Desert in Arizona got its first crossing in 2016, and last year work began on a project south of Jackson, Wyo.

While many recent projects are in the West, crossings are becoming more common elsewhere too. Vermont, Massachusetts and North Carolina provide a few of many examples. One highway underpass even protects Amur leopards in Russia.

A growing body of research shows a wide range of wildlife making use of the crossings, including deer, moose, alligators, desert tortoises and even salamanders. In Florida, where planning for wildlife crossings began as early as 1972, studies show crossings led to sharp drops in roadkill among panthers, bears and turtles.

The successes represent safer highways for people and greater habitat connectivity for wildlife. But species will increasingly require such room to roam as the effects of climate change accelerate.

Making wildlife crossings a reality requires determined collaboration among citizen groups and state and federal agencies. It’s a story told well in Cascade Crossroads, which features engineers, biologists, citizens and agency officials at times beaming with pride at their work. It is “a wonderful thing to watch,” as former Washington Secretary of Transportation Doug MacDonald says in the film.

It’s a refreshing story to witness today, a reminder that, despite disappointing headlines, people on the ground are still hard at work protecting public lands and the wildlife that depend on them.

Watch Cascades Crossroads below:

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.

Industry Is Taking Over the EPA

A new study finds the EPA is now on the verge of “regulatory capture,” making it a servant of the companies it is supposed to regulate.

By Chris Sellers, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York); Lindsey Dillon, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Phil Brown, Northeastern University

The Environmental Protection Agency made news recently for excluding reporters from a “summit” meeting on chemical contamination in drinking water. Episodes like this are symptoms of a larger problem: an ongoing, broad-scale takeover of the agency by industries it regulates.

We are social scientists with interests in environmental health, environmental justice and inequality and democracy. We recently published a study, conducted under the auspices of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and based on interviews with 45 current and retired EPA employees, which concludes that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration have steered the agency to the verge of what scholars call “regulatory capture.”

By this we mean that they are aggressively reorganizing the EPA to promote interests of regulated industries, at the expense of its official mission to “protect human health and the environment.”

How close is too close?

The notion of “regulatory capture” has a long record in U.S. social science research. It helps explain the 2008 financial crisis and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In both cases, lax federal oversight and the government’s over-reliance on key industries were widely viewed as contributing to the disasters.

How can you tell whether an agency has been captured? According to Harvard’s David Moss and Daniel Carpenter, it occurs when an agency’s actions are “directed away from the public interest and toward the interest of the regulated industry” by “intent and action of industries and their allies.” In other words, the farmer doesn’t just tolerate foxes lurking around the hen house – he recruits them to guard it.

Serving industry

From the start of his tenure at EPA, Pruitt has championed interests of regulated industries such as petrochemicals and coal mining, while rarely discussing the value of environmental and health protections. “Regulators exist,” he asserts, “to give certainty to those that they regulate,” and should be committed to “enhanc(ing) economic growth.”

In our view, Pruitt’s efforts to undo, delay or otherwise block at least 30 existing rules reorient EPA rule-making “away from the public interest and toward the interest of the regulated industry.” Our interviewees overwhelmingly agreed that these rollbacks undermine their own “pretty strong sense of mission … protecting the health of the environment,” as one current EPA staffer told us.

EPA budget — Historical trends in EPA’s budget show a spike during the Carter administration, followed by sharp cuts under President Reagan and an infusion of economic stimulus money in 2009. President Trump has proposed sharp cuts. EDGI, CC BY-ND

EPA workforce shrinking — Historical trends in EPA’s budget show a spike during the Carter administration, followed by sharp cuts under President Reagan and an infusion of economic stimulus money in 2009. President Trump has proposed sharp cuts. EDGI, CC BY-ND

Overturning Obama’s Clean Power Plan and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord were recommended by coal magnate Robert Murray in his “Action Plan for the Administration.” Emails released under the Freedom of Information Act show detailed correspondence between Pruitt and industry lobbyists about EPA talking points. They also document Pruitt’s many visits with corporate officials as he formulated his attack on the Clean Power Plan.

Muting other voices

Pruitt and his staff also have sought to sideline potentially countervailing interests and influences, starting with EPA career staff. In one of our interviews, an EPA employee described a meeting between Pruitt, the home-building industry and agency career staff. Pruitt showed up late, led the industry representatives into another room for a group photo, then trooped back into the meeting room to scold his own EPA employees for not listening to them.

Threatened by proposed budget cuts, buyouts and retribution against disloyal staff and leakers, career EPA employees have been made “afraid … so nobody pushes back, nobody says anything,” according to one of our sources.

As a result, enforcement has fallen dramatically. During Trump’s first 6 months in office, the EPA collected 60 percent less money in civil penalties from polluters than it had under Presidents Obama or George W. Bush in the same period. The agency has also opened fewer civil and criminal cases.

Early in his tenure Pruitt replaced many members of EPA’s Science Advisory Board and Board of Scientific Counselors in a move intended to give representatives from industry and state governments more influence. He also established a new policy that prevents EPA-funded scientists from serving on these boards, but allows industry-funded scientists to serve.

And on April 24, 2018, Pruitt issued a new rule that limits what kind of scientific research the agency can rely on in writing environmental regulation. This step was advocated by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute.

What can be done?

This is not the first time that a strongly anti-regulatory administration has tried to redirect EPA. In our interviews, longtime EPA staffers recalled similar pressure under President Reagan, led by his first administrator, Anne Gorsuch.

Gorsuch also slashed budgets, cut back on enforcement and “treated a lot of people in the agency as the enemy,” in the words of her successor, William Ruckelshaus. She was forced to resign in 1983 amid congressional investigations into EPA misbehavior, including corruptive favoritism and its cover-up at the Superfund program.

EPA veterans of those years emphasized the importance of Democratic majorities in Congress, which initiated the investigations, and sustained media coverage of EPA’s unfolding scandals. They remembered this phase as an oppressive time, but noted that pro-industry actions by political appointees failed to suffuse the entire bureaucracy. Instead, career staffers resisted by developing subtle, “underground” ways of supporting each other and sharing information internally and with Congress and the media.

Similarly, the media are spotlighting Pruitt’s policy actions and ethical scandals today. EPA staffers who have left the agency are speaking out against Pruitt’s policies. State attorneys general and the court system have also thwarted some of Pruitt’s efforts. And EPA’s Science Advisory Board – including members appointed by Pruitt – recently voted almost unanimously to do a full review of the scientific justification for many of Pruitt’s most controversial proposals.

Still, with the Trump administration tilted hard against regulation and Republicans controlling Congress, the greatest challenge to regulatory capture at the EPA will be the 2018 and 2020 elections.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Plastic Pollution Is a Problem — These Kids Are Working for a Solution

We have five questions for teenagers Carter and Olivia Ries, founders of One More Generation and the One Less Straw campaign.

Sometimes a couple of kids can help change the world.

Siblings Carter and Olivia Ries founded their nonprofit One More Generation (OMG) in 2009, when they were just 8 and 7 years old, out of a desire to protect the world’s endangered species. Their journey to heal the planet has taken them around the world, from assisting injured wildlife after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil-spill disaster to delivering thousands of handwritten letters to South Africa’s President Zuma, imploring him to do more to end rhino poaching.

Last year Carter and Olivia, now 17 and 16, pointed their attention at one important solution for helping wildlife: getting people and businesses to reduce or phase out their use of disposable plastic, most notably straws, which have been known to injure or kill animals around the world.

Through their One Less Straw campaign, the Georgia-based teens have worked with individual consumers and businesses around the country and the world on issues related to plastic consumption. Carter and Olivia spoke with The Revelator to discuss their campaign, how they work to change minds and habits, and what they see for the future.

Your One Less Straw campaign has really taken off, and several other organizations have joined the call to help reduce the amount of straws or other plastic items from our dinner tables. Are you satisfied with how far things have come so far or do you still see a lot of work left to do?

Olivia: Yes, we’re very satisfied with how things are going so far. We started back in October of last year and we’ve had many big organizations partnered up with us. I do believe we have some more work to do. We’d like to reach out to even more people over time and educate more of today’s youth.

Carter: As much as people may have done, we can always do more. There are billions of plastic straws continuing to go into our landfills. I believe that no matter the situation, we all need to continue our work. We need to push on so that the future generations can see how anyone can make a difference.

Obviously this isn’t just about straws. What are the real impacts you care about in getting the world to use One Less Straw?

Carter: Our campaign is about the awareness. We believe that education is the key to any problem anyone faces. You can’t fix a problem you don’t know about. When we give presentations, we don’t tell the people what they need to do — we don’t force people to change immediately. What we do is we educate them. We want to have a personal impact on every person so that they will resonate with the issue more. That’s how One More Generation started, because we educated ourselves on an issue and decided to try and solve it no matter how long it would take. That is the true message we want to leave people with.

Olivia: If you just think about it, plastic has been here for a long time and the first piece of plastic is probably still somewhere on this Earth. Plastic doesn’t just go away. Plastic is in our food chain, fish are eating it and getting sick, birds are getting sick, and many more animals are affected by our plastic waste.

On the flip side, what’s the biggest objection people or organizations give you to getting rid of straws — and how do you overcome it?

Carter: One of the biggest objections we face with any company or organization when we start is cost. We tend to see that one of the biggest obstacles is the issue of whether they can afford sustainable straws. So we created campaign buttons that say, “We Only Serve Straws Upon Request, Ask Me Why.” This starts a conversation with the people who would usually receive a straw and once again they become educated on the issue. In every restaurant we have given these to, we’ve seen a 70 to 80 percent reduction in plastic straw uses, and from that the restaurant is saving money and has been able to switch to something such as paper straws.

We believe that there is always a solution to an issue if you try. It may take time, but it is possible.

Olivia: Many organizations or restaurants that sign up with our campaign are worried about the cost as well as what the customers will think of either removing all straws or switching to more sustainable straws. Ninety percent of people can live without a straw. Of course there are people with sensitive teeth or medical problems but there are other alternatives such as paper, glass or metal straws.

If we can make so much progress to reduce this one type of single-use plastic, what other types of products or packaging do you think we could start to remove from our plastic “diets”?

Olivia: I think that one other big problem is the small plastic bags we put our produce in at the grocery store. There are many other ways you can carry your fruits and vegetables without using plastic.

Carter: There are so many different types of plastic and things that end up in our landfill that we have found other issues that we want to help fix. We partnered up with Delta Airlines and went to their cafeteria and took notes on what to fix. One of the major issues is the shrink wrap around every container. If you notice, many companies use shrink wrap on many different items and it lands up in our landfill very easily and animals eat it and die. We also noticed in the Delta cafeterias that by not using a straw, people no longer need a lid, thus reducing more plastic from our environment. So there are many things that go along with the straw awareness.

Another issue is the six-can rings around soda cans. Some of the rings get thrown in with the cans and go to the same place, and if the rings are still around the cans, they tend to be thrown away. So there are truly so many problems but we have found that focusing on one at a time and improving that issue, helps so much.

Next year will be OMG’s tenth anniversary. Did you ever imagine how far this journey to help wildlife would take you?

Carter: I never believed that this is what I would be doing. Don’t get me wrong — it’s the best decision we’ve ever made. If I didn’t do OMG for the amount of time we have been, I honestly don’t know what I would be doing. The fact that we have been doing this for over half my life continues to surprise me. We meet so many people along the way and to think that everything we are doing started because of cheetahs is still unbelievable. One thing leads to the next and more and more amazing opportunities come with it. I love what I do and would never change anything. One More Generation has changed my life for the better, and I love it.

Olivia: When we first started OMG we didn’t think we would get this far or reach as many people as we have. I feel like we’ve made a big difference, but we can’t do this alone. Our goal is to educate others about these issues, so they can go out and make a difference.

Additional Links:

Individuals can take the One Less Straw pledge to use fewer disposable straws. So can business and schools.

This year’s World Oceans Day is Friday, June 8, and the theme is plastic pollution. Find a local beach cleanup event here.

Finally, find out why disability advocates oppose straw bans and favor banning other types of single-use plastic or putting the responsibility on producers instead of consumers.

A Warning About the Rapid Erosion of Nature’s Strongholds

New research finds that one-third of the world's protected areas cannot serve the conservation mission for which they were established.

More than 200,000 protected areas have been established around the world. Collectively they cover more than 7.7 million square miles — an area greater than the size of South America. Nations establish these protected areas so that plants and animals can live in spaces without human pressure — pressure that would otherwise drive many of them toward extinction.

These are nature’s strongholds, and we place great trust in protected areas to deliver on their promise. They’re a core component of the world’s most influential environmental strategy: the United Nation’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity. Under the plan, signatory countries have agreed to ensure that 17 percent of Earth’s land surface is covered in protected areas by the year 2020 via their commitments to the Convention on Biological Diversity.

With the 2020 deadline fast approaching, many countries are striving to meet their obligations toward the global target. Yet there has been no global measure of the degree of human pressure inside protected areas. That is, until now. In a study just published in Science, we have assessed the extent and intensity of human pressure across protected areas worldwide. We found far too many areas in very poor health, with fully one-third at pressure levels linked to biodiversity declines.

Our measure of human pressure was based on the human footprint — a metric that combines data on buildings and other structures, intensive agriculture, pasturelands, human population density, night time lights, roads, railways and navigable waterways.

Giraffes and a drilling rig. Photo: Paul Mulondo/WCS

Somewhat incredibly, almost three-quarters of countries have more than 50 percent of their protected land under intense human pressure, and protected areas in Western Europe and southern Asia are under debilitating levels of human pressure. Only 42 percent of land safeguarded for conservation goals — making up a mere 4,334 individual protected areas — is completely free of measurable human pressure.

This health check represents an urgent reminder that we must focus on improving the condition of protected areas so that we can trust them to deliver on their promise of saving nature in 2020 and long beyond. If we are to be confident that protected areas are serving the purpose for which they were created, human pressure inside their boarders must be limited, managed, and sustainable.

Without those interventions, reports of nations that appear to have met their targets for protected land are likely to be misleading.

For example, while 111 countries have officially reached their 17 percent goal, if protected land under intense human pressure did not contribute toward their targets, 74 of these nations — just over two-thirds — would drop off that list. Moreover, the protection of some ecological types (for example, mangroves and temperate forests) would decrease by more than 70 percent if protected land under intense human pressure were discounted from data.

Mining site in Kahuzi Biega Park. Photo: Andy Plumptre

We did find that protected areas with strict biodiversity conservation objectives have significantly lower levels of human pressure compared to those permitting a wider range of human activities. But our overall results do not tell a happy story.

They do provide a timely chance to be honest about the true condition of global protected areas. If we cannot relieve pressure on these places, the fate of nature will become increasingly reliant on a mix of vague, largely untested conservation strategies that are subject to political whims and difficult to implement at meaningful scales. We can’t afford to let them fail.

Countries therefore need to start acknowledging and accounting for levels of human pressure inside protected areas when reporting on progress toward international conservation commitments. This will likely energize conversations about where such areas can be made better through concerted restoration efforts or by other actions to achieve higher levels of protection.

Being transparent about the true condition of protected areas is also likely to encourage countries to prioritize the protection of land that is free of human pressure. They’ll have to act quickly, however. Given the accelerating rate of human development, the opportunities to protect untouched places on Earth are rapidly dwindling.

For more on this problem, watch this video from James Watson:

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

Raptors to the Rescue

Using birds to help get rid of pests is proving to be more effective than poisons — and less expensive.

Karl Novak faced a dilemma.

Rodents were digging into the dirt levees that protect Ventura County from flooding. It was more than just annoying: If they caused any of the county’s 40 miles of levees to breech, the results could be life-threatening. As dam safety inspector for the county’s Watershed Protection District, Novak was responsible.

He’d been using poisons since the 1980s to prevent pocket gophers and ground squirrels from burrowing through dams and levees, weakening the structures and risking their collapse. But a 2005 countywide ordinance enacted limited the use of rodenticides after bait traps accidentally caused the deaths of local mountain lions and other wildlife, causing public outcry. Novak was allowed to poison rodents at levees and dams, but he was under pressure to seek alternatives.

Ground squirrel burrows. Photo: Ventura County Public Works Agency

How could he do without poisons and still maintain a safe levee system?

Novak says he’s no birder. But in this Southern California agricultural region, where fields of berries, broccoli and salad crops stretch across the level landscape, it’s hard to miss the raptors swooping down from telephone poles to grab a gopher for lunch.

Novak decided to test what must have seemed like a wacky notion for a public-works department run by engineers. In 2016 he set up an experiment to determine whether raptors could control rodent damage to the county’s levees. His inspiration was a 2015 experiment in neighboring Santa Barbara County, where flood-control managers used birds to reduce rodent burrowing. Those results were positive but anecdotal. Novak wanted an empirical study that would demonstrate scientifically whether raptors are as effective as poison.

He and his crews began by filling in all the gopher and ground-squirrel holes in two 6,000-foot stretches of levee. They erected 14 raptor perches that were 20 feet high, plus a few owl boxes, along one section. They continued to use rodenticides in bait traps in the other section.

Boy Scouts Troop 820 helps install an owl box. Photo: Consortium Media | JM

Then they waited and watched. Their weekly monitors documented red-tailed hawks, white-tailed kites and seven other hawk species frequenting the test sites. Meanwhile, in the bait-trap area, pocket-gophers and ground squirrels were gobbling up 84.5 pounds of rodenticides while digging burrows up to 35 feet long. Department crews collected the pellets raptors regurgitated at both sites, had them analyzed, and studied the bones of rodents scattered near the levees.

But it wasn’t until Novak compared the number of new burrows in the test and control sections that he knew the upshot of his experiment. Even he was surprised. The levees with newly erected raptor perches had 50 percent fewer burrows than levees without them.

Rodenticides are also more expensive than raptors. The birds, it turns out, are free. “We don’t buy them,” he tells me. “We just provide the perches.” Novak calculated annual savings to the county at $7,400 per levee mile. He estimated savings over 30 years at $218,589.

And Novak got another surprise: Burrowing and great-horned owls — species he’d rarely even seen — were consuming rodents just as fast as hawks. “They have evolved to be very effective night hunters,” he says. “We had ground squirrel and gopher patrols 24/7 and didn’t even know it.”

Linda Parks, the Ventura County supervisor who initiated the countywide limits on rodenticides, pronounced the results “ground-breaking… We don’t need these poisons, and they are not as effective as raptors,” she says.

The Ventura County study, released in December, provides data for what many farmers and birders already knew. “It’s great to finally have the quantitative evidence that using (raptors) is more effective than poison,” says Jaclyn Desantis, supervisor at Ojai Raptor Center, which provided perches and owl boxes for the experiment.

Birds of prey have made other contributions toward limiting poisons, notably by helping Raptors Are The Solution (RATS), a San Francisco-area coalition, persuade the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to ban over-the-counter household sales of 2nd generation anticoagulant rodenticides starting in 2014.

And now another experiment is underway north of San Francisco. Matthew Johnson, a professor of wildlife habitat ecology at Humboldt State University, used GPS tags on barn owls to determine that they spend a third of their time hunting in vineyards in Napa wine country. He put infrared cameras in owl nest boxes, documenting that a pair of owls with four chicks can eat up to 1,000 rodents in a breeding cycle.

Johnson — who presented these results at a workshop on barn owls and pest control earlier this year — also found that people like having owls around. That concurs with the results in Ventura County, where the primary public reaction to Novak’s study is “where can I buy an owl box,” says Parks, the county supervisor.

Novak has now installed 127 raptor perches and 16 owl boxes on 10 miles of levees and a third of the county’s 55 dams. He has recommended expanding the program throughout Ventura earthen flood-control system. Eventually, he believes, he can reduce or eliminate rodenticide use altogether.

He’s happy about the cost savings the raptor program promises for his department. And Novak is proud to be pioneering this technique for other flood-control districts. But reducing the use of poisons? “That’s paramount,” he says.

Beavers, National Parks and Trump’s Attacks on Science: 16 New Environmental Books for June

Eco-books coming out this month also look at the Flint water crisis, the effects of sea-level rise and the history of radical environmentalism.

We’ve made it past Memorial Day weekend, which means that for many of us it’s time to start planning our summer reading lists. Luckily there are plenty of new environmentally themed books coming out in June — more than any one person could read at the beach or by the campfire, but enough for everyone to easily pick out a few titles that appeal to them.

Here’s our list of the 16 best-looking books being published this month, including books about whales, beavers, sea-level rise, national parks, the Trump administration’s attacks on science, the history of radical environmentalism and a whole lot more. As usual, we’ve tried to pick a wide range of titles for dedicated environmentalists, nature-loving kids, mystery fans and everyone in between.

Wildlife, Animals and Endangered Species:

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb — North America’s ecosystems are messed up, and the eradication of beavers is often to blame. Millions of these crafty critters were trapped and killed for their fur, leaving the ecosystems that depended on them up a creek without a beaver. Goldfarb looks at the consequences of the loss of beavers, as well as the people who are trying to restore their populations. (Related: read Goldfarb’s recent essay, “Can Wildlife Services Learn to Believe in Beavers?”)

The Last Lobster: Boom or Bust for Maine’s Greatest Fishery? by Christopher White — As someone who spent eight years living in coastal Maine, I know how utterly reliant the local economy is on lobster fishing. But that industry, currently booming, could soon crash as a result of climate change and warming oceans. White bites into this critical issue and talks to the lobstermen who are working their tails off now but already bracing for an uncertain future.

Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson — How did whales evolve, and can they continue to survive in the face of climate change and other threats to the world’s oceans? Pyenson, one of the world’s most influential marine mammal researchers, dives deep into these issues in his important new book.

The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World by Stephanie Feldstein — Subtitled “Practical Advice and Everyday Actions for a More Sustainable, Humane and Compassionate Planet,” this book by Feldstein, an activist with the Center for Biological Diversity (publishers of The Revelator) takes fans of pets and wildlife through the actions they can take to protect the planet and all of its denizens.

The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species by Ian A. Smith — This academic book, from a series on studies in ethics and moral theory, argues that species have a right to exist because they are capable of existing and reproducing in the first place. Sounds like a good argument.

Squidtoons: Exploring Ocean Science with Comics by Garfield Kwan, Dana Song — Kids love weird creatures, and the ocean is full of them. So is this book. The illustrations are pretty neat, too.

Science and Politics:

Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology and Politics in Science (Revised & Expanded) by John Grant — I was a huge fan of this book when it was first released as a small hardcover 10 years ago. Now it’s back in a much larger and massively updated format. Grant (an award-winning science-fiction writer and editor) looks at centuries of history to expose how science has been misused and misrepresented since the age of Galileo — and into the modern climate-change denial movement and the Trump administration.

What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City by Mona Hanna-Attisha — A first-person account of how the author, a pediatrician and activist, helped to uncover and expose the devastating lead-water contaminant crisis in Flint, Michigan.

National Parks and Public Lands:

Yosemite Fall: A National Park Mystery by Scott Graham — A mystery novel, book four in a series set in national parks, about an archeologist trying to solve two murders: one from 150 years ago and another, in the present day, in which he’s just been implicated.

Where the Fire Falls: A Vintage National Parks Novel by Karen Barnett — Here’s another mystery set in a national park, this time a romantic thriller that takes place in Yosemite during the 1920s.

The Adventures of Bubba Jones: Time Traveling Through Acadia National Park by Jeff Alt — This month’s third and final work of fiction set in a national park, this time an epoch-leaping kids’ book that explores thousands of years of history of Maine’s Acadia National Park.

In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer by Steven Davis — This heavily researched book — nonfiction, to set it apart from the others in this category — lays out the arguments for privatizing public land…and then obliterates them, showing why these landscapes are an asset for the country and its people.

Climate Change:

Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush — A heavily reported look at the plants, animals and people in the United States who are already being affected by climate change and sea-level rise. Billed as “a shimmering meditation on vulnerability and vulnerable communities,” as well as a look at “how to let go of the places we love.” Uh-oh.

Environmentalism and Sustainability:

The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism by Keith Makoto Woodhouse — A look at the radical environmentalism movement that arose during the 1980s, from Earth First! and beyond.

Formerly Known as Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture by Kristin Lawless — What the heck are we eating, and what’s happening to our bodies as a result? Lawless looks at the deteriorating nutritional content of our food, the chemicals it’s packaged with, and how that’s reshaping our brains, microbiota and genes.

A New Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future by Jonas Salk and Jonathan Salk — A look at the future of human population and related issues, with Jonathan Salk expanding upon ideas developed by his father, the famous creator of the polio vaccine.

That’s it for this month, but there are lots more recent books waiting for you at your local bookstore or library. Check out our previous “Revelator Reads” columns for dozens of additional recent recommendations — and feel free to recommend your own recent favorites in the comments.

Wildlife Rangers Face A ‘Toxic Mix’ of Mental Strain and Lack of Support

They’re tasked with protecting the world’s most endangered species, but at least 100 rangers die each year, mostly after conflicts with poachers.

Originally published by Mongabay.

On April 9, suspected members of an armed militia gunned down five wildlife rangers and their driver in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was the worst attack in Virunga’s bloody history, and the latest in a long line of tragic incidents in which rangers have lost their lives defending the planet’s natural heritage.

But it’s not just danger that rangers must contend with. We spoke with people who have worked with or alongside front-line ranger forces in Africa and Asia. They described challenging working conditions, community ostracization, isolation from family, poor equipment and inadequate training for many rangers — all for low pay and little respect.

“The pressure is relentless, there is no respite,” said Elise Serfontein, founding director of Stop Rhino Poaching. “The physical and mental fatigue is taking its toll.”

Despite a growing awareness of the vulnerability of many of the world’s most beloved and charismatic species, such as elephants and rhinos, there is little awareness and virtually no research into the stress and possible mental health implications for those tasked with defending them. In fact, more research has been conducted on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among elephants following a poaching incident than on the rangers protecting them.

“We have got to take care of the people that make a difference,” said Johan Jooste, head of anti-poaching forces at South Africa National Parks (SANParks).

A Dangerous Line of Work

Eighty-two percent of rangers in Africa and 63 percent of rangers in Asia said they had faced a life-threatening situation in the line of duty, according to 2016 surveys by WWF, one of the world’s largest conservation groups. These are the only extensive surveys ever to examine rangers’ working conditions.

The Thin Green Line Foundation, a Melbourne-based organization dedicated to supporting rangers, has been compiling data on ranger deaths on the job for the last 10 years. Between 50 and 70 percent of the recorded deaths are due to conflict with poachers. The remainder are due to the challenging conditions rangers face every day, such as working alongside dangerous animals and in perilous environments.

“I can categorically tell you about the 100-120 [ranger deaths] we know of each year,” said Sean Willmore, founder of the Thin Green Line Foundation and president of the International Ranger Federation, a non-profit organization overseeing 90 ranger associations worldwide. Topping the list is India, with 175 deaths in the last five years alone.

Willmore said he believed the true global figure could be much higher, since the organization lacks data from a number of countries in Asia and the Middle East.

Rohit Singh, a law enforcement specialist with the WWF and chairman of the Ranger Federation of Asia, was kidnapped and held for three days, during which he was routinely beaten, after an undercover operation in Nepal went wrong in 2006.

But the 15-year veteran is quick to downplay the experience, instead pointing out the risks his fellow rangers endure.

“What I have faced is just one example of what thousands of rangers are faced with every day,” he said.

That Singh considers his ordeal unexceptional offers some insight into the violence that many rangers are forced to live with on a daily basis. Psychological research has shown, unsurprisingly, that soldiers and police officers exposed to dangerous and stressful situations over an extended period of time face increased risk of mental health issues. Although no one has published similar research on rangers, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to that end from those who have spent time on the front lines.

Willmore recalled a ranger he met in Kahuzi-Biéga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who eight months earlier had come face-to-face with three poachers armed with AK-47s in the bush. In the ensuing fight, the ranger killed one poacher and injured another before being shot three times. He managed to escape and crawl the 10 kilometers (6 miles) back to his station.

With parks resources already thinly spread, management asked him to return to work before his injuries had fully healed and without any psychological support.

“The look on his face, the look in his eyes. I can still see it perfectly, he was just petrified,” Willmore said.

Rangers often come from the same communities as poachers, inevitably leading to additional conflict. Of the 570 rangers WWF surveyed across Africa, 75 percent said their local communities had threatened them because of their work.

“I’ve seen guys receive death threats and they don’t know how to deal with it,” said Francis Massé, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield. “They don’t know if these guys who are threatening them also know where their family lives in the city.”

Massé studied the anti-poaching forces in Mozambique for his Ph.D. Many of the rangers faced threats and attacks during the five months he spent living alongside them. Massé said he believed Mozambique’s legal system exacerbated the problem.

“[Poachers] get arrested and in two weeks they are back out in the communities right outside the park where the rangers have to pass in and out,” he said. “I’ve seen rangers cry from the stress, from being afraid … because of the strain and the stress and the anxiety that goes along with their work.”

The Poaching War

Not all rangers face the same level of risk. Chris Galliers, chairman of the Game Rangers Association of Africa, said threats vary significantly in different countries, from tackling subsistence poachers with snares, to heavily armed militias.

The resurgence of the illegal ivory and rhino horn trade over the last 10 years has created especially dangerous conditions for rangers in sub-Saharan Africa.

South Africa saw the start of an intense escalation in rhino poaching in 2008. The year before, poachers killed just 13 rhinos. By 2013, they were killing over a thousand a year. In total, the country has lost more than 7,100 rhinos in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, poachers killed around 30 percent of savanna elephants between 2007 and 2014, and 66 percent of forest elephants between 2008 and 2016.

Organized criminal networks have been enticed into the rhino horn and ivory trade by the vast amount of money exchanging hands. The result: well-funded and supplied poaching syndicates.

In his role with SANParks, Jooste, a former major general in the South African military, is charged with defending Kruger National Park’s white rhino population. He said he believed the poaching syndicates were now more assertive and aggressive than ever before.

In response, many conservation managers have adopted paramilitary-style tactics, sparking a heated debate about the “militarization of conservation.”

Law enforcement has always been part of a ranger’s duties, but in areas where poaching is most intense it is now eclipsing all other duties.

“Eighty percent of the work now, in many of the parks, is hard-core, 24/7 operations to combat poaching,” Jooste said.

Rangers, originally trained for traditional conservation tasks like ecological surveying, now need a whole new skill set. In many countries, the resources are not available to train rangers for these new, often combat-oriented, responsibilities, leaving them unprepared for what is required on the ground.

“It’s really difficult for a ranger that’s been given a gun and sent out on patrol to know how to escalate properly,” Willmore said. “It’s more dangerous for the ranger and the poacher.”

And the new rules of the game are not always clear.

Serfontein, who has worked closely with rangers through her NGO, Stop Rhino Poaching, said she believed the legal implications for rangers engaging with poachers added another layer of complexity and stress.

“You have a split second to make a call,” she said. “Pulling that trigger to defend your life and the lives of your fellow rangers will result in a police inquest or potential murder charge.”

For many rangers, especially those who have served for a long time, this increasingly violent and soldier-like role is not what they signed up for.

“Not everyone is comfortable with being in the position of having to possibly shoot someone,” Massé said. “It’s asking a lot of people to go way beyond what we would think of as a conservation ranger.”

But for many there is little choice. In impoverished countries like Mozambique, where Massé conducted his research, paid employment is hard to come by. Leaving a relatively secure job, however dangerous, is simply not an option when there’s a family to support, no matter the personal and familial toll.

So far, support for rangers has not kept pace with the escalating violence of their role.

“Just as [parks] need to adapt their strategies and escalate their responses … so they need to adjust their ranger well-being programs,” Serfontein said.

Tough Working Conditions

Besides being dangerous, ranging can be a tough life. Rangers often spend long periods away from home on patrols, and Willmore said isolation was the number one stressor for rangers.

The rangers Massé studied in northern Mozambique were dropped off in remote areas the size of Switzerland for three months at a time — up to five if trucks were unable to reach them during the rainy season.

“They’ll tell you straight: ‘This is no way to live,’” Massé said.

Some families are allowed to stay at ranger stations, but these are generally remote sites with no schools nearby. Rangers are often forced to choose between educating their children and keeping them close. The result is that children as young as 3 are often sent away to boarding school.

“This is heart-breaking stuff, when you’ve got to say goodbye to your 3- or 4-year-old not to see them for the rest of the year,” Willmore said.

This has an impact on relationships. In some countries, the divorce rate among rangers is as high as 90 percent, according to Willmore, who attributes this to the pressures of so much time spent apart.

To add to their stress, many rangers are also chronically underequipped. The WWF survey revealed that as many as 74 percent of the rangers polled in Asia did not feel they had the adequate equipment to safely discharge their duties.

“Most rangers don’t even have the basics like mosquito nets, boots, uniforms and wet weather gear,” Willmore said.

For all the risk and hardship rangers endure, remuneration is often poor. Rangers cited low and erratic pay as the worst part of the job in both the African and Asian WWF ranger surveys. Low pay was also the number one reason why rangers did not want their children to follow in their footsteps.

Financial insecurity is further compounded by a lack of life insurance. Many rangers are the sole breadwinners in their family. If they are killed in the line of duty, their family could be left bereft.

In the absence of insurance, it has been up to NGOs like the Thin Green Line Foundation to step in and offer support to deceased rangers’ families.

“Those colleagues that have seen their friends die will at least see there is some support for their families,” Willmore said. “It gives them greater confidence and greater morale to continue doing patrols.”

Singh, from the Ranger Federation of Asia, said a lack of recognition was just as demoralizing as low wages.

“They work under extremely difficult conditions but they don’t get credit for it. How do we give the message to the entire world that … it’s a job everyone should look up to?” he said.

When rangers feel the risks they take go unappreciated, the money offered by poaching cartels becomes ever more appealing.

“You think, if no one else cares about me, I may as well get some insurance policy for my family, I may as well take that money,” Willmore said. He added he was amazed that more rangers didn’t choose to sacrifice their integrity for a quick buck, given their difficult living and working conditions.

Even where rangers receive better support, the escalating price of wildlife parts such as rhino horn can be a difficult temptation to resist. Between 2012 and 2016, 17 staff at Kruger National Park were implicated in rhino poaching. In one case, Rodney Landela, a previously highly regarded section ranger who had won a number of awards, was chased down and apprehended inside the park with bloodied shoes, a high-caliber rifle and two rhino horns.

“As the money becomes bigger and the odds become greater there is corruption, some rangers are bought,” Jooste said.

As a former army officer, he said, he was highly aware of the impact such betrayals could have on morale.

A Toxic Mix

“Add that up, it’s a toxic mix,” Jooste said. “We daily see rangers struggling to cope.”

Under Jooste’s command, South Africa is one of the only places that proactively cares for its rangers’ psychological well-being. Project Embrace, under SANParks, offers psychological support to rangers in Kruger National Park.

As an employer providing firearms, SANParks has a legal duty under the current South African Firearms Act to provide a “psychological debriefing within 48 hours after experiencing any violent incident, discharging their firearm or witnessing a shooting.”

But SANParks also has a team of volunteer rangers who visit stations on a regular basis, teaching rangers and their families techniques to cope with stress and recognize the warning signs of mental health issues.

“Anybody who has to use firearms in any of the armed forces is at greater risk of developing stress-related mental health conditions,” said Susanna Myburg-Fincham, a clinical psychologist working with Project Embrace. “That is well documented.”

Myburg-Fincham, an expert in trauma-related stress, was brought in by SANParks in 2011 to provide psychological counseling to rangers.

“The work I do is preemptive work, to prevent mental health problems,” she said, adding that she believed strongly in the importance of her work.

“All you have to do is look at the Vietnam War where people feel totally abandoned,” she said. “We’re trying not to let that happen, we want our rangers to know that they are supported.”

Myburg-Fincham said she was keen to fill in the research gaps on ranger mental health. She said she found that a narrative approach, where rangers relate their experience through stories, was the most effective method with the Kruger Park rangers.

Jooste said he believed the project was delivering real benefits.

“We are a long way from where we need to be, but the change is significant,” he said.

Project Embrace is just one part of a raft of measures SANParks has put in place to support its rangers, which includes legal advice, advanced training, and state-of-the-art equipment. But the harsh reality is that most ranger forces around the world simply do not have access to the kind of resources that SANParks can afford.

“To have consistent psychological services for these rangers who are in remote communities is a real hard ask,” Willmore said.

Even the well-resourced SANParks program requires additional support. When Serfontein found out about Myburg-Fincham’s work at a conference in 2015, she created a collaboration between Stop Rhino Poaching and the Game Rangers Association of Africa to ensure the project had continued funding and support.

“It’s one thing to implement a [psychological well-being] project,” Serfontein said. “It takes commitment to maintain it.”

Taking Care

So long as there is money to be made from ivory, rhino horn and numerous other wildlife products, poaching and illegal logging are likely to persist. And on the front line of the poaching epidemic, even the well-supported SANParks rangers are struggling to cope.

All of the individuals we interviewed said rangers were owed more than many of them currently receive: that they should be paid fairly, trained properly, equipped correctly, and supported fully.

But it’s not just a case of more boots, more training and more helicopters. In the increasingly militarized scrabble to defend nature, conservationists must also do much more to protect the psychological well-being of the rangers asked to put their lives on the line.

“They expect the rangers to look after the animals,” Myburg-Fincham said. “Someone has to look after and protect the rangers.”

How close is too close?

Serving industry

Nuzzling up to industry

Muting other voices

What can be done?

Wildlife, Animals and Endangered Species:

Science and Politics:

National Parks and Public Lands:

Climate Change:

Environmentalism and Sustainability:

A Dangerous Line of Work

The Poaching War

Tough Working Conditions

A Toxic Mix

Taking Care