Quantcast
Channel: Wild and Weird– The Revelator
Viewing all 49 articles
Browse latest View live

The Bats, the Bridge and Hurricane Harvey

0
0

Houstonians turned out by the thousands this week to help rescue neighbors who had been displaced or trapped by Hurricane Harvey’s record floods.

Some of those neighbors had wings.


Over the past few days rescuers have saved thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadaria braziliensis) from Waugh Bridge’s famous colony, which before the storm was home to an estimated 250,000 flying mammals. Dedicated volunteers sometimes hung over the top of the inundated Waugh Bridge to pull bats out of the water in nets.

Additional bats were scooped up into buckets and taken to peoples’ homes to dry off. Others ended up at shelters, working with Bat World Sanctuary, where they received emergency fluids and food before being released.

Some bats didn’t need rescue; they made their way to nearby office buildings and parking garages, where they found shelter from the storm.

Mylea Bayless, senior director of network & partnerships for Bat Conservation International, based in Austin, says they will begin monitoring the Waugh Bridge bat colony after the waters recede. “We are a little bit worried about the impact this flooding is going to have on them, so we’re going to be paying attention to that,” she says.

Mexican free-tailed bats are a populous and wide-ranging species, so even if the colony were devastated it wouldn’t have much impact on the species as a whole. It would, however, be a blow to the local people. “It’s a really visible bat colony,” Bayless says. “People in Houston gather along the banks of the Buffalo Bayou to watch the bats come out from under the bridge. It’s just really become part of the local community to go out and watch these bats. It’s a great educational opportunity.”

Ultimately, Bayless says, she’s relatively optimistic about the colony. “We’re hoping some of the colony crawled out and they’re roosting in these temporary places until the rain and the wind subside and they can go back to roosting under the bridge.”

Other bats, however, may not have been as lucky. The Texas coast is also home to several tree-roosting bat species that could have been harder hit by the hurricane.

“Yellow bats roost underneath palm fronds in the South,” Bayless says. “If those trees get whipped around and as their foliage gets knocked off, those tree-roosting bats are likely to be impacted too. They might end up on the ground or without roosts. That’s a little harder for us to assess because those bats are distributed across the landscape. You can’t just go check all the palm trees to see what bats got knocked out, while you can go to a bridge and see a whole colony. The impact on trees and vegetation is going to be really hard to assess.”

Bayless adds that Harvey’s effect on bats and other wildlife offers an important lesson for the future. “It’s moments like this that should point out how important open spaces are,” she says. “I think about this a lot on the Texas coast, particularly in big cities and where every square foot of land is at a premium. Maintaining those natural open spaces, even in urban environments, it’s not only good for the soul but also those open spaces are the areas that can absorb the rising flood waters. In Houston, the bayous and the parks are safe places for the floods to happen, as opposed to the floods moving up the streets and going into peoples’ houses. It may be an opportunity to call attention to how important it is to protect those open spaces and continue to protect those open spaces for future storms and future situations like this.”

For now, the question remains how many of the Waugh Bridge bats were lost and how that impact will be felt in the near future. Before the disaster the colony consumed an estimated 2.5 tons of insects every night. With mosquito populations anticipated to explode as waters recede, Houston may need every bat it can get.

Previously in The Revelator:

Is Hurricane Harvey a Harbinger for Houston’s Future?

The post The Bats, the Bridge and Hurricane Harvey appeared first on The Revelator.


Digging Deep into De-Extinction

0
0

Right now, in labs around the world, researchers are doing what science-fiction writers used to dream about: trying to bring extinct species back to life.

The science of resurrecting lost species takes many forms, but collectively it has become known as “de-extinction.” According to advocates like Stewart Brand, de-extinction could soon result in the return of the passenger pigeon to the skies of North America or the woolly mammoth to the forests of Eastern Siberia.

With the actual science advancing so quickly, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and examine the implications of such technological advances and potential resurrections. In fact, a journal called The Hastings Center Report — which “explores the ethical, legal, and social issues in medicine, health care, public health, and the life sciences” — has done just that in a special supplemental issue devoted to the topic of de-extinction. The issue — subtitled “Recreating the Wild: De-Extinction, Technology, and the Ethics of Conservation” — contains 11 fascinating and thought-provoking essays addressing what de-extinction really is, the promises of biotechnology for conservation, the value of the technology to still-living endangered species, the morality of the concept and the potential risks.

The Revelator reached out to Gregory E. Kaebnick, editor of the Hastings Center Report, to dig even further into the topic.

Platt: How did this special issue come about?

Kaebnick: I came at it from a nearby issue. I’d been doing research on the ethical questions surrounding the group of high-tech endeavors that go under the heading of “synthetic biology,” and I kept seeing these references to a new example of synthetic biology that was getting called “de-extinction.” Most of syn bio has to do with making genetic changes to microorganisms that cause them to do something useful for humans — produce fuel photosynthetically or turn a sugar into a medicine, for example — and some of that stuff seems acceptable to me in principle, as long as details about the organism or the way the organism is being changed and used give reason to think that the risks aren’t going to be unbearable when set against the potential benefits. However, the idea of genetically changing organisms, in the process maybe basically creating new species, does raise an important question about how far we humans should be going in bending the natural world to suit our needs and preferences. I thought de-extinction offered a chance to dig into that question.

De-extinction raises that question in a really powerful way because it’s about using those technologies specifically to alter the shared natural environment and because extinction has always seemed to be such an inalterable fact of nature. De-extinction also raises that question in a very complicated form, because the idea in it is that you’re trying to protect nature, but you’re doing that by changing nature. Is that even conceptually coherent? And if it is, how should you be thinking about the changes you’re making?

At the same time as I began working on de-extinction, I was invited to serve on a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee about the use of gene drives, which are another technology for altering the shared environment, again with some potential conservation-oriented uses. So de-extinction seemed like maybe the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. It might lead to other and even more significant ways of altering nature.

Platt: What do you hope readers will take away from reading these essays?

Kaebnick: First off, de-extinction is no solution for the extinction crisis. It is too hard to do, and most of the few “successes” would be so limited that they wouldn’t deserve the term “de-extinction.” If you were trying for a wooly mammoth, all you’d be likely to get is a hairy, cold-tolerant Asian elephant. Even if you got something genetically almost identical to a mammoth, it would still have such a different set of relationships to its environment and to other species that it wouldn’t really be a mammoth. (Curt Meine emphasizes this point in his essay.) And just as a conceptual matter, a species is not something that can be “brought back” or “resurrected,” as some proponents like to say. A species is a lineage of organisms, and once that lineage ends, the species is gone. Period. Even if we created something totally identical to the original mammoth, it would be a human creation, not a “resurrection” of the extinct species.

That said, the technologies are still very interesting. Perhaps the technologies could sometimes be used not for “de-extinction” but for the protection of merely threatened species. And maybe sometimes “de-extinction” would be reasonable. There might be some few occasions where creating a kind of proxy or replacement of a lost species would be possible and environmentally reasonable, maybe because having something in that environmental role is necessary for an ecosystem, for a network of other species. And in a very, very few cases, “de-extinction” might be done simply through cloning rather than with genetic alterations, and the organisms created that way could be put back into the original environment in a way that essentially picks up and carries on the species’ relationships with the environment. The gastric brooding frog might be an example of this category. “De-extinction” is still not the right word for these cases, but it’s less misleading than when we’re talking about bringing back the wooly mammoth.

So, I guess the second take-home point is that while de-extinction isn’t the answer to the extinction crisis, the technologies may have some meaningful conservation-oriented uses. We should be realistic about them — which the proponents of de-extinction are not — but we shouldn’t unthinkingly write them off, either.

And I think a third big take-home point is that the emergence of these technologies means we need to think very carefully about what we mean by “conservation” and what the goals and values of conservation are. How much human intervention is consistent with a preservationist mindset? Is the “gardening ethic” that Michael Pollan and Emma Maris have proposed a better mindset for an environmentalist?

Platt: What surprised you from the contributions?

Kaebnick: The contributions largely agreed that, as a practical matter, de-extinction is very limited, but they got to that point from very different philosophical positions. Philip Seddon, a zoologist in New Zealand who chaired a task force on de-extinction for the IUCN, defended the idea of using technological interventions for conservation goals, while Claudio Campagna, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and some coauthors argued basically that the very idea of de-extinction is horrible and shows that conservation isn’t sitting on secure philosophical foundations. Hank Greely, a legal scholar who served with Seddon on the IUCN task force, argued that de-extinction is basically just another in a line of bioethical issues, and he laid out a bioethical framework as the philosophical foundation for assessing it, but some environmental theorists, including Curt Meine from the Aldo Leopold Foundation and Christopher Preston, who’s a philosopher at the University of Montana, put de-extinction in the context of other environmentalist thinking about the human relationship to nature.

Maybe this combination of near-agreement on practical conclusions and wide divergence on theory is not all that surprising, but it is very interesting, and as the technology moves forward and some of the other, more powerful ways of intervening in nature become feasible (if they do), then we may well need better clarity on the philosophical foundations. That’s what I argue in my essay in the set, anyway.

Platt: What topics might still need to be explored?

Kaebnick: Can we use genetic or other technologies for “assisted adaptation”? The work being done to make an American chestnut that survives chestnut blight is an example of that. Can we use “de-extinction” merely to help threatened species like the black-footed ferret — say, to recreate some of that species’ lost genetic diversity? And how should we think about human management of nature? Obviously the main thing we need to do is to reduce our alteration of nature — eat more wisely, drive more efficiently, fly less frequently, keep houses cool in the winter and warm in the summer, and so on — but it seems pretty plain to me that it is no longer possible to protect biodiversity just by reducing the alteration of nature. Management is necessary. But does accepting that we have to manage nature force us to go along with Pollan’s gardening ethic? To me, that seems dangerous. I can go along with the gardening ethic only if we’re very careful and conservative about what “gardening” means.

You can read the entire issue of The Hastings Report special issue on de-extinction here.

The post Digging Deep into De-Extinction appeared first on The Revelator.

Critical Critters Call for Gonzovationists

0
0

Artist Ralph Steadman has become the ultimate recycler.

Until recently, the dirty water the 81-year-old satirist used to clean his paint brushes each day would get dumped down the sink, never to be seen again.

But last year Steadman started pouring his water glasses onto something else: large pieces of paper on his studio floor. After the dirty water has dried for a day or two, he examines the faint colors and patterns — like a giant Rorschach inkblot — and an image forms in his mind. His paintbrushes come out again and he swirls and splats color and ink until the portrait of an endangered animal emerges.

“Picasso had his blue period,” he tells me. “I’ve entered my dirty-water period.”

The resulting paintings — 100 of them — can be found in the new book Critical Critters, published Sept. 26 by Bloomsbury, with proceeds from each sale benefitting the World Wildlife Fund.

The watery book marks Steadman’s third collaboration with writer, filmmaker and conservationist Ceri Levy. “That’s us,” Levy says. “A team built out of filth.”

ralph steadman ceri levy
Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy. Courtesy Bloomsbury

The book is packed with portraits of endangered animals — giant pandas, tigers, chimpanzees, vaquitas, pangolins and dozens of other species — all depicted in the wild, paint-splattered technique Steadman made famous through his collaborations with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Next to each painting, Levy provides text (both scientific and comic) about the various species. Alongside that information he contributes a running narrative about the process the duo used to develop the book and its contents.

critical critters orangutanThat process involves Steadman and Levy trading a constant barrage of jokes, insults, barbs, slings, snipes and burns, along with the more-than-occasional pun.

“I guess that’s why we work well together,” Steadman laughs, “because we enjoy the hurt.”

The duo first teamed up a little over six years ago, when Levy asked Steadman to provide a single painting for an art exhibition about extinction. Steadman produced dozens. That led to their first book, Extinct Boids (2012), which contained portraits of bird species that are no longer with us. They followed it in 2015 with Nextinction, about the bird species that could be next to fall into extinction if the world doesn’t take action. Now they’ve finished the series by turning their pens and keyboard to the rest of the animal kingdom, tackling mammals, reptiles, fish, insects and even a plant or two.

(There are still a couple of birds in the new book. Steadman likes drawing beaks.)

Despite the heady topics of endangered species and extinction, Critical Critters — like the two books before it — is remarkably funny while remaining deeply informative. “We’ve always maintained that you’ve got to make people laugh in order to engage them,” Levy says. “If we just tell people, ‘you’re all dreadful bastards, you’ve screwed it all up, and now look what’s going to happen,’ people go, ‘yeah, whatever.’ But if you make them laugh, you’ve got a chance.

“That’s all you’re trying to do is inform people,” he continues. “But you’re trying to bribe them by giving them a good joke or two. And then they come to the table.”

Both creators say they feel they’ve accomplished something over the course of their collaboration and friendship. “Three hundred paintings down the line and we’re still talking to each other,” Levy says. “The weird thing is that one painting has now turned into a trilogy. We’re calling it the ‘gonzovation’ trilogy.”

critical critters nextinction extinct boids“He stole that word off of me,” Steadman accuses gruffly, as the three of us talk over Skype.

Levy sighs, exasperated. “As soon as he’s in public, he says I’ve stolen everything.”

“Ceri just causes trouble,” growls Steadman. “He’s a bit like one of these critters. He creeps about and smashes things and then he eats somebody’s sandwich.”

Even with the book done, the two still trade their fair share of barbs.

So — what exactly is “gonzovation?” Levy says a gonzovationist is just an alternative conservationist. “I think it means the normal, regular people who are trying to help the world of conservation in some way,” he explains. “Everyone can do something to help animals, creatures, the planet, nature, and we don’t have to have, you know, university degrees. We can partake in conversation.”

Steadman interrupts. “What do you mean we don’t have university degrees?”

“Yours isn’t real! Did you show up for the tests?”

“I’m a BSc,” says Steadman, mock-indignant.

“I know what the BS stands for.”

“Bloody silly.”

“Gonzovation,” Levy finally continues, “allows the rest of us who aren’t in those hallowed halls of conservation to have a chance to do something. That’s the important thing. I think everyone’s fed up with clicking the ‘like’ button on Facebook or donating three dollars a month to help this or that animal. We need to find a way to participate and be hands-on.”

Both say working on the trilogy has opened their eyes. “I’ve learned an awful lot,” Levy says. “I had no idea when we started just how screwed the planet is at the moment and how many people are trying to screw with it. We’ve all got to do something. We can’t do nothing anymore. It could mean taking out the recycling. It could mean planting a tree that butterflies like. It could mean getting really good pollinating plants. We can all do things that help.”

Steadman says he’s stunned to find out why some of these species are endangered. “One of the things that amazes me, is that people have a need to go out hunting still.”

Even with three books under their belts, Levy feels there are still important things to learn, not just for himself but for the entire conservation community. “Conservation needs to find a way to get more people to do things that will help,” he says. “We need to engage. We need to find a way to make people feel they’re part of it, so they’re not disassociated from conservation projects. That’s the million-dollar question for conservationists today: how do we make people gonzovationists?”

The process that led to the creation of Critical Critters may hold part of that answer: “It’s just teamwork,” says Steadman. That’s what works in conservation — only maybe with fewer puns and snipes.

The post Critical Critters Call for Gonzovationists appeared first on The Revelator.

Snails Are Going Extinct: Here’s Why That Matters

0
0

Ah, snails. They’re small. They’re slimy. They lack the charisma of a polar bear or a gorilla. And yet just like flora and fauna all over the world, they’re disappearing.

In Hawaii, a critically endangered snail called Achatinella fuscobasis has been brought into captivity to help learn how to keep them alive in the wild. In New Zealand, a snail known only as Rhytida oconnori has found itself constrained to a habitat just one square kilometer in size. On Fiji, scientists have expressed an “urgent need” to keep the island’s unique tree snails from going extinct. That fate may have already happened to three snail species in Malaysia after a mining company wiped out their only habitats, a series of limestone hills. Closer to home, 14 species of Nevada springsnails could be wiped out by a plan to pump away the groundwater their microhabitats depend upon.

That’s just scratching the surface. By my count, nearly 140 scientific papers about endangered snails have been published so far this year.

All of which begs the question: why does the extinction of a snail matter?

Obviously the answer to that question depends on the exact species, but we can make generalizations. Many birds, fish and other species rely on snails as important parts of their diets. Most land snail species consume fungi and leaf litter, helping with decomposition, and many are carnivores, so they help keep other species in check.

Beyond that, there’s actually a lot that we can learn from snails. “From the most practical standpoint, snails have a few pretty interesting characteristics that tell us we should probably pay attention,” says snail researcher Rebecca Rundell, assistant professor at State University of New York. For one thing, their shells — which they carry with them their entire lives (because they’d die without them) — are made of calcium carbonate, which provides a record of their lives. Unlike plant husks or insect exoskeletons, these shells tend to persist after a snail has died, leaving behind a valuable tool for researchers. “We can look in marine sediment and pockets of soil for evidence of past ecological communities, and thus evidence for environmental change in a particular area,” she says.

Living snails can also serve as indicators when something is wrong with the environment, something we’re already seeing with ocean acidification. “If snails in the ocean that make their shells, their protection, exclusively from calcium carbonate are having trouble building them, then that means the ocean is in big trouble,” Rundell says.

They can provide similar clues on land, where land snails often have particularly narrow habitat requirements. “They need certain levels of moisture, shade, and decaying matter,” Rundell says. “When they don’t have this, they start dying off.” That’s just the start: If tiny land snails start to disappear, it’s important to ask what might happen next. “It might give you a chance to change course,” she says, “to detect subtle changes that humans might not otherwise be able to see until it is too late.”

Snails also help us to answer bigger questions. “The fact that many of these land snail species have small geographic ranges and that there are many species, make them fascinating subjects for learning about how life on Earth evolved,” Rundell says, adding that “scientists really rely on groups like Pacific island land snails to tell life’s story.”

That opportunity, however, is at risk. “We are losing snail species at an astronomical rate,” Rundell says, “one that is equivalent to, if not exceeding, the worldwide rate of loss of amphibians.” Most species have extremely limited ranges, making them, as she puts it, “particularly susceptible to human-induced extinction.”

Meanwhile, the number of people studying snails remains relatively small. “That means we are at a big disadvantage in not only documenting land snail diversity, particularly in the tropics, but also learning from it in terms of what snails have to tell us about how life on Earth evolved,” Rundell says.

Saving snails from extinction is no easy feat. For one thing, their habitats are just too easy to destroy. For another, we don’t even know what it would take to keep most snail species alive in captivity, a function of their narrow microhabitat requirements. “One snail species might be feeding on hundreds of species of fungi that are unique to that particular forest,” Rundell says. “It is very difficult to replicate these diets in the lab.” A handful of captive-breeding efforts have been successful, but Rundell says they are labor-intensive and hard to fund.

Rundell’s own work studying Pacific island snails has shown her what it would take to reverse this snail-extinction trend. “Ultimately what is most important for land snails is the human element: people working together to protect what is most unique, precious, and irreplaceable on these islands—native forest,” she says. “This involves documenting what is there using a combination of field work and the study of natural history museum specimens. It also involves learning lessons from the past unchecked development such as agriculture and later urbanization, particularly in lowland tropical forests, and figuring out how we can protect as many pieces left as possible.” This, she says, has the “added benefit of leaving parts of the watershed, storm protection, and forest food and medicinal resources intact for people to survive in these places.”

So why does snail extinction matter? Just like everything else, snails are an important piece of the puzzle that makes this planet function. They’re also a way to help us better understand how we got here — and maybe where we’re going.

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

(A version of this article was originally published by Scientific American.)

The post Snails Are Going Extinct: Here’s Why That Matters appeared first on The Revelator.

The Fungus Killing America’s Bats: “Sometimes You’ll See Piles of Dead Bats”

0
0

It’s Friday evening in Pittsburgh, and the mosquitoes are out in force. One bites at my arm and I try to slap it away. Another takes the opportunity to land on my neck. I manage to shoo this one off before it tastes blood.

I’m at Carrie Furnaces, a massive historic ironworks on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River. Stories-tall rusting structures loom all around me, as do the occasional trees poking their way out of the ground. A tour guide, leading a group from the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, tells me the soil here is full of heavy metals and other pollutants from the factory, which operated for nearly a century before closing in 1982. Plants and trees have started to recolonize the area, but cleaning up the soil itself remains an unlikely task that could cost millions and millions of dollars — if it’s even feasible. Another nearby site, he tells me, was so polluted that it couldn’t be reclaimed and had to be paved over.

For a moment, as I walk the grounds around Carrie Furnaces, I wonder about the toxic substances biding their time beneath my feet. Quickly, though, I become more concerned about what’s in the air — or what’s missing from it. As another bug lands on my hand, I can’t help but think we’d be experiencing fewer mosquito bites if Pennsylvania’s bat populations had not been devastated over the past 10 years.

It’s a day earlier, and the sun is still young in the morning sky. A group of journalists from the conference has piled onto a bus on our way to Laurel Caverns, the biggest cave system in Pennsylvania. With us are representatives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there to tell us about a fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans, best known by the name of the often-fatal disease it causes in bats, white-nose syndrome (WNS).

Since the pathogen first turned up in 2006, millions of bats have fallen victim to its deadly embrace. It often collects around their snouts, which is where the disease got its name, but that’s not where the worst damage occurs. “It erodes right through their wing membranes,” Robyn Niver, endangered species biologist with the Service, tells us during the two-hour bus ride from downtown Pittsburgh. “Flight is extremely important for bats, and the fungus affects their basic ability to move around and forage for themselves.”

The easily transmissible fungus also does something to bats’ metabolism, causing the animals to wake up during hibernation more than twice as often as they normally would. This increase in winter activity burns up the bats’ winter reserves of fat, water and electrolytes, leaving the animals hungry, thirsty and confused. “If they go out to forage in the winter, there’s nothing available to them,” Niver says. “They’ll go out on the landscape and just die. Sometimes you’ll see piles of dead bats. Other times they’re just gone.” Caves that once held tens of thousands of bats now, more often than not, now lie nearly empty.

bat bones
Bat skulls and bones on the floor of Aeolus Cave, a white-nose syndrome site in Vermont. Photo: Ann Froschauer/USFWS

That’s the case in Laurel Canyons. Before the disease turned up, the caves were the winter home of a relatively small population of hibernating bats, about 2,500 animals from four species. Last year, Canyons representative Laura Hall later tells us, they counted just 12 bats.

We knew going into Laurel Canyons for our two-hour underground tour that we weren’t likely to see any of the flying mammals. For one thing, it was still a few weeks before hibernation season. For another, the guides wouldn’t have taken us into the bats’ hibernacula. But still, knowing what we knew, the caves we explored felt eerily silent and empty.

Other Pennsylvania caves must seem even worse. Greg Turner, a mammologist and WNS researcher with the state’s Bureau of Wildlife Management, shared information on bat declines throughout the state. One mine, he tells us, had more than 30,000 bats in 2007. White-nose syndrome arrived just three years later. By 2013 only 155 bats remained. In cave after cave, that pattern has repeated itself.

And Pennsylvania is not alone. White-nose can now be found in 31 states and 5 Canadian provinces and has affected nine bat species, including the endangered gray bat (Myotis grisescens) and Indiana bat (M. sodalis). Some populations have fallen 99 percent or more, meaning other species could soon become officially endangered.

white nose syndrome map

When the fungus first turned up — probably accidentally carried by humans from Europe, where it has no effect on the continent’s bats, to a cave in Albany, New York — no one expected it to be as bad as it has become. “We all just thought, maybe it will only be in one site and it won’t be a big deal,” Niver says. “Then the next year happened. 2008 was a terrible year. We had mass mortality in Vermont.” Some estimates suggest half a million bats died that winter.

After that the disease just “took off,” she says. “We were hopeful it wasn’t going to be much of anything, but every winter just was devastatingly proving us wrong. It was terrible.”

Biologists around the northeast scrambled to figure out what was happening. “There were just these bats dying and there was nothing we could do,” Niver says. “We didn’t know what was killing them. We would have these weekly phone calls just trying to figure out who found it where and on which species. We went through all the steps of grief.”

Fortunately, there was already a model for figuring out these types of pathogens: the working groups for bee colony collapse disorder. Biologists quickly organized, developed their own working group, identified the fungus and developed protocols to help slow its spread.

Those protocols for human activity, however, can only do so much when all it takes is the beat of a bat’s wings to spread tiny but deadly fungal spores to all of its neighbors. And protocols can’t stop bats from migrating, which has taken the fungus from coast to coast in just over a decade. As that happened, the death toll has climbed. Biologists estimate that at least 5 to 6 million bats — probably more — have died since 2007.

What is the impact these mass bat fatalities? It’s too early to know. “I feel like we’re just in this huge environmental experiment,” Niver tells me. Scientists never had very good information on insect populations, so we don’t know how exactly they’re changing as the bats disappear. She suggests it’s time to start keeping an eye on things like gypsy moth or tent caterpillar outbreaks, which could become a problem without bats to control the insects’ populations. Other pest insects could also be a problem; a 2011 study estimated that bats provide an estimated $22.9 billion a year in economic services by eating insects that could damage crops.

Then there’s the impact on the bats themselves. Some species could become endangered, if they’re not already.

Meanwhile, other bats are actually changing in the face of the disease. Turner tells us that some bats have started to hibernate at colder temperatures where they could be safer from the fungus, while Niver says some species have potentially started to expand their territories into habitats previously inhabited by one of the species hardest hit by the disease, the little brown bat (M. lucifugus).

The bats may also be starting to change physically or behaviorally. Turner shared data, still pending publication, which suggests that some bats that survive the initial infection in one year appear to be packing on additional weight to help them persist through their next hibernations.

Despite these minor adaptations in some populations, the future for bats in this country is precarious. Over the past year the fungus has spread to Texas and Washington state; Niver says biologists in the East are warning their colleagues in the West what to expect. The message isn’t an easy one: “Don’t count on anything being different enough for your bats to survive,” she warns.

Survival of any bats, now, is the key. Turner tells us their best hope is not that the declines will stop, only that they’ll level off. “Stabilization,” he says, “that’s what we’re hoping for.”

laurel cavern
Journalists descend into Laurel Cavern. Photo: John R. Platt

As we come to the close of our underground tour, our guide — a former steelworker named Justin — brings us into a large cavern where there’s room for us to sit or lean against the rock walls. This, he tells us, is our opportunity to experience total darkness. One by one, we switch off our flashlights and headlamps. The room grows darker and darker until all light disappears. Our eyes struggle to adjust, but there’s nothing they can do except send false signals to our brain.

Then Justin tells us to enjoy a moment of silence. The journalists stop talking, and for a few minutes all we can hear is the soft rustle of wind through the caverns around us.

It’s peaceful, but it would have been more comforting to hear the flap of a bat’s wings in the darkness.

The post The Fungus Killing America’s Bats: “Sometimes You’ll See Piles of Dead Bats” appeared first on The Revelator.

Looking Beyond the Charismatic Megafauna

0
0

There’s a phrase that describes species like polar bears, wolves, gorillas and giant pandas: “charismatic megafauna.”

There’s nothing wrong with being a large, good-looking species, but charisma can often come with a price. For one thing, all the species I just listed are endangered — many of them in no small part to their attractiveness.

Perhaps more importantly, though, humans — including journalists — can sometimes give these charismatic species a bit too much of the spotlight. That leaves a lot of other species on the sidelines. What about snails, bats, snakes, fish, mussels, insects and even plants? Do they get the attention they need from people? Or do they get left behind by the conservation community? Beyond that, what can we do to give these species more focus, and why do they deserve the effort?

To help address these questions, I gathered an all-star team of experts for a panel discussion called “Beyond Megafauna,” which took place in Pittsburgh last month at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Joining me on the panel were wildlife journalist Jason Bittel; Tierra Curry, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity (publishers of The Revelator); and Justin Wheeler, communications specialist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

You can hear the whole conversation — including some great questions from the journalists in the audience — below:

Images:

The post Looking Beyond the Charismatic Megafauna appeared first on The Revelator.

How the Search for Mythical Monsters Can Help Conservation

0
0

After fears the Loch Ness Monster had “disappeared” last winter, a new sighting in May 2017 was celebrated by its enthusiasts. The search for monsters and mythical creatures (or “cryptids”) such as Nessie, the Yeti or Bigfoot is known as “cryptozoology.”

On the face of it, cryptozoology has little in common with mainstream conservation. First, it is widely held to be a “pseudoscience,” because it does not follow the scientific methods so central to conservation biology. Many conservation scientists would find the idea of being identified with monsters and monster-hunters embarrassing.

Moreover, in the context of the global collapse in biodiversity, conservationists focus their attentions on protecting the countless endangered species that we know about. Why waste time thinking about unknown or hypothesized creatures? Most people are rightly skeptical of sightings of anomalous primates or plesiosaurs in densely populated regions that have been surveyed for hundreds of years.

However, while there are strong ecological and evidence-based reasons to doubt the existence of charismatic cryptids such as Nessie and Bigfoot, conservationists should not automatically dismiss enthusiastic searches for “hidden” species. In fact, cryptozoology can contribute to conservation in several ways.

Known unknowns

Firstly, the process of mapping out the world’s species is far from finished. Conservationists aim to protect and preserve known plants and animals – but it is not always appreciated how many remain “undescribed” by scientists. Since 1993, more than 400 new mammals have been identified, many in areas undergoing rapid habitat destruction. The number of undescribed beetles, for example, or flies, let alone microscopic organisms, will be huge.

The pygmy three-toed sloth was identified in 2001. It exists only in one 4sq km mangrove forest in Panama. MaxPixel
We are entering a new age of discovery in biology with descriptions of new species reaching rates comparable to the golden era of global exploration and collection in the 18th and 19th centuries. The advent of methods such as DNA barcoding offer the possibility of automated species identification.

A recent mathematical model predicted that at least 160 land mammal species and 3,050 amphibian species remain to be discovered and described. Other predictions suggest that a large proportion of undescribed species will go extinct without ever being recorded or conserved at all – a phenomenon we might term “crypto-extinction.”

The father of cryptozoology, Bernard Heuvelmans, argued that “the great days of zoology are not done.” In the sense that so many species remain undiscovered, he was correct. The main principle behind cryptozoology is soundly zoological: species exist that humans have not discovered or described. The quest to locate and protect the world’s biodiversity is one that conservation and cryptozoology share, even if cryptozoologists tend to focus their attentions on the large, mythical and monstrous, over the small, plausible, and non-mammalian species in our midst.

Cryptozoology involves rampant speculation and unconventional surveying methods. But controversial new “findings” can inspire a renewed quest to better map out the natural world. This was the case with the cryptid spiral-horned ox, never seen by a scientist in the flesh and known only from a few horns found in a market in Vietnam. The debate between rival camps of zoologists about whether the ox existed pulled together historic accounts, local folklore, and samples of museum specimens – all classic cryptozoological methodologies.

Shared histories

The second reason why conservationists should not automatically discount cryptozoology is its shared history, co-evolving with conservation in the 20th century and interesting many conservationists along the way.

One notable connecting thread comes through Peter Scott, the founder of the World Wildlife Fund and creator of the Red Data Book method of classifying endangered species. Scott first grew interested in Loch Ness Monster reports in 1960 and in the same year wrote to Queen Elizabeth offering to name the – undiscovered – cryptid Elizabethia nessiae in her honor. Although the Queen was said to be “very interested,” her advisers wrote back saying it would be inappropriate to attach her name to something viewed as a monster or likely to be a hoax.

Loch Ness Lizzie? Khadi Ganiev / shutterstock

In an infamous article in Nature in 1975 Scott published underwater photographs appearing to show a creature with a diamond-shaped flipper. Scott and his co-author, the American Nessie enthusiast Robert Rines, named the creature Nessiteras rhombopteryx with the intention that it could then be preemptively protected under the Conservation of Wild Creatures and Wild Plants Act (1975).

Although he knew that grainy photographs were insufficient taxonomic evidence in the long term, Scott argued “the procedure seems justified by the urgency of comprehensive conservation.” For Scott, conservation was at the heart of the hunt for Nessie.

Scott was not the only curious conservationist. In his book Searching for Sasquatch, Brian Segal examines several other mainstream conservationists who grew interested in cryptozoological ideas and endeavors.

More recently, when specimens of a species named Homo floresiensis were found on the island of Flores in Indonesia in 2003, Henry Gee, an editor at Nature, wrote:

If animals as large as oxen can remain hidden into an era when we would expect that scientists had rustled every tree and bush in search of new forms of life, there is no reason why the same should not apply to new species of large primate, including members of the human family.

Homo floresiensis went extinct around 50,000 years ago. Tim Evanson / Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, CC BY-SA

Cryptozoology – in from the cold?

Given conservation’s haunting relationship with the problem of absence, is it time to bring cryptozoology, in some form at least, in from the cold? A rapprochement would demand changes on both sides.

Cryptozoology’s appeal currently comes from its celebration of the anomalous and monstrous. A “post-monstrous” outlook might aid in forging new coalitions, and a stronger focus on plausible undiscovered species (such as the thousands of smaller amphibians and mammals predicted to exist) than on charismatic, but highly unlikely, cryptids.

The third way that cryptozoology can contribute to conservation is through the sense of wonder. From the conservation perspective, something might be learned from the Nessie and Bigfoot hunters about telling new stories of weird and wonderful discoveries alongside the more familiar tales of flagship species decline.

Instead of rebuffing them, conservationists might consider enlisting cryptozoologists as part of a wonder zoology that accelerates conventional taxonomic efforts. Indeed, the EDGE of Existence conservation initiative is doing exactly this by focusing its attention on “weird” endangered species.

Other examples of wonder zoology include the descriptions of new (although known to local people) primates by Marc van Roosmalen in the Amazon, and the “lost world” of new species found in or near Vietnam’s Vu Quang Nature Reserve in the 1990s.

The saola, or Vu Quang ox, was first discovered in 1992 and first photographed in the wild in 1999. Bill Robichaud / Global Wildlife Conservation, CC BY-SA

One promising model of how conservationists and cryptozoologists might engage is sketched out by the paleozoologist Darren Naish. Naish’s “sceptical cryptozoology” does not dwell on the question of whether cryptozoology is pseudoscientific or not but focuses instead on the ground it shares with conventional zoology.

Stories of the discovery and rediscovery of species routinely punctuate the depressing catalogue of extinction after extinction. Wonder and speculation – however untethered – must play a role in energizing conservation actions.

Although no one expects conservation NGOs to start searching for Bigfoot, it would be remiss of them to ignore the powerful ecological imagination that can be inspired by cryptozoology.

Bill Adams, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development, University of Cambridge and Shane McCorristine, Visiting Researcher, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge

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

The post How the Search for Mythical Monsters Can Help Conservation appeared first on The Revelator.

Parasite Lost: Did Our Taste for Seafood Just Cause an Extinction?

0
0

A lot can change in five decades.

In 1963 University of Aberdeen researcher Ken MacKenzie published a paper about a parasite called Stichocotyle nephropis living in the waters around Scotland.

Last month he came full circle, publishing a new paper in the journal Fisheries Research describing the tiny flatworm’s possible extinction due to overfishing of its host species.

Stichocotyle was the subject of the first paper I ever published in 1963 and it is a sobering thought that it has probably disappeared in my lifetime,” he says. He adds that he regrets never photographing the species while he was working on it in the 1960s, although he did provide this drawing from an earlier paper:

StichoctyleThe species — like most parasites — spent its life in different hosts depending on its life stages. According to MacKenzie’s new paper, Stichocotyle’s larval form lived in the bodies of Norway lobsters (Nephrops norvegicus). In its adult form — a worm reaching about 4 inches in length — it could be found in the bile ducts of the thornback ray (Raja clavata). It was also observed one time in the barndoor skate (Dipturus laevis).

Neither the ray nor the skate are commercially fished, but they are frequently killed as bycatch, enough so that they are considered near-threatened and endangered, respectively.

According to the paper, it’s the overfishing of these two species that may have caused the parasite’s extinction because there now aren’t enough of the animals to host the adult parasites.

The reports of this extinction have been a long time coming. Stichocotyle was last seen in 1986, and attempts to locate it since then have proven fruitless. “I was initially surprised when I went to look for specimens in 2001 in areas where I knew it to have been common in the 1960s and I failed to find it,” MacKenzie says. More recently he and his co-author examined more than 1,200 Norway lobsters and found no signs of infection. Similar inspections of thornback rays did not turn up any signs of the parasite.

This doesn’t mean the species is definitely extinct, but the prospects don’t look good. The host rays have been seriously overfished and its populations have become disconnected, so there is little opportunity for the parasite’s larvae — if they still exist — to be transmitted from lobsters to the rays. According MacKenzie additional populations of Stichocotyle could still survive, but only in isolated pockets with few opportunities for propagation. “We would love to be proved wrong about Stichocotyle now being extinct and we hope that parasitologists in other areas will now search for it,” he says.

So why should we care about the extinction of a tiny parasite? For one thing, it was the only known member of its taxonomic order, meaning an entire evolutionary line has possibly been lost.

Beyond that, we don’t know exactly what role Stichocotyle played in its ecosystem, but MacKenzie points out that its very existence was an important sign. “Parasites can be good indicators of the health of an ecosystem,” he says. “It is said that a healthy ecosystem has a healthy parasite fauna.” The loss of this parasite, therefore, indicates an ecosystem pushed out of balance by human activity.

Meanwhile, Stichocotyle may not be a lone example. Earlier this year a paper published in Science Advances warned that climate change could cause one-third of the world’s parasites to go extinct by the year 2070.

MacKenzie himself has seen evidence of this. “I have some indications of local parasite extinctions, but not enough evidence yet to publish anything. I have been retired from full-time work since 1995 but I continue to pursue my interests as an honorary member of staff of the University of Aberdeen. I hope that younger workers, such as my co-author Campbell Pert, will continue to monitor parasites as indicators of the health of marine ecosystems.”

In other words, keep checking those lobsters. Our oceans could need what’s inside them.

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

Snails Are Going Extinct: Here’s Why That Matters

The post Parasite Lost: Did Our Taste for Seafood Just Cause an Extinction? appeared first on The Revelator.


Can Plastic Ever Be Made Illegal?

0
0

I thought I knew what garbage looked like. Then I arrived in Bangalore, the third-largest city in India.

There was trash was almost everywhere you looked. Plastic bottles, food packaging and other waste that could’ve potentially been recycled contaminated the landscape, even in people’s front- and backyards. When I’d ride into the city from the ashram where I was staying in the countryside, I’d inhale toxic fumes of garbage piles burning and observe wild animals rummaging through fields of trash.

During my first day on Commercial Street, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, I could feel the pollution sink into my pores and ignite oils on my face. The ground was no better. While wearing only flimsy flip-flops, I nearly stepped on a rat with a candy wrapper in its mouth.

My experiences weren’t just anecdotal. According to a 2016 study by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore generates 5,000 metric tons of garbage a day, of which only 10 percent on average is recycled. The city’s landfills, however, can only handle 2,100 tons of waste per day.

When I returned home, I quickly learned that Bangalore was not alone, and how the United States plastic lobby keeps its waste pollution behind closed doors. New York City — which has a population 1.5 million fewer people than Bangalore — throws away twice as much garbage; according to GrowNYC, residents of the Big Apple produce 12,000 tons of solid waste a day.

My experiences inspired a radical belief in me, going beyond plastic-bag bans and littering fines: Plastic should be illegal.

Communities around the world have taken action to ban single-use plastic bags. I began to wonder, could we ever take things a step further by banning plastic altogether? That’s not an easy question, I quickly learned, because not all plastics are created — and therefore, disposed of — equally.

When we explore the possibility of banning plastic, we need to be specific about which kinds. The base of all plastic is resins, which are composed of polymers. Different chemicals are required to make the many different types of resin. According to the American Chemistry Council, some common types include:

  • Polyethylene terephthalate, found in water bottles;
  • High-density polyethylene, included in bags for grocery and retail purchases;
  • Low-density polyethylene, used for food packaging and shrink wrap;
  • Polypropylene, utilized for medicine bottles and bottle caps; and
  • Polystyrene, typically in the form of Styrofoam.

Each of those types of plastic comes with different potential environmental costs. “The plastics of greatest concern from an environmental health perspective are polyvinyl chloride (vinyl), polystyrene, polycarbonate, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene,” says Mike Schade, Mind the Store campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. “Using vinyl products exposes consumers to hormone-disrupting phthalates, which are dangerous at very low levels of exposure.” Even getting rid of vinyl is dangerous, he says, because incinerating it releases dioxins, one of the most toxic man-made chemicals.

Additionally, I found that not all plastics are regulated equally. Although there hasn’t been any federal U.S. legislation yet banning vinyl, or any other type of plastic, cities and states have successfully passed and adopted measures to ban plastic bags. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Austin, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco are among the cities to implement straight bans as opposed to fees. Meanwhile, statewide bans have passed in California and Hawaii.

“When it comes to high density polyethylene and other [types of] plastic bags, the biggest issues are with them clogging up landfills, polluting parks, and waterways,” Schade says. “Plastic bags are a huge solid waste problem and a waste of precious resources.”

According to the Earth Policy Institute, the United States consumes 100 billion plastic bags each year, which is enough to circle the equator 1,330 times.

What if plastic bags were to be banned in the United States, as they were in Kenya earlier this year? Unfortunately that legal battle would require likely copious amounts of money to fight the plastic industry, most notably the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a pro-plastic lobbying group run by the American Chemistry Council. In her documentary Plastic Patch: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which I initially watched after returning from India, journalist Angela Sun revealed that the council is an umbrella organization for Dow Chemical Company, DuPont and ExxonMobil.

According to a recent report in The Huffington Post, the group is the moneybag behind legislation to ban the banning of plastic bags. These types of laws have already passed in states like Florida and Arizona. As depicted in Sun’s film, the American Progressive Bag Alliance ran negative, untruthful commercials urging Californians to vote against that state’s proposed plastic bag ban years ago. This year, the Iowa became the most recent state to ban plastic bag bans following a push from the organization and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Ironically, experts tell me that plastic-bag bans can actually endanger municipalities by instigating lawsuits from “big plastic.”

“Cities potentially expose themselves to lawsuits over environmental claims if they only ban plastic bags, but allow other bags to be given away for free,” explains Jennie Romer, a New York City-based attorney and founder of Plastic Bag Laws. Romer works with grassroots organizations in New York City to push for plastic-bag fees; according to The New York Times, Governor Cuomo quashed a measure to implement a 5-cent fee on plastic bags earlier this year.

There’s a reason why conversations about the plastics industry revolve around plastic bags: it’s a gateway to other environmental issues. Romer explains that once people get accustomed to having certain plastics banned, the plastic industry becomes concerned about the potential of all plastic products being banned rather than just bags. In other words, I realized that plastic bag legislation isn’t really about plastic bags; it’s about what other types of plastic can be potentially banned in the future.

While governments can regulate the plastics industry, ultimately, the effort to reduce plastic consumption comes down to shifting consumer behavior, Romer says. She adds that implementing fees encourage consumers to be more mindful compared to straight bans.

“People just don’t get a bag when they get an item or two or they bring a bag when they don’t want to pay a fee,” Romer explains.

While plastic bags are her focus, Romer also consults on expanded polystyrene, found in Styrofoam. She believes this type of plastic requires a straight ban because it breaks up more easily and cannot be recycled, unlike high-density polyethylene in plastic bags.

Sun tells me the government should have a role in regulating the labeling of plastic products. “Just because Bisphenol A [or BPA] is a buzz word and in social consciousness, the chemical industry can easily make a slight change and call it something else and still have a BPA-free label on it because it’s technically free of BPA,” she says. “Putting a BPA label on a baby bottle doesn’t mean it’s necessarily OK to be used.”

Sun also stresses that while governments should implement policies to reduce plastic consumption systematically, it’s up to individual people to raise awareness about the issue. No matter how much policy can influence our everyday lives, reducing plastic ultimately falls us — as individual consumers — to take action. This both inspires me and disappoints me, because it’s difficult to fight against a culture specifically designed to consume plastic. After all, bringing your own reusable bag doesn’t go very far when most of the products you purchase are packaged in plastic.

“Social change is hard to do, but it can be done little by little,” explains Sun. “Empowered citizens in different realms have pushed and lobbied for this change. It’s power to the people.”

While bans, whether they are for plastic bags or certain types of resin, seem to be the best idealistic policy for the environment, I learned that they can make governments vulnerable to lawsuits by the plastic lobby. While fees can inspire a change in consumer behavior without the potential of legal action, even those are difficult to just get passed. If we seriously consider banning plastic, not only do we have to specify which kinds, but we also need to work around a system heavily influenced by plastic manufacturers. Otherwise the United States’ garbage problem could start to look a lot more like Bangalore’s.

© 2017 Danielle Corcione. All rights reserved.

The post Can Plastic Ever Be Made Illegal? appeared first on The Revelator.

Wasted Water: The Crappiest Places in America — Literally

0
0

It’s in the water. In our favorite beaches, swimming holes and — somehow — even in wild creeks and streams in the middle of nowhere.

Poop, that is.

America’s waters are infested with feces. We know this because state and federal agencies routinely test surface water across the country looking at various factors of quality, including E. coli bacteria levels, an indirect measure of fecal contamination. E. coli live exclusively in human and animal intestines, so the only reason for them to be present in the environment is…they were pooped there. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that several hundred thousand human cases of E. coli infection occur in the United States every year.

As disgusting as this is, the news is actually worse in some cases. Since E. coli is an indicator of untreated sewage, it can be a sign of everything else that comes with it — hazardous chemicals, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, antibiotics and pesticides, among other things. This single bacterium tells a larger story of an environmental issue that affects humans and whole ecosystems.

Dive in (metaphorically only, please) to these waste-filled waters as we explore the most egregious poop contaminations recorded across the country (and possibly near you).*

*Scroll to the bottom of the article if you’re interested in reading about our methods for processing and ranking E. coli data, as well as the limitations to the accuracy of the nationwide picture that emerged.

The top 10 percent most contaminated locations in America:

If your state didn’t show up on the map and you’re wondering what the situation is closer to you, take a look at:

The 10 most contaminated locations in each state:

Whose poop?

One thing you might be wondering at this point is — whose poop is it? If you’ve explored the maps above for a few minutes, you’ll have noticed that a lot of these places aren’t exactly in highly populated areas.

Location, location, location.

To try to understand what’s really going on, let’s get down to the street level at the 10 most contaminated sites in the country.

No clear solutions.

Here’s the rub — there’s no reasonable explanation for all this contamination. Treated urban sewage and farm manure contain low levels of E. coli. Waste from livestock farms sprayed as manure on fields is meant to stay there and fertilize fields — not flow into waterways. Some of the contamination comes from wildlife, but that’s only one small piece of the puzzle.  There’s no reason E. coli should be present in our waters at these levels if there are proper systems in place to deal with the excrement of 320 million Americans and the farm animals that outnumber us — which means current systems are failing somewhere along the line.

While the country’s ecosystems are silently being flooded with poop, the situation is on track to get even worse. Earlier this year a congressional bill was introduced to further weaken regulations on dairy manure. Meanwhile climate change is increasing the frequency of critical sewage flooding events with every hurricane that hits the country.

This is not a problem that can easily be flushed away, and solving it will require communities to address the need not just for safer fecal management, but for larger sustainable choices that reduce the magnitude of the problem if they want to keep their citizens safe — and clean.

Disclaimer: This is not an absolute ranking of the most contaminated sites in America. There are many limitations to available data. Many known catastrophic manure spills and sanitation failures — such as hurricane flooding in North Carolina — do not show up in these maps, and some states just do not monitor their waters as closely as others.

Methods:

Data source:
Water-quality data downloaded from
The Water Quality Portal, a cooperative service sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency and National Water Quality Monitoring Council. It serves data collected by more than 400 state, federal, tribal and local agencies.

Land cover and urban areas geospatial data provided by USGS.

Data parameters:
Quality characteristic: Escherichia coli. Other fecal organisms are sometimes evaluated by agencies, but
E. coli testing has the widest and most uniform geographic coverage.

Quality measure: Number of E. coli as reported in Colony Forming Units (CFU), Most Probable Number (MPN), or number (#). Suitable  data were collated under these three most widely used measures, and the top 10 percent of each of the three categories were collected separately to obtain the top 10 percent results overall.

Time period: All test results in five years — from October 2012 to October 2017. The same monitoring stations are sampled annually, but sampling occurs at different and sometimes arbitrary times of the year. To account for seasonal changes, unusual events, and other sources of stochasticity, five years of data were pooled and the highest result for each monitoring station was retained.

Limitations: Monitoring stations varied widely across states, with some states having more than 5,000 sampling sites, and others having as few as 500. However, existing monitoring stations across all states appeared to be well distributed across watersheds. Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, and Rhode Island had the poorest monitoring coverage of all states.

The post Wasted Water: The Crappiest Places in America — Literally appeared first on The Revelator.

Revelator Reads: 6 New Environmental Books for the New Year

0
0

January is always such a great time of year. We start the month well-rested, the pressures of the holidays are over, and we get a chance to look at the New Year with fresh eyes and new perspective. Maybe that’s why so many great environmental books are scheduled for publication this month — they provide a perfect primer for change and opportunity.

Here are our picks of the best new eco-books coming out in January 2018, covering topics ranging from climate change and sustainability to gorillas and Godzilla (yes, really). As usual we tried to pick books for inspired activists, interested kids and hard-working professionals — or anyone with a holiday gift card burning a hole in their pocket.

wizard and prophetThe Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann

This month’s most challenging tome: a look at the radically different ideas proposed by twentieth-century scientists Norman Borlaug and William Vogt. Borlaug, founder of the so-called “Green Revolution,” set out to feed the world. Vogt, who advocated for reducing the human population, called for us to dramatically cut back on our consumption. How will their ideas fare in a world poised to soon contain 10 billion people? (Knopf, Jan. 23, $28.95)

Snowy Owl Invasion! Tracking an Unusual Migration by Sandra Markle

Here’s a fun one for kids that I’m actually looking forward to reading myself. Why did snowy owls start leaving the Arctic in 2013 to arrive in far-flung places like southern Florida? This beautifully illustrated science book for students digs into the reasons behind this rare phenomenon. (Millbrook Press, Jan. 1, $31.99 print/$6.99 digital)

ranger rick gorillaRanger Rick: I Wish I Was a Gorilla by Jennifer Bové

Boy, would I have loved this book when I was just starting to read. Gorillas were probably the earliest thing that drew me into caring about animals and the environment. If you’ve got a nature-loving wee one, check this out. (HarperCollins, Jan. 2, $16.99 print/$4.99 digital)

The End of Sustainability: Resilience and the Future of Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene by Melinda Harm Benson and‎ Robin Kundis Craig

Is it time to retire the word “sustainability”? The authors argue that we should replace it with a better word: “resilience.” Will their ideas prove to be resilient? Read the book to find out. (University of Kansas Press, Jan. 5, $29.95)

tide of warTide of War: The Impact of Weather on Warfare by David R. Petriello

In a world where climate change is sometimes making things a little…tense…around the world, perhaps it’s time to take a look back at history to see how past weather events have influenced conflict. From massive rainstorms to the outbreak of disease to the appearance of Halley’s Comet, Petriello digs into the past to reveal what might happen in the future. (Skyhorse Publishing, Jan. 16, $24.99)

japan's green monstersJapan’s Green Monsters: Environmental Commentary in Kaiju Cinema by Sean Rhoads and Brooke McCorkle

Godzilla is more than just a big green monster that breathes radioactive fire. Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera and other Japanese movie creatures (collectively known as kaiju) are also environmental metaphors for topics such as extinction, pollution, nuclear power and climate change. This academic text explores the deeper meaning behind the big green guy and his rubbery ilk. (McFarland, Jan. 29, $37.95)

 

Well, that’s it for our list this month. Happy reading — and feel free to share your own recent recommendations in the comments.

The post Revelator Reads: 6 New Environmental Books for the New Year appeared first on The Revelator.

These Decaying Film Canisters Could Hold Secrets to Saving Species from Extinction

0
0

It’s a cool and rainy June morning in upstate Jamestown, N.Y., when I first catch a glimpse of the rustic river-rock façade of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. In 1984 Roger Tory Peterson, the pioneering American naturalist and ornithologist of Peterson-Field-Guides-fame, founded this scientific establishment to serve as an educational storehouse for his life’s work. Nearly 21 years after his death, I’m here to learn more about efforts to preserve Peterson’s vast and varied collection of sketches, drawings, films, research equipment, slides, letters, bird feathers and skins.

Roger Tory Peterson

Preserving and maintaining decades of Peterson’s analog works and artifacts in an ever-modernizing world is a challenging and time-consuming task, according to the Institute’s staff. They cite funds, free hands, time and technology as limiting factors affecting how quickly the institute’s collection can be preserved in long-lasting and shareable modern formats. Worldwide, tens of thousands of scientific establishments face the same problems in preserving scientific artifacts of yesteryear, leaving millions of these old and possibly scientifically valuable items in danger of being lost to time and obsolescence.

When I walk out of the rain and into the Institute I almost immediately notice a detailed Peterson painting of a soaring barn owl with a prominent heart-shaped face. As I’m admiring the piece, I’m greeted by Twan Leenders, Institute president, who leads me upstairs to show me one of America’s largest and likely most valuable collections of old nature films.

Upstairs Leenders and I walk into an air-conditioned room crowded with shelves of film reels. Jane Johnson, the Institute’s director of exhibits and special collections, is taking inventory of the films. She’s tasked with preserving these and the other items in the institute’s collection. Johnson shows me the degrading film canisters up close. Some are unlabeled; others are marked with short, nondescript titles like “Mexico – 51 – 52” and “Wood Ibis” on yellowed masking tape or plastic labeler tags. Johnson says each reel holds unique documentary footage shot by Peterson during the middle of the 20th century. Preserving these films, she says, is currently the Institute’s biggest archival challenge.

Film archives
© Erica Cirino. All rights reserved.

“I’m very excited to start digging into the film collection,” she tells me. The Roger Tory Peterson Institute has preserved a few of the films, including Wild America, Wild Africa and Wild Eden. “This gave our staff a glimpse into the types of footage contained on the films,” says Johnson.

Once given some TLC, these artifacts shed some new light into the scientific work contained in Peterson’s many mysterious, often unlabeled canisters. Based on these first restored recordings and the story of Peterson’s life, Leenders says, he expects the total scientific value of the footage to be enormous. He adds that Peterson was involved with many high-profile conservation efforts in globally important research areas like the Galapagos Islands and Coto Doñana in Spain. The reels, he says, could contain abundant images of extinct or now-endangered species, and habitats that are now destroyed or threatened.

“Peterson would be on the front lines of conservation and documented a lot of these areas photographically and through film in times when nobody was doing anything like that still,” says Leenders. “Hopefully, the materials in our collection will one day allow us to virtually travel back in time and see how these areas have changed in the past 50 to 70 years.”

To look back in time through artifacts like Peterson’s footage requires an intensive preservation process, according to preservation expert Ian Bogus. Bogus, who now works as executive director of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium at Princeton University, formerly directed preservation for university libraries as the MacDonald Curator of Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. Libraries are filled with artifacts containing possibly valuable scientific data; to uncover what each artifact contains, he says, requires an often-intensive preservation process that starts with some important decision-making.

“We look at needs of institution and quality of the artifact before we delve into the preservation process,” says Bogus. “We have a variety of good strategies to deal with deterioration, some of which fundamentally change an item. But that’s not always a bad thing if it helps preserve important data or information so it can be shared.”

With old footage, Bogus says, it’s impossible to stop the degradation of a deteriorating film, but it is possible to slow the process. Decaying films should be cooled, which decelerates the chemical deterioration process by four to ten times, allowing the film to be usable for a while.

“Ultimately old acetate films, like those at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute and countless libraries and museums across the world, must be transferred to a more stable media, such as polyester,” says Bogus. “Keep in mind that digitizing can change the way things look in films, reducing three-dimensionality and quality. And digitized films need to be maintained over time as technology changes and advances — so keeping these artifacts alive is an important and ongoing process.”

Amber Anderson, registrar at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, says the practice of preserving and caring for objects at her institute is constantly evolving. Keeping items accessible and in good shape requires keeping up with new preservation technologies. Anderson’s staff uses grants to fund 3-D printing projects to make replicas of fragile specimens, such as fossils, for use as educational tools to avoid damaging the originals while sharing knowledge with a wide audience.

Outside the scientific world, there’s a growing effort to preserve artistic artifacts, particularly films, before they’re lost. Virtually every library and art museum has its own preservation staff, and groups like Obsolete Media Miami — run by artists — are working to preserve 35mm slides, films and film equipment so they can continue to be viewed and enjoyed. Science and art, it seems, are two disciplines that are too valuable for us to lose to time.

“Continued preservation of films and other archival items allows the legacies of scientists and artists, like Peterson, to endure,” says Bogus. “It opens up their works for the world’s enjoyment.”

The Roger Tory Peterson Institute is moving forward with the preservation of its founder’s footage, but it’s been a slow and arduous process. Since my visit in June, the film preservation project has still not gone into full swing — it’s just one part of Peterson’s vast and important collection that needs continued attention.

Preservation of historical scientific and artistic works could help instill an understanding of Earth’s past, present and future ecological conditions. For example, just this month scientists at William and Mary College announced a project involving the examination of digitized herbaria records to determine how human development has affected monarch butterfly habitat.

Peterson’s aging bird skins, slides and footage hold records of species, places and times that may no longer exist, at least not in the way Peterson experienced them, says Leenders. “In essence, his notes, sketches, slides and film represent virtual time capsules that, in some cases, allow for direct comparison with today’s situation and illustrate environmental changes.”

© 2018 Erica Cirino. All rights reserved.

The post These Decaying Film Canisters Could Hold Secrets to Saving Species from Extinction appeared first on The Revelator.

Extinction Ink

0
0

“I tattoo,” says artist J. Trip. “That’s what I do.”

A second-generation tattooer, Trip brings something unique to his creations. From his chair at Funhouse Tattoo: International Guesthouse in San Diego, Trip turns his customers’ biceps, shoulders, knees and backs into stunning visualizations of extinct and endangered species.

Trip has been creating the tattoos of what he calls the Holocene Project for a few years now. He sketched out his first creation a few hours after seeing the documentary Racing Extinction. “I’ve always loved nature,” he says. “So when I saw Racing Extinction, it inspired me to do even more research into what we humans are doing to our planet. It also made me decide to figure out more ways to open eyes. The Holocene Project is the culmination of those thought processes.”

extinction tattoos
Photo courtesy J. Trip

Trip’s flesh-and-ink images depict species from all over the planet, but they all bear one common design element. Each tattooed animal is accompanied by the image of an hourglass, counting down the species’ time left on Earth. For some, like the giant panda, the hourglass is mostly full. For others, like the now-extinct western black rhino, the sands of time have run out and the hourglass is left empty.

extinction tattoo sloth
Photo courtesy J. Trip

It’s the hourglasses that often draw Trip’s customers’ attention. “I have a few designs for pieces that I haven’t tattooed yet hanging around my workspace,” he says. “People ask about them and then I get to explain the project.”

Once a customer expresses interest in wearing an endangered species on their body, Trip starts searching for inspirational images. He looks for each species’ most defining traits, thinks about the body part where the tattoo will go, and then goes about designing the art. “I have to think about how to best incorporate the hourglass and the environment, without overpowering either the featured species or the body part,” he says. “By the time the design is correct, I’ve studied every inch and every detail that makes the thing what it is. I’ve imagined why they are as they are, and the function they serve in their worlds.”

As with any good tattoo, the process takes a while, but the resulting images are both stunning works of art and lasting conversation-starters. “By the time I’m done tattooing it, mostly I’m just grateful to the client,” Trip says. “I’m grateful for the person who thought enough of the creature, of my work, and of the project to dedicate a portion of themselves and their bodies. It’s extremely humbling.”

Trip hasn’t kept an exact count, but he figures he’s done a few dozen Holocene Project tattoos at this point. He completed many of them while he and his wife spent a year driving across the country in a renovated van — complete with solar-powered fridge and composting toilet — with more customers finding him since they settled in San Diego, either by coming into his studio or through seeing his Instagram account. “One guy drove all the way from Utah to get a green sea turtle,” Trip says.

extinction tattoo sea turtle
Photo courtesy J. Trip

Tattooing endangered species is an emotional experience for both artist and client, but Trip says the effort is worth it. “It’s been amazing, and I’m looking forward to what I’m lucky enough to be asked to do next,” he says.

The post Extinction Ink appeared first on The Revelator.

No Cell-phone Reception? That’s Good News for Jaguars

0
0

Jaguars are not impressed by your cell phones.

In fact, phones and jaguars just don’t go well together at all. A new study finds that the big cats and dozens of other threatened mammal species do best in areas where there isn’t much human disturbance — in particular, places where you can’t get any coverage.

The study, published last month in Biological Conservation, looked at the distributions of 45 medium and large mammal species in the Brazilian Atlantic forest and compared that data to the distribution of cell towers in the region. The results: Out of more than 18,000 animal observations (including everything from in-person sightings to tracks and camera traps), only 18 percent occurred in areas where there was decent cell-phone coverage. The relationship was even more striking for threatened species, like the jaguar: Only 4 percent of sightings occurred in locations where you could make a mobile phone call.

Now, it might seem obvious that the very presence of humans (and their phone networks) pushes out wildlife from their former habitats, but this is data that’s never really been used to make conservation decisions before. The study builds on a well-established project called the Human Footprint Index, which looks at factors such as roads, nighttime lighting and human population density to determine the impact of civilization on natural systems and help make conservationists to make strategic decisions about what habitats to protect. That index, though still incredibly useful, is based on data from 2005 and earlier and predates the vast worldwide proliferation of mobile devices. These past dozen years have made quite a difference, the researchers found; their study reveals that many sites which the Human Footprint Index ranks as “roadless” and therefore hospitable to wildlife actually have high levels of cell coverage, indicating they’re more degraded than the index alone would reveal. For example, they wrote, the maps that feed into the Footprint Index often poorly represent things like the accessory roads that lead to cell towers or the power-transmission lines that supply them — the types of things that carve up habitats and make them less suitable for healthy animal populations.

That means something like your mobile carrier’s coverage map might actually supplement the Human Footprint Index with newer, more rapidly accessible data than what many researchers are currently using to make conservation decisions. As the authors wrote in their paper, this “is the first study demonstrating that cellphone coverage can be used as a simpler, modern and unprecedented tool to assess human influence.”

The authors caution that this still isn’t perfect — the ground-level data could be even finer, and there are certain cases when the technique isn’t particularly useful, such as when wildlife-friendly reserves are surrounded by cell-phone-heavy urban centers. Still, they say the fact that cell-tower data is updated very often means it could be used as an “early warning system” to help prioritize areas of high conservation value before too many more cell towers are built and people move in. “We may be able to distinguish areas free from cellphone coverage,” the authors wrote, “and, therefore, from human influence.” Locating these areas with no cell towers and no roads could allow governments to set them aside for conservation before any further degradation occurs.

The research earned quick praise from experts. “This paper provides a valuable contribution to the field of conservation biology,” says conservation biologist Richard Schuster, a Liber Ero fellow at Carleton University, adding he is “excited to see this develop further.” He did note that this approach could have limitations in other parts of the world, but “it seems to be doing a good job in identifying areas of high human impact” in the study area.

William F. Laurance, distinguished research professor at Australia’s James Cook University, one of several researchers involved in updating the Human Footprint Index, also praise the paper. “It’s just one more line of evidence showing that vulnerable wildlife species need places that are free of human influence. We keep thinking that we can have our cake and eat it too as far as nature is concerned, and that’s just not true. Nature needs part of the planet just to itself.”

 

That’s a message that needs to be heard, loud and clear.

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

The Surprising Ways Tigers Benefit Farmers and Livestock Owners

The post No Cell-phone Reception? That’s Good News for Jaguars appeared first on The Revelator.

“We Roam With Jaguars” — 5 Questions With Wildlife Artist Racheal Rios

0
0

Visual artist Racheal Rios’s work reflects the cultures and ecosystems of her hometown of Tucson, Ariz. Her bold, iconographic work features native wildlife and saint-like figures, cactus and flowers, braids and stars.

the askRios, who received the Buffalo Exchange Arts Award for local emerging artists in 2016, first came to our attention because of her work inspired by two jaguars (Panthera onca) living along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These big cats once roamed North America from the mountains of Southern California to Louisiana. Due primarily to a 20th-century government extermination program, jaguars all but vanished from their U.S. range. Recent footage from wildlife cameras, however, shows that a handful of jaguars are still to be found north of the border.

The Revelator asked Rios about her artistic influences and themes — and about jaguars.

As an artist based in Tucson, Ariz., how does your work comment on cultural, political and environmental issues of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands?

Most of my early exposure to art growing up in Tucson was murals and lowrider art in magazines. They depicted scenes of Aztec warriors, Mexican revolutionaries, Yaqui deer dancers and other prolific imagery that would have incredible influence on my art today. Because of where I live my art can’t help but comment on political, cultural and environmental issues of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. They’re all tied together.

Rachael Rios braided snake hands
© Racheal Rios. Used with permission.

How has your art been received by audiences?

I find people either really like and feel connected to what I make (mostly my dad), or don’t like it at all. Art critics are like a box of chocolates.

Who are your biggest influences — artistic or cultural?

Some of my biggest cultural influences are the Chicano mural movement and hip-hop. My biggest influences artistically are probably Leonora Carrington, an English-born Mexican artist, and Remedios Varo, a Spanish artist. As far as a contemporary: Artist Chip Thomas, aka jetsonorama, creates an intimacy with his viewer that I find very inspiring and thrive for. I would also say that although my husband Albert Chamillard makes very different work than mine, his dedication and daily practice of drawing heavily influences my artistic work ethic and lights my artistic fire.

Rachael Rios handjaw
© Racheal Rios. Used with permission.

You’ve created art based on El Jefe and Sombra, two wild jaguars that crossed the border from Mexico to reside in Arizona. Why did you choose jaguars?

The jaguars that have recently been making their way back into the Arizona mountains are really a symbol of hope. My family and I spend a lot of time hiking and camping in the mountains surrounding Tucson and across southern Arizona, and I am in awe that we would roam the same spaces as jaguars.

Rachael Rios birth of Osa
© Racheal Rios. Used with permission.

What advice would you give to other emerging artists?

I think my biggest piece of advice to emerging artists is that you have to make a lot of bad work to make good work. It’s a practice that needs practice.

To see more of Rios’ work, check out her Instagram account.

The post “We Roam With Jaguars” — 5 Questions With Wildlife Artist Racheal Rios appeared first on The Revelator.


Living Will Template for Critically Endangered Species

0
0

In the event that my species is so badly depleted due to hunting or habitat loss that it is on the verge of extinction, and I am (still) unable to direct my own care, I hereby authorize this Living Will/Advance Directive as a testament of my wishes:

I, GENUS AND SPECIES NAME, residing at NAME OF ZOO / WILDLIFE PRESERVE / ROADSIDE TORTURE CIRCUS, being of sound mind, and acting willingly and without duress except for YOU CUTTING DOWN / PAVING MY HOME / PUTTING ME IN SOUP, herein state the following desires with regard to my end-of-life care:

Life Support

I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE attempts to create a romantic environment for a partner and me while people with clipboards watch us through a window.

I wish to ACCEPT / ABSOLUTELY REFUSE encouragement to mate with a related subspecies or species I’m not really attracted to.

I will BE COOL WITH IT / NOT BE COOL WITH IT if I get put to sleep with a dart gun and wake up with a big scar on my nether regions.

I wish to GRUDGINGLY ACCEPT / POLITELY DECLINE being the subject of an earnest Change.org petition circulated on Facebook.

In the event that men with rifles are standing around me while I sleep to fend off poachers, I wish that they would GET THEIR GROSS SMELL OUT OF MY SWEET URINE-NEST / SHOOT SOMEONE FASTER / COME OVER HERE AND SCRATCH THIS SCAR ON MY NETHER REGIONS.

De-Extinction

After my death, I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE having my frozen sperm or eggs combined with those of a related species in an ambitious IVF procedure that will result in news headlines such as “Frog-enstein’s Monster?” or “In Vitro Turtle-ization!”

I wish to REFUSE / REFUSE, OH GOD WHY having my genes approximated by the manipulation of a living species’ DNA and turned into an embryo that an elephant or other animal is forced to carry to term.

Commemoration

I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE / ACCEPT, BUT ONLY IF IT’S TASTEFUL being put onto a special-edition stamp.

In the event that a third-grade teacher assigns his or her students to draw a poster about an extinct species and one of them chooses me, I wish to ACCEPT / REFUSE (WHY ARE YOU PUTTING THE BURDEN OF YOUR SHAME ONTO YOUR CHILDREN?).

If Elon Musk wants to engrave my genetic code on a rocket and shoot it into space, that would be KIND OF DUMB / VERY DUMB.

If a museum wishes to taxidermy my carcass and pose it in a diorama, feebly trying to escape a human hunter mannequin, I REFUSE / ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME / I WILL COME BACK AND HAUNT YOU.

Signed,

COMMON NAME

SPECIES NAME

WITNESS / ZOOKEEPER / TORTURE CIRCUS PROPRIETOR

DATE

 

© 2018 Elizabeth Preston. All rights reserved.

The post Living Will Template for Critically Endangered Species appeared first on The Revelator.

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

0
0

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 beaverEager: 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 fallYosemite 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:

ecocentristsThe 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.

The post Beavers, National Parks and Trump’s Attacks on Science: 16 New Environmental Books for June appeared first on The Revelator.

Farmed Fish Threaten British Columbia’s Wild Salmon Population

0
0

Something fishy is going on in the coastal waters of Canada’s British Columbia, and it may prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the already endangered wild salmon in this part of the world.

Over the past few years, the salmon in British Columbia have become infected with a particularly nasty infection called the piscine reovirus. The virus, which has plagued commercial salmon fisheries in Norway since 1999, causes inflammation in fish heart and skeletal muscles, making it difficult for salmon hearts to pump blood. Marine Harvest, the Norwegian company that grows one-fifth of the world’s farm-raised salmon, listed this inflammation as the second largest cause of death of its fish in a 2012 Annual General Report.

Now Norway’s problem has come to British Columbia — except that in North America, the situation is even worse. The virus isn’t just infecting farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). It’s also spreading to wild populations of Pacific salmon, including the Fraser River sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka) that was recommended for listing under Canada’s Species at Risk Act this past December, as well as Coho (O. kisutch), and Chinook (O. tshawytscha) salmon — both of which are also under consideration for listing.

A 2017 study led by marine biologist Alexandra Morton revealed that the virus strain found in Pacific salmon appears to have originated in Norwegian Atlantic salmon, and it also showed a likely connection between infection and an impaired ability of wild salmon to complete their spawning migrations. There are a variety of ways the virus is able to jump from farmed to wild populations, including the effluent from salmon processing plants and the escape of farmed Atlantic salmon after the collapse of net pens.

“Salmon farming sounded like a good idea,” Morton tells me over email, “but as we are learning it is never a good idea to allow pathogens to move freely between feedlot-type environments and wild populations — whether it’s avian flu, or piscine reovirus.”

The issue is not confined to Canadian waters. In August 2017 the collapse of a Cooke Aquaculture fish-farm pen in Washington’s Puget Sound, and the subsequent release of hundreds of thousands of non-native Atlantic salmon, prompted Governor Jay Inslee to immediately put a halt to new net-pen leases, pending an investigation by the state’s Department of Natural Resources. The department returned with damning results. In mid-March Inslee ended three decades of Atlantic salmon farming in Washington’s waters and even blocked lawmakers from reconsidering the ban at a later date.

According to Washington governor’s office communication specialist Simon Vila, the threat of piscine reovirus spreading from farmed fish to wild populations was a major concern. “The risks of net pens to wild salmon in Puget Sound may be low,” he says, “but our tolerance for that risk is even lower.”

More recently, Washington took another biologically significant step and prohibited transfer of 800,000 infected juvenile salmon from a hatchery to a farm in Puget Sound.

And yet, so far, the response by Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been minimal — even after a 2017 video produced by underwater videographer and naturalist Tavish Campbell showed effluent from Brown’s Bay Packing Company’s Atlantic salmon-processing plant gushing into wild salmon spawning habitat.

Blood Water: B.C.’s Dirty Salmon Farming Secret from Tavish Campbell on Vimeo.

The video spurred the department to launch an investigation into whether or not that blood was infected with the virus, something testing done by Morton had actually already proved. Morton, who is in her fifth year of legal action to stop the Minister of Fisheries from permitting the transfer of infected farm salmon into marine pens in British Columbia and more recently the ’Namgis First Nation, also sued the Minister to stop infected farmed salmon from entering their territory. Marine Harvest’s Canadian subsidiary plans an open-net salmon pen at Swanson Island, near the ’Namgis territory. These lawsuits will be heard in September.

It’s not just the salmon at risk here; it’s also First Nations’ culture. Frustrated with the government’s lack of action, some members of the ’Namgis and Musgamagw First Nations have taken matters into their own hands, protesting the industry they perceive as damaging to wild salmon populations by occupying Marine Harvest property near the Swanson Island farm and elsewhere off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island. Their protest has continued for more than for 290 days.


Their occupation has been reminiscent of Standing Rock, with one notable difference: a lack of press. It’s hard to find any coverage of the protest in American news outlets.

British Columbia’s Supreme Court responded to the protests by ordering protesters to cease their occupation of Swanson Farm, and any other Marine Harvest property, effective immediately. This decision came just one month before a landmark decision for the future of the province’s salmon, as five-year provincial tenures on 20 farms in the area by Marine Harvest and another company, Cermaq, are set to expire June 20.

The protesters have complied with the court order but continue their resistance from tents nearby.

Meanwhile the risks of the virus continue to emerge. A new study published in May 2018 found Chinook salmon exposed to the virus experience catastrophic necrotic liver and kidney lesions following rupture of their red blood cells.

Morton says the time for a decision has come. “The industry admits 80 percent of British Columbia’s farmed salmon are infected, making the decision critical to both wild and farmed salmon.” She says she hopes the authorities take the right action before it is too late. “It comes down to the global issue of how governments respond to the science that warns us that essential living systems are being disabled to the point of collapse.”


To learn more about piscine reovirus in British Columbia’s fisheries, check out this film released by Morton.

Racing a Virus – Short Film from Alexandra Morton on Vimeo.

Article © 2018 Chris Kalman. All rights reserved.

The post Farmed Fish Threaten British Columbia’s Wild Salmon Population appeared first on The Revelator.

We Need Bold Protests, Says ‘Stop Shopping’ Activist Rev. Billy Talen

0
0

This is a tough time to be a protestor.

the askAround 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:

The post We Need Bold Protests, Says ‘Stop Shopping’ Activist Rev. Billy Talen appeared first on The Revelator.

Sorry AC/DC, Rock and Roll Is Noise Pollution

0
0

It’s a rare scientific paper that cites both biologist E.O. Wilson and AC/DC guitarist Angus Young.

In fact, there’s only one paper with that distinction: “Testing the AC/DC hypothesis: Rock and roll is noise pollution and weakens a trophic cascade,” published this week in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

As you might guess from the title, the study — by ecologist Brandon T. Barton and other researchers from Mississippi State University — takes its cue from the famous AC/DC song “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” as an avenue to reveal the actual effects of anthropogenic noise (musical or otherwise) on species and their ecosystems.

Here’s the refrain from that song, which AC/DC released on their album Back in Black in 1980.

Rock ‘n roll ain’t noise pollution

Rock ‘n roll ain’t gonna die

Rock ‘n roll ain’t noise pollution

Rock ‘n roll it will survive (yes it will)

So what was the effect of this music on natural systems? Not so rockin’, as it turns out. The researchers fired up their boom boxes and blared music by AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses and other hard-rocking bands (as well as a few less musical urban noises, like jackhammers) at some soybeans and their accompanying aphids (a pest insect) and ladybugs (which normally eat the aphids). During a two-week trial — in which Back in Black was played on a continuous 24-hour loop — the ladybugs became less effective predators and ate fewer aphids. This meant there were 40 times more aphids to consume the soybean plants, resulting in plants that were 25 percent smaller.

In other words, rock ‘n roll may survive, but the plants exposed to it were less likely to.

Now, this is about a lot more than AC/DC. The rock music may be the novel part of the experiment, but the most interesting tests were the ones using more urban noises, which were played at roughly the same volume as traditional farm equipment like tractors and combines. Those tests had the same effect on the ladybugs and aphids, which reveals the real-world consequences of anthropogenic sound. “Farm noise could actually reduce the efficiency of natural predators at controlling pests,” Barton said in a press release. “If that happens and the pests take off, you might have to spray more chemicals. So it could be a soundscape that’s influencing how many chemicals we have to use because it changes the efficiency of the predator.”

This is just the latest study that shows human-generated noise is causing trouble for ecosystems. A 2016 study found that the noise from natural-gas extraction sites robs owls of their ability to hunt. Another study published last year found that engine sounds from highways diminished the ability for nearby animals to find prey (or, conversely, to avoid predators), even when the animals live in parks and other protected areas. A study published earlier this year found that birds living near natural-gas well are experiencing PTSD-like symptoms.

What sets this new experiment apart, as Barton wrote in an essay for The Conversation, is that previous studies looked at the direct effect of noise on specific species. Here, the soybean plants weren’t themselves harmed by the music, but their ladybug protectors were. “Animals don’t live in isolation,” Barton wrote. “They’re embedded within a tangle of food web interactions with other species. So by affecting even one species, noise pollution — or any other environmental change — may generate indirect effects that spread from individual to individual, and eventually may affect entire communities.”

As for the communities affected by their study, the researchers do offer their apology to AC/DC for proving that “in some contexts, rock and roll is noise pollution.” They also, however, thank the band for their contribution to the work, which led to one of the more interesting acknowledgment sections I’ve seen in a recent scientific paper: “We thank B.F. Johnson, A.M. Young, M.M. Young, C. Williams, P.H.N. Rudd, and R.B. Scott for inspiration and motivation to conduct this research. This work is dedicated to the memory of M.M. Young, who passed away during the preparation of this manuscript.”

Ah, science: One more way rock ‘n roll will survive (yes it will) and live forever.

Now turn down the music, kids. There are some ladybugs doing important work over here.

The post Sorry AC/DC, Rock and Roll <i>Is</i> Noise Pollution appeared first on The Revelator.

Viewing all 49 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images