If you’re scratching your head, you’re probably not alone. It’s been 137 years since this South African zebra subspecies went extinct, and it was only photographed once, so its image doesn’t exactly leap to mind.
The quagga isn’t the only lost species that’s fading from our memory. A recent art project asked 20 illustrators around the world to draw extinct species like the quagga, great auk and sea mink without looking them up first.
The results were … not very accurate.
Take the Pyrenean ibex, for example, which went extinct just 20 years ago:
Courtesy: Tanzania Expeditions
As you can see, a lot of the illustrators had the antelope family in mind, but some of their images differed dramatically from the ibex’s actual appearance. A few artists apparently thought the ibex was a bird.
The project was the brainchild of a safari tourism company called Tanzania Expeditions, which created it as a tool for conservation outreach.
“We know how much people love lions, tigers, zebras and elephants,” says Justin Mtui, the company’s CEO. “But can they imagine a world where people didn’t know these animals? We wanted to highlight the importance of keeping these species a part of our world by showcasing how some of those historic animals — many of which lost to human intervention — have been erased from knowledge.”
A few of the artists report that they had an idea about what some of these extinct species looked like before sitting down to draw. Others had more difficulty — and they found that troubling.
“It made me realize that I actually don’t know many of the extinct animals, apart from the dodo,” says Connor Handley, a designer based in the United Kingdom.
The artists tell us that the experience offered them a valuable lesson.
“I think this project really highlighted how little awareness there are of some now-extinct animals, and it does make you worry about which of our current wildlife could be completely extinct and unknown in future,” says French illustrator Candice Massaria. She adds that she wasn’t too pleased to see how her drawing of the extinct moa differed from reality. We won’t tell you which of these was hers:
Courtesy: Tanzania Expeditions
Let’s be honest: This isn’t just about extinct species. How many of us in this era of disconnection from nature can accurately draw or describe any species, whether rare or common? Even a certain environmental editor admits to having this occasional problem:
How would you or your kids cope with this challenge? Let’s put that to the test during this time of self-isolation. Here’s a list of 10 extinct species, some of which were just declared lost this past year. Try drawing them — no Internet searching! — and send us the results or post them on social media using the hashtag #drawingextinction. We’ll add the best entries to this article.
Last month Netflix unleashed its captivating but sensationalized docuseries, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. The public, hungry for something new to binge-watch while they sheltered in place in the developing pandemic, quickly ate it up and made it a pop-culture sensation in a wave of social-media posts, memes and virtual water-cooler discussions.
But amidst all this amusement, shock, titillation and general confusion, the tragic story of the tigers at the heart of Tiger King has been eclipsed by the outsized egos of their human captors.
Looking beyond the “Hatfields and the McCoys” approach of the series to examine the issues the program fails to dig into, we find several key lessons about the threats tigers and other charismatic species face in a world that values them more as entertainment than as wild animals and living creatures.
1. The Tiger Trade Is Alive and Well in the United States.
Tiger King — centered on Oklahoma’s Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park (more commonly known as the G.W. Zoo) and its operator, the self-anointed “Joe Exotic” — offers a revealing view into the forces and actors driving what could be called a tiger crisis in the United States.
Through murky underground markets, captive tigers have become commodities — sold, kept and exploited with little in the way of regulation of their care and breeding. This unregulated commerce, centered on one of the most endangered species in the world, has resulted in more tigers living in captivity here than remain in the wild in Asia. Actual numbers on private ownership of tigers are notoriously difficult to obtain, but the World Wildlife Fund estimates 5,000 of the big cats live in captivity in the United States.
This figure is particularly stunning when you consider that just an estimated 3,900 tigers remain in the wild.
And as Tiger King demonstrates, the lives of these captive wild cats are marked by cruelty, abuse, exploitation and — frequently — early death.
The sad reality is that most of these captive-bred cats grow up to become too big and too dangerous, not to mention to expensive, for amateurs to keep safely. All too often they end up in one of several already over-capacity legitimate rescue sanctuaries where their incredible dietary and care needs become enormous burdens.
And that’s if they live long enough to reach that point.
2. Roadside Zoos Do Not Contribute to Conservation
Over the course of the events depicted in Tiger King, Joe Exotic and another featured tiger exhibitionist, Doc Antle, make several claims that their breeding of rare tigers helps the species because they’re, well, making more tigers. Breeders and private owners have made similar claims for years.
Sadly, that’s far from the truth. In reality big-cat breeding programs stewarded by private owners are not beneficial to species conservation.
Tigers raised in private hands or at facilities like G.W. Zoo hold no potential value for efforts to bolster remaining wild tiger populations. Captive cats of unknown provenance cannot be included in carefully managed projects of conservation breeding, genetic banking, or any sort of program to be released into the wild.
Captive tigers. Photo taken undercover in 2017 while working with the Carden Circus. Photo: The HSUS
In the United States, conservation breeding and genetic-banking programs are managed by the American Zoological Association, which maintains rigorous standards, records, genetic histories and life histories on individual animals and their progeny to ensure the health of species. There are five subspecies of tiger in the wild, and the accredited global program for their captive breeding works diligently to maintain the genetic diversity and rigor within each subpopulation.
Private breeding facilities like G.W. Zoo have no concern for genetic conservation and frequently crossbreed subspecies for the largest litters or (to them) most desirable characteristics. Two of the most common outcomes of these non-scientific, opportunistic programs are breeding for recessive characteristics like with white tigers or worse yet, the creation of hybridized cats like the “liger” (lion/tiger) as crowd-pleasing curiosities. The AZA condemns not only the breeding of such inter-species hybrids, but also the breeding of white tigers, which are not a subspecies but the result of severe inbreeding that leads to shortened lives, often plagued with health defects. All white tigers are born and bred for profit.
Of course, the very fact that these cats are “forbidden” and rare makes them that much more desirable to collectors.
Even the big cats raised in conditions specifically and scientifically developed for release into the wild have rarely been successful. The very few instances of tigers being successfully released required hundreds of thousands of dollars per animal in specifically built facilities, and the cases of greatest success have not involved captive-bred animals but cats who were born in the wild (and therefore possess the necessary survival instincts).
3. Selfies Have Become the New Trophy Hunts
Through the lenses of both the documentary crew and Joe Exotic’s self-produced content, Tiger King reveals how his zoo and other for-profit establishments attract visitors willing to pay extraordinary sums of money for the opportunity to interact with tigers. This has become, in many ways, a readily accessible hunting safari for the average Joe — and one with extraordinary appeal to those immersed in social media.
The G.W. Zoo and other similar unaccredited venues have become spaces for patrons to experience a sense of power over nature. Here they can claim authority to touch the untouchable through cub petting; engage in transgressive behaviors like swimming with young tigers; take the now-(in)famous “tiger selfies”; and watch self-styled “celebrity” zookeepers interact with full-grown cats in a spectacular expression of outsized and misplaced ego.
As the popularity of the docuseries itself reveals, the visceral thrill of tiger proximity has moved beyond embodied experience into social media. The trophies that visitors claim through these visits — coveted selfies with tigers and other wild animals —are an in-demand commodity within the thriving attention economy. As this plays out in social media, it spurs users to pursue ever more fantastic and engagement-worthy photos.
Tiger selfies may look harmless, but they represent an imbalanced, unnatural relationship between humans and large carnivores. They can turn up anywhere online, but they’re perhaps most infamously deployed in online dating platforms, which abound with profile photos of (typically) men and (drugged) tigers. In this context they represent an attempt to appear virile and desirable — a way for men to claim their conquest over nature. These images have themselves inspired a tongue-in-cheek meme culture mocking men who associate proximity to an incapacitated tiger to their own performative masculinity — and these very connections to Joe Exotic’s own personal use of tigers in the construction of his public image hasn’t escaped the attention of audiences.
The pervasive positioning of wildlife as objects of entertainment trickles down onto our screens, big and small, where it warps our perceptions of the place of wildlife in the modern world. The ever-urbanizing population in the United States and other parts of the world has resulted in a global extinction of experience. No longer do we experience nature in nature; instead, our exposure to wildlife and wild things takes place through the plastic and glass of our computer and television screens. Experience has been replaced by pixels.
This has become especially true for our relationship with large carnivores. Media channels promote a wildlife-as-performer notion that wild animals exist chiefly to put on shows for people. It’s evident not just in Tiger King but in the daily news, where we frequently see tourists in national parks approach bears, bison, moose and other dangerous wildlife — again, for selfies.
This imperils people, wildlife and even the parks’ ability to stay open. For instance, Waterton Canyon in Denver, Colorado was forced to close for a time due to its inability to stop potentially dangerous behaviors of visitors seeking bear selfies.
Even if tourists aren’t quite waiting for a show like the one the now-jailed Joe Exotic used to put on, they’re still holding on to an expectation of non-threatening interactions. Thousands of hashtagged #tigerselfie posts to social media, accompanied by similar #bearselfie, #bisonselfie shots, indicate posters’ expectations of wild animals to stay still and to cooperate — whether in “controlled” environments or in the wild.
4. This Is Not Just a U.S. Problem
While Tiger King focuses on the United States, troubled interactions with wildlife are a global phenomenon, boosted in part by the voracious demands of a competitive global tourism market (at least, pre-pandemic). From the Amazon to South Africa to Thailand, wildlife petting and photo ops put animals, humans and entire ecosystems in harm’s way.
Chained tiger and cub photographed at the notorious Tiger Temple in Thailand, which has been linked to wildlife trafficking. Photo: Kieran Lamb (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The welfare of individual animals, obviously, is a pressing concern. Equally concerning are systemic harms to the conservation of the species like tigers. These feline-profiteering operations fuel illegal international wildlife trade for the pet market, and the removal of animals from the wild affects population dynamics and the functioning of entire ecosystems. The United Nations cited this as one of most significant threats to conservation worldwide. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted on 2018’s World Wildlife Day (a day dedicated to the big cats), “We are the cause of their decline, so we can also be their salvation.”
He added that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which address global challenges including climate change and poverty, “include specific targets to end the poaching and illegal trafficking of protected species of wild fauna and flora.”
This trade isn’t limited to tigers, although they remain a favorite in the trade. Cheetahs and lions are widely circulated in this global market, as well as other big cats (jaguars, leopards) and a plethora of small cat species (Asian leopard cat, ocelots). Countless amphibians, reptiles, birds, primates and other mammals are also ensnared in the global circulations of animal bodies.
5. Good Documentaries Inspire Change. Tiger King Does Not.
While the human protagonists/antagonists cast in Tiger King’s Greek tragedy are woven together with the connective threads of tiger-keeping, their ardent disagreements and ongoing social-media-boosted battles reflect personal projects of ego more than concern for others, including the big cats.
While the end result is, arguably, entertaining, it undermines any potential the film might have had to be a force for ethics around endangered tigers and other trafficked species.
Unlike 2013’s Blackfish — another wildly popular wildlife documentary, but one that placed the experience of animals in captivity in the foreground and ultimately inspired a groundswell of protest that nearly bankrupted for-profit aquarium/theme park SeaWorld — the tiger’s tale in Tiger King is subsumed within a sordid story of power and abuse. It’s hard to imagine audiences taking away from this series a conviction that there’s a deep-seated need for systemic change in how we treat wildlife — although some activists and even Congressmen have tried to use the program to drum up support for the long-stalled Big Cat Public Safety Act, which if ever passed would ban private tiger ownership and roadside zoos.
Beneath the frivolity of meme culture that surrounds it, Tiger King is a deeply disturbing look into the private ownership of captive-bred tigers and other big cats and a grim reflection of the larger issues that entice eager patrons to spend their dollars and share vanity photos of themselves with captive cats. It’s a shame we need to look so far beyond its surface offerings to expose those undercurrents.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Could a five-inch-long, bloodsucking leech inspire efforts to protect other leech species?
Yes, according to researchers — but only if it’s not already extinct.
That’s a possibility, as the New England medicinal leech (Macrobdella sestertia) — a name that dates to the practice of using leeches to “treat” fevers and other health conditions — hasn’t been observed in the wild since 2008.
But it’s gone long unseen several times before. The species, a relative of the much more common American medicinal leech (M. decora), was first described back in 1886, after which no reports of its existence emerged again until 1977. It had been presumed extinct before that rediscovery.
Since then it’s remained a bit of an enigma. Just a handful of reports of its existence have emerged from the leech’s wetland habitats in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire.
We don’t know exactly why it’s been so hard to find — it may always have been rare — but the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife describes it as “likely sensitive to shoreline changes and declines in water quality” and identifies sewage seeps and habitat loss as potential threats.
And maybe we weren’t looking in the right places. Recent research revealed that several New England medicinal leeches were observed in 2002 and 2008 in South Carolina — far outside their previously recognized range. The discovery wasn’t published until 2018.
Another recent finding provides even more hope. Last year scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of National History announced that they’d identified a new Macrobdella species, the first such discovery in 40 years.
For #NationalRelaxationDay we share this hypnotic video…of a LEECH. Its name is Macrobdella mimicus. And it was just described today in the Journal of Parasitology, by our curator of parasitic worms, Anna Phillips @Annalida500, and a team of scientists. pic.twitter.com/3iCQO9h2Uk
They found it just 50 miles from the museum, as well as in museum collections around the country, where it had been misidentified as other species.
“A discovery like this makes clear just how much diversity is out there remaining to be discovered and documented, even right under scientists’ noses,” said lead researcher Anna Phillips, the museum’s curator of parasitic worms, at the time.
That theme echoes in the new paper about the New England medicinal leech by Phillips and Georgetown University biologist Colin Carson. They’re calling for additional surveys to find any remaining populations of the lost species, as well as assessing it to be listed under the Endangered Species Act and the IUCN Red List. They also recommend protecting critical freshwater habitats and creating Red List entries for it and at least a dozen other rare or vulnerable leeches.
If protected or rediscovered, Phillips and Carson suggest that the New England medicinal leech could serve as “the first flagship species for parasite conservation.” As they write in their paper:
“…parasitic leeches are a comparatively easy ‘sell’ for parasite conservation: they are diverse, useful in medicine and as a model organism in developmental biology, striking and often colorful in appearance, have an infamous reputation, and are unlikely to pose a major threat to endangered hosts.”
Of course, the question remains: Does the New England medicinal leech still exist or is it extinct? Phillips and Carson devote the core of their paper to that problem. They used a series of six “extinction date estimator” mathematical models to calculate the probability of the species continued existence based on how often and when it was last observed. Their conclusion: There’s just not enough evidence to support the hypothesis that it’s no longer with us.
That’s potentially good news for now, but it doesn’t mean this species is exactly safe. Two of the six models suggest it might already be extinct, while a third calculates the year it could go extinct as…2020. The other three models give it a little bit more time — anywhere from 2027 to 2046.
As Phillips and Carson note in their paper, only a handful of leech species have ever received conservation protections. Could the New England medicinal leech help turn that trend around? It’s certainly time to try — while there’s still time to try.
Spiders need our help, and we may need to overcome our biases and fears to make that happen.
“The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. “Nightmares, anxieties and fears are very frequent reactions in ‘normal’ people,” he concedes.
Perhaps that’s why spiders remain under-represented across the world’s endangered-species conservation plans. Average people don’t think much about them, relatively few scientists study them, and conservation groups and governments don’t act enough to protect them.
That’s a major gap in species-protection efforts — one that has wide repercussions. “Efforts in conservation of spiders are particularly meaningful for nature conservation,” Isaia points out. Spiders, he says, have enormous ecological value as food for birds and other animals. They’re also important to people, both as predators of pest species and as inspiration for medicines and engineering.
And yet they remain neglected.
How bad is the problem? A new paper by Isaia and 18 other experts digs into the conservation status of Europe’s 4,154 known spider species and finds that only a few have any protection at the national level. Most have never even been adequately assessed or studied in detail, so we don’t know much about their extinction risk or their ecological needs.
Italy, for example, is home to more than 1,700 spider species, but fewer than 450 have had their conservation status assessed and only two have any legal protection in that country.
Greece, meanwhile, has nearly 1,300 spider species within its borders, but scientists have only assessed the conservation needs of 32 of them. None are legally protected.
A jumping spider in Greece. Photo: Miltos Gikas (CC BY 2.0)
Researchers found the same results — or lack thereof — throughout Europe.
“What surprised us most while assembling the data was the extremely poor level of knowledge about the conservation status, extinction risk and factors threatening the survival of European spider species, despite Europe being one of the most studied regions of the world in terms of biodiversity,” says Filippo Milano, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. student in Isaia’s research team. “And even when the conservation status of the species was provided, information was often incomplete or out-of-date, resulting in assessments based on poor quality information and high levels of subjectivity.”
It’s not just individual European nations; the problem is continent-wide. The researchers say just one spider — the endangered Gibraltar funnel-web spider (Macrothele calpeiana) from the Southern Iberian Peninsula — is protected at the European level by the Bern Convention, an international treaty about habitat and species conservation on the continent and some African nations, and European Union Habitats Directive.
Macrothele calpeiana. Photo: Gail Hampshire (CC BY 2.0)
And of course, this is not unique to Europe; other countries and continents fail to protect arachnids, and for similar reasons.
“Spiders are understudied, underappreciated and under attack by both the climate crisis and humans affecting our environment,” says spider expert and science communicator Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri, who was not affiliated with the study. “These are one of the most diverse groups of animals that we don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis. There’s like 48,000-plus species, but my experience is that most people don’t really have a sense of how many are in their area. In the United States, for example, we have just 12 spiders on the endangered species list out of the thousands of species recorded here.”
This lack of information or protection at the national level affects international efforts. At the time the research was conducted the IUCN Red List, which includes conservation status assessments for 134,400 species around the world, covered just 301 spider species, eight of which are from Europe. That number has since increased — to all of 318 species from the order Araneae. (And perhaps tellingly, it’s worth noting that the Gibraltar funnel-web spider has not currently been assessed for the IUCN Red List.)
The great raft spider (Dolomedes plantarius), listed as vulnerable by the IUCN. Photo: Charlie Jackson (CC BY 2.0)
The Red List does not grant protections to any species, but it’s often used by governments and conservation groups to seek protections on the national or international level.
That dearth of IUCN data seems likely to change, since one of the paper’s authors is also the chair of the IUCN Spider and Scorpion Specialist Group, but they have a monumental task ahead of them.
As we see with so many other wide-ranging species, a transnational border is often not a spider’s friend. The paper identifies several examples of species protected in one country but not its neighbor, despite being found in both places. According to the paper only 17 spider species are protected by conservation legislation in two or more European countries.
“Animals aren’t limited by our political lines on a map,” notes Echeverri. “You can protect something here, but if that animal’s habitat extends past your border and the people next door don’t know about it or don’t protect its habitat in the same way, it could still be pushed toward extinction even though you’re doing your best.”
At the same time, cross-border protection can also create problems if legislation is based on out-of-date scientific data. The Gibraltar funnel-web spider — the one species that’s listed on the Bern Convention and the EU Habitats Directive — has “protection against all forms of disturbance, capture, keeping, deliberate killing, and damage or destruction of breeding or resting sites,” according to the paper. That’s essential in its native habitat, but at the same time it’s now rapidly spreading through the commercial olive-tree trade and has been spotted in at least four countries outside its range. “As a matter of fact, it seems that the unique spider protected at the European level is considered an alien species in many countries,” says Milano.
How Do We Fix This?
Echeverri calls the study “an important call to action.” In particular, he points out how it compares different spider assessment and conservation approaches in each country. “This gives people in the IUCN and lawmakers a tool to say, ‘hey, this system seems to be working really well, let’s take what we can from it that will work great in our country.’ ”
Isaia notes that they hope this paper spins out a wide-reaching web. “We hope to stimulate environmental government agencies, stakeholders and decision-makers to include spiders in effective conservation strategies and fostering processes that may contribute to the conservation of threatened spider species,” he says. Examples, he says, would include “promoting risk assessment procedures for spider species, or including threatened spider species in planning protected areas and biodiversity action plans.”
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Susan Cameron searches moss mats for the spruce-fir moss spider. Photo: G. Peeples/USFWS
But moving forward will require a lot of effort — not to mention some money.
“There’s not a lot of funding for naturalists to go out and survey these animals,” says Echeverri. “It’s this ongoing crisis within science. You don’t know a lot about the species, so you don’t know who’s there. You don’t know how many are there. You don’t know how they’re doing or what habitats they’re in, and we need to make our conservation plans based on scientific data. If that data doesn’t exist, even if there is a desire to do something for these animals, we can’t plan anything because we don’t have the fundamentals.”
The researchers hope others will take up their mantle to understand and protect spiders. “Highlighting general patterns and identifying the main strengths and weaknesses in biodiversity conservation across Europe is an appropriate starting point to plan achievable solutions focusing on the local context,” says Milano. “The same model may be adopted to other geographic regions and may certainly apply to other taxonomic groups.”
And maybe, along the way, their work can help inspire people who fear spiders to look at them in a different light — or even to help look for them, like the Map the Spider project that asks citizen scientists to upload locations of the complex webs woven by elusive purse-web spiders.
Who knows, that might even inspire a new generation of arachnologists — a field of scientists who are currently in short supply.
“Focusing on spiders has been a very important choice in my career,” Isaia says. “There are those who, like me, see spiders as miracles of the natural evolution. You may study their web, their venom, their bizarre behaviors, the interactions between different species, their role as predators, their amazing taxonomical and functional diversity, their key role in the maintaining ecosystem equilibrium. You may also use them as sources of inspiration in architecture and visual arts. Aren’t these good reasons to find them attractive?”
The news moves quickly — especially when it comes to environmental issues, which despite the threat of climate change still tend to get overlooked by major media outlets. We know how easy it is to miss critical stories and not be able to see the forest for the trees, so we’ve collected some of the best and worst news stories for the month, connected the dots to reveal a few trends, located updates to ongoing stories, and uncovered some new science and important transitions you won’t want to miss.
Welcome to Links From the Brink.
Best News of the Month: Keystone XL is kaput. TC Energy, the company behind the notorious pipeline, pulled the plug this month following more than a decade of protests. President Biden cancelled the pipeline’s permit a few hours after he took office, and that appears to have finally been TC’s signal to stop trying. It took ‘em nearly five months to admit defeat — even for a corporation, it’s hard to give up on your dreams.
Will similar, ongoing protests at the Line 3 pipeline have the same result? We live in hope — and also hope more protestors don’t get injured along the way (because things are escalating badly).
Finally, the U.S. Border Patrol is doing what it’s supposed to do: defend Canadian oil assets from Native Americans
Worst News of the Month: Carbon dioxide levels reached another new high in 2020, capping out at 419 parts per million. This might seem shocking, since global greenhouse gas emissions famously fell 6% last year as a result of the pandemic, but it reflects all CO2 released over the years — gases that don’t just go away the minute we stop burning fossil fuels.
“We still have a long way to go to halt the rise, as each year more CO2 piles up in the atmosphere,” geochemist Ralph Keeling said in a statement. “We ultimately need cuts that are much larger and sustained longer than the COVID-related shutdowns of 2020.”
And imagine how much worse off we’d be if Keystone XL hadn’t been cancelled — or if Line 3 isn’t.
The Missing Link … of Death: We’ve covered the dangers of rodenticides a few times here at The Revelator, most recently linking the poisons to the deaths of endangered wildlife in the United States. Well, Americans aren’t the only ones overusing these deadly concoctions. A new study out of Tasmania finds a frightening level of rodenticide-related deaths of wedge-tailed eagles — one of the Australian island’s apex predators.
Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Here’s the twist: Wedge-tailed eagles don’t eat rodents. They eat animals that eat rodents, which means the poisons are traveling up the food chain all the way to the top. The study didn’t identify which animals served as the missing link, but smaller birds like ravens could be the carriers.
The study found high levels of a rat poison called brodifacoum in dead eagles, as well as flocoumafen, an agricultural pest-control toxin that’s part of a group of chemicals called “second-generation poisons” that kill with a single dose. But while these second-generation poisons are quite fatal to rats, death isn’t instantaneous. “Because these poisons take a while to kill the rodents, the rodents can…eat far more poison than they actually need to kill themselves,” Birdlife Australia raptor specialist Nick Mooney told the Australian Broadcasting Company. This makes the rats themselves super-toxic (and deadly) to anything that eats them. “They’re little walking time bombs,” he said.
The problem isn’t limited to the island of Tasmania. Over on mainland Australia, dozens of owls have been found dead over the past 18 months, and autopsies revealed internal bleeding from wounds that should have healed. Second-generation rodenticides are anticoagulants, so scientists suspect the poisons caused these deaths as well.
And tragically, as scientists warn at The Conversation, this could just be the start of more to come.
Food for Thought? Intensive human contact correlates with smaller brains.
OK, this isn’t a general statement (although it kind of feels that way). It’s research about how centuries of husbandry have reduced the size of the brains in various cattle breeds. Still, it speaks volumes — and raises novel ethical questions about the ways we raise our food.
Cattle grazing on public lands. Photo: Greg Shine, BLM
The Bright, It Burns: Our Google News Alerts about light pollution were operating in overdrive this month. Here are just a few of the recent headlines:
That last one about orbital debris — maybe the solution involves not putting up so many satellites to begin with. Could NEPA, an environmental law normally applied to terrestrial problems, provide a tool to do just that?
You can find our previous coverage on light pollution here.
Meow Max: Last year I wrote about the threat feral cats pose to Hawaii’s unique species. Well, things have gotten even worse in the past 12 months, as the pandemic slowed down the state’s trap and sterilization efforts. Now experts worry that hungry cat populations will have a baby boom, which could push native species even closer to extinction.
Renewables on the Rise: The United States consumed (good word, BTW) a record level of renewable energy in 2020 — 11.6 quadrillion BTUs, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s 12% of U.S. energy consumption: way too low, but still progress.
And that progress will continue: New solar installations are projected to increase 24% this year, although the industry faces supply-chain issues and a tight labor market that could limit further growth.
Solar reserve putside Tonopah, Nevada. Photo: Dan Brekke (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Meanwhile, new research from the International Renewable Energy Agency finds that the renewable energy generation installed in 2020 delivers power cheaper than coal.
But don’t count the coal industry out quite yet. So far this year the United States has actually produced 9.5% more coal than it did by this point last year, according to data released June 24 by the EIA. (Sigh…)
City of Amphibians: Los Angeles just published a list of 37 “umbrella indicator species” that reside within the city limits, along with a plan to monitor them. The list includes Baja California tree frogs, great blue herons, mountain lions, North American Jerusalem crickets and — of course — bumblebees. If these species thrive, it will serve as a sign that the city is keeping its natural spaces healthy and connected. To find out how they’re doing, the city will post species observations on citizen-science platforms like iNaturalist, which they hope will also help keep residents engaged about their local wildlife and public spaces.
This appears to be the first list or program of its kind. Hopefully it can serve as a model for other metropolitan areas.
If you’re in the Los Angeles area, the public can participate in monitoring during (and presumably after) the L.A. Bioblitz Challenge that runs through Aug. 7 — just don’t get too close to those mountain lions.
Heartbreaker: Why a dying U.S. Army veteran keeps fighting to end the toxic military burn pits that, in all likelihood, caused his terminal cancer — even as he shops for his own coffin.
A burn pit in Afghanistan. SIGAR Inspection Report, via Special IG for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Lawbreaker? Will ecocide join the ranks of genocide and war crimes at the International Criminal Court? A new draft law defines ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” It will take at least four years for this proposal to become official law, and it will have to jump several hurdles along the way, but hey, that gives certain corporations (you know who you are) plenty of time to line up their defense attorneys…
The moment you’ve been waiting for! Today the expert drafting panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation reveals the result of 6 months of legal deliberations: their proposed definition of #ECOCIDE as a fifth crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. pic.twitter.com/mMA6U58wA4
— Stop Ecocide International (@EcocideLaw) June 22, 2021
What’s Next? July is already shaping up to be quite a month, with continued drought and record heatwaves, a potential wolf slaughter in Idaho, and more protests over Line 3 — not to mention showdowns over voting rights, infrastructure and so much more that will affect environmental issues for years to come.
What are you watching or waiting for in the months ahead? Good news or bad, drop us a line anytime.
That does it for this inaugural edition of Links From the Brink. For more environmental news throughout the month, including bigger stories you won’t find anywhere else, subscribe to the Revelator newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Links — the connective tissue that binds us all together.
The brink — the edge of something you don’t want to fall over, or a tipping point we can be pulled back from just in the nick of time.
As the world burns (or floods), too many stories slip through the cracks. We’ve collected some of the most important stories you may have missed — and connected the dots to bigger trends and issues along the way.
Best News of the Month: Put down those chainsaws. The Biden administration this month proposed restoring protections to nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the latest in a thankfully long list of reversals of Trump-era policies. That’s great news by and of itself, but the Biden team went even further and moved to end large-scale old-growth logging within Tongass, while also adding $25 million to fund new sustainable development projects in Alaska. This would protect about 400 species in the region as well as people worldwide, since the forest serves as a one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. (That last part is especially important now that Amazon deforestation has flipped that region from a climate sink to a climate emissions source.)
A grumpy Western screech owl in Tongass. Photo: Don MacDougall/Forest Service
I’m Gonna Wash That Trump Right Out of My Hair: Speaking of Trump policy reversals, the standard for low-flow showerheads that the previous president flushed away is now on its way back to our bathrooms.
Trump’s standard rollback in this case was the watery equivalent of “rolling coal” — it was purposefully wasteful and done just out of spite. Luckily, consumers and corporations never agreed with this approach. Virtually all showerheads currently on the market already conform to or beat the old standard, which we expect will officially be in place again in a few months.
This ends the six-year-old “no-tolerance zone” that blocked fishing with the waters necessary for vaquita survival. With as few as nine of these porpoises left in the Gulf of California, and a long history of the animals dying in fishing nets, this change in policy could amount to a death sentence and eventual extinction.
Of course, things have been dire for the vaquita for two decades, and the species still manages to hang on. We can only hope that remains the case long enough for international pressure to force Mexico to change its mind once again.
What’s in a Name? Mountain lion, puma, panther, catamount … these names — and 78 others — are all commonly used to describe the same species, the big cat known scientifically as Puma concolor. New research finds that those wide and varied names “can obscure or deflect conservation communication,” making it harder to generate and maintain public interest in protecting these important predators (whatever you call them).
Eric Kilby (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Speaking of Panthers: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed opening Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge to “off-road vehicles, mountain bikes, camping, fishing, drone-flying, commercial filmmaking, commercial tour groups, and, for three weekends a year, turkey hunting.” Journalist Craig Pittman (who literally wrote the book on Florida panthers) says the move is “not as bad as building golf courses in state parks, but it’s close.”
“Just call me Lymantria dispar.” Photo: August Muench (CC BY 2.0)
What’s in a Name, Part II: The push to decolonize species names made some key advances this month. The Entomological Society of America launched its Better Common Names Project to “review and replace insect common names that may be inappropriate or offensive.” Case in point: the gypsy moth, which is named after a slur against the Romani people.
Separately, Minnesota state Sen. Foung Hawj initiated an effort to rebrand the four species known as “Asian carp” plaguing the region to “invasive carp.” This is not a new idea, and it hasn’t been accepted in scientific circles yet, but it’s a welcome move in an era with so many hate crimes against Asian-Americans.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, an extinct saber-toothed cat species has been named Machairodus lahayishupup, with the second half of the taxonomic name using the words for “ancient wild cat” from the language of the Cayuse people, on whose ancestral lands the fossils were found. There are no fluent speakers of the Cayuse language today, so this name “gives the community an identity and recognizes the contributions of early generations of Cayuse people,” linguist Phillip Cash Cash, Cayuse-Nez Perce, told Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Richard Branson Can F*** Himself, and Jeff Bezos Can Put His Rocket Where the Sun Don’t Shine: It seemed like all the TV networks fell for the enormous PR stunts of rich people catapulting themselves into “space” this month. Few reported on the most shameful aspect of these missions: their terrible consequences for the planet.
“One Virgin Galactic launch produces >30 tons of carbon dioxide,” climate scientist Peter Gleick wrote on Twitter. “7x more than the average human produces in a year; twice what the average American produces in a year. Enjoy your 4 minutes of weightlessness.”
For the most part the true cost of these brief trips to our outer atmosphere did not attract much oxygen from the broader media. Heck, CNN even bumped climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe from a planned appearance in order to cover “breaking news” about Sir Richard Branson’s launch.
And it got worse from there. In the days after his flight, Branson himself doubled down on his excess, telling late-night TV host Stephen Colbert that critics calling for him to invest his billions into combatting climate change weren’t “fully educated” about space travel — a discussion the right-wing media leapt upon almost immediately as a way to criticize the “woke warriors” on the left.
Okay, culture wars aside, we agree with Branson on one point: Space travel and technology are — in many ways — essential to this modern world. We wouldn’t, for example, be able to monitor the damage we’re doing to the planet without space-based satellites and sensors. But do we need to do more damage along the way for a mission that accomplishes nothing scientific or practical? Even Jeff Bezos acknowledges that we don’t — not that that stopped him.
The Maine Event: The Pine Tree State made innovative progress on three critical environmental issues recently. First, Maine required its pension system and state treasury to divest from the fossil-fuel industry over the next five years, a move that will put at least $1.3 billion of investments into more climate-friendly industries. Activists say other states should follow this model.
Unfortunately Maine failed on two other major fronts. Gov. Janet Mills signed a law banning wind farms in state waters (forcing them further offshore) and vetoed legislation to shift its electricity networks to community ownership, a move proponents said would have further sped up the transition to renewable energy.
Unexpected Conservationist of the Month: Cartoonist Matthew Inman, better known as the mind behind The Oatmeal and books like How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, turned in a hilarious comic strip about wombats, focusing (rightly so) on their square poop and evolutionarily marvelous butts.
But that’s not all: When he published the strip, Inman also donated $10,000 to wombat conservation (that averages out to about $1k per poop joke) and provided resources for others to follow in his footsteps. With as few as 80 northern hairy-nosed wombats remaining, every dollar (and poop joke) counts.
What’s Next? August will undoubtedly see more tragic fires, floods and destruction. Will the month also bring any action on the infrastructure bill, which may or may not end up containing legislation to address climate change? We’ll be watching this topic closely.
We also expect the arrival of the next climate assessment from the IPCC, more action on voting rights (which strongly affect environmental legislative outcomes), and news about wolves. We’ll also celebrate Cycle to Work Day on Aug. 6 and World Elephant Day on Aug. 12.
What are you watching or waiting for in the months ahead? Good news or bad, drop us a line anytime.
That does it for this edition of Links From the Brink. For more environmental news throughout the month, including bigger stories you won’t find anywhere else, subscribe to the Revelator newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Life in these modern times: masks indoors for Covid, masks outside for wildfire smoke. Welcome to Links From the Brink.
Best News (and Worst) of the Month: The media is finally paying attention to climate change and, for the most part, covering it accurately.
This is an important shift, as journalism’s longstanding policy of presenting both sides of a story allowed too many climate deniers and industry hacks to get their disinformation out there and, in the process, confused the public about the nature and threats of global warming. This false balance undoubtedly served to delay concrete action for decades.
But the scientific evidence of climate change is now incontrovertible, while deniers’ arguments are anything but, and the media has taken notice. A new study examined more than 2,600 news articles published between 2005 and 2019 and found that 90% of them “accurately represented climate change,” and that this accuracy improved over time.
Of course, there’s an exception to this trend. Conservative media, the study found, publishes fewer articles about climate change, and only 71% of those articles reflected the scientific consensus.
The Newsmax home page the day of the IPCC report release.
We found this dichotomy in action on Aug. 9 following the release of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The major media I checked that day — including the Times, The Washington Post, CNN and the Associated Press — all carried this bleak news as their lead story. That wasn’t the case for right-wing news sites like Fox News and Newsmax, which both covered the IPCC report, but only by republishing a short AP article and posting it way, way, way below the top of the page. Readers could only find it if they scrolled past headlines designed to drum up fears about Antifa, immigrants at the border, the “left-wing media,” the Green New Deal, sports’ stars “anti-American” attitudes, vaccination mandates and violent crime.
That’s by design, not by indifference. Fox News and other broadcast outlets still gave airtime to “discredited contrarians and climate deniers to discuss, or tried to downplay the stark findings,” according to Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that monitors conservative misinformation, which also found that these right-wing outlets aired far fewer segments about the new IPCC report than they have in the past.
That lack of coverage itself is disinformation. By being quiet or devoting their scaled-back efforts to discrediting the IPCC report, they told readers and viewers that climate change is nothing to worry about or a left-wing hoax.
So, all things considered, we’ve made progress. But right-wing disinformation still plays a major in American public life, and that’s going to keep causing trouble — and delaying both understanding of climate change and action against it — for years to come.
Buzzworthy Science: A team of scientists this month provided a list of “eight simple actions that individuals can take to save insects” amidst the ongoing declines. Some of the recommendations are for individual action, like replacing lawns with native plants, but several aim to improve the conservation outlook for insects overall. They’re all backed up with the latest evidence and clear examples of how these actions have helped in cases around the world.
A Wild Fantasy: One of our favorite articles of the month came from The Guardian, which profiled Irish baron and death-metal enthusiast Randal Plunkett’s efforts to rewild his 1,600-acre ancestral estate, which his family has owned since 1402. Locals called him an “idiot” for getting rid of the estate’s traditional lawns, cattle and sheep, but now the property has grown so wild and hosts so much biodiversity that biologists frequently journey there to study its success. The official Dunsany Nature Reserve account on Instagram showcases the many species that live on the estate, including deer, foxes, hedgehogs, birds, butterflies and a wide variety of plants.
What the article doesn’t mention is how Plunkett’s ancestry fits into all of this. You see, he’s the 21st Baron of Dunsany. The 18th baron, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), wrote hundreds of books, stories and plays under the name “Lord Dunsany,” through which he arguably created modern-day fantasy and horror fiction, much of which resonates with his descendant’s work today. “The need for human reunification with the natural world was the overriding theme that permeated all his works,” according to the website Irish Identity.
Here’s one of my favorite Lord Dunsany lines: “Ivy dreams sullenly and alone of overthrowing the cities.” Now his modern-day lineage has made that quote come alive.
More Rewilding: Irish aristocrats don’t have a monopoly on rewilding. Here are some related stories from the past few weeks:
Santa’s Gonna Be Pissed: Wildfire smoke reached the North Pole for the first time this month, thanks to the record-setting fires in Siberia. Meanwhile, new research finds the Russian Arctic is losing billions of tons of ice a year due to climate change, and so much ice is melting in Greenland (and down south in Antarctica) that the freakin’ Earth’s crust is starting to warp.
Speaking of Greenland, did you hear that it rained at the Greenland ice sheet’s highest point this month — for the first time in recorded history? And yes, that’s just going to make the ice there melt even faster.
As if the specter of resulting sea-level rise weren’t bad enough, all this melting creates other threats to people and wildlife, including landslides and the release of toxic pollution.
And this is only going to accelerate, as the Arctic’s oldest ice is now being pushed by excessive wind patterns into warming waters, where it too is melting. Eventually, scientists warn, the loss of sunlight-reflecting ice will cause more of the sun’s heat to be absorbed by the ocean, further speeding up the effects of global warming.
So yeah, Santa’s probably not in the best mood this year. Plan those holiday wish lists carefully.
Speaking of which, what do we put in naughty kids’ stockings now that coal needs to stay in the ground? Because I can think of a few fossil-fuel executives who don’t deserve any treats this (or any) year.
A Life in Beauty: Whenever we need to illustrate an article about the value of public lands, we’ve always turned to one man: Bob Wick. As a photographer for the Bureau of Land Management, Wick’s images have done more than just capture the beauty of wild spaces in the United States, they flat out inspired us.
Wick retired this month, but his photos will live on, as you can see in the video below.
What’s Next? August ended with some small but significant progress on the Democrats’ big infrastructure bill, which includes numerous climate-related provisions, and we expect that to dominate the discussion throughout September.
Our eyes will also be on California, were the upcoming gubernatorial recall election could have negative environmental consequences not just for the state but the whole world.
September will also bring World Cleanup Day on the 18th, World Gorilla Day on the 24th and World Environmental Health Day on the 26th.
(Wait, shouldn’t every day be environmental health day?)
What are you watching or waiting for in the months ahead? Good news or bad, drop us a line anytime.
That does it for this edition of Links From the Brink. For more environmental news throughout the month, including bigger stories you won’t find anywhere else, subscribe to the Revelator newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Humans share the Earth with billions of other species. We all need somewhere to live, yet only humans own their homes.
What if other species could own theirs as well?
That’s what Karen Bradshaw, Arizona State University law professor, proposes in her recent book, Wildlife as Property Owners.
Drawing on Indigenous legal systems and the ideas of philosophers and property law theorists before her, Bradshaw argues that wild animals should be integrated into our system of property law to prevent further habitat destruction — the leading cause of species extinction.
Under what Bradshaw calls an “interspecies system of property,” animals and people would co-own land through a legal trust. This would give animals, through their human representatives, standing in court, like other property owners.
The proposal may seem radical, but it fits into the more well-known concept of “rights of nature.” These Indigenous-led efforts to establish legal personhood for natural entities have seen expansive rights granted to ecosystems such as the Klamath River in Oregon and Te Uruwera rainforest in New Zealand.
In the latest development within the rights-of-nature movement, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe tribe in northwestern Minnesota filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the state on behalf of wild rice, called manoomin in their language. The tribe argued that allowing fossil fuel company Enbridge to divert billions of gallons of groundwater for the construction of the Line 3 oil pipeline violates manoomin’s rights, which tribal law recognized in 2018.
Could granting a more limited, and perhaps less controversial, right to property similarly help us to account for the interests of nature?
From Cats and Dogs to Cougars and Wolves?
Applying rights of nature to existing legal régimes “means you have to look to find places where that already exists or could exist,” says Bradshaw.
She finds one such place in some precolonial Indigenous legal systems that allowed animals to own property and resources. While some of these Indigenous laws were explicitly supplanted by colonial legislation, this was not the case for animal property rights. These laws, Bradshaw argues, are simply “dormant,” not dead.
But modern laws that can serve as a basis for turning wildlife into property owners also now exist, she says, having been unwittingly established by state lawmakers over the past few decades when they created “pet trust” laws. Trusts enable people to bequeath property to their companion animals, managed for the animals’ benefit by an appointed human trustee.
Few animal-law experts considered the implications of these laws at the time, says Bradshaw, but in theory they could be extended to wild animals as well.
“Attorneys can and should wield these laws creatively to create habitat-level solutions to solve biodiversity problems when possible,” she says, noting that property rights could be granted to all wildlife that depends on a piece of land, with the land managed at the ecosystem level by human trustees. She’s in the process of doing that on her property in Phoenix, which boasts populations of rabbits, bees, bobcats, javelinas and other wildlife.
In addition to private property, this approach can also work for public lands. In the United States public lands are at least partly managed for the benefit of wildlife by government agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management. But factors such as changes in political administrations or pressure from industry groups can affect how wildlife interests are weighed against other human stakes in these lands.
One example of this is the removal of gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act under the Trump administration in 2020. Since then, hundreds of wolves have been killed by hunters. The Biden administration recently announced it will consider a proposal to relist the species, but hunts continue in the meantime.
Gray wolf pups emerge from their den. Photo: Hilary Cooley/USFWS
Similar changes in political winds would have fewer effects on animals and their habitats if Congress formalized the preservation of property rights for wildlife habitat on public lands, Bradshaw argues.
Marking Their Territory
Underpinning Bradshaw’s proposal is the idea that the dominant model of property is too anthropocentric. This view of property law is also emerging in the work of other legal scholars, as a rights-of-nature movement challenges the anthropocentrism of the broader legal system.
For Bradshaw, our property system focuses narrowly on humans due to a mistaken assumption by colonial and modern lawmakers about the ownership capacities of other species.
“The argument is that we’ve wrongly excluded animals from the social contract of property,” says Douglas Kysar, law professor at Yale Law School. “We’ve wrongly assumed that animals are not possessive, but they are instead just possessed. And Bradshaw shows that’s empirically and philosophically wrong.”
The territorial behavior of many other species, Bradshaw argues, reveals that they have a sense of property ownership, demonstrated through how they establish, maintain and defend areas of land. Animals signal ownership through visual, scent-based and vocal boundary-marking behavior — not unlike how humans erect fences or other property lines.
A fiddler crab defends its territory. Photo: Marcia Pradines Long/USFWS
In a parallel to how the law functions for humans, animals often resolve territorial disputes nonviolently such as through “ritualized aggression,” or physical posturing. They even have ways of transferring property between generations. As humans are also animals, our property behavior has similar biological origins, Bradshaw says, dictated by environmental conditions such as the availability of resources like food and water.
This conception of the human property system as rooted in biology chimes with recent work by Australian law professors Margaret Davies, Lee Godden and Nicole Graham. They argue that although governments and developers tend to see property and habitat as separate and in conflict with one another, habitat is essential for both human and nonhuman life.
“Habitat is the organisms’ resource system,” says Davies. “And property is the system for sharing and distributing [resources].”
But habitats are changing as the climate crisis accelerates, and species are responding by moving to new regions. Can an interspecies property system accommodate these migrations?
“If we buy a piece of land for a specific vulnerable group today, what if we discovered that they need something else tomorrow?” Bradshaw asks. The answer, she believes, is to do what humans do: If somebody buys a house in a spot that later becomes unsuitable for some reason, such as worsening extreme weather, “they can sell it or take the insurance loss or potentially sell it for less money … One of the beauties, if you will, of the [wildlife property] model is it allows the trust to buy and sell land just like any other participant in a property regime.”
Animals won’t simply pack up a U-Haul and drive directly to a new territory. But several initiatives in different countries can support their movements across landscapes, such as the elephant Rights of Passage project in India, or the wildlife corridors provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which partners with landowners to provide safe passage from animals between wildlife refuges.
Adding to Existing Layers
Animals and humans typically use property differently. Humans tend to maintain rigid delineation of property boundaries, while a wild animal’s territory shifts and fluctuates depending on factors such as the seasonal availability of food, water and shelter.
In Bradshaw’s view, this means that an interspecies property system would be more flexible and pluralistic than the anthropocentric concept of property. Not only would it need to take account of how multiple nonhuman species use a space, but also how those uses intersect with human ones.
A badger pokes its head out of its den. Photo: Cindy Souders/USFWS
But property, Bradshaw argues, already functions in a more pluralistic way than people often assume, with competing interests overlapping on private property. Rights to airspace, water or minerals below the ground can all be subject to claims from different actors, including state and federal governments and corporations. Resources may be managed on an individual or communal basis.
“When you’re able to conceptualize a property as this layered bundle of rights instead of one person holding all the sticks in the bundle,” Bradshaw says, “what very quickly becomes clear is that there are ecological and biological interests to property that are nonhuman. We just haven’t made room for them in our narrow conception of property.”
Of course, a more ecocentric property system may be a hard sell in some quarters. Habitat and property are often pitted against each other, argue Davies and her coauthors, because of the close association between private property and the “right to exclude” non-owners from accessing it. This makes property ownership appear more absolute than it really is.
“People do have that idea that they have total control over [their property] and over who accesses it, and they can be very resistant to any incursions or changes,” says Davies. The ecological consequences of this conception of property are evident in a range of contexts, from the way Americans’ obsession with neat lawns creates ecologically barren monocultures to farmers’ extirpation of predators and native herbivores from agricultural lands.
Bradshaw anticipates the potential for such resistance by insisting that private landowners would grant property rights voluntarily. Meanwhile, recognizing wildlife property rights on public lands would not necessarily prevent activities such as recreation, hunting or sharing grazing land, since these rights are already more limited than those of personhood granted by the broader rights of nature approach.
A Moral Case
As calls grow for humans to understand that our fate and that of other species is intertwined, could wildlife property ownership present a potential way to alter the unequal dynamic that so frequently results in the subordination of wildlife interests to those of humans?
A standoff between two juvenile mountain lions and five coyotes in the National Elk Refuge. Photo: Lori Iverson / USFWS
“There’s something to be said for the symbolic value of saying, this land is not just land that’s set aside as a national park, this is land that’s owned by these other beings that we share the Earth with,” says Kysar. “That would maybe have a pretty significant cultural effect on how we regard other beings … rather than thinking of ourselves as the creatures with dominion over everything on the planet.”
This is, of course, what the rights of nature movement seeks to achieve. Bradshaw believes that integrating wildlife into the property system is another route into creating those more expansive natural rights. This, she says, is especially important as the interaction between Indigenous legal systems — many of which already have more ecocentric conceptions of rights — and dominant colonial legal systems is “really ill-defined.”
“Once you start down that pathway of incremental reform,” Bradshaw adds, “you eventually get to a place that looks much more like the rights of nature model, where we are envisioning ourselves as coexisting with other living beings.”
The collective unconscious is telling us something…
These days more and more artists are turning their feelings about climate change, environmental justice and the extinction crisis into powerful creative works. It’s easy to see why. These issues affect just about everybody — a new recent study found that about 85% of people on the planet already live with the effects of global warming — and that leaves us all with a lot of fear and grief.
That’s where fiction comes in. Whether it’s literature or pop culture, serious or satire, novels and short stories can help us investigate both our inner and outer worlds. Authors’ imaginations, meanwhile, can remind us of the beauty and mystery of the world we’re trying to save (or call out the ugliness of what’s destroying it).
We’ve pulled together 12 environmentally themed novels released so far in 2021, from a list that seemed to get longer every day. They include the latest from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, literary and mystery novels, a comics adaptation and even a horror story. (Well, they’re all horror stories, in a way.)
These aren’t full reviews — we’re still digging into this reading pile ourselves — but the descriptions should give you enough to pick the titles that speak to you, your communities and your rapidly changing world.
I’ll admit, I’m late to Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning and much-lauded Overstory, but I’m finally reading it right now (and it is, of course, stunning). His new one, which examines the broader world through the lens of endangered species, looks just as good. I’m not going to try to read them both at the same time — that’d probably be a Powers overkill — but I’ve already seen a preview of Bewilderment and I’m looking forward to diving into it as soon as I get a chance.
A novel about wolf reintroduction to Scotland from the author of Migrations. McConaghy looks at the complex relationships we have with predators and the awful things some people do rather than relearn how to coexist with nature — perfect components for drama.
An African village stands up against decades of colonialism and pollution wrought by an American oil company. The pain they suffer, and the corporate doublespeak they receive in response, should resonate with readers in any community struggling for environmental justice. We need more books like this (and more real-world equivalents, too).
An ambitious greed-vs-nature novel sprawled across the centuries. One part takes place in the 1700s, another 50 years from now, and the third follows a man who may be the last living human, 1,000 years in the future. Can the characters come back from this dystopia? Can we?
This surreal short-story collection, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, isn’t environmental from cover to cover (some of the stories are just weird), but it does feature nightmarish tales of havoc-wreaking invasive animals (the titular lagomorphs) and a critter returned from supposed extinction (who doesn’t appear very happy about its fate).
Yosemite Fall, an earlier novel in the National Park Mystery series, came out when public lands faced increasing threats from the Trump administration. The immediate threat may be gone for now, but the long-term dangers to public lands and wild spaces remain. Although there probably aren’t as many real-world murders as in this book, set at … well, you can probably guess from the title.
This month marks the start of breeding season for orange-bellied parrots, among the world’s most endangered birds, who migrate between Tasmania and mainland Australia. Five years ago, only 17 of these birds existed following decades of habitat loss, invasive species, pet trade depredations and multiple disease outbreaks. Today, thanks to captive breeding, that number stands at 192 — still perilously low, but it’s progress. Few of us will ever get a chance to see an “OBP” in person, which is why I’m looking forward to reading this magical-realism novel that uses the birds, the extinction crisis and last year’s Australian fires to examine the nature of grief and loss (as well as grief over the loss of nature).
What does it mean to live at the end of the world — and what’s it like when someone new suddenly arrives from beyond the walls? Originally published in German, this unique fable was translated by Jen Calleja.
A double-dose of nature-filled weirdness. VanderMeer’s horror/science fiction novel tackles wildlife trafficking, extinction and the climate crisis in predictably nightmarish fashion.
Nightmares of a different sort pervade Secret Life. Ellsworth, one of my favorite artists, adapts a surreal VanderMeer short story into graphic novel form. The tale takes place in a horrifyingly familiar office building, where human nature goes awry and plants and mice have a way of invading the narrative and the workers’ lives.
Something fungi this way comes… Just in time for Halloween we’ve got this new eco-horror novel about an invasive killer fungus disturbed from its underground slumber and ready to take over the world. I’m not sure if I’m emotionally prepared to read a novel about an outbreak after 19 months of the pandemic, but I’ll admit that I’m hungering for some good old-fashioned “Earth strikes back” horror, which reminds us that this planet can shake us off if it really tries.
Take artist Mesa Schumacher, for example. At the beginning of 2021 she set herself a lofty goal: Create and post illustrations for 365 species around the world.
With the final weeks of the year counting down, she’s accomplished what she set out to do and shared more than 300 digital illustrations of whales, reptiles, carnivores, birds, invertebrates and a host of other interesting creatures, many of which are threatened or endangered.
#Biodiversity is so important for our ecosystems to function. We barely scrape the surface in our knowledge of life and biostrategies that exist on our planet.
Her Project Animalia helped fill a void in her life in the middle of the worldwide pandemic, when she found herself spending a lot more time at home with two young children.
“I was kind of in the depths of Covid winter despair,” Schumacher says. “I thought, ‘I just want to do something this year that’s going to be positive and that I can share.’ I committed to it the night before 2021.”
The work also helped fill a gap in her creative and professional life.
“I have a master’s in biomedical and medical illustration,” she says, “but I just love drawing animals, and frankly, there’s not as much demand drawing species anymore. We have so many photographs of animals.”
It’s a bit ironic, then, that many of the images started with her own reference photos, collected during worldwide travels.
“I spent the last couple of years living in Katmandu,” she says. “I like visiting places where I can go searching for animals. I go out in the national parks and find some species that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”
That personal experience adds something special to her drawings, allowing her to capture a species’ personality, weight and the way it moves through the world.
“It’s always nice when I’ve had personal interaction with an animal, or I’ve gotten to see it in the wild,” she says. “Those drawings are kind special to me, and they often come out better.”
Schumacher draws each animal digitally, starting on an iPad in a program called Procreate and finishing in Photoshop. Some images she completes in less than an hour. “Some of them take, uh, many hours,” she admits.
Although she started posting the results on Jan. 1, before she had a backlog of drawings ready to publish, she quickly adapted and has had as many as 10 or 20 in the works at a given time.
“I can work on them based on my mood,” she says. “Maybe I just feel like drawing scales.”
As the year progressed, Schumacher says she’s drawn many species from her own personal checklist. “There are a lot of species that I have wanted to draw for years and years, and I’ve just never gotten around to it.” That includes a fair number of whales:
Hey, it’s my birthday!
Happy day, here is Project Animalia day #16 Beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas)
Some of the animals, meanwhile, come from suggestions by her social-media followers, including scientists and conservationists around the world.
“That’s been the fun, connected part of this whole thing,” she says. “I don’t love social media, but I do love that this year it’s been connecting me to people who are passionate about something that I love. And the best thing about this has been these mini-collaborations with people making great requests of animals that I didn’t know about, or didn’t know that much about, and sharing their stories.”
In a similar vein, Schumacher found she helped open viewers’ eyes to some amazing, new-to-them species — which is how I learned about Madagascar’s satanic leaf-tailed gecko, which looks more like a fantasy illustration than a real animal:
Someone left the hell-mouth door open for the most metal of animals…disguised as a leaf and hanging from branches, it’s…
“I love hearing it when people say, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know this species existed and I just went down a rabbit hole and learned all these new things.’”
That, she says, may be the ultimate message of Project Animalia.
“Biodiversity and conservation have such implications for so many things, including pandemic diseases, but if people don’t even know if things exist, well, the better something is known the more people want to see it continue existing.”
With Day 365 looming, Schumacher says she’s grateful for the yearlong project, which has challenged her artistically. “I’ve become a better painter,” she says.
It’s also offered relief during troubling times. “It’s been a real spark. I think it kept me motivated while we’re all kind of in this dreary time.”
And with so many species under her belt, does Schumacher know yet what she’ll post on Dec. 31?
“That’s a secret,” she says, returning to her iPad.
But it’s gone long unseen several times before. The species, a relative of the much more common American medicinal leech (M. decora), was first described back in 1886, after which no reports of its existence emerged again until 1977. It had been presumed extinct before that rediscovery.
The Maine Event: The Pine Tree State made innovative progress on three critical environmental issues recently. First, Maine required its pension system and state treasury to 
Under what Bradshaw calls an “interspecies system of property,” animals and people would co-own land through a legal trust. This would give animals, through their human representatives, standing in court, like other property owners.
These days more and more artists are turning their feelings about climate change, environmental justice and the extinction crisis into powerful creative works. It’s easy to see why. These issues affect just about everybody — a new recent study found that about 
Bewilderment
Once There Were Wolves
How Beautiful We Were
Harrow
Appleseed
Rabbit Island
Canyonlands Carnage
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
Milk Teeth
Hummingbird Salamander
The Hungry Earth
