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This story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Americans are regularly told that climate change is happening here and now, in real time, and that nobody will be left unscathed. Just this week as a corporate-backed disinformation campaign continued to fuel lobbying against climate science and on behalf of a failed vote on the Keystone XL pipeline, the White House released a landmark climate change report, underlining that “certain people and communities are especially vulnerable, including children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and some communities of color.” According to the even more landmark IPCC report, that goes for the developing world and rich countries alike.
Just the other day, the National Wildlife Federation announced its new president—a white male “whiz kid”. Last month, the Climate Reality Project, founded by Al Gore, replaced its female chief executive with a white man. Last November, the National Parks and Conservation Association replaced its veteran leader with another white male. The Union of Concerned Scientists is due to announce its new leader as early as next week. Spoiler alert: it’s not going to be a woman.
Public opinion research in the US suggests women, Latinos, African-Americans, Asians and Native Americans are more concerned—and more directly affected—by climate change than other populations. Doesn’t it make sense to include those who are most at risk in decisions about how we fight the defining challenge of our time?
Now take a look at the top executives at eight of the top 10 groups devoted to fighting that fight:
Sierra Club? White male.
Nature Conservancy? White male.
League of Conservation Voters? White male.
World Wildlife Fund? White male.
Environmental Defense Fund? White male.
Friends of the Earth? White male.
National Audubon Society? White male.
Nature Conservancy? White male.
The very top of “Big Green” is as white and male as a Tea Party meet-up. It doesn’t look like change. It doesn’t even look like America. So is it any wonder environmental groups are having trouble connecting with the public on climate change? Corporate and conservative funding of climate denial is one thing, but it’s beyond past time for the leaders of this movement to look at how their choice in leadership is affecting their strategy and messaging.
It’s not as if there haven’t been opportunities: the last few years have seen a generational change as more and more founding activists of the 1970s have retired. But rather than embrace the turnover as a chance to make change, we have exceptions to the old-white-man rule:
The Natural Resources Defense Council has a woman president in Frances Beinecke, but she just announced her retirement.
Greenpeace on Tuesday chose the well-known activist Annie Leonard as their president. Women also lead at Environment America, Defenders of Wildlife and Rainforest Action Network. And not to knock their leadership, but those are much smaller organizations. They are far from the top when it comes to getting money from donor foundations—which tend to be headed by white males, too—and operate on smaller budgets. They are also less likely than Big Green groups to get the access to White House officials who would help them shape climate policy.
Women and minority candidates have been applying for those top jobs, in some cases getting shortlisted. And they have been getting the top environmental jobs in government for years: Barack Obama chose Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Steven Chu to head the Energy Department during his first team. He promoted Gina McCarthy to the top job at the EPA. Even George Bush—though he blocked action on climate change—appointed Christine Todd Whitman to head the EPA.
Set aside for a moment the equality-in-the-boardroom part. America is in the midst of a demographic transformation. By mid-century—as the effects of climate change really begin to bite—whites will no longer be the majority population. In California, Latinos became the single biggest ethnic/racial population last March.
And yet the environmental groups that are calling for sweeping changes to the economy—moving away from oil and coal to carbon-free sources of energy—seem incapable of making a transition themselves.
“The community should challenge itself in the same way that it challenges corporate America to change the business-as-usual trend,” Kalee Kreider, a former environmental advisor to Al Gore, wrote me in an email. “It’s well past time for the environmental movement to look more like America and the world.”
That gap between activists and Americans has resulted in some bad decisions. In 2009, with Obama in the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, Big Green took a roll on the once-in-a-generation chance of trying to pass climate change legislation. Their strategy? Engage in a series of clubby, back-room negotiations with the chief executives of oil and utility companies to reach a deal that achieved some carbon cuts—while limiting the costs to big business. The insider deal suffered a spectacular collapse.
Then there’s the messaging. Environmental groups are only now beginning to wake up to the idea that bombarding the public with graphs and statistics is not, on its own, going to persuade people that climate change has anything to do with their own lives.
Meanwhile, beyond Washington, and beyond the male-dominated preserves of Big Green, women activists are just getting on with the job—without that White House access or the expensive consultants paid for by the biggest of big donors.
It’s worth remembering that one of the biggest victories for the environmental movement in recent years—last month’s indefinite delay on the Keystone XL pipeline—was achieved thanks to the efforts of Bold Nebraska, a tiny environmental group with just three paid staffers, which assembled an unlikely coalition of ranchers, Native Americans and other activists operating in one of the country’s most conservative states.
The president of Bold Nebraska who was so instrumental to that breakthrough? Why, that would be one Jane Fleming Kleeb.
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This story originally appeared on The Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On a cold, overcast day last fall, Jesse Logan and Wally Macfarlane hiked up Packsaddle Peak near Emigrant, Mont., not far from Yellowstone National Park. They had to climb high into the forest, at least 8,500 feet above sea level, to find the trees: tall, majestic whitebark pines, which grow slowly and can live more than a thousand years. A light snow started falling halfway up the mountain, the flakes getting heavier and wetter as they climbed. “You gotta want it to get up in here,” said Macfarlane, 46, a researcher from the Department of Watershed Resources at Utah State University.
The last time Macfarlane and Logan, 69, a former entomologist with the US Forest Service, hiked this peak, in 2009, they found the trees’ normally bright green needles turning shades of yellow and red. Now, just four years later, all the needles had fallen to the ground, and there were few signs of life in the forest. Even covered in fresh snow, which can lend anything a beautiful luster, the dead trees gave the landscape a bleak, post-apocalyptic aspect.
All across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a 28,000-square-mile area covering parts of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, a devastating beetle infestation has been killing whitebark pines. The consequences may stretch far beyond the fate of a single species of tree, however. The whitebark pine has been called the linchpin of the high-altitude ecosystem. The trees produce cones that contain pine seeds that feed red squirrels, a bird known as the Clark’s nutcracker and, most significantly, grizzly bears–a symbol of the American West and the current focus of a high-profile conservation battle.
A stand of dead whitebark pine atop Packsaddle Peak in Montana, killed by an infestation of mountain pine beetles. Kate Sheppard
In December, a panel of experts from across federal government recommended taking the grizzly bear off of the endangered species list. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to issue its final ruling on the status of the bears in the coming weeks. Successfully bringing the bears back from the brink of extinction would be a huge victory for the agency and for the Endangered Species Act, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in late December.
Yet some environmentalists and scientists like Logan and Macfarlane believe the grizzly bears are still in peril, because the whitebark is in peril. They argue that the government has failed to acknowledge the true role that climate change is playing in the pine beetle infestation. High up in the alpine wilderness, they say, a crisis is unfolding–the denial of which is a stark example of the government’s refusal to take the effects of climate change seriously.
“You have a bureaucracy that changes slowly, and you have an ecology that is being compressed in time in a way that we’ve never experienced as humans on this earth,” said Logan. “There are a lot of people within the agencies that are well aware and concerned. But there are also those whose response is denial that there’s a real critical issue here.”
Jesse Logan hiking up Packsaddle Peak in search of whitebark pine. Kate Sheppard
Logan retired from the Forest Service in 2006 and moved to Montana with the intention of skiing in the winter and fly fishing in the summer. He’d spent his last few years with the Forest Service as a project leader for the agency’s mountain pine beetle work out of the Logan, Utah, station. But instead of a peaceful retirement, he has found himself spending most of his time defending the trees he has come to love, hiking out to the far reaches of the forest to document the beetle infestation.
He and Macfarlane began working together in 2004 after meeting at a conference of US and Canadian researchers studying bark beetles. It was at that conference, Macfarlane says, that they first realized they were dealing with “the largest insect outbreak in recorded history.” A local news story referred to them as the “whitebark warriors,” a moniker that has stuck.
“Once you get into whitebark, it gets under your skin,” Logan explained. “It was just the ecology and the drama, and everything that’s associated with it in Yellowstone. I just couldn’t walk away from it.”
Because they grow at high elevations, whitebark pine trees historically did not have to deal with infestations of mountain pine beetles. Cold snaps, with temperatures sometimes plunging 30 to 40 degrees below zero, had been enough to keep beetle populations in check.
Not anymore. Global temperatures are an average of 1 degree Fahrenheit higher than the 20th century norm, and the situation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is even more alarming, with temperatures 1.4 degrees higher than last century’s average. As temperatures have risen, the beetles have moved farther north and to higher elevations. Recent studies have also found that the warmer temperatures appear to be speeding up the beetles’ reproductive cycle, meaning there are many more of them than there used to be. The whitebark pine trees, despite being able to stand up to the harsh alpine conditions, are nearly defenseless against the invaders.
“Whitebark is one hell of a survivor,” Logan said, “but it’s not a competitor.”
Logan began looking at the impact rising temperatures might have on whitebark pines back in the late 1990s, when he was still with the Forest Service. “Before any of this started, we were saying this could happen unbelievably fast,” he said. “But I was thinking this is something maybe my grandchildren will see, maybe my children. I’m not going to see it.”
In 2003, however, his prediction started coming true. Throughout the region, whitebark forests began showing signs of infestation: first patches of trees with yellowing needles, then spots of red, dying trees. Within a few years, some whitebark forests were a sea of red. By 2009, according to Logan and Macfarlane, 95 percent of the whitebark forests in the Yellowstone region showed signs of infestation.
A deep cold snap that year beat back the beetle population, however, at least temporarily. According to the federal government’s scientists, the beetle problem peaked then and has been on the decline ever since. But Logan and Macfarlane say the feds aren’t seeing what they’re seeing.
Over the summer and early fall of 2013, they partnered with the environmental groups Union of Concerned Scientists and Clean Air Cool Planet to send several young researchers deep into the whitebark forests to document the trees’ status. Some of the areas they surveyed were a three-day hike off forest roads. They didn’t find the shocking sea of red like they had during the outbreak of the previous decade, but they did find many trees facing new beetle attacks. Fifty-two percent of the plots included trees that beetles had killed, nearly half of those from infestations within the last 30 months.
“What they were able to document is, rather than this major outbreak that was easy to document, there’s been this insidious, chronic mortality, that, if you add it up over time, is no less threatening to the whitebark,” said Logan. “But it’s not as obvious because you don’t have the sea of red forest.” This, said Logan, is evidence of a long, slow, climate-fueled mortality for the whitebark.
The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem covers 28,000 square miles in parts of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. National Park Service
That’s an issue bigger than a few trees. It’s one factor under consideration as the Fish and Wildlife Service decides whether to remove protections for the grizzly bears of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem under the Endangered Species Act–protections that have been in place since 1975.
Studies have found that the high-fat, protein-rich pine seeds are beneficial to bears in a number of ways. If the bears can eat the pine seeds, for example, they are less likely to go foraging for other food, a search that can increase the likelihood that they will encounter humans and be killed. Other studies have found that female bears with access to whitebark pine seeds give birth to more cubs.
The Fish and Wildlife Service attempted to remove the “threatened” designation for the bears in 2007, after finding that populations in the region had recovered to the point that they no longer needed special protections. Delisting the grizzly would mean states, rather than the federal government, could manage habitat protections and allow some hunting of the bears.
Environmental groups filed suit to block the delisting, arguing, in part, that the government had not looked closely enough at the impact the decline of the whitebark pine would have on the bears. A federal appeals court sided with the environmentalists, finding that the government had “failed to adequately consider the impacts of global warming and mountain pine beetle infestation on the vitality of the region’s whitebark pine trees.” Protections for the bear were kept in place.
Now, however, the Fish and Wildlife Service is again considering delisting the grizzly, a decision steeped in political controversy. Removing the bears from the list would be a signal that endangered species protections work–that the bears are a success story, brought back from a population of just 136 in 1975 to more than 700 today. It would also be a recognition of the work that state land and wildlife managers have put into bringing the bears back from the brink.
“They’ve invested 30-some years of effort to get to this point,” said Christopher Servheen, the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “They would take over the management that’s in place, rather than Fish and Wildlife. It’s a vindication of that effort that they get to manage the bears.”
Indeed, the federal agency has been facing increasing pressure from states like Idaho and Wyoming, which want the federal protections removed.
But conservation groups say that the celebrations for the bear are premature, and that a decision to delist them is overly optimistic, given the climatic changes that are underway. Bill Snape, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, cited a “psychological need to declare success” on the bear’s recovery, as well as a fear of backlash from the states that want to see the bear taken off the list.
There’s also a disinclination among federal agencies, Snape said, to include climate change as a significant factor in endangered species considerations.
“They’re reluctant to come to grips with what climate change really means for that species,” said Snape. “The grizzly bear is definitely a climate-impacted species, and the agencies are not quite yet willing to admit as much.”
In December, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee recommended taking the bears off the list, in response to a report from a panel of experts from across the federal government. The report concluded that whitebark pine decline “has had no profound negative effects on grizzly bears at the individual or population level.”
In its report, government scientists concluded that beetle outbreaks are “episodic,” occurring every 20 to 40 years, and lasting 12 to 15 years. Citing Logan’s research, the report noted that “the severity of the current outbreak is attributed to warmer winters at higher elevations” and that “the long-term future of whitebark pine remains uncertain in light of climate change.” But it concluded that the current beetle outbreak is waning, and management and reforestation work should be enough to preserve the trees in the ecosystem.
“We’re still going to have some blowouts. There will be some areas where mountain pine beetles will still get a stronghold,” said Mary Frances Mahalovich, a regional geneticist at the Forest Service who served on the scientific panel that authored the report, “but it’s not going to be the watershed path of destruction we’ve seen in the last 10, 12 years.”
“There are still going to be areas where there are beetle outbreaks, and those may be the areas where Jesse and his people are working,” she said, “but when you look at the entire ecosystem, the entire beetle population is waning.”
Federal scientists say that the delisting recommendation is evidence of the success of species protections. The grizzly population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is probably bigger than it’s been in more than 100 years, said Servheen, and is three times bigger than it was 32 years ago. Further, the report concluded, grizzly bears are adaptable enough to substitute other foods for the pine seeds, and any decline in whitebark in recent years has not had a dramatic effect on the bears.
“Bears are omnivorous. They use a wide variety of foods,” said Servheen. “They’re not dependent on whitebark. They eat it when it’s available. When it’s not available, they eat other stuff.” He noted that bears in the Yellowstone region eat at least 75 different types of food on a regular basis. Meanwhile, grizzly bears in the northern part of Montana don’t eat whitebark pine seeds at all because there are far fewer trees there, due to an outbreak of a fungus known as blister rust several decades ago. And yet the bear population there is growing an average of 3 percent per year, Servheen said.
Logan and other researchers outside the federal government say federal agencies are too bullish when it comes to the whitebark and the bears. The beetle outbreak, they argue, persists, and climate change will only make the situation worse.
“The evidence on the ground does not support that,” Logan said of the committee’s determination that the beetle infestation is waning. “In fact it supports just the opposite.” He called the study team’s report “so flawed in this aspect that it’s really hard to come to grips with.”
With the Fish and Wildlife Service expected to follow the recommendations of the grizzly bear panel, environmentalists are gearing up for another legal fight. Earthjustice, the group that successfully challenged the government’s decision to delist the bear in 2007, is preparing a similar case now. The group believes that the government has again failed to consider adequately how the overlapping issues of climate change, the beetles and the whitebark pine will affect the grizzlies.
“Because the government has been so unwilling to look at climate, it’s a real vulnerability for them. That’s how we won the first delisting effort,” said Abigail Dillen, Earthjustice’s vice president for litigation on climate and energy. “This is a major trend that will affect this species. If you’re ignoring it, you’re ignoring the real biological threat here.”
Wally Macfarlane shows how the beetles have infested a whitebark pine tree on Packsaddle Peak. Kate Sheppard
The day after visiting Packsaddle Peak, Logan and Macfarlane trekked up to the top of the Beartooth Plateau, just over the border in northern Wyoming and not far from a place known as the Top of the World. Logan once considered this area a refuge for the whitebark–too high and cold for the mountain pine beetles to target. It had been safe from the beetles in 2009.
“Last time we were here, it was green forest,” Macfarlane said.
Now, however, about half of the whitebark trees were starting to show the early signs of infestation. A red, sap-like substance dripped from their bark like tears, the trees’ attempt to expel the beetles that had burrowed inside them.
“It’s very discouraging,” Logan said. He used a small hatchet to hack off a section of bark from one tree. Inside, the beetles had carved narrow, J-shaped burrows into the tree’s tissue. He plucked a tiny, dark insect, no bigger than a black bean, from the crevice.
Many of the trees still wore greenish-yellow needles that, to an untrained eye, looked healthy enough. But there were signs that the beetles were already at work inside. Logan calls these trees the “standing dead.” Soon the needles would turn a brilliant red, before falling off and leaving behind a grey, bare tree like the ones on Packsaddle Peak. He predicted that in the next two years, nearly all of the trees on the Beartooth Plateau would also be dead.
“I would not use the term ‘refuge’ standing here now,” said Logan. “We’re on the brink of a catastrophic collapse.”
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Image: James Butler
One of the most commonly repeated criticisms of wind power is that it kills birds. The giant spinning turbines are basically bird death traps—and often they cut through prime flying space, making the carnage even worse. At least that’s the story. But how many birds really do die?
If you look around for statistics about bird deaths from wind turbines get you wildly different numbers. Some say just 10,000 birds a year meet their end at the hands (blades) of the wind industry. Others ramp that number up to 600,000. Now, a new study tried to actually use science to estimate.
Of course, they didn’t go to each turbine and count how many little feathered bodies they found at the base. Instead, they combed the literature for all the studies they could find on bird deaths, and tried to combine them into an estimate. This meant searching for fun things like “’bird AND wind turbine’ with ‘collision,’ ‘mortality,’fatality,’ ‘carcass,’ and ‘post-construction.’” And then—even more cheerful—searching all those terms again, but “with ‘bird’ replaced by ‘avian’ and ‘wildlife’; and ‘turbine’ replaced by ‘farm,’ ‘facility’ and ‘energy.’”
In the end, using 58 mortality estimates that met their criteria, they came up with an estimate. According to the current literature somewhere between 140,000 and 328,000 birds die each year from collisions with wind turbines. That’s not all, explains the blog Natural Reactions:
In addition, it appears that there is a greater risk of fatal collisions with taller turbines. This is a real problem, as larger wind turbines may provide more efficient energy generation. Consequently, it is expected that new wind farms will contain even bigger turbines, which will result in even more bird deaths. Future developments therefore will have to give very careful consideration to potential wildlife impacts when planning the type of turbine to install.
The estimate, and conclusions, don’t let wind turbines off the hook. And with recent rulings to try and protect certain species from the spinning blades, the scrutiny will probably continue when it comes to bird deaths due to wind power. But at least now there’s a scientifically derived number for those deaths.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Do Wind Turbines Need a Rethink?
Scientists Save Bats and Birds from Wind Turbine Slaughter
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Remember the Sneetches?, our Dr. Seuss said:
“Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches
Had bellies with stars.
The Plain-Belly Sneetches
Had none upon thars.”
And the plain-bellied Sneetches, with one Sylvester McMonkey McBean,
painted stars on their bellies, to gain social esteem.
Now, there are species like Sneetches, but in very real places.
Pūkekos get status from shields on their faces.
On their foreheads emblazoned are bright shields of red.
The shields’ size affects everything—access to food, sharing of beds.
But like a mean Mr. McBean, Cody Dey had a plan.
With his big brush of black, he caught those birds and began.
Dey painted some, but he did not paint all.
He shrank some shields and some statuses, three sizes too small.
But while Dr. Seuss’ creatures learned that “Sneetches are Sneetches,”
the Pūkekos had trouble with Mr. Dey’s breaches.
Pūkekos’ shields can change size, a display of their might.
But by painting them down, Dey’d sealed their fates tight.
The painted Pūkekos never recovered their status;
their shields, shrunk for good, were now considered the saddest.
H/T CBC
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By Painting Their Markings, This Scientist Disrupted Birds’ Social Structure
About 1,200 acres of land have disappeared from Bulls Island and three nearby islands along the South Carolina coast since the 1990s — lost to rising seas and the eroding effects of powerful storms.
The erosion problems at the barrier islands, which are part of Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, are so severe that U.S. Interior Department secretary Sally Jewell visited them last week.
The State reports that the land’s vanishing act is harming wildlife populations:
Islands in the 66,000-acre Cape Romain refuge provide important nesting habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, federally protected reptiles that deposit their eggs in sand dunes for protection. But many of the dunes are washing away. …
Raye Nilius, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and Cape Romain project leader, said some birds that nest on Cape Romain’s islands also face threats from the encroaching ocean. As islands dwindle in size, birds that lay nests on top of the beach have fewer places for their young to hatch.
Least terns, black skimmers, and eastern brown pelicans are some of the birds of particular concern because of nesting habitat loss, Nilius said.
“We used to have huge numbers of eastern pelicans on some of those islands,” Nilius said, noting that at one spot, “They’re all gone now. Their habitat has been diminished in size.”
It’s not just chunks of land that are disappearing: Entire features of the landscape — like the spit known as Sandy Point — are entirely vanishing. A sign used to warn visitors not to bring their pets onto Sandy Point; now it juts ominously out of the water.
Source
Wildlife could be biggest losers as SC islands wash away, The State
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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The Tree of Ténéré, circa 1961. Photo: Michel Mazeau
For around 300 years, the Tree of Ténéré was fabled to be the most isolated tree on the planet. The acacia was the only tree for 250 miles in Niger’s Sahara desert, and was used as a landmark by travelers and caravans passing through the hostile terrain. The tree sprouted when the desert was a slightly more hospitable place, and for years was the sole testament to a once-greener Sahara.
In the 1930s, the tree was featured on official maps for European military campaigners, and a French ethnologist Henri Lhote called it, ”an Acacia with a degenerative trunk, sick or ill in aspect.” But he noted, as well, that “nevertheless, the tree has nice green leaves, and some yellow flowers.” The hardy tree, a nearby well showed, had reached its roots more than 100 feet underground to drink from the water table.
But then, in 1973, the centuries-old survivor met its match. A guy ran the tree over with his truck. The Libyan driver was “following a roadway that traced the old caravan route, collided with the tree, snapping its trunk,” TreeHugger reports. The driver’s name never surfaced, but rumors abound that he was drunk at the moment that he plowed into the only obstacle for miles—the tree.
Today, the tree’s dried trunk rests in the Niger National Museum, and a spindly metal sculpture has been erected in the place it once stood. The loneliest tree in the world is now this sad spruce on New Zealand’s subantarctic Campbell Island.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Things Are Looking Up for Niger’s Wild Giraffes
Born Into Bondage
Link:
The Most Isolated Tree in the World Was Killed by a (Probably Drunk) Driver
Libros
