Richard Conniff's Blog, page 28

Last Act for Africa’s Vanishing Lions

Walking dead. (Photo in Zambia: Patrick Bentley/www.patrickbentley.com, by permission)

The lion, long regarded as the king of wild African landscapes, is now rapidly vanishing from much of the continent.

Where perhaps 200,000 of them roamed across Africa in the mid-twentieth century—and an estimated 500,000 in pre-colonial times—only about 20,000 now remain.

Half of those are likely to disappear over the next two decades, according to a report out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

They are being crowded out by habitat loss, depletion of their prey base by bushmeat hunters, and retaliatory or preemptive killings to protect livestock and people—all symptoms of a sub-Saharan human population on track to grow to four billion people by the end of the century.

Poorly regulated sport hunting also contributes to the problem, according to the report.

Weirdly, this catastrophic decline of one of the most celebrated species on Earth is happening almost without public notice, even as rampant poaching of elephants, rhinos, and tigers dominates the attention of the conservation community. That’s partly because, to visitors on safari, lions can seem just fine.

“Tourists go to the Serengeti or to Kruger National Park,” said Philipp Henschel, a lion specialist for Panthera, the cat conservation group, and a co-author of the PNAS report, “and they get the impression that there is a lion lying under every single tree.” Lions are the easiest of the so-called “Big Five” African wildlife species for a tourist to see, and in these protected areas the lions are completely comfortable lounging around and looking picturesque for hours on end.

“But these are the last surviving populations,” said Henschel. “Outside protected areas, lion populations are in freefall.” They typically face shooting, spearing, trapping, or poisoning if they step across a park border. Even within some protected areas, they are in decline because of inadequate funding for park management.

The PNAS report provides a starkly divided picture of lion conservation. Populations are stable or increasing in a handful of southern African nations—Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. (Yep, despite the furor over the illegal trophy hunting of Cecil the Lion by a Minnesota dentist, and despite that country’s atrocious political and economic problems, Zimbabwe still manages to provide a degree of wildlife protection, much of it funded by trophy hunting.) A remnant population in India’s Gir Forest National Park is also on the increase. According to the PNAS authors, those populations merit “of least concern” conservation status.

But everywhere else, lion populations are plummeting. Lions are already extinct in many West and Central African nations, with only two major populations surviving—350 lions in the W. Arley Pedjari complex, on the borders of Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger; and 250 in Cameroon’s Bénoué Complex. Despite thriving wildlife-based tourism in East Africa, those populations are also experiencing sharp declines. The PNAS co-authors recommend that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) uplist lions in these regions to endangered status. (In response to a 2011 petition seeking an “endangered species” listing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year proposed listing all lions as “threatened.”)

Apart from human population growth, money is the big challenge for lion survival. “Protecting lions is not cheap,” said Hans Bauer, an Oxford University lion specialist and lead author of the PNAS report. One recent estimate put the cost to protect a lion population at $2000 per square kilometer per year. “But it’s not just for lions,” said Bauer. “Lions are the flagship.” To protect lions, you have to protect habitats, and you have to protect prey species within the habitat. “Behind lions is the whole ecosystem.”

One reason southern African nations succeed at lion conservation, added Henschel, is that governments there recognize the importance of so-called “retention schemes.” That is, they allow protected areas to retain a portion of the funds they generate through photo tourism and trophy hunting, to be used for rangers, anti-poaching patrols, vehicles, fences, and all the other infrastructure needed to keep the habitat healthy.

No such retention schemes exist, for example, in Tanzania. “The most dramatic example I know,” said Henschel, “is the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, with 8000 square kilometers of protected area. It could have 1000 lions, and yet there are only 50 there, and that’s because they are only protected on the crater floor where the tourists go. The rest, they don’t care about.”

Tourists, many of them from the United States, spend $30-50 million a year visiting there, mostly for the wildlife and also because of the celebrated archaeological site at Olduvai Gorge. Almost all of that money goes straight to a national government that is widely regarded as corrupt. Just how much comes back to maintain the habitat and the wildlife remains secret, but it is a pittance. The local Maasai pastoralists who gave Ngorongoro its name (“Gift of Life”) also do not share in the tourism economy. So if a lion steps off the crater floor, they generally spear it.

One other threat to lions is the specter of a growing trade in lion bones, as substitutes for scarce tiger bones in Asian traditional medicine. That trade, supplied mainly by trophy hunting ranches and lion breeding facilities in South Africa, is currently legal, with permits from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). But according to a recent report from Traffic, which monitors wildlife trade, the price paid for lion bones–$2100 for a complete skeleton in 2013—has motivated some hunting facilities to exhume buried carcasses to sell the bones.

The fear is that this price might also motivate the killing of lions in wild areas outside South Africa. In 2012, said Henschel, the West African nation of Benin arrested two poachers with lion skins and bones, within months after a Chinese road crew arrived in the area. The case shocked local wildlife officials: No one had previously been willing to risk their lives taking on a lion.

The bottom line is that if you think Africa without lions isn’t really Africa at all, you should contribute to groups working there to make a difference. Panthera is a good place to start. So is the African Wildlife Federation, or the Kenya-focused Living with Lions.  If you hope to see lions in the wild, you should probably do it soon. I recommend Botswana and Namibia in particular, not least because your travel dollars will actually help pay to protect the habitat.

But that’s probably not enough if you hope for lions and other African wildlife to be around long enough for your grandchildren to see.  Craig Packer, a co-author of the PNAS  report, has argued elsewhere that “African countries have too small of a tax base to support their parks in the same way as in the West,” and that World Bank funding could make a dramatic difference.  That kind of support from Germany and the European Union is the only reason the W. Arley Pedjari complex, for instance, has survived.

Support from the United States and the World Bank now looks to be our last chance step up and save the world heritage of Africa’s remaining wild areas, before they vanish forever.  Please let me know what response you get when you write or phone to ask your representatives in government to act.

Feeling That Old Mammalian Thing

I was just reading a scene in one of the Patrick Melrose novels where a young child is watching his baby brother nurse, and when someone asks what he wants for lunch, he says, “I want what he’s having.” (Yes, yes, the Edward St. Aubyn novels post-date the “I want what she’s having” scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” so it’s derivative, but also more deeply resonant.) Then I ran across this intriguing essay in the New York Times about our deep mammalian identity:

In a world of conscious beings, identity matters. Self-perception plays a vital role in behavior, so the question of how human beings think about themselves in relation to the world is more than simply one of semantics; ways of seeing lead, directly and indirectly, to ways of acting.

Given all that, I choose to identify as mammal.

And this is my reason: Our relationship to the natural world, which is changing in such dramatic ways, is in desperate need of revision. Human exceptionalism — expressed in our treatment, use and abuse of other animals, and in the damage we do to the natural environment — has paved the way for enormous harm. It seems clear, then, that identifying exclusively as human has its pitfalls.

It’s worth reading the whole piece in the Times.

Still Time to Save the Persian Gulf’s Dying Coral Reefs?

“Luxury” in place of coral reefs: Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah. (Photo: Matthias Seifer/Reuters)

My latest for Takepart:

If you wanted to see the rapid and disastrous effects of ignoring environmental science, it would be hard to find a more discouraging example than the Persian Gulf. It’s a small, shallow, salty body of water, bottled up at its southern end by the 29-mile-wide Straits of Hormuz, and researchers have been warning for more than 30 years about the inevitable consequences of careless development.

Those warnings have gone almost entirely unheeded, as the eight oil-rich nations bordering the Gulf have rushed to create global megacities in place of former trading and fishing villages. Salt marshes, salt flats, sea grass beds, mangrove swamps, and rich coral reefs have rapidly vanished, along with the fisheries they supported. An estimated 70 percent of the coral reefs, which once flourished across an area of almost 1500 square miles, are already dead, with another 15 percent in critical condition. The few reefs that remain relatively healthy tend to be around diving clubs, and in areas “worth visiting for recreational purposes,” according to an article appearing this week in Marine Pollution Bulletin. And even those are commonly “covered with fish traps and lobster pots.”

The major cause of this devastation doesn’t come from some force beyond local control, despite frequent claims to that effect. “It is not uncommon in Gulf States to hear that degradation of the shallow coastal habitats is caused variously by global warming, or by the massive and deliberate Iraqi oil spill, or by other factors which somehow are not our fault, ” writes Charles Sheppard, a University of Warwick marine ecologist who has worked in the region since the mid-1980s.

Sheppard calls that “a false deflection of blame” for problems largely caused by such mundane—and preventable–problems as “reclaiming” land by filling coastal waters, misguided dredging practices, sedimentation from development, discharges of sewage and other pollutants, and overfishing.

In one notorious case, the United Arab Emirates built Palm Jumeirah, the ostensibly glamorous artificial archipelago in the shape of a palm tree, over what had been a protected marine reserve. It buried three square miles of living coral under tons of rock and sand. (Palm Jumeirah is now said to be sinking back into the sea.)

The people behind such projects often “have little idea of understanding of what is underwater,” or how marine ecosystems works, according to Sheppard. He describes another case in an unnamed country, where a restoration program had established artificial reefs to create habitat, as the natural reefs were vanishing. Together with a ban on fishing, this resulted in a rapid recovery of corals and large groupers—a prize game fish—followed immediately by pressure from officials to allow spearfishing. Informed that this would destroy the value of the restoration project, the officials then asked if there could at least be spearfishing on holidays “with the reasoning that one day per week surely could not matter.” The only way to get them to understand why this wouldn’t work was to put it in terrestrial terms: Would they also allow one-day-a-week hunting in that nation’s struggling Arabian oryx recovery program?

To save the Gulf—“a very enclosed and not particularly large marine basin”–will require far more cooperation among the eight Gulf nations, according to Sheppard. Satellites have tracked sediment “plumes from one state going right into another, where they will smother the sea grass and algae beds and coral reefs.”

Whether such episodes result in protests from one state to another is unknown because the workings of Gulf State governments are largely hidden. But writing last year in the journal City, John Burt, a marine biologist at New York University Abu Dhabi, argued that “the highly centralized decision-making framework characteristic of governance in this region” might actually be an advantage in addressing these kinds of problems, because of the potential for “rapid changes in policy direction and financial support for … more environmentally sustainable urban development on the Gulf’s coasts.”

First, though, the Gulf States—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, together with Iraq and Iran—need to admit that they have a problem. The next step after that isn’t to do more research, Sheppard writes: “We already know enough about what is killing the shallow marine habitats of the Gulf—it is no longer a scientific issue and indeed has not been for a couple of decades.”

The job is simply to pay attention to the science that already exists in abundance. For Sheppard, that means “ecological evidence should not be viewed as being just another optional ‘stakeholder input,’ alongside the voices of, for example, a construction project’s managers, or an investment company’s interests.” Instead, “construction and investment need to work around the needs of maintaining the ecosystems because ecosystems cannot work around the needs of a heavily invested construction project.”

If that kind of dramatic shift does not happen soon, the devastation in the Gulf will only accelerate—one more poignant warning to the rest of the world, where ignoring inconvenient environmental science now seems to be epidemic.

Six Flags Wants to Go “Eco-Friendly” by Trashing a Forest

(Photo: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

I have a lot of fond memories of the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park in Jackson, NJ. When my kids were small, we made regular trips to visit grandparents at the Jersey Shore, and many summers, we also headed 24 miles inland for a day braving the latest thrill rides (or just the merry-go-round). But those fond memories are fading fast.

Early this year, John Fitzgerald, president of Six Flags Great Adventure, announced a plan to become the world’s first solar-powered amusement park. He touted it as “part of our ongoing commitment to conservation and eco-friendly initiatives,” and said it would also “enhance our role as good stewards of the environment.” The press release went on to boast that Great Adventure, which includes a 350-acre Safari Park, “has cared for more than 70 different species of animals, including some that are endangered and even extinct in the wild.” Taking the park off fossil fuels sounded smart, and also market-sensitive, at a time when its many customers on the Jersey Shore are still recovering from the climate change-aggravated devastation of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.

But there is a sticking point: The park wants to clearcut roughly 18,000 trees on 90 acres of Pine Barrens ecosystem forest to make room for a ground-mounted solar farm. Six Flags plans to compensate for the immediate loss of 18,000 mature trees by planting 27,000 immature trees somewhere else on its property, over a seven-year period.

(This is a wildlife column, but bear with me for a moment while I rant about the skewed carbon footprint mathematics that often characterize environmental tradeoff schemes, including this one: 18,000 trees growing 30 years on average—a conservative estimate–represent 540,000 years of carbon storage. Instead, the park wants to plant 27,000 trees growing, say, three years, for 81,000 years of carbon storage. But let’s give them credit, maybe Six Flags will spring for four-year-old trees. That’s just 108,000 years of carbon storage—or a quarter of what it plans to destroy. Is this the kind of accounting that passes muster anywhere other than in the p.r. department? Sorry, I’m done now.)

If Great Adventure somehow imagined its solar plan “would bring green accolades its way,” the Asbury Park Press soon editorialized, “it was sorely mistaken.” Saving the world on the lines Fitzgerald proposed, the editorial concluded, was like the American major in the Vietnam War who notoriously said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Conservationists pointed out that the acreage Six Flags Great Adventure is targeting is the headwaters of two environmentally-sensitive streams, tributaries of the Toms River and Crosswicks Creek. It is also home to nesting bald eagles, still a protected species, and possibly also to the Pine Barrens tree frog, which is already threatened by habitat loss. I say “possibly” because by email, Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, told me, “We cannot get on the property to do surveys for the tree frog or pitcher plant or anything else.” Caring for endangered species inside a Safari Park apparently counts. Protecting them in the wild not so much.

In a recent op-ed, Tittel argued that Fitgerald’s solar proposal doesn’t make sense even on business grounds: “Clear-cutting 18,000 trees on environmentally sensitive lands will not only cause destruction, but it will take longer to achieve permits for wetlands, wetlands buffers, buffer hazards and storm water, and take threatened and endangered species habitat.”

The State Department of Environmental Protection has already gone on the record opposing the proposal, which involves a site adjacent to the state’s 13,000-acre Colliers Mills Wildlife Management Area. In a letter to the park’s parent company, Six Flags Entertainment Corporation, a DEP official wrote, “We have consistently held that any solar project should be sited on existing buildings, parking lots, remediated brownfields, properly closed landfills or other previously developed land in order to limit environmental impacts. We oppose large solar projects that damage or destroy previously undisturbed natural resources, such as the project you propose.” The letter suggested that Six Flags Great Adventure instead sell the forest to the state’s Green Acres program.

In an interview, Tittel wondered why the amusement park isn’t proposing to put carport-style solar in its 200 acres of parking lot and in other developed areas of the park. That rang a bell for me, because my one unhappy memory of the place has to do with herding my kids on the long slog in scorching sun across vast areas of blacktop. Carport-style solar wouldn’t just power the amusement park, it would also provide shade.

It would be more expensive by 35-50 percent, according to Solaire Generation, a company that does parking lot installations. But Tittel pointed out that raw land in the area now sells for about $10,000 an acre. Six Flags Great Adventure could probably haggle for a premium on that 90-acre forest and use the roughly $1 million payment to defray any added cost of doing carport solar. And it’s not like parking lot solar hasn’t been tried before.

Just 43 minutes away, on the Rutgers University campus in Livingston, a 28-acre parking lot has been producing eight megawatts of power since 2011. Mike Kornitas, director of sustainability there, says its canopy system was in fact significantly cheaper than a ground-based solar facility installed three years previously. Plus it’s a nice spot for football tailgates. Rutgers is of course a government institution, and doesn’t know much about business. But Kornitas says its parking lot canopies provide 53 percent of the peak electric demand on campus–and have been cash-positive from day one. You’d think a smart business guy like John Fitzgerald could do at least as well.

The sad thing here is that Fitzgerald is a local boy made good. He started out as a Great Adventure cable car operator and has come back to serve as park president. But it’s not too late. He could still be a local hero, and let a lot of loyal customers feel good about their connection to Great Adventure.

It’s a pretty simple matter of doing the right thing, and not just talking about it.

Is Climate the Funhouse Mirror for Animal Size & Shape?

The conch snail Gibberulus gibbosus.

My latest for Takepart:

There’s plenty of evidence that species are already relocating in response to climate change. Tarpon now show up in summer as far north as Maryland. Humboldt squid have recently moved up from South and Central America into California. But is climate change also affecting the size and shape of animals’ bodies, or the way they function?

I first started thinking about the idea when I ran across a 2013 study of ocean acidification. It’s a subject I had scrupulously avoided until then because the words “ocean acidification” are, let’s face it, sleep-inducing. But stay with me a moment: The oceans have soaked up about a third of all the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by human activity over the past three centuries, with the result that marine creatures now live in water that is 30 percent more acidic than in pre-industrial times.

Think of it this way: If you jump into a swimming pool where the pH has crept up a little above the accepted range (say, from 7.6 to 7.7), you may notice that your eyes sting and your skin starts to itch. You can of course just jump out again and run to the shower. But sea creatures can’t.

The study by Australian and European researchers looked at how increasing acidity might affect an Indo-Pacific conch snail living on coral reefs. (It’s got a pretty white shell with some brown stripes, but it goes by the unlovely name Gibberulus gibbosus.) The good news: Spending a week in an aquarium tank with the acidity tweaked to near-future levels had no effect on the conch’s ability to right itself after being turned upside down. The bad news: It rapidly lost its ability to jump.

Right. I know. You never imagined that a snail could jump in the first place. But these conchs jump out of the way—by their own body length–to escape predators. You can see a slow motion video here. They may leap five times in a row, and with good reason. The predator is a cone snail, which uses a lance to inject a deadly toxin. Not jumping would be a fatal mistake. But the research team, led by Sue-Ann Watson of James Cook University, found that increasing acidity altered the function of a key neurotransmitter, slowing down or stopping the escape response in many individuals. Species can of course adapt, so this change might not lead over time to extinction. In certain scallops, for instance, escape responses are heritable, meaning they are subject to natural selection. But many mollusks are key predators, shaping entire food chains, so changes to their behavior could also change or even un-do entire ecosystems.

A more recent study looked at eleven bird species in Germany, from 1889 to 2010, to see if the steadily warming climate had caused them to shrink a little. (Bergmann’s Rule says bigger species are more common in the north, smaller ones in warmer regions.) The German researchers found no change, or at least no change consistent with climate. But another study published just this week in the journal Biology Letters looked at two butterfly species collected at the Zackenberg Research Station in northwestern Greenland between 1996 and 2013 and found their wings had become significantly shorter, meaning they have less ability to disperse by flying lomg distances.

Another study early this year looked at four parrot species in Australia from 1871 to 2008. Allen’s rule—and yes, there do seem to be a lot of rules for such an unruly topic as wildlife–argues that animals’ tend to have bigger limbs in warmer areas, as a means of shedding body heat. The Australian researchers found that the surface area of the parrots’ bills had increased by as much as 10 percent, apparently in response to the warming climate.

The most startling change, though, has to do with a new study of tongue size. I’m not sure there are any rules in play here, but tongue size makes a huge difference both for pollinators and the plants they pollinate, with tongue length and flower size often co-evolving together. In one famous story, Charles Darwin received samples of an astonishing orchid from Madagascar in which the nectar was located at the bottom of a 14-inch-long tube called the nectary. “Good Heavens what insect can suck it,” he wondered to a friend. He conjectured that there must be a moth with a proboscis that long to reach the nectar. When just such a moth turned up 41 years later, biologists named it praedicta (“predicted”) in Darwin’s honor.

For the new study, researchers looked at plants and bumble bees that have co-evolved at high elevation in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. Comparing current specimens with others in museums, they found that the tongues in some bumble bee species had lost a quarter of their length over the past 40 to 50 years, a rate of a half percent per year. Nicole Miller-Struthman of SUNY College in Old Westbury, NY, and her co-authors tracked the cause back not to decreasing body size, competition from invasive species, or other factors. Instead, warmer summers had reduced the abundance of the bees’ co-evolutionary partners—flowers with deep nectary tubes. The bumble bees are becoming generalists, visiting almost any flowers still available. That’s good news in a way. “Evolution is helping wild bees keep pace with climate change,” the authors concluded.

But a large part of the wonder and variety of the natural world has to do with its quirky specialists, its praedicta moths. Those specialists must now often adapt, becoming generalists, or die. If so, wildlife in one place will increasingly become like wildlife in another, all around the world, the way a McDonald’s is much the same in Madrid or Tokyo. It promises to be a far more boring world, if it were not also so damned scary.

After 29 Million Years, A River Dolphin Faces Risky Future

A blind dolphin swims on the Indus River in the southern Pakistani city of Sukkur. (Photo: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

If you recall the emotional impact of the 2009 movie “The Cove,” you know how horrible it is to witness the spectacle of hunters trapping and slaughtering dolphins. But it was also gratifying to our feelings of outrage, because it seemed like something we could fix, with a bit of public outrage and international pressure.

It’s infinitely harder to come to terms with the fate of an animal like the blind dolphin of the Indus River in Pakistan and India. Nobody stabs or beats them to death any more. Hunting ended by law in the early 1970s. But that is not the same thing as saving the subspecies. Instead the Indus River dolphins are on the red list of endangered species. They have lost 80 percent of their old home range, which once extended almost 2200 miles from the Arabian Sea to the foothills of the Himalayas.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, irrigation dams have repeatedly sub-divided the dolphin’s habitat, into a current total of 17 segments—10 of them now devoid of dolphins. According to a new study in the journal Biological Conservation, anywhere from 1200 to 1750 individuals survive—with 70 percent of them confined to a single 118-mile stretch of river.

That raises the disheartening prospect that the river dolphin will join Mexico’s vaquita and China’s baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin, on the spiral down to extinction. But when I phoned lead author Gill Braulik, who spent years doing field work on the Indus for WWF-Pakistan, she remarked that this is also, from another perspective, an upbeat story: The dolphins are still there, they have proved resilient in the face of appalling change, and if the world decided to take action on their behalf, they could survive indefinitely. There is hope.

These river dolphins belong to a group of freshwater dolphins that emerged about 29 million years ago, tens of millions of years before marine dolphins. They grow to about seven feet in length, live perhaps 35 years, and hunt by highly sophisticated echolocation. (Their eyes are rudimentary pinholes, because vision would be a useless extravagance in the heavily silted waters of the Indus.) Their long, toothy snout ends in the characteristic upturned “smile” of other dolphin species. By rights, they should be the charismatic poster animal for saving the ecosystem.

It is an ecosystem in dire need of saving: The dams have already destroyed a shad migration that once supported a major local fishery. Hunting has largely eliminated mugger crocodiles, as well as two species of otter. Formerly abundant freshwater turtles have lately fallen victim to a booming Chinese traditional medicine trade. The gharials, another crocodilian, are gone from the Indus, along with most of the large riverside animals—tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and Indian rhinos. That makes the river dolphin not just the top predator, but the sole remaining large aquatic species in the entire Indus River system and one of only five freshwater dolphins in the world.

The problem for the river is of course the booming human population. Pakistan is home to 188 million people today, but on track to top 307 million by mid-century. They depend on the Indus River for the overwhelming majority of their drinking water, as well as for food, the economy, and intermittent electric power. The dams back up the river water and divert it into a complicated system of irrigation canals to support the cultivation of wheat, sugar cane, and cotton on the Indus plains. Parts of the river system down stream run dry for much of the year.

The farms being fed by this irrigation rely increasingly on pesticides, which quickly find their way into the river. Upstream cities also dump 90 percent of their municipal and industrial wastewater into the river without treatment. The dolphins are thus “exposed to some of the highest levels of pollution of all cetaceans,” according to the new study, and their tissue is loaded with heavy metals, DDT, PCBs, and other toxic substances.

In addition to the agricultural dams, Pakistan now has plans to install nineteen hydropower dams on the river or its tributaries over the next ten years, and India has other such projects in the works upstream. Trying to stop those dams is not realistic and might prove counter-productive, according to Braulik. “Water is so enormously political and emotional in Pakistan because it’s so limited,” she said. “Everybody knows about the river, that’s where the water for the country comes from. You talk to shopkeepers in the bazaar, and they know about withdrawals.” Everyone also lives with an electrical system that routinely goes off for two or three hours at a time. “So that’s a big issue, especially when the temperature hits 45 degrees (113 degrees Fahrenheit) and there are no fans. It drives people completely mad, and makes them very angry.”

So where’s the hope for the Indus River blind dolphin? First, there are people in Pakistan who care passionately about dolphin conservation. In 1974, Pakistan designated an Indus Dolphin Reserve, upstream of the city of Sukkur, and volunteers there regularly take schoolchildren out onto the river to see the dolphins. The reserve’s dolphin population has steadily increased, despite the lack of regulations on fishing or other threats. (In a 2011 case, fishermen actually dumped insecticides directly into the river to increase their catch, accidentally killing six dolphins in the reserve.)

The strength of the population in some areas of the river opens up the possibility of translocations, according Braulik and her co-authors. It wouldn’t require taking dolphins out of the fast flowing river, which would be hazardous for dolphins and conservationists alike. But river dolphins sometimes get trapped in irrigation canals, and WWF-Pakistan and Sindh Wildlife Department already rescue them from otherwise certain death. Translocation to river segments that now have as few as 10 individuals could keep those populations going and prevent inbreeding.

But the bigger change would require substantial investment, first for the complicated research to find out what kind of flow the dolphins need to survive, and second to introduce the concept of water conservation. Pakistan now focuses all its efforts on taking more water from the river and the aquifer, and almost nothing on conserving what it already takes. But researchers have been pointing out since the 1980s that 40 percent of the water being taken from the Indus now goes to waste. Improvements like properly lining irrigation canals could save an estimated 14.8 billion cubic meters of water—and dolphin habitat–a year.

What can individuals do? Donating to WWF-Pakistan is one way to help. Given the geopolitical mess in the region, it’s hard to recommend actually going to the Indus River to do the work of dolphin rescue firsthand. But that’s what came to mind for co-author Randall Reeves: “Young people willing to go to really risky place on behalf of wildlife, people who have a commitment, a desire, a willingness, and a dedication” can join those already working in Pakistan and make a difference, “not just for dolphins but for wildlife generally. It can be done.”

Without that kind of commitment, the 29-million-year history of the Indus River blind dolphin will almost certainly come to an end in this century.

Leopard Becomes Total Pothead. So Sad.

In India’s Rajasthan state, a leopard got stuck when he attempted to drink water from a pot. Forest Department officials tranquilized him and managed to remove his headgear. They later set him free. (Photo: AP/Kabir Jethi)

Why Obscure Species Matter

Without bats, a lot more corn would look like this. (Photo: Flickr)

Odd bits of recent wildlife news, mostly about very small and obscure species, have left me thinking lately about a game called Jenga. If you happen never to have played it, here’s how it works: The game consists of small wooden blocks, and you start by assembling them into a tower, with each level consisting of three blocks laid horizontally, and the layers arranged crisscross to one another. On each turn, a contestant removes one block and places it on top, the point being to remove as many blocks as possible without causing the whole thing to collapse.

Believe it or not, something called the “Jenga hypothesis” has become an alternative model for understanding how ecosystems really work. In the conventional paradigm, keystone species are typically predators at the top of a food chain, and plenty of evidence has demonstrated that removing them can cause a “trophic cascade” of unexpected and sometimes catastrophic changes down the entire food chain. It’s like removing the “keystone,” the central stone that holds up an architectural archway, and watching everything fall down.   Take sea otters out of the coastal Pacific, for instance, and the sea urchins, abalone, and other invertebrates they feed on predictably boom; the sea urchins and friends in turn demolish the kelp forests, and so on down the ecosystem.

But according to the “Jenga Hypothesis,” first proposed in the journal Science in 2005, the keystone analogy is too static. It misses the highly dynamic character of real ecosystems, which change continually because of an endless and unpredictable host of factors. Jenga make a better analogy for that complexity because of its constantly shifting weights and stresses.

Much as any individual block can decide the game, the Jenga Hypothesis suggests, even the most obscure species—a humble plant-eater, say–can turn out under certain circumstances to be the keystone of an entire ecosystem. Sometimes you can remove a species from a habitat, and other species make up for the loss, allowing the ecosystem to go on as if nothing has changed. In other circumstances, you pull out that same species and the tower comes crashing down.

The first of the studies that got me thinking about the Jenga Hypothesis has to do with the copepod Calanus finmarchicus, a marine crustacean about the size of a grain of rice. There are a lot of these grains of rice in the North Atlantic, billions or trillions of them. European researchers have discovered that they swim down to a depth of more than half a mile for their winter hibernation. That’s deep enough that the water does not come into contact with the atmosphere, and the carbon dioxide the copepods release there is effectively sequestered, perhaps for thousands of years. The bottom line, the researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is that—good news–we can reasonably double the estimate of the amount of carbon being taken out of the atmosphere by the oceans. That is, unless circumstances change—for instance, because of the climate change that’s already happening. In that case—bad news–loss of Calanus finmarchicus might just become key to the collapse of the ecosystem called Planet Earth.

Given our tendency to think in hierarchical, top-down terms, it might be hard to accept that bottom-feeders can play a critical role in making the world work. But in truth, our own system of producing food depends on this reality. Also in PNAS recently, another study carefully screened off cornfields by night to see if researchers could quantify just how much difference bats make in controlling agricultural pests. The screens were rolled back by day, to provide free access to birds and other pest-eating species. Even so, the absence of bats by night meant that corn there had a higher level of fungal infestation, 60 percent more corn earworms, and 50 percent more kernel damage. The authors extrapolated their results—not counting the amount bats save farmers in pesticide spraying—and calculated the benefit to the global crop at $1 billion annually.

The numbers are of course even higher for the agricultural work performed by honeybees and native pollinators. In the United States alone they contribute anywhere from $4 to $8 billion a year in essential services. Because pollinators (and also bats) are in sharp decline, farmers must often struggle to replace them. In China, they now have to hand-pollinate some crops.

But the Jenga hypothesis isn’t really about agriculture. It’s about the natural world, in an age of global mass extinction caused by humans.   Species are now disappearing at 10 to 100 times the normal rate of extinction, and that rate is likely to accelerate as climate change and ocean acidification kick in, and as early-wave extinctions cause knock-on extinctions among other species that depended on them. In Hawaii, for instance, the loss of a native pollinator species means conservationists must use a paintbrush to hand-pollinate one native shrub species to keep it from also becoming extinct. But you cannot hand-pollinate an entire planet.

The Jenga Hypothesis asks us to think about each species—and even about each new oil well, each new housing development, each new clearcut that imperils a species–and ask: Is this the one? Is what I’m doing part of the great undoing? Is this the crucial block that will bring down the tower on us all?

Me and My Jetta: How VW Broke My Heart

THE day I went to pick up my new Volkswagen Jetta TDI in March 2009, the salesman had me sit in the driver’s seat while he introduced the car’s various features. The engine was softly idling, and as I reached to shut it off, he told me not to bother. The minimal amount of fuel this car burned — sipped, in the automotive argot — was its great selling point. That, and the almost complete removal of hazardous exhaust that had made earlier diesel vehicles notorious.

This was that new thing in the world, “clean diesel,” using ingenious German technology to keep nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions out of kids’ lungs, and low enough to meet even California’s stringent pollution standards. A committee of jurors, including the executive director of the Sierra Club and the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, had just called it the “Green Car of the Year.” A review in this newspaper described the Jetta TDI, persuasively, as “easy on money, fuel and the planet.”

It was quiet, too. The salesman told me to rev the engine, to hear just how quiet, and I hesitated. I am not …  Read the full story in the New York Times.

How Farm Subsidies Could Save the World, Not Trash It

Ol’ Syngenta had a farm. Ee-i-ee-i-o (Photo: Gary Cameron/Reuters)

My latest for Takepart:

Agricultural subsidies are, let’s face it, incredibly complicated and boring, and that’s the eternal problem with changing them: It’s just too hard to get the public to care even about a system that is, on its face, bizarre, destructive, and politically corrupt. It’s especially hard to care when the big losers are wildlife and the environment.

Well, o.k., taxpayers lose, too. In the United States, agribusiness takes $20 billion worth of subsidies out of our pockets every year. Hardly any of that supports the production of healthier foods, or benefits wildlife, the environment, or the public. But most of us would rather scrub toilets or run marathons than think about it. Meanwhile, agribusiness spent $138 million on lobbying in 2012, and another $90 million on federal campaign contributions to keep these handouts just the way they are.

And yet, it’s worth thinking hard about how to design a farm subsidy program that benefits wildlife, the public, and farmers alike. It’s worth it because—and forgive me for being the buzzkill on a day when you would rather be happily cleaning toilets–the survival of life on Earth depends on it.

Check out this 2010 TED talk by ecologist Jon Foley for the scary details. Or let me summarize: It’s bad enough that agriculture is already the single largest consumer of land and water, the biggest polluter of our waterways with suffocating quantities of nitrogen and phosphorous, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest driver of species extinctions and biodiversity loss on Earth. But here’s the really scary part: Farm output needs to double in this century the human population grows to 11 billion people.

Where to begin the business of reforming subsidies to make our agricultural sector a little less insane? A new article in PLOS Biology casts a skeptical eye on even our current limited subsidies aimed at making agriculture less destructive. “My big beef,” said Andrew J. Tanentzap, lead author and an ecosystems specialist at the University of Cambridge, ”is that these European agri-environment scheme cost billions every year and nobody knows whether they work.”

A typical problem is that incentive schemes reward farmers for taking actions, rather than for producing results. In one absurd case, the European Union was trying to encourage recovery of certain bird species by offering a subsidy for every nesting box farmers put up on their land. “So this farmer in Hungary nailed a nesting box on every tree,” said Tanentzap. “There were maybe 500 trees in this stand, where one or two nesting boxes would have been enough. That really crystallizes the perversity of the whole thing. You’re paying people for things that have no benefit whatever.”

Another EU program paid farmers to take land out production and set it aside for wildlife. But since “no environmental outcome was explicitly targeted,” Tanentzap and his co-authors write, farmers tended to retire their worst land, “limiting environmental benefits.” (The U.S. counterpart, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), avoids this mistake, specifically rewarding farmers to set aside riparian buffers, wildlife habitat buffers, and other environmentally sensitive land. But Congress last year drastically scaled back the program—meanwhile maintaining perverse federal ethanol subsidies, which have led many farmers to plant border-to-border corn on former CRP land.)

Even when conservation-minded incentives work, Tanentzap and his co-authors write, they may simply cause productivity in one place to shift to someplace else. They might reduce U.S. production of soybeans, say, and indirectly cause the clearing of farmland from South American rainforests to grow additional soybeans.

So what kind of changes do we need to get more food and at the same time see better results for wildlife, clean water, and other key environmental values? A good first step is to eliminate subsidies that fail to accomplish both objectives. For instance, price supports for milk production make farming marginal land “artificially profitable,” according to the PLOS Biology paper. A study in Wisconsin found that simply lowering the price support—never mind eliminating it—would reduce costs to consumers and taxpayers, cause thousands of acres to revert from marginal farmland to natural forest, create new wildlife habitat, reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and sequester more carbon, among other benefits. The story is much the same for subsidies that artificially support corn, sugar, and meat production.

Smarter incentives should aim at feeding the world and saving it, too, according to Tanentzap. It would probably require a mix of subsidies for beneficial practices and penalties for bad ones. For instance, it might reward farmers who use high-tech methods to apply water and nutrients exactly where their crops need them, but penalize farmers who use too much water or fertilizer.

Broad visionary changes to the global farming system could make a lifesaving difference. For instance, researchers recently calculated that Brazil could save its beleaguered Atlantic Forest, protecting 10,000 plant species and more birds than in all of Europe, simply by shifting just 6.5 percent of agricultural subsidies.

So what are the chances that we can make those kinds of changes happen, in time to save wildlife and the world? Here is the thing: Government officials pay attention to those who speak up. According to a 2013 industry survey in Europe, government officials considered lobbying up to 80 percent effective. But the lobbyists are almost all from industry. Unless the rest of us speak just as loudly, elected officials will continue selling wildlife, water quality, the soil, and the global climate down the river—and they’ll sell the river, too—in blind devotion to their twin gods, corporate profits and election campaign largesse.

Pick up the phone and call your representatives in Congress now. It is our only hope.

P.S. Here’s a good one to start talking about: Fifty years ago, Congress created The Land and Water Conservation Fund by unanimous vote. Now it’s intent on letting it expire at the end of this month.   That’s a tragedy your voice can prevent.