Richard Conniff's Blog, page 36

Are Big Environmental Groups Selling Out the Environment?

(Photo: Drew Rush/Getty Images)

In the book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed tells her story of hiking 1,100 miles from Southern California to Washington. That journey��� depicted in the new movie ���Wild��� starring Reese Witherspoon���ultimately healed her from a mess of woes.�� She learned, as Strayed put it at one point, that ���being amidst the un-desecrated beauty of wilderness meant I too could be un-desecrated, regardless of what I���d lost or what had taken from me.���

Score one for the United States government: That trail winds through dozens of areas officially protected as wilderness by the Wilderness Act of 1964. It defines wilderness in part as those places ���untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.��� Women, too.�� Since President Johnson first signed it into law, the Wilderness Act has permanently protected about 100 million acres of land from logging, motorized recreation, or other forms of development–an area larger than the state of California.

Now, however, that wilderness is at risk, under attack from the very groups that should be protecting it, according to Howie Wolke, a long-time wilderness advocate and guide. ���A deep malaise afflicts wildland conservation,��� he, told a recent conference otherwise devoted to celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. He went on to praise local activist groups for acting as the guardians of nearby wilderness areas. ���But these outfits are routinely undercut by a relatively small cadre of big national and regional groups with big budgets, and often with obscenely big salaries for their executives. Real activism that highlights education and organizing wilderness defenders has been swept aside, replaced by collaborative efforts to designate watered-down wilderness.���

Wolke���s criticism came at a moment when environmental groups generally are under criticism for abandoning former ideals, like the absolute protection of species, in favor of policies that focus on working with local communities and developing the social benefits of protected areas.�� While this shift has many advocates who regard it as the only practical way to keep protected areas from being overwhelmed by increasing human populations, federally-designated wilderness has always belonged in a separate, more sacred, category.

These wilderness areas often represent the last vestiges of pre-settlement America, undisturbed for all of recorded history.�� That���s not something to trifle it, according to Wolke, who started out working for Friends of the Earth before co-founding the radical environmental group Earth First! in 1979.�� ���Once you lose it, it���s gone,��� he said. Federal wilderness is generally high-quality wildlife habitat, especially for species that are sensitive to intrusion, or for those, like wolves, bears, and other large carnivores, with extensive home ranges.�� ��Wilderness can also serve as a reservoir of genetic diversity for repopulating developed areas, and it protects watersheds, aquifers, and air quality. Least important, it provides a place where people can come to experience the benefits of being in nature, both spiritual and physiological.

But according to Wolke, groups like The Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Audubon Society are doing more harm than good when it comes to wilderness protection. ���Unfortunately, I am not simply talking about honest differences of opinion over strategy. I���m talking about the Big Greens actively working against conservation, routinely teaming up with corporate exploiters and other anti-wilderness constituencies. There���s a fine line between strategic differences and actually working to oppose grassroots conservation; and that line is now routinely crossed.���

The Wilderness Society, he said, ���opposed the efforts of Wilderness Watch and local conservationists to keep Georgia���s Cumberland Island National Seashore wild��� and supported the National Park Service plan to run motor tours through this designated wilderness. (Wolke serves on the Wilderness Watch board of directors.) ��It encouraged the Bureau of Land Management to allow ranchers to use ATVs in the Owyhee Canyons Wilderness in Idaho.�� It also �����supported an extremely absurd Forest Service plan to burn nearly the entire Linville Gorge Wilderness in North Carolina! Of equal shock value, a couple of years ago, TWS staffer Paul Spitler produced a paper entitled ���Managing Wildfires in Wilderness.��� That paper supported logging, road-building and bulldozing pre-emptive fire-breaks in designated Wilderness.���

Those sorts of action add up, according to Wolke, to a loss of commitment to wilderness and the Wilderness Act, meaning a pattern of creeping intrusions into designated wilderness areas and a sense among federal wilderness managers, as a post on the Wilderness Watch website put it, that Congress will ���bail them out of unlawful actions when they are caught.���

The main problem, Wolke said in an interview, is that the Wilderness Society and other major conservation groups are no longer grassroots organizations, as they once were, but instead now have top-down structures with decisions made in Washington, D.C., by ���people who do not have a real close association on the ground, with the land.��� Without a ���visceral, personal connection��� to wilderness, Wolke said, it���s much easier to compromise.

���Our job is to push, pull, cajole, embarrass, and encourage the agencies and politicians to support new Wilderness designations and to keep designated Wilderness wild,��� he wrote in published prepared comments for his talk. ���Our job is not to rubber stamp agency plans or to appease Congressional Democrats.���

Stewart Brandborg, who was president of The Wilderness Society when President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act and for 13 years afterward, agreed with Wolke. ���I���m deeply concerned about the failure of the national environmental groups to mobilize the public in support of aggressive campaigns for preservation of the wilderness,��� he said in an interview. He thinks that groups like The Wilderness Society should be acting through their state and local entities to build teams of citizens ���who will work tirelessly��� to protect more wild lands. The ���ultimate strength��� of the movement, Brandborg said, ���lies in citizen activists who see the critical urgency of gaining dedication of these lands as wilderness.��� Without these citizens, he said, the movement will ultimately fail.

But Amy Vedder, a Yale lecturer and former senior vice president of conservation at The Wilderness Society, countered Wolke���s charge of inside-the-Beltway indifference. ���The people I was working with,��� she said, ���were almost uniformly deeply committed to wilderness. I think it���s an organization that has tremendously passionate people who care very deeply for wilderness.���

She noted that getting new areas designated as wilderness has become a messy process, held up by the deeply polarized climate in Congress and the resulting legislative gridlock.�� Congress designated two million acres across nine states as wilderness in 2009.�� But it failed to designate any additional lands over the next five years, despite multiple bills proposing new wilderness areas.

What can voters do to change that?�� To get a sense of the value of protected wilderness, take a page out of Cheryl Strayed���s book and go for a walk in your closest wilderness area.�� Beyond that, said Wolke, write to your representatives in Congress. ���This is very old-fashioned, but it works, because politicians worry about votes,��� he said. ���Say that you want public lands that qualify to be designated wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964, without special provisions and with maximum acreage.��� Writing letters to local newspapers helps, too, since Congressional staffers often read and relay those to their bosses. ���Make an annoyance,��� Wolke said, speaking from experience. ���The squeaky wheel gets the grease.���

The Oceans Are on the Brink of Mass Extinction

A whale killed by our increasing reliance on container ships (Photo: Marco De Swart/Agence France-Presse ��� Getty Images)

Take a look at Carl Zimmer’s disturbing story in today’s New York Times.�� Here’s the lead:

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

���We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,��� said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

And here’s an excerpt from further down in the article:

���I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea,��� said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.

There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as

technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.

Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide, partly as a result of climate-change-driven warming.

Some fish are migrating to cooler waters already. Black sea bass, once most common off the coast of Virginia, have moved up to New Jersey. Less fortunate species may not be able to find new ranges. At the same time, carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic.

���If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,��� Dr. Pinsky said. ���In effect, that���s what we���re doing to the oceans.���

Read the whole article here.

Using Probiotics to Prevent Disease is Common in the Animal World

Doctors of probiotic medicine (Photo: Stefan Meyers/Arkive)

I light up whenever I see a story about hoopoes, colorful Old World birds, mainly for the silly reason that they have the coolest scientific name in the animal kingdom.�� I think it may just be impossible to say Upupa epops without smiling.�� I’m pretty sure these birds must be fans of 1950s jazz.

But let’s talk about the story, which is in equal parts intriguing and kind of annoying. Scientists have discovered that hoopoe moms laying their eggs automatically apply a bacterial film that protects their protects their offspring from various pathogens.�� This is cool stuff: Birds using probiotics.

The press release says that this sort of behavior has never been detected before in any bird species.�� It thus gives the gives the annoying impression that this is a totally new thing in science, which is of course not so.�� For at least the past half dozen years, for instance, scientists have been studying how certain salamanders and frogs apply a bacterial coating that protects their eggs from the deadly chitrid fungus and other pathogens, as I wrote here in 2013.

Indeed, all the writer of the press release needed to do was read the first paragraph of the study to learn that the science of probiotics in multiple species “is one of the most exciting discoveries in ecological immunology”:

Animals using chemicals from metabolism of symbiotic bacteria against pathogenic micro-organisms and parasites is one of the most exciting discoveries in ecological immunology. Bacteria produce an extraordinary diversity of antimicrobial compounds to inhibit other micro-organisms (Ji, Beavis & Novick 1997; Riley & Wertz 2002) and, when they are in symbiotic associations with animals, such chemicals may function for hosts as defences against pathogenic micro-organisms and parasites. For instance, chemicals produced by symbiotic bacteria are known to protect ants’ gardens, wood galleries of beetles and embryos of shrimp, lobsters, squid, wasps and some salamanders from pathogenic bacteria and/or competitor fungi (Gil-Turnes, Hay & Fenical 1989; Barbieri et��al. 1997, 2001; Currie et��al. 1999; Kaltenpoth et��al. 2005; Cardoza, Klepzig & Raffa 2006; Banning et��al. 2008; Scott et��al. 2008), or aphid hosts from their parasitoids (Oliver et��al. 2003), which illustrate the great variety of animals that use antibiotic-producing bacteria as defence against pathogenic infection.

What’s really exciting, and could have made a far better press release, is the idea that the animal world has its own complete science of probiotic medicine, which we are only beginning to figure it out.�� Anyway, here’s the annoying press release.

Researchers from the University of Granada and the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) have found that hoophoes cover their eggs with a secretion produced by themselves, loaded with mutualistic bacteria, which is then retained by a specialized structure in the eggshell and which increases successful hatching. So far this sort of behaviour has only been detected in this species of birds, and it is a mechanism to protect their eggs from infections by pathogens. Through an experiment published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, scientists from several research groups precluded several female hoophoes from impregnating their eggs with this substance, which they produce themselves inside the so-called uropygial gland. The research groups involved in this project were the following: Animal Behaviour and Ecology, Microorganism-Produced Antagonistic Substances, both from the UGR, and Evolutive Ecology and the Behaviour and Conservation groups from the Dry Areas Experimental Station (Almer��a, CSIC)

By doing so they confirmed that the amount of pathogen bacteria that could be found inside the eggs which failed to hatch was higher in those nests in which they had experimentally precluded the females from using their secretion than in those where they were allowed to use this substance. They concluded that this secretion provides a barrier for the entry of pathogens towards the interior of the egg.

Presence of enterococci

On the other hand, not just the secretion as a whole, but particularly the bacteria that did produce bacteriocins (small antimicrobial proteins) in that secretion, the enterococci, are beneficial for the developing embryos, since successful hatches were directly related to the amount of these enterococci in the egg shells and in the secretions of the females. The more enterococci they had, the higher the rate in their successful hatching.

As UGR zoology professor, Manuel Mart��n-Vivaldi, one of the authors of this research underlines, during the last few years the field of evolutive ecology has acknowledged “the important role played by bacteria, not just as infectious agents capable of producing diseases, but also as allies of animals and other living creatures in their struggle against disease, due to their extraordinary capacity to synthesise compounds with antimicrobial properties”

In the case of the hoophoe’s uropygical gland, scientists have confirmed that its components are very different from those of other birds. This is to a large extent due to the action of the bacteria present in this particular gland.

This research has also revealed that hoophoes have developed an exceptional property in their eggs — which has not so far been found in any other species of bird. This consists in the presence in the surface of many small depressions that do not completely penetrate the shell, and whose function appears to be the retention of this bacteria-carrying secretion that covers the egg.

Bacteria in the eggshell

“With this experiment, we have been able to establish that if the females can use their secretion, towards the end of the incubation period, those tiny craters are full of a substance saturated with bacteria. If we preclude the use of this secretion, these tiny craters appear empty towards the end of the hatching process,” said professors Mart��n-Vivaldi.

These results prove that in this particular species of bird, “its reproductive strategy has evolved hand in hand with the use of bacteria which may be beneficial for the production of antimicrobial substances, which they cultivate in their gland and then apply upon eggs which are particularly endowed to retain them”

These scientists are currently working to determine the specific composition of the bacterial community within the gland, how these symbionts are acquired, and the types of antimicrobial compounds which synthesize these bacteria, capable of protecting the embryos which are undergoing development.

Further research along these lines will facilitate a better understanding of the way in which mutualistic interactions function between animals and beneficial bacteria, and also to detect new antimicrobial substances with a potential to be used in medicine of for food preservation.

This study is the result of the following two projects: “Nests, parasites and bacteria: a multidisciplinary approach to the study of adaptation for breeding in high parasitism risk environments,” funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and “Biodiversity and acquisition mechanisms in the bacterial community within the uropygial gland of hoophoes (Upupa epops), funded by the Department of Innovation, Science and Business of the Junta de Andaluc��a (within the Programme of Incentives for Excellence in Research)

Journal Reference:

Manuel Mart��n-Vivaldi, Juan J. Soler, Juan M. Peralta-S��nchez, Laura Arco, Antonio M. Mart��n-Platero, Manuel Mart��nez-Bueno, Magdalena Ruiz-Rodr��guez, Eva Valdivia. Special structures of hoopoe eggshells enhance the adhesion of symbiont-carrying uropygial secretion that increase hatching success. Journal of Animal Ecology, 2014; 83 (6): 1289 DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.12243

Why Bats Are So Prone to Pathogens

A pallid bat holds a meal of a katydid. (Photo: Merlin D. Tuttle/Bat Conservation International)

I’ve written here before about why bats are the source of so many deadly diseases–including MERS, SARS, Nipah virus, Hendra virus, Lassa and Marburg hemorrhagic fevers, and of course Ebola.

Why bats? It���s partly because they are such a diverse group, with 1,250 species, comprising about 20 percent of all mammals, says Jon Epstein, a veterinary disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance in New York. Some researchers theorize that immune systems or other physiological differences might make bats more likely to carry viruses. But so far that���s only a theory. The bat lifestyle of roosting together in dense colonies may also encourage viruses. These colonies often occur in and around human habitations, and the ability of bats to fly means any virus can get dispersed across a wide geographic area.

But when you see an emerging disease come from wildlife, says Epstein, ���it���s generally triggered by something people have done to manipulate the environment,��� meaning agricultural expansion or intensification, or urbanization, coupled with the modern tendency to move plants, animals, and people all over the world.�� ���It���s really human activities that are driving spillover.���

In today’s New York Times, Natalie Angier suggests that the proneness to pathogens is all about the immune system:

Yet bats appear largely immune to the many viruses they carry and rarely show signs of the diseases that will rapidly overwhelm any human, monkey, horse, pig or other mammalian host the microbes manage to infiltrate.

Scientists have also learned thatbats live a seriously long time for creatures of their small size. The insectivorous Brandt���s bat of Eurasia, for example, weighs an average of just six grams, compared with 20 grams for a mouse. But while a mouse is lucky to live for a year, the Brandt���s bat can survive well into its 40s ��� a disparity between life span and body mass that a report in Nature Communications called ���the most extreme��� of all mammals.

Bats may be girded against cancer, too. ���At this stage, the evidence is anecdotal,��� said Lin-Fa Wang, a bat virologist at the Duke-NUS Graduate School in Singapore and the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong. ���But of all the bat biologists I���ve spoken with, I���ve only heard of one or two cases of bat tumors.���

Researchers are scrutinizing bat DNA and the details of the bat vocation for clues to what sets the flying mammals apart from other members of the lactating clade. Preliminary findings indicate that bats��� apparent indifference to the viral throngs they harbor, together with their Methuselah-grade longevity, probably arose from the adaptations needed to grant them the power of flight.

Read the rest of Natalie’s story here.�� (And reflect on that little Angier-esque gem that we are all members of “the lactating clade,” defined by a trait exclusive to the female gender. I guess if we wanted to bring the male side into it, in the interest of gender balance, we would have to put a little more emphasis on fur-bearing.)

Why 2015 Should be a Good Year for Wildlife

(Photo: David Fettes/Getty Images)

 

There’s always plenty of reason to get depressed about the prospects for wildlife at the start of the New Year.  Environmentalists were, for instance, unable to stop last weekend’s predator hunting derby by Idaho’s abundant population of anti-wolf idiots.  But there’s good news, too: They didn’t kill any.  (In fact, it took the sound and fury of 125 hunters to shoot just 30 coyotes).

Better still, a study published last month in the journal Science reported that even if the Idaho effete tremble at the idea of living with their native predators, Europe is handling them just fine.  In fact, the continent that gave us “Little Red Riding Hood” and “the Big Bad Wolf,” is now home to twice as many wolves as the contiguous United States, despite being half the size and more than twice as densely populated.  Look for wolves to expand their range this year, building on recent forays into Denmark and Belgium. Thanks to its equivalent of the Endangered Species Act, Europe also manages to live happily with an estimated 17,000 brown bears compared with just 1,800 grizzly bears in the U.S. Lower 48.

My point is that we should start the New Year not in frustration and despair at the plight of wildlife, but intent on success, because the worldwide fight for wildlife has in fact compiled an extraordinary record of achievement.  (I’m thinking of

the U.S. recovery of bison and bald eagles, for starters.) With that in mind, the list of areas where we should focus on winning in 2015 starts with the usual suspects: Climate change and habitat loss.

Yes, I know, you’re tired of reading about the perils of a warming planet. Me, too. But when it comes to wildlife, there is nothing else that comes close to having the same impact. Species from coral to Kirtland’s warblers are already shifting their ranges to adjust to new regional temperatures, while other species have declined or simply vanished. Even protected areas may not provide much of a refuge: Without connectivity between high-quality habitats, many animals won’t be able to migrate to cope with rising temperatures.

So where can we work for progress on the issue?  Republicans in Washington, who once dreamed up the ingenious marketplace fix for pollution called “cap-and-trade,” now think the Keystone XL pipeline is God. And for the next two years, the Party of No Hope is calling the shots in Congress.

On the other hand, China joined the United States late last year in announcing an agreement to reduce emissions, a surprise move that lent an air of optimism to the ensuing Lima climate change negotiations. The accord that came out of Lima was weaker than many had hoped for. But negotiators will meet again late this year in Paris, and one proposed paragraph calls for a binding deal on “carbon neutrality/net zero emissions by 2050.” Will it happen?  The reluctance of countries to make firm pledges in Lima does not bode well.

Activists on the issue might want to look to cities rather than nations for a quicker way to save the world, because cities tend to downplay ideology and experiment with practical fixes.  (Not incidentally, many of them are among the first areas likely to face flooding from rising seas.)  Cities have also lately become a lot quicker at copying one another’s success stories. For instance, bike-sharing, introduced in Paris in 2007, as a fix for both traffic and pollution problems, has spread to 714 cities around the world.  The city of Wuhan, China, alone, now has 90,000 bikes in service.  That may sound like a long way from wildlife issues.  But the C40 Cities Group now has 70 major cities, from London to Jakarta, working on other practical steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The global migration to cities may also help address habitat loss and fragmentation.  One reason wolves and other species are making a comeback in Europe is that small farmers are abandoning marginal land at a rate of nearly 4,000 square miles—or half a Massachusetts—every year, leaving room for the recovery of native species. 

There’s also a promising movement among conservationists to put marginal land in urbanized areas—like roadsides and power transmission corridors—back to work as habitat for endangered pollinators and other wildlife.  Some forward-thinking utilities now recognize that they can save money and earn public relations bonus points when they stop mowing transmission corridors and maintain them instead as a scrubby habitat of wildflowers, sedges, ferns, and low shrubs.  A new group, the Right of Way Stewardship Council, is setting standards for right-of-way management with wildlife in mind, and a half-dozen power companies have sought certification so far. Utility rights-of-way add up in the U.S. to about nine million acres for power transmission lines, and another 12 million for pipelines.One pollinator biologist told me they have the potential to become a network of conservation reserves roughly one-third the area of the national park system.

A handful of states—notably Arizona, Florida, and Iowa—are leading a similar movement to develop the habitat potential of highway margins.  With America’s most beloved butterfly, the monarch, moving rapidly toward the Endangered Species List, it’s time to take advantage of the margins and medians on the nation’s four million miles of highways.

Wildlife may also get a break from the recent pact signed by 30 nations to halve the rate at which they are leveling forests over the next five years and restore a million square miles of degraded forest.  Brazil, home to the largest continuous forest on Earth, declined to join the effort. But it has reduced deforestation significantly over the past decade.  Despite satellite data from October showing an uptick in deforestation, Brazil expects to continue that downward trend.

The bad news is that rate of deforestation in Indonesia last year surpassed that of Brazil, and it’s only increasing.  Wood pulp and palm oil plantations have wiped out vast areas of forest, leaving orangutans and countless other species homeless, along with the indigenous human residents.  Until that changes, shoppers should avoid all products from Indonesia, and think hard about using the many common products made with palm oil.

On the other hand, some developing countries seem to be waking up to the idea that protecting at least some forms of wildlife really does matter to their economic well being.  Despite its deforestation failures, Indonesia recently declared the entire island nation a refuge for manta rays, as part of an effort to move its outlaw fisheries industry back toward sustainability.  More dramatically, Indonesia set fire to a foreign vessel fishing illegally in its waters and put other pirate fishing operations on notice that they should expect to be sunk on sight.

So, yeah, there are plenty of reasons to despair and do nothing.  But that happy thought has me believing we can still work to make 2015 a very good year for wildlife.

 

How Farming Tiger Parts Just Makes Poaching Worse

At Tiger Park in Harbin, China, tourists pay $10 to feed tigers a live chicken. (Qilai Shen/For The Washington Post)

The Washington Post has an interesting account about how the trend among China’s elite for showing off status with products made from tigers is actually getting worse, not better. China’s State Forestry Administration is driving the process by subsidizing farming of tiger parts, according to the report, and that inadvertently makes poaching of wild tigers more lucrative.

Here’s an excerpt:

Encouraged by the tiger farming industry, China’s wealthy are rediscovering a taste for tiger bone wine — promoted as a treatment for rheumatism and impotence — as well as tiger-skin rugs and stuffed animals, sought after as status symbols among an elite obsessed with conspicuous consumption.

That trend, in turn, is making tiger poaching more lucrative across Asia — because it is cheaper to kill wild tigers and smuggle pelts and parts across borders than to raise captive-bred ones, and the wild cats often are preferred by consumers. Farming has removed any stigma from tiger products and undermined global efforts to stamp out the illegal trade.

“The argument put forward by the tiger-farming lobby is that farmed tiger products will flood the market,

relieving pressure on wild tigers,” said Debbie Banks of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). “This is a ridiculous notion and has turned into a disastrous experiment.”

Tigers’ numbers globally have stabilized in recent years, yet they are still perilously low. And wild tigers are dying in record numbers in India, their main habitat, with many killed by poachers to satisfy demand from China.

The next two years could be crucial, environmentalists say. With calls for change increasing both within the country and outside, China is reviewing its 25-year-old wildlife law and asking itself: Will it stand on the side of its domestic tiger-farming lobby or will it stand on the side of wild tigers and global public opinion?

Read the whole story here.

In Texas: A Little Too Close to the Cows

NPR’s Morning Edition interviewed some nuns from a convent that operates a ranch somewhere in the great and very peculiar state of Texas.  I was going along with it just fine, until Sister Mary Longhorn said, “Praying is like chewing the cud. You chew, chew, chew, regurgitate, chew, chew, chew.”

This is even worse than when the nuns in grade school taught us that short, ecstatic prayers were “ejaculations.”

I stand by the larger truth that God is Dog.

We Spend $60 billion on Pets. How About a Little for Wildlife?

A wildflower at The Nature Conservancy’s Boardman Grasslands in north central Oregon.

You’ve probably already noticed this while flipping through the contents of your overstuffed mailbox or scrolling past the endless stream of email solicitations, but this is the time of the year when nonprofit organizations ramp up their pleas for your donations. And with good reason: About a third of all charitable giving in the United States takes place in December. This is, of course, due to holiday cheer and a spirit of giving—not anything so cynical as tax write-offs.

But don’t be so quick to hit delete. Charitable giving makes us happier, and it has the potential to make wildlife happier too, or at least to keep monarch butterflies, wolves, elephants, songbirds, and other creatures a part of this world. Government funding for wildlife is declining everywhere, even as the pressure on wildlife from poaching, climate change, and expanding human populations dramatically worsens. “Conservation is often an early casualty of any government funding squeeze,” the authors of a recent Nature article noted. In the United States, for instance, the National Park Service has seen a 13 percent drop in funding over the past five years, and it’s much worse in many other countries. That means many wildlife and conservation organizations, and the animals they protect, increasingly depend on charitable contributions.

So how do you handle the tricky task of choosing just which organizations to support? Charity Navigator rates nonprofits on their financial efficiency and transparency (but not on the effectiveness of their services and programs). It lists 271 organizations under the Environmental Protection and Conservation heading, and that’s just organizations it has evaluated. Behavioral economists have shown that too having many choices leads to inaction, and the check never makes it into the mail. So let’s cut down the choices.

When I asked conservation-minded contacts on Twitter and Facebook and via email for their ideas on donating to help wildlife, responses generally fell

into one of two camps. Some people suggested heavy hitters like The Nature Conservancy, where yearly expenses top $750 million. Such big groups naturally do much more work overall than small, local organizations. But others argued that the little guys, whose yearly budget might be less than $1 million, get more done with each dollar donated.

Clint Boal, a wildlife ecologist at Texas Tech, argued that it’s hard to beat TNC or Ducks Unlimited for “effectiveness of conservation dollars put to work.” TNC boasts that it has protected 119 million acres of land and 5,000 miles of rivers since its founding in 1951, and it now also operates more than 100 marine conservation projects worldwide. Ducks Unlimited, which works to maintain critical migratory habitats in North America, calls itself “the world’s largest and most effective private waterfowl and wetlands conservation organization.”

The trouble is, you have to think about it. Charity Navigator gives both these organizations only two out of four stars, mainly because the percentage of their budget spent on fund-raising and administration is a little too high relative to the amount spent (just 72 percent for TNC) on the actual services they deliver. Philosophical considerations also matter. Maybe you’re troubled by assertions made by Peter Kareiva, TNC’s chief scientist, that “conservation is failing” and that we need a new vision of conservation that rejects “idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness” and “in which nature…exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes.” Or maybe you think that Kareiva’s realpolitik is the way forward. Likewise, you might have philosophical issues with the hunting orientation of Ducks Unlimited. I think both organizations do fine work. But the important thing is to decide what you think.

In the course of writing the “Strange Behaviors” column, I have repeatedly found researchers funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society doing important work around the world, whether in East Africa to prevent poaching of elephants or in China to shift consumer attitudes away from wildlife products. The WCS 96 Elephants program (referring to the number of elephants killed every day in Africa) has kept the ivory trafficking issue on the public’s mind while also working behind the scenes to effect change among government officials. WCS gets three stars from Charity Navigator, with 83 percent of its budget spent on programs, and as with TNC and other large organizations, you can specify which programs you want to fund.

The other way to fund specific projects—say, conservation of a certain region, ecosystem, or species—is to go with a smaller, more targeted nonprofit. “I am less and less convinced about the efficacy of… ever bigger organizations with ever bigger budgets of which a smaller and smaller amount goes to ‘boots on the ground,’ ” wrote John Anderson, a seabird ecologist at Maine’s College of the Atlantic. He recommended the Mono Lake Committee, which has worked for more than three decades to protect that weird and iconic lake in the Sierra Nevada range east of San Francisco. Mono has a brine shrimp ecosystem that makes it a critical stopover for migrating songbirds, and the committee (two stars, 78 percent) is “actively involved in stream restoration…plus their public education program is pretty phenomenal.” The staff and volunteers, Anderson wrote, demonstrate “in full what a handful of dedicated, passionate people can do for conservation.”

Another way to choose among the myriad nonprofits is to support organizations working to solve the most pressing wildlife and conservation issues of the year. The Xerces Society (not rated) has been fighting the alarming collapse of pollinators in the U.S. and worldwide, including honeybees and monarch butterflies. Almost all wildlife species are also vulnerable to the looming menace of climate change. The Natural Resources Defense Council (four stars, 84 percent) has been a strong force, especially in the courtroom, fighting against oil companies and for stronger carbon regulations. Because the Western war on wolves has been in the news so much this year, I also like Defenders of Wildlife (three stars, 75 percent) for taking the bastards to court, and a small group, Keystone Conservation (unrated), for helping ranchers learn to live with native wildlife.

On the other hand, I urge you to bypass the Humane Society or any other group that advocates “trap-neuter-return” as a solution to the rapidly worsening problem of feral and outdoor cats. These cats kill billions of birds every year, and TNR is a cruel and ineffective hoax that simply puts them back out on the street to kill again. (As an alternative, consider the American Bird Conservancy, which has led the fight against TNR.)

One final thought: We Americans are a little crazy about our pets. We spend $60 billion on them every year. That’s not entirely a bad thing. I love my dog, and our pets allow us to remain at least a little in touch with the natural world. But here’s a New Year’s resolution: From now on, think about matching some of that money—say 10 percent, or $100 for every $1,000 you spend on Fifi—for the world of other animals now being left out in the cold.

 

Wolves and Bears Make Comeback in Crowded, Urban Europe

What if European travelers suddenly stopped going to Yellowstone National Park to see grizzly bears and wolves, and found that they could see even more of the same species in their own backyards—say, within an hour or two of Rome? What if the “call of the wild”—the sound of wolves howling in the night—became more a European than a North American experience? This improbable scenario may be closer to reality than we imagine.

A study published Thursday in the journal Science reports that Europe, one of the most industrialized landscapes on Earth, with many roads and hardly any large wilderness areas, is nonetheless “succeeding in maintaining, and to some extent restoring, viable large carnivore populations on a continental scale.”

A team of more than 50 leading carnivore biologists across Europe, from Norway to Bulgaria, details in the research a broad recovery of four large carnivore species: wolves, brown bears, the Eurasian lynx, and the wolverine.

“There is a deeply rooted hostility to these species in human history and culture,” the study notes. And yet roughly a third of Europe, and all but four of the continent’s 50 nations, are now home to permanent and reproducing populations of at least one of these predators.

An estimated 17,000 brown bears (Ursus horribilus, the same species as North America’s grizzly) now inhabit 22 countries—compared with just 1,800 grizzly bears in the U.S. Lower 48. (If you are in Rome, you can see them just two hours away, at Abruzzo National Park.)

Europe, the birthplace of the “Little Red Riding Hood” legend and the Big Bad Wolf, is now home to twice as many wolves as the contiguous United States, a new study finds, despite being half the size and more than twice as densely populated. (For wolves, you need travel only about 40 minutes from Rome, to the vicinity of Hadrian’s villa.)

 What’s the key to this “underappreciated conservation success story”? A study last year from the Zoological Society of London and BirdLife International attributed the recovery of many European bird and mammal species to new habitat, created as rural populations have abandoned marginal farmlands and moved into cities.

The new study places greater emphasis on legal protections under the European Union, particularly the EU Habitats Directive, which functions like the Endangered Species Act in the United States. Animals in Norway and Switzerland, countries that are not part of the EU and are thus exempt from that directive, have lagged far behind their recovery elsewhere in Europe, according to the study.

Europe’s Change in Thinking

The study’s lead author, Guillaume Chapron of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, also attributed the recovery of predators to a profound shift in psychology, from hostility to tolerance, dating back to the environmental movement of the 1970s. “The European model shows that people and predators can coexist in the same landscapes,” he said. “I do not mean that it is a peaceful, loving coexistence; there are always problems. But if there is a political will, it is possible to share the landscape with larger predators.”

The new study presents this “coexistence model” as a direct challenge to American thinking about wilderness, which separates people and nature. That model, which has spread from its 19th-century origins at Yellowstone National Park to many countries around the world, argues that large predators can survive only in protected areas or wilderness. This American approach to conservation—essentially roping off certain areas—was born in reaction to “former policy goals to exterminate these species” elsewhere, according to the new study.

But if Europe had tried to practice American-style predator conservation, the study continues, “there would hardly be any large carnivore populations at all, because most European protected areas are too small to host even a few large carnivore reproductive units.”

As human populations expand, further constricting national parks and wilderness areas, the coexistence model could provide the only way forward for many regions, Chapron said. California, for instance, is currently debating the likely return of breeding wolf packs, and a petition to reintroduce grizzly bears. “Well, look at the European example,” Chapron suggested. “You can have a lot of wolves and bears in California; you just have to move to a coexistence mindset.”

Finding the Right Level of “Wildness”

Coexistence is, of course, not easy. In Chapron’s native France, farmers have recently staged outraged protests against wolf attacks on sheep, and LeMonde recently declared “La Guerre du Loup,” the War of the Wolves. Ségolène Royal, a former presidential candidate and the current minister of the environment, claimed that children are now afraid to go to sleep at night because “there are too many wolves!”

But scapegoating wolves is easier than addressing more complex underlying issues. For instance, Chapron said, the real cause of the decline in the sheep industry in France isn’t the wolf, it’s the arrival of cheaper competition from New Zealand. It’s easier for a politician to seem to stand up for sheep farmers by blaming wolves.

Dealing with those kinds of emotional responses will require programs to help farmers and others adapt, said Frans Schepers, managing director of Rewilding Europe. For areas that have been free of major predators for a hundred years, this can mean relearning old methods, including the use of guard dogs, night corrals, and shepherds.

It may also require removing problem animals in certain situations. “It has to be done carefully,” he said, “but that’s what you need to do to have people accept living with these animals.”

Schepers praised the new study for demonstrating that coexistence is possible: “People have this general picture of Europe that we lost all our nature and lost our wildlife. What the rest of the world and a lot of Europeans still can learn from this is that conservation works. If we have the resources, if we have proper strategy, if we put in our effort, it actually works.”

For Endangered Species, a Call for Genetic Rescue

Before God told Noah to take “two of all living creatures, male and female” into the ark with him, He probably should have consulted with a wildlife biologist. Then He’d have known that extensive inbreeding after the flood would cause the rapid extinction of many of the species Noah had built his ark to save.

We are in roughly the same boat today. Instead of divine floodwaters, the relentlessly rising tide of human civilization is spreading into every corner of the landscape, leaving populations of threatened or endangered species isolated in a few remaining islands of habitat.  These survivors—tigers in India, red wolves in North Carolina, the kakapo parrot in New Zealand, African wild dogs in South Africa, and countless other species—almost inevitably experience inbreeding and reduced fitness, a recipe for extinction.

But a new paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution argues that “genetic rescue” could provide a fix for inbreeding problems.  It’s not about genetic engineering—no Franken-Kakapo—but rather about the seemingly simple business of crossbreeding with individuals introduced from outside populations.

“Genetic rescue has the potential,” conservation biologist David A. Tallmon and his co-authors write, “to be one of the most powerful means to

conserve small and declining populations,” and it has already demonstrated its power, notably in the case of the Florida panther.  “Yet in practice, it remains controversial and is rarely applied.”  The study suggests that cautious conservation biologists tend to exaggerate the risks of genetic rescue.  They may thus be missing out on an essential tool to keep wildlife populations healthy long enough to resolve the underlying problem that caused them to become isolated in the first place.

Understanding how “genetic rescue” works is about as basic as high school biology: In any population, there are different varieties, called alleles, of every gene. Some of these alleles have mutations that can cause health problems. Fortunately, these “deleterious” alleles are usually recessive: As long as an animal has one of each kind of allele for a given gene—that is, one good, non-mutated allele and one mutated, recessive allele—it stays healthy. But in a small, inbred population, the chances of an individual getting two copies of the deleterious allele dramatically increase. As a result, that individual is likelier to die young.  Or it may fail to reproduce, because it’s not strong enough to fight for a mate, or because physical deformities reduce fertility.

That’s what was happening to Florida panthers in the 1980s and early ‘90s.  As their habitat and population shrank, the cats began showing signs of inbreeding depression, including kinked tails, undescended testes, and other health problems. In 1995, scientists decided that the roughly two-dozen remaining Florida panthers needed genetic rescuing. They brought in eight female cougars from a Texas population of a different subspecies, but closely related to the Florida panthers. Within six years, the Florida panther population was showing signs of recovery. Cats with Texan ancestors had normal testes and fewer kinked tails. These days, the population of Florida panthers is somewhere between 100 and 180 and climbing.

So why don’t biologists rely on genetic rescue more often?  One big worry is the risk of outbreeding depression.  In some cases, a small, isolated population of a species may have become especially well adapted to local conditions.  That’s how evolution of a new species begins.  But if individuals arrive from another population with different adaptations, cross breeding might just un-do evolution, resulting in offspring that are less well adapted to local conditions. That could lead to lower survival rates.  A rescue that was intended to slow the demise of the population could end up hastening it instead.

In the new paper, Tallmon and his-co-authors examined 18 documented instances of genetic rescue, in species ranging from wood rats to Mexican wolves. They found that in almost all cases—including experiments with bighorn sheep, snakes, and prairie chickens—population size increased after one or more individuals from another population arrived and bred with the isolated population. Only a single case, an experiment with tiny Pacific Coast marine invertebrates, called copepods, resulted in outbreeding depression. “Genetic rescue appears to be much more important and powerful than we anticipated,” said Tallmon, a professor at the University of Alaska Southeast.  Moreover, modern genetic testing techniques make it possible to reduce the risk of outbreeding depression even further. It’s now relatively easy and inexpensive to identify the genes that are causing problems in an isolated population, then introduce only outsiders with healthy alleles for that gene.

While the risks from outbreeding depression may be overblown, the other problem with genetic rescue is that it is only a temporary solution, said Philip Hedrick, of Arizona State University. “This is a short-term bandage,” he said. In a study published earlier this year, he looked at genetic rescue in an isolated population of wolves on Isle Royale in Lake Superior.   In 1997, a single wolf crossed an ice bridge and joined a pack there. That helped produce a temporary increase in population to about 30 animals by 2006, but after two or three generations, the benefits of crossbreeding faded away.  The population of wolves on the island is now down to just a dozen or so individuals.

But even if introducing outsiders cannot permanently prevent the extinction of a population, it can delay it.  That’s the real value of genetic rescue as a conservation tool: It can stave off extinction long enough to address the root cause of the initial decline. Often, that cause is habitat loss or fragmentation, said Tallmon, and the survival of a healthy population can be the most powerful argument for getting government officials to reverse that process.

In the case of the Florida panthers, for instance, genetic rescue kept the population going long enough for the state government to protect more than 300,000 acres of prime habitat and create highway underpasses to protect the big cats from cars.  Elsewhere conservation biologists are working to re-establish corridors between isolated populations, so the animals can go about cross breeding on their own.

Otherwise, as one scientist wrote in a 2010 commentary on the Florida panther genetic rescue, “wildlife managers all over the world can look forward to carting rare species from one park to another until the end of time.”