Richard Conniff's Blog, page 6

Could Your Air Conditioning Help Cure–Not Cause–Climate Change?

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by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century—and assuming fossil-fuel–fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius.

A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy:  Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour.  Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air.  So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?

This futuristic proposal, from a team led by chemical engineer Roland Dittmeyer at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, goes even further. The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, and then use a multistep chemical process to transform that hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.  The result: “Personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells” in buildings or neighborhoods, the authors write. “The envisioned model of ‘crowd oil’ from solar refineries, akin to ‘crowd electricity’ from solar panels,” would enable people “to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths.”

The research group has already developed an experimental model that can complete several key steps of the process, Dittmeyer says, adding, “The plan in two or three years is to have the first experimental showcase where I can show you a bottle of hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide captured in an air-conditioning unit.”

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Future Synthetic Oil Well?

Neither Dittmeyer nor co-author Geoffrey Ozin, a chemical engineer at the University of Toronto, would predict how long it might take before building owners could purchase and install such units. But Ozin claims much of the necessary technology is already commercially available. He says the carbon capture equipment could come from a Swiss “direct air capture” company called Climeworks, and the electrolyzers to convert carbon dioxide and water into hydrogen are available from Siemens, Hydrogenics or other companies.  “And you use Roland’s amazing microstructure catalytic reactors, which convert the hydrogen and carbon dioxide into a synthetic fuel,” he adds. Those reactors are being brought to market by the German company Ineratec, a spinoff from Dittmeyer’s research.  Because the system would rely on advanced forms of solar energy, Ozin thinks of the result as “photosynthetic buildings.”

The authors calculate that applying this system to the HVAC in one of Europe’s tallest skyscrapers, the MesseTurm, or Trade Fair Tower, in Frankfurt, would extract and convert enough carbon dioxide to yield at least 2,000 metric tons (660,000 U.S. gallons) of fuel a year. The office space in the entire city of Frankfurt could yield more than 370,000 tons (122 million gallons) annually, they say.

“This is a wonderful concept—it made my day,” says David Keith, a Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy, who was not involved in the new paper.  He suggests that the best use for the resulting fuels would be to “help solve two of our biggest energy challenges”: providing a carbon-neutral fuel to fill the gaps left by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar power, and providing fuel for “the hard-to-electrify parts of transportation and industry,” such as airplanes, large trucks and steel- or cement-making. Keith is already targeting some of these markets through Carbon Engineering, a company he founded focused on direct air capture of carbon dioxide for large-scale liquid fuel production. But he says he is “deeply skeptical” about doing it on a distributed building or neighborhood basis. “Economies of scale can’t be wished away. There’s a reason we have huge wind turbines,” he says—and a reason we do not have backyard all-in-one pulp-and-paper mills for disposing of our yard wastes. He believes it is simply “faster and cheaper” to take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into fuel “by doing it an appropriate scale.”

Other scientists who were not involved in the new paper note two other potential problems. “The idea that Roland has presented is an interesting one,” says Jennifer Wilcox, a chemical engineer at Worcester Institute of Technology, “but more vetting needs to be done in order to determine the true potential of the approach.”  While it seems to make sense to take advantage of the air movement already being generated by HVAC systems, Wilcox says, building and operating the necessary fans is not what makes direct air capture systems so expensive.  “The dominant capital cost,” she says, “is the solid adsorbent materials”—that is, substances to which the carbon dioxide adheres—and the main energy cost is the heat needed to recover the carbon dioxide from these materials afterward.  Moreover, she contends that any available solar or other carbon-free power source would be put to better use in replacing fossil-fuel-fired power plants, to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide getting into the air in the first place.

“The idea of converting captured carbon into liquid fuel is persuasive,“ says Matthew J. Realff, a chemical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology. “We have an enormous investment in our liquid fuel infrastructure, and using that has tremendous value. You wouldn’t have to build a whole new infrastructure. But this concept of doing it at the household level is a little bit fantastical”—partly because the gases involved (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) are toxic and explosive. The process to convert them to a liquid fuel is well understood, Realff says, but it produces a range of products that now typically get separated out in massive refineries—requiring huge amounts of energy.  “It’s possible that it could be worked out at the scale that is being proposed,” he adds. “But we haven’t done it at this point, and it may not turn out to be the most effective way from an economic perspective.” There is, however, an unexpected benefit of direct air capture of carbon dioxide, says Realff, and it could help stimulate market acceptance of the technology: One reason office buildings replace their air so frequently is simply to protect workers from elevated levels of carbon dioxide. His research suggests that capturing the carbon dioxide from the air stream may be one way to cut energy costs, by reducing the frequency of air changes.

Dittmeyer disputes the argument that thinking big is always better. He notes that small, modular plants are a trend in some areas of chemical engineering, “because they are more flexible and don’t involve such a financial risk.” He also anticipates that cost will become less of a barrier as governments face up to the urgency of achieving a climate solution, and as jurisdictions increasingly impose carbon taxes or mandate strict energy efficiency standards for buildings.

“Of course, it’s a visionary perspective,” he says, “it relies on this idea of a decentralized product empowering people, not leaving it to industry. Industrial players observe the situation, but as long as there is no profit in the short term, they won’t do anything. If we have the technology that is safe and affordable, though maybe not as cheap, we can generate some momentum” among individuals, much as happened in the early stages of the solar industry. “And then I would expect the industrial parties to act, too.”

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Richard Conniff (@RichardConniff) is the author of “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth” and an @NYTOpinion contributing writer.

 

We’re Still Slaughtering Bison–and American Indians Lose

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Old habits die hard: Bison skulls from their 19th century annihilation.

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

In a 120-acre pasture on an Indian reservation in northeastern Montana, five prime examples of America’s national mammal rumble and snort. They shake their enormous heads and use them to plow aside the snow to get to their feed. In the night, I like to think, they put those shaggy heads together to ruminate on the weird politics of the American West and blast clouds of exhausted air out their shiny nostrils.

These five, all males, arrived last month from Yellowstone National Park, the last great refuge of the wild bison that once dominated the American landscape from Pennsylvania to Oregon. Their arrival marks the beginning of what will ostensibly become a pipeline sending surplus bison from Yellowstone out to repopulate portions of their old habitat.

Since 2000, it has been the custom to send 600 or 1,000 prize Yellowstone bison to slaughter every year at about this time to keep the park’s booming population at roughly 4,000 animals. The meat goes mainly to tribal nations. Even so, the culling is perverse and wasteful: Yellowstone is home to genetically pure wild bison, coveted by national parks, Native American tribes and conservation groups across the West.

But Yellowstone is also home to a notorious disease called brucellosis, dreaded by cattle ranchers everywhere. And while Congress in 2016 designated the American bison the national mammal, everyone knows that title comes with fine print reading “other than cattle.” And when it comes to cattle — a species that is not native to North America — the politics always gets weird.

Much of the talk about brucellosis could leave a person thinking that bison are the source of the problem. A typical document headlined“Brucellosis and Yellowstone Bison,” from APHIS, the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, declares that “brucellosis and Yellowstone Bison Overview Brucellosis” have “cost the federal government, the states and the livestock industry billions of dollars in direct losses and the cost of efforts to eliminate the disease.” And that is no doubt true. The livestock industry has suffered heavily from brucellosis, which lowers milk production and can cause cows to miscarry. But it’s worth adding that the livestock industry also introduced the disease to this country. The cattle infected the bison, not the other way around.

As usual, the tribes are paying a heavy cost. In 2014 the Sioux and Assiniboine tribal nations at Fort Peck Reservation, in northeastern Montana, spent more than $500,000 building a double-fenced, state-of-the-art quarantine facility, according to Daniel Wenner, a lawyer for the tribes, and did so based on assurances that they would be on the receiving end of that pipeline of surplus bison from Yellowstone. This facility can handle 350 bison, double the combined capacity of the two quarantine facilities near Yellowstone maintained by the Park Service and APHIS.

The plan, says Robbie Magnan, fish and game director for the tribal nations, was for the Sioux and Assiniboine to put bison through the late stages of the elaborate protocol for testing whether they are free of brucellosis, then release some into a 13,000-acre fenced range, and send some on to help start herds on other reservations. But until the arrival of that token shipment of five males in February, the quarantine facility has stood empty.

“The Montana livestock community” and its allies in state and federal agencies “have obstructed this effort at every turn,” Mr. Wenner said. In addition to decades of bureaucratic slow-walking by APHIS and the State of Montana, the obstructionists got help last year when vandals broke into the Park Service quarantine facility and released scores of bison that were due to go to Fort Peck. In June, the interior secretary at the time, Ryan Zinke, piled on, forcing out the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, who had been a strong proponent of the move to Fort Peck.

Mr. Zinke was sympathetic, according to Mountain Journal, an environmental news site, to “a carefully orchestrated populist revolt” by eastern Montana ranchers “using Bundyesque fear tactics to thwart Yellowstone bison from being relocated there as seedstock for building new public herds.”

There are plenty of paradoxes to the effort to keep the bison from getting to Fort Peck. The first is that brucellosis is typically transmitted in the aborted fetus and fluids of an infected cow. Transmission by bulls is unlikely. That means the five bulls sent to Fort Peck as a token of cooperation have spent most of their lives being quarantined at great expense for a disease they don’t spread.

The next shipment of Yellowstone bison tentatively scheduled to go to Fort Peck, possibly later this year, is also all bulls. This is a good way to not build new herds, which may be the point. But Mr. Magnan, fish and game director for the tribal nations, isn’t complaining. He hopes that taking the males through the quarantine process will persuade officials that the reservation can handle the females, too.

Another incongruity has to do with the lack of evidence implicating any bison at all in transmission of brucellosis. In an authoritative 2017 study, scientists traced the genetic lineage of the Brucella bacteria in 27 livestock herds infected around Yellowstone since 1998 and found bison not guilty on all counts. The culprits in every case were elk. There are, however, no plans to contain or cull elk. One possible reason: Unlike bison, elk won’t compete with cattle for grazing rights on public lands.

The Montana state veterinarian, Marty Zaluski, argues that the genetic study means nothing, except that elk interact with cattle more than bison do. “It defies logic to say that Brucella bacteria in bison magically do not affect other animals,” he said, adding that a Brucella infection in a cattle herd in South Dakota in the 1980s was “most likely from bison.” The state has also delayed use of the Fort Peck quarantine facility, he said, because “we don’t have jurisdiction — it’s an independent sovereign nation and not subject to state regulation.” That means the state might have no way to enforce an order for testing or euthanasia.

The Fort Peck tribes have offered to sign an agreement to accept state jurisdiction over quarantined animals, Dr. Zaluski acknowledges. “My concern is all of these agreements are severable, and possession is nine-tenths of law,” he said. “It’s ultimately extremely difficult for me to go into an agreement that potentially jeopardizes Montana’s disease control program when we know those agreements can be severed.”

The notion that Native Americans won’t keep their word is also moderately paradoxical. “Since 1492,” said Mr. Magnan, “Europeans have made promises and reneged on everything, and yet they hang it on us?” He doesn’t bother to add that the 19th-century annihilation of bison was in large part a deliberate campaign to destroy and displace the Plains Indians. Or that restoring bison to the tribes at Fort Peck and elsewhere, after 150 years, ought to be one of the easier acts of reparation for the United States to undertake.[image error]

The bison deserve better, too. They are an integral part of the Great Plains landscape they helped create, and their patchy way of grazing is beneficial for water resources, for plant growth and for plant and animal diversity. Keeping them locked up in Yellowstone turns them instead into glorified zoo animals.

This country will never get back the “immense herds of buffalo, elk, deer and antelopes feeding in one common and boundless pasture” witnessed with awe by Meriwether Lewis in 1805. But with a measure of care and tolerance on both sides, we could still allow our national mammal to become something grander and more glorious than a buffalo-nickel treat for tourists.

 

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Richard Conniff (@RichardConniff) is the author of “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth” and an @NYT contributing opinion writer.

How the Polynesians Made Odysseus Look Like a Day-Tripper

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Hōkūle’a (Photo: Unknown)

In the early 1990s, on an assignment for National Geographic, I made a trek on horseback around Easter Island, with a couple of islanders as guides. I still vividly recall wandering just before sunset through the quarry where the celebrated statues, called mo‘ai, were carved, and then sitting on a cliff staring out at the curvature of the Earth and the great emptiness of the Pacific. Reviewing this book brought some of those memories back.

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

As HMS Endeavour was preparing to leave Tahiti in July 1769, after a tropical sojourn of four months, a celebrated Polynesian priest and navigator named Tupaia announced that he wished to join the British in their travels. James Cook, commander of the expedition, demurred at first. But with a nudge from the expedition’s naturalist Joseph Banks, he relented, allowing that Tupaia “was the likeliest person to answer our purpose.”

[image error]This soon proved to be the case at sea, where the new passenger’s navigational guidance through the intricacies of the Society Islands proved extraordinarily precise. But Tupaia’s real value only became evident on land, three months later, as Cook struggled to make peaceful contact with the Māori. The Endeavour had by then traveled 3,500 miles from Tahiti, Christina Thompson writes in “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia,” and “there was nothing in the geography of New Zealand to suggest that the people who lived there might have anything in common with the people in the tropical islands they had left behind.”

The first encounter at Poverty Bay had gone badly, with bloodshed on the Māori side. “The following day, Cook tried again, this time taking two additional precautions,” Ms. Thompson continues. “First, he landed with a party of marines, and, second, he took Tupaia with him.” Again, the situation deteriorated, with about a hundred Māori brandishing their weapons and staging a haka, their ferocious war dance. The marines advanced in turn, with the Union Jack in front. “The stage was set for a confrontation—and then something unexpected occurred. Tupaia stepped forward and addressed the warriors in fluent Tahitian and, to the surprise of everyone present, he was immediately understood.”

The violence suddenly drained out of the scene, and the strangeness and immensity of the Polynesian accomplishment became apparent. “It is extraordinary,” Cook would later write, “that the same Nation should have spread themselves over all the isles in this Vast Ocean . . . which is almost a fourth part of the circumference of the Globe.” What’s now called “the Polynesian Triangle” encompasses 10 million square miles of water, with the northern apex at Hawaii and the base stretching from New Zealand in the southwest to Easter Island in the southeast.

Let’s put that extraordinary expanse in terms that might make it a little more meaningful for landbound readers: New Zealand is of course southeast of Australia. But Easter Island is some 4,000 miles further east, on about the same longitude as Salt Lake City. For the north-south extent, think Mexico City down to southern Argentina. The -+ is not only unfathomably vast but also contains so little habitable land that, as Ms. Thompson puts it, the surprise is that “anyone ever found anything at all.”

And yet somehow, she writes, “all the islands inside this triangle were originally settled by a clearly identifiable group of voyagers: a people with a single language and set of customs, a particular body of myths, a distinctive arsenal of tools and skills, and a ‘portmanteau biota’ of plants and animals that they carried with them wherever they went. They had no knowledge of writing or metal tools—no maps or compasses—and yet they succeeded in colonizing the largest ocean on the planet, occupying every habitable rock between New Guinea and the Galapagos, and establishing what was, until the modern era, the largest single culture area in the world.” It remains one of the great achievements in all of human exploration.

Ms. Thompson’s previous book, “Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All,” wove the history of New Zealand together with her own story of being a Boston academic married to a Māori laborer. In “Sea People,” she forgoes the personal, except to acknowledge being pleased “to think that my children share in this breathtaking genealogy.” Her purpose is to learn how the Polynesians did it, and how we know what they did.

These have never been simple questions. One of the frustrations for Ms. Thompson, and inevitably for her readers, is that “until the nineteenth century, everything Polynesians knew—or, indeed, had ever known—had to be transmitted by word of mouth.” There were no written Polynesian accounts to quote, and “the answers that Polynesians gave were confusing to Europeans: they were not framed with the right sort of knowledge, and did not address the right points or provide the sort of information that Europeans were after. It is easy to forget just how different people once were from one another.” Critical parts of the story fell out as the two sides “traded across the epistemological gap.”

Ms. Thompson is at her best in two scenes of this trafficking in separate systems of knowledge. The first is of Cook and Tupaia, “two brilliant navigators,” working together to comprehend each other’s methods. A copy of a chart on which they collaborated survives, “a translation of Tahitian geographical knowledge into European cartographic terms at the very first moment in history when such a thing might have been possible.” Ms. Thompson calls it a miracle. But it was also inevitably a muddle. The Polynesian’s physical world “was less like a set of discrete, objective phenomena” that Cook could readily grasp “and more like a web of connections” linking “gods, ancestors, humans, fish, birds, insects, rocks, clouds, winds, and stars.”

The other powerful scene begins in the 1960s, as a British sailor and explorer named David Lewis first comes to recognize that much of Polynesian navigational knowledge survives among seagoing old men in remote islands. These navigators still lacked even modern compasses, relying instead on the rising or setting points of a succession of stars, typically 10 in a night, to follow a “star path” from one island to the next. Bird lore, cloud lore and the lore of sea currents—the way the “long swell” from the southeast and the “sea swell” from the east-northeast passed “through each other like the interlocked fingers of two hands”—were also factors in reading the seascape.

Lewis helped locate an islander named Mau, who was schooled in these methods and would be the entire navigation system for a daring attempt to re-create long-distance Polynesian voyaging. On May 1, 1976, Hōkūle’a (“Star of Joy”), a replica of a traditional double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe, sailed from Hawaii to attempt the 2,600-mile run to Tahiti. Aboard were a largely Hawaiian crew, plus Lewis to record Mau’s navigational methods, plus an anthropologist named Ben Finney intent on refuting an academic idea then current that the Polynesians had merely drifted to their island homes, plus the customary “portmanteau biota” of dog, pig, chicken and so on. Five weeks later, Mau’s star path having proved true, the canoe sailed into the harbor at Papeete, Tahiti, where 17,000 islanders—and even a church choir singing a Tahitian hymn—had gathered to celebrate a moment of Polynesian “cultural triumph” and renewal.

Ms. Thompson writes well—for instance, when she describes “le mirage tahitien” as “that constellation of images of indolence and hedonism that still cluster about Polynesia today.” Or when she writes of the endless voyaging: “Mile upon mile of ocean slipped by; masses of cloud swept in and were torn away by the wind; the sea rose, whipped to a froth, and then fell to a smooth, flat calm.”

Her story lags occasionally during the academic infighting about different theories of Polynesian origin, though Ms. Thompson works hard to explain the contending ideas fairly, even the ones she may disagree with. At times, I also found myself adrift in descriptions of potential routes among some of the more obscure Pacific islands. Maps indicating not just where different islands are located but also what prevailing winds might work either for or against a navigator’s chances of getting to them would have been helpful. Modern readers may find themselves agog at the idea of HMS Bounty being stymied for a month by headwinds at Cape Horn en route to Tahiti and finally turning around to get there by sailing an extra 10,000 miles in the opposite direction. But the odds faced and overcome by Polynesian sailors were often more daunting.

In the end, according to Ms. Thompson, the puzzle of where the Polynesians came from is being resolved largely by DNA and updated radiocarbon dating. The two technologies together suggest that the ancestors of the Polynesians, called Lapita, emerged from Indonesia and the Philippines in about 900 B.C., striking out into the western Pacific. But the DNA of modern Polynesians also indicates a separate ancestral source inside Melanesia, the area roughly from Papua New Guinea east to Tonga and Samoa. Contrary to their romantic image as restless explorers, the Polynesians seem largely to have remained in that region until about A.D. 1000.

“Having reached so far out into the Pacific,” Ms. Thompson asks, with something like consternation, “what kept them sitting there for nearly two thousand years?” And then, “as though they had been suddenly pricked into action, what made them set out and conquer the ten million square miles of the Polynesian Triangle?” This is the real shocker, which she addresses only at the end of the book and too briefly: “According to the new orthodoxy, none of the archipelagoes of central and eastern Polynesia (the Society Islands, Hawai’i, the Marquesas, Easter Island, the Cooks) is thought to have been settled before the end of the first millennium A.D., while the discovery and settlement of New Zealand was pushed as far forward as A.D. 1200.” That makes Tupaia’s ability to be understood by the Māori at Poverty Bay suddenly more natural: They were practically cousins. It also appears, says Ms. Thompson, “to corroborate the chronologies” that various scholars have inferred “from Polynesian oral traditions,” particularly tales of “bold expeditions, stirring adventures, and voyages undertaken to far-off lands” within relatively recent memory.

What it also means is that these seagoing people accomplished their astonishing migrations, occupying what Cook wonderingly called “almost a fourth part” of the globe, in a matter of just a few hundred years. Why did they do it? What suddenly changed? The puzzle of the Polynesians endures.

Mr. Conniff is the author of, among other books, “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.”

 

Eradicating Disease-Causing Pests Sound Like a Smart Idea? Not So Fast.

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by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Sleeping sickness (or trypanosomiasis), endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, is a horribly debilitating disease. When the parasitic protozoan that causes it gets into the nervous system and brain, weeks or months after being transmitted by the blood-eating tsetse fly, it sends the victim into a steep decline marked by depression, aggressiveness, psychotic behavior, disrupted sleep patterns and—if untreated—death.

Happily, a concerted multinational effort has reduced the reported incidence of the disease by 92 percent in this century, from 26,550 cases in 2000 to just 2,164 cases in 2016. That puts the fight against sleeping sickness on track to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) goal of eliminating it by 2020, according to a study published in December in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated methods of reducing the population of tsetse flies, the area where people are at risk of infection has also decreased by 61 percent in the same period.

Why not just finish the job and end sleeping sickness by eradicating the tsetse (pronounced TET-see) fly from the entire African continent? That’s the stated goal of the African Union’s Pan African Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis Eradication Campaign. But another new study, published in December in BioScience, calls for reexamining that approach. “The important ethical question remains: Is tsetse fly elimination morally appropriate?” entomologist Jérémy Bouyer and his co-authors write. The study lays out a protocol for properly considering a question that is less simple and more momentous than it seems at first glance, says Bouyer, who spent seven years in tsetse control in Senegal and now works on pest-control programs for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

For one thing, tsetse fly eradication is not about getting rid of a single species—but rather an entire taxonomic family called Glossinidae, with 31 species and subspecies across Africa. Conservationists commonly eradicate introduced or invasive species from habitats where they do not belong. But tsetse flies are native to Africa, the study notes, and have “a complex biology and unique evolutionary history.”

The female rears one larva at a time in her abdomen and “lactates,” a little like a mammal, to feed it in utero. When she eventually evicts the larva, she has provisioned it with enough food to burrow underground, mature as a pupa and emerge as an adult fly a month or so later. These traits help demonstrate what conservationists call “intrinsic value”—meaning both the worth a species gives to its own life experience and also the worth of its evolutionary and ecological character as a unique species.

But making a case for intrinsic value proved elusive as the researchers were developing their protocol for thinking about tsetse fly eradication, says study co-author Neil Carter of Boise State University. It is easier to quantify “instrumental value”—the costs and benefits of a species for humans, other species, and ecosystems. On the one hand, for example, tsetse flies can be devastating for livestock as well as people; eliminating these insects on the island of Zanzibar made it possible for many more small farmers there to keep cattle, raising their income by 30 percent. On the other hand, getting rid of tsetse flies can lead to increased cattle encroachment into natural areas where they conflict with wildlife.

After considering a long list of such pros and cons, the study concludes, “arguments predicated entirely on instrumental value do not provide compelling support for global tsetse fly eradication.” But the study says it is “morally justified” to identify areas where tsetse flies pose a threat, and then control or eliminate local populations.

For the authors, the main point is that it’s important to think through the ethical and practical implications rather than simply acting on the initial impulse to eradicate a pest. For instance, Carter says, it might seem like common sense to eliminate leopards from a national park in the middle of Mumbai, India—which has grown up around the park into a city of 20 million people. But it turns out the leopards feed largely on the city’s thriving population of feral dogs. So losing the predators could dramatically increase incidence of dog bites and rabies.

It is almost impossible to predict the future instrumental value of a species. The fer-de-lance, for instance, was once considered just another deadly South American viper. But beginning in the 1980s its venom became the source for the first ACE inhibitor drugs, a life-changing treatment for cardiovascular disease. Carter says he is optimistic about humans’ increasing willingness “to be transparent about all the benefits and costs” of a pest species “and come to a conclusion as a community, rather than having to say, ‘Oops, it’s too late.’”

Glyn Vale, former director of Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis Control for Zimbabwe’s Department of Veterinary Services, says he welcomes the study’s stand against eradication. But he is also sharply critical of Bouyer’s employer, the IAEA, for heavily promoting the “sterile insect technique”—a method for disrupting insect reproduction by releasing large numbers of flies that have been sterilized by irradiation. That technique is far too expensive, he says, adding it is ineffective in tsetse flies and does more to boost the IAEA’s agenda of demonstrating peaceful uses of atomic energy than it does to improve the health of people in Africa. Bouyer says he began work on the study well before joining the IAEA, and the study is not about the sterile insect technique but about the ethics of eradication.

“People have been trying to get rid of tsetse flies for 100 years, and they haven’t succeeded so far,” says Michael Barrett, a University of Glasgow trypanosomiasis expert who was not involved in the study. The biggest recent successes, he says, have come from “insecticide-impregnated tiny targets”—inexpensive handkerchief-size bits of blue fabric set out on sticks in areas infested by the tsetse fly. The flies are attracted to the color and pick up the insecticide on landing, resulting in “incredible decreases in the number of tsetse flies and the incidence of disease,” he notes.

Barrett, who chaired the WHO’s 2018 working group to eliminate the disease, is also optimistic about an epidemiological technique that calculates how frequently the disease gets transmitted by tsetse fly bite from one person to another. Mathematical modeling of the infection rate makes it possible to estimate the reduction in tsetse fly numbers needed to bring transmission down to zero. It eliminates the disease, but not necessarily the flies themselves.

One other cause for optimism stems from improving treatments for sleeping sickness. Current treatments are inconvenient at best. One type of the disease requires intravenous injection two to four times a day for at least a week—a challenge in the remote, isolated and impoverished areas where sleeping sickness is most common. Another type requires an injection so painful it has been likened to having chili peppers injected straight into the heart; it also kills one patient in 20. But late last year the European Medicines Agency approved a new drug called fexinidazole in pill form, for use in the first type of sleeping sickness. Approval for its use in treating the other type is expected soon, and approval for use by individual countries in Africa appears likely to follow

Such developments could make the proposed eradication of tsetse flies seem not just impractical but also, in the not too distant future, irrelevant.

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Richard Conniff is an award-winning science writer. His books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W. W. Norton, 2011).

How to Send a Finch Extinct

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Australia’s southern black-throated finch: Going, going …

This one caught my eye because it’s such a pretty bird, and because of the mindlessness with which Australia is letting human development drive it to extinction.

The state of Queensland and Australia’s federal government have allowed more than 1900 square miles of potential finch habitat to be cleared without anybody asking: Is this really a good idea? Almost 800 developments have been proposed and only one was turned down for its unacceptable impact on the finch, which has now vanished from 80 percent of its original habitat. Still in the works, five new coal mines in the last remaining high quality finch habitat.

It’s kind of amazing in a country that just this month is experiencing fish, wild horse, and bat die-offs  because of climate change.  (“Their brain just fries.“)

There’s a Senate hearing in Brisbane Friday on the continuing decline and extinction of Australia’s diverse wildlife. Time for somebody to get riled up. And of course it’s not just Australia. Development is our God everywhere, and the natural world pays the price.

Gee, I Guess Biofuels Haven’t Actually Fixed Global Warming, After All

[image error]The Trump Administration is increasing the amount of biofuel oil refiners must blend into their fuel. But the green image of corn ethanol biofuel is based on big lie. It puts profits in the pockets of corn ethanol refiners but does nothing to slow the rate of global warming, as I pointed out in this article for Smithsonian Magazine.

By Richard Conniff

Smithsonian magazine, November 2007

I first started to think that the biofuels movement might be slipping into la-la land when I spotted a news item early this year about a 78-foot powerboat named Earthrace. In the photographs, the boat looked like a cross between Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose and a Las Vegas showgirl. Skipper Pete Bethune, a former oil industry engineer from New Zealand, was trying to set a round-the-world speed record running his 540-horsepower engine solely on biodiesel.

Along the way, he spread the word that, as one report put it, “it’s easy to be environmentally friendly, even in the ostentatious world of powerboating.”

Well, it depends on what you mean by “easy.” Bethune’s biodiesel came mostly from soybeans. But “one of the great things about biodiesel,” he declared, is that “it can be made from so many different sources.” To prove it, his suppliers had concocted a dollop of the fuel for Earthrace from human fat, including some liposuctioned from the intrepid skipper’s own backside.

Given the global obesity epidemic, that probably seemed like a sustainable resource. You could almost imagine NASCAR fans lining up for a chance to personally power Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Chevy Monte Carlo into the tunnel turn at Pocono. But biofuel skeptics were seeing warning flags everywhere.

Over the past few years, biofuels have acquired an almost magical appeal for environmentalists and investors alike. This new energy source (actually as old as the first wood-fueled campfire) promises to relieve global warming and win back America’s energy independence: instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or oil, which fill the atmosphere with the carbon packed away during thousands of years of plant and animal growth, the idea is to extract energy only from recent harvests. Where we now pay larcenous prices to OPEC, we’d pay our own farmers and foresters instead.

Of course, biofuels also produce carbon dioxide, which is the major cause of global warming. But unlike fossil fuels, which don’t grow back, corn, soybeans, palm oil, grasses, trees and other biofuel feedstocks can recapture, through photosynthesis, the massive quantities of carbon dioxide they release. This makes biofuels seem like a good way to start bringing the carbon ledger back into balance. Other factors have made the promise of biofuels even more tantalizing.

• Ethanol producers in this country receive a tax credit of 51 cents a gallon, on top of billions of dollars in direct corn subsidies. (In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, it was $9 billion.) In Europe biodiesel subsidies can approach $2 a gallon.

• Some biofuel entrepreneurs are coining energy, and profits, from stuff we now pay to get rid of: methane from municipal dumps, wood chips piling up around sawmills, manure from livestock facilities, and paper-mill sludge that now usually ends up being trucked to a landfill.

• With a little planning, proponents say, biofuels could give us not just energy but wildlife too. Switchgrass and other potential feedstocks provide good habitat for birds and other animals between harvests.

All this, and in the minds of people like Pete Bethune, we get to keep our muscle boats too.

So what’s the hitch? Partly it’s that bit about doing a little planning. The move to biofuels thus far looks more like a stampede than a considered program to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Critics in the financial community have used words like “gold rush” and even the dreaded “bubble,” fretting that “biofool” investors are putting too much money into new refineries, which could go bust as markets and subsidies shift or as technologies and feedstocks become obsolete.

Betting the farm on biofuels has become commonplace: this year alone American farmers planted an additional 15 million acres in corn, and they were expecting one of the largest harvests in history. The share of the corn crop going into ethanol is also increasing pell-mell, from about 5 percent ten years ago to 20 percent in 2006, with the likelihood that it could go to 40 percent in the next few years.

Not surprisingly, the price of corn doubled over the last two years. This past January, angry consumers took to the streets in Mexico City to protest the resulting surge in the price of tortillas, a staple food. In China, rising feed costs boosted pork prices 29 percent, prompting the government to back off its plan to produce more biofuels. Even titans of agribusiness worried out loud that we might be putting fuel for our cars ahead of food for our bellies.

The chief executive at Tyson Foods said the poultry producer was spending an extra $300 million on feed this year and warned of food-price shocks rippling through the market. Cargill’s chief predicted that reallocation of farmland due to biofuel incentives could combine with bad weather to cause food shortages around the world. Cattle ranchers and environmentalists, unlikely bedfellows, both called for rethinking those incentives.

Not that anybody seems to have given them much thought in the first place. One problem with current subsidies is that they act as if all biofuels were created equal—while some may actually be worse for the environment than conventional gasoline. For instance, corn ethanol on average produces about 13 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline, according to Daniel Kammen, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. But when ethanol refineries burn coal to provide heat for fermentation, emissions are up to 20 percent worse for the environment than gasoline. Yet that ethanol still earns the full subsidy.

In the United States, state and federal biofuel subsidies cost about $500 for every metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions they avoid, according to a study by the Global Subsidies Initiative, an environmentally oriented nonprofit. We could pay somebody else to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, via the European carbon emissions trading market, for about $28 a ton.

But don’t biofuel subsidies buy us energy independence? President Bush, a former oil executive, declared last year that we are “addicted to oil.” In this year’s State of the Union speech, he set a national goal of producing 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017. The next morning, C. Ford Runge, who studies food and agriculture policy at the University of Minnesota, calculated that this would require 108 percent of the current crop if it all came from corn. Switching to corn ethanol also risks making us dependent on a crop that’s vulnerable to drought and disease. When the weather turned dry in the Southeast this summer, for instance, some farmers lost up to 80 percent of their corn.

In a recent Foreign Affairs article, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor,” Runge and co-author Benjamin Senauer noted that growing corn requires large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. It contributes to massive soil erosion, and it is the main source, via runoff in the Mississippi River, of a vast “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. (This year the dead zone, expanding with the corn crop, was the third-largest on record.) The article made the switch to corn ethanol sound about as smart as switching from heroin to cystal meth.

Biofuel subsidies might make sense, other critics say, if they favored “cellulosic” ethanol instead—fuel that comes from breaking down the cellulose in the fibrous parts of the plant, such as the corn stalk instead of the kernel. That wouldn’t put direct pressure on food prices, and might even reduce them by providing a market for agricultural waste products. Cellulosic technology is also the key to exploiting such nonfood plants as switchgrass, and it promises an improvement of more than 80 percent in greenhouse gas emissions compared with conventional gasoline. But while an experimental cellulosic ethanol plant is now operating in Canada, and several others are being built in this country, most experts say it will take years for the technology to become economically competitive. There are also political realities. “Corn and soybean interests haven’t spent 30 years paying campaign bills” for national politicians, says Runge, “to give the game away to grass.”

Even if cellulosic ethanol becomes practical, biofuels will provide at best only part of the solution to the problems of global warming and energy supply. That’s because biofuels will never match the one thing fossil fuels do brilliantly: concentrating solar energy. A gallon of gasoline represents the power of the sun gathered up and locked away by about 196,000 pounds of plants and animals. To produce all the petroleum, coal and natural gas on earth, it took an entire planet’s worth of plants and animals growing and dying over about 700 million years.

Switching to biofuels means getting our energy only from what we can grow in the present day, and that’s not much. In the course of a year, an acre of corn yields only as little as 60 gallons of ethanol, after you subtract the fossil fuels used to cultivate, harvest and refine the crop.

So let’s flash forward five years. Twice a month you swing by the biofuels station to fill the 25-gallon tank in your sporty flex-fuel econo-car. (Pretend you’ve kissed the SUV goodbye.) Even this modest level of energy consumption will require a ten-acre farm to keep you on the highway for a year.

That might not sound too bad. But there are more than 200 million cars and light trucks on American roads, meaning they would require two billion acres’ worth of corn a year (if they actually used only 50 gallons a month). The country has only about 800 million acres of potential farmland.

What if we managed to break out of the corn ethanol trap and instead set aside 100 million acres for high-yielding cellulosic ethanol crops? That’s an attractive option to almost everyone outside the corn industry, including such environmental groups as the Natural Resources Defense Council. But it would still produce only about an eighth of the nation’s projected energy consumption in 2025, according to a University of Tennessee study.

One other problem with the rush to “greener” fuels is that, despite the biodiversity happy talk, wildlife is already prominent among biofuel victims. Last year, for instance, farmers were protecting about 36 million acres through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which works to restore degraded lands, reduce soil erosion and maintain wildlife habitat. CRP land is what biofuel proponents often have their eyes on when they talk about producing biofuels and biodiversity by growing switchgrass. But farmers look at the bottom line, sizing up the $21 per acre they net with the CRP payment (to take a representative example from southwest Minnesota) against the $174 they can now earn growing corn. And they have begun pulling land out of CRP and putting it back into production.

Other countries are also rapidly surrendering habitat to biofuel. In Indonesia and Malaysia, companies are bulldozing millions of acres of rain forest to produce biodiesel from oil palm, an imported species. The United Nations recently predicted that 98 percent of Indonesia’s forests will be destroyed within the next 15 years, partly to grow palm oil. Many of the new plantations will be on the island of Borneo, a mother lode of biological diversity.

Apart from the effect on wildlife, critics say Indonesia’s forests are one of the worst places to grow biofuels, because they stand on the world’s richest concentration of peat, another nonrenewable fuel. When peat dries out or is burned to make way for a plantation, it releases huge quantities of carbon dioxide. Indonesia, despite its undeveloped economy, already ranks as the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States. When you add the peat effect into the equation, according to the conservation group Wetlands International, Indonesian palm oil biodiesel is up to eight times worse for the environment than gasoline.

Oh, and one final irony. The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that because of the way U.S. biofuel laws are written, foreign tankers loaded with Indonesian biodiesel can stop briefly at an American port, blend in a splash of regular petroleum diesel and qualify for a U.S. subsidy on every gallon. It’s called “splash and dash,” because the tankers generally push on to Europe to collect additional subsidies there. All in the name of greener fuels.

None of this means we should give up on biofuels. But we need to stop being dazzled by the word and start looking closely at the realities before blind enthusiasm leads us into economic and environmental catastrophes. We also should not let biofuels distract us from other remedies. Conservation and efficiency improvements may not sound as sexy as biofuels. But they are typically cheaper, faster and better at dealing with the combined problems of global warming and uncertain energy supply. They also call on what used to be the defining American traits of thrift and ingenuity.

And what about Pete Bethune, gallivanting around the planet in his powerboat and telling us it’s easy to be environmentally friendly in this newfangled world? I think he must be kidding. Our brief infatuation with biofuels has already taught us, with every high-priced tortilla, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

END

Richard Conniff is the author of The Species Seekers, and other books.

When Trade Deals Become an Invitation to Environmental Crime

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(Photo: EIA)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

When the trade deal between the United States and Peru went into effect in 2009, proponents touted it as a shining example of environmental good sense. It was the first time the main text of any trade deal included detailed protections for the environment and for labor. That mattered — and still matters — both as a model for other trade deals and also because the environment ostensibly being protected includes a large chunk of the Amazon rain forest.

As part of the deal’s Forest Sector Annex, the United States provided $90 million in technical assistance to beef up enforcement by Peru’s forest service and to create an electronic system intended to track every log from stump to export. (That system does not appear to be working so far, because of software issues, according to rumors.) Peru in turn agreed, among other things, to ensure the independent status of its forest watchdog agency, called Osinfor, which sends its agents into the field to check that loggers have actually harvested the trees reported in their export documents. (That system works all too well, repeatedly demonstrating that logging companies lie.) On passage, then-Senator Max Baucus assured skeptics that enforcement of the treaty’s added provision would “have real teeth.”

Sadly, the U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement is now slouching toward its 10th anniversary on Feb. 1 in shambles, brought on this time by the Peruvian government’s latest attempt to hobble, cripple or otherwise rid itself of this meddlesome Osinfor.

From the start, the Peru deal has served as a cover for almost laughably rampant illegal logging. The Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit group, laid out detailed evidence in 2012 that Peru’s timber industry was a “laundering machine,” mass-producing “legal” paperwork for stolen timber. Stolen, that is, from national parks, protected areas and the lands of indigenous communities, whose leaders risked assassination if they resisted. So not laughable, after all, especially since much of the stolen timber has routinely been making its way from the Amazon port of Iquitos to American lumber yards and D.I.Y. stores.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which has traditionally focused on promoting trade, has been toothless in response. It waited until 2016 to ask the Peruvian government to verify the legality of a timber shipment — and even then, did so only after the Department of Homeland Security, acting on information from Osinfor, had already impounded the timber in Houston. It was the first time the U.S.T.R. had ever issued a verification request in any trade deal. When Osinfor inspectors subsequently demonstrated that 93 percent of the impounded timber was illegal, the U.S.T.R. responded by suspending a single Peruvian timber exporter from the United States market for up to three years. Peru’s response was to fire the head of Osinfor, who fled the country after death threats and a firebombing of one of Osinfor’s regional offices.

The Peruvian government, which rates a 37 out of 100 on the Transparency International scale of perceived corruption (with 100 being “very clean”), has been maneuvering ever since to bring Osinfor under its thumb. In mid-December, when many people were distracted by pre-Christmas doings, the government’s council of ministers decided on short notice and without consulting the affected agencies to bury Osinfor within the environmental ministry.

Representative Richard Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, as incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, fired off a letter to the U.S.T.R., angrily protesting this “brazen, bad faith decision” as “a flagrant attack on the heart of the forestry annex.” The surprise came when the trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, appointed by a Trump administration that is otherwise outspokenly contemptuous of environmental concerns, wrote back just two days later, “in complete agreement with you and your colleagues that this development is unacceptable.”

One possible explanation is that the U.S.T.R. has finally become fed up after 10 years of being lied to and laughed off by Peru. Also possible: Mr. Lighthizer may simply be making a show of force on past environmental commitments to help ease the revised Nafta treaty — the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — through forthcoming congressional hearings. (Happily for the U.S.T.R., the environmental provisions of the unpronounceable U.S.M.C.A. are largely too weak to require much enforcement.)

For now, Mr. Lighthizer has “requested consultations with Peru under the Environment Chapter” of the trade agreement, another first for the U.S.T.R., with the possibility of sanctions still ahead. In Lima, government ministers are taking a this-too-will-pass attitude.

It should not pass. Tolerating stolen timber imports costs the jobs of thousands of Americans in the legal timber industry. It lends an eager hand to deforestation even as an intact Amazon forest is increasingly seen as a critical factor in fighting climate change. It implicates everyone who buys or sells lumber, or who lives in a wood house, in a global pattern of corruption, murder and devastation. And it turns all trade agreements into thinly veiled invitations to crime.

If in fact the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has overcome its teething pains, that’s good news. Now when trade partners prove false, it should learn how to bite.

END

Richard Conniff (@RichardConniff) is the author of The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth and a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times.

 

When Trump Babbles About His Damned Wall, Just Think Ocelots

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(Photo: Ana Cotta)

This is a piece I wrote a few years ago about an awkward family secret. But it seems appropriate to reprint tonight, as a man with too much power and too little sense holds the nation hostage over his dream of building a useless $6 billion wall. That wall will do a lot of bad things. But one of them is that it will ultimately kill off the last remaining ocelots on American soil.

by Richard Conniff

Everybody has some dreadful bit of family history stashed away in the attic and preferably forgotten. For the Rockefeller heirs last week, it was their investment in the fossil fuel industry, largely founded by their oil baron ancestor John D. Rockefeller. For me, it was an ocelot jacket inherited from my wife’s grandmother.

And let me tell you, it is hard to write about endangered species when you have a dead one literally hanging over your head. Or more like 15 dead ocelots, to make up the single carcoat-length jacket that has been hidden away in my attic for several decades now. So I decided to get rid of it, more or less the way the Rockefellers decided last week to divest their millions from fossil fuel companies. Only on a somewhat more modest scale.

Ocelots are beautiful little cats, roughly twice the size of a house cat and covered in elongated spots that seem to want to become stripes. They’re hide-and-pounce predators, and tend to be solitary and elusive, but still range through much of South and Central America, and up both coasts of Mexico. The fur trade used to kill as many as 200,000 ocelots annually for jackets like the one in my attic, which probably dates from the 1950s. But that traded ended in the 1980s, under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Even so, ocelots continues to decline across most of their home range, largely because of habitat loss, roadkill incidents, and inbreeding in populations that have become isolated. Two such populations, totaling fewer than 100 animals, survive in and around the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande valley, and ocelots also sometimes turn up in southern Arizona. So I phoned up the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) at Laguna Atascosa and asked them what to do when in possession of an endangered species, other than proceed directly to jail. Happily, they wanted the jacket as an educational tool.

“You want me to give my grandmother’s jacket to someone from Texas?” my wife cried, full of New England umbrage, when I broached the idea.

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Each dark line represents a dead ocelot (Photo: Richard Conniff)

“I sent them a photo. They say that jacket has 15 ocelots in it. Maybe more.”

“I didn’t do it.”

” You’re not going to wear it, and you can’t sell it.  What are you going to do with it?”

She retreated to the bathroom, where we have a lot of family pictures, saying, “I’m going to have to talk to my grandmother.” After a minute, from behind the closed door, she added, “Did you tell them I don’t trust Texans?

“They’ll put it on display in the visitor center.”

“That has to be in the contract,” she said.

I phoned Laguna back, and this time chatted with an ocelot biologist named Hilary Swarts, who by good fortune grew up in Connecticut, where we live. She even went to the same summer camp as our kids. Texas problem solved. My wife packed the jacket and mailed it herself.

Swarts told me about work to increase the ocelot population at Laguna Atascosa, including a plan being negotiated to boost genetic diversity by bringing in a female ocelot from a Mexican population. Research a few years ago also demonstrated that up to 40 percent of ocelot deaths at Laguna result from collisions with vehicles. The refuge is currently working with the Texas Department of Transportation on a plan to install eight wildlife crossings on a busy road that runs through the refuge.

But according to Tom DeMaar, a veterinarian who heads the Friends of Laguna Atascosa, the refuge is also in the middle of intense negotiations with TexDot, as it’s known, about addressing a deadly problem on another road. State Highway 100 is a busy four-lane road running alongside the refuge on a route that leads to South Padre Island, a popular spring break destination. A few years ago, to reduce drunk driving and other accidents, TexDot installed a concrete center barrier, ignoring the recommendation from biologists that it use guardrails instead to allow wildlife to cross under. Since then, three ocelots have been trapped on the road and killed by vehicles, the most recent of them this July.

According to DeMaar, a spokeman for TexDot in one interview described the ocelot as “a Texas National Treasure,” but also said replacing the concrete barriers would cost $1 million–too much money. “If a ‘Texas national treasure’ is not worth $1 million,” DeMaar asked, “What is it worth?” In a negotiation, he added, a TexDot employee wondered if the small size of the ocelot population didn’t mean it was doomed to disappear in any case, “and then the issue would go away?” DeMaar suggested that TexDot might change its attitude under public pressure, best addressed to its executive director, Tom Weber, by phone at (512) 305-9515 or by email.

Meanwhile, my wife’s grandmother’s ocelot jacket is out of the attic and making the rounds at Texas schools and other outreach events. “Although it’s tough to see something that represents a different time in our treatment of wild animals,” Hilary Swarts told me, “it’s a really powerful tool in showing the public how many cats it takes to make a jacket and how much more beautiful they are on actual, live ocelots. It’s one thing to tell them about it, but it’s always more powerful when you can show them.”

If it gets people angry enough to support the Laguna Atascosa ocelots—and fix that highway–I think even my wife’s grandmother might consider that a happy ending.

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Pterosaurs Just Keep Getting Weirder

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Wild and crazy anurognathid

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Even experts often resort to the word “bizarre” when describing pterosaurs, the winged dragons that ruled the skies for more than 160 million years. This is especially true of the group of short-tailed pterosaurs called anurognathids, which used to dart and bob through Mesozoic era forests like bats, hawking for insects.

Now it appears anurognathids and other pterosaurs may also have worn a weirdly varied coat of feather- and fur-like structures, according to a new study published Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution. A team led by paleontologist Zixiao Yang from Nanjing University in China reached that conclusion based on two near-complete, pigeon-size anurognathid pterosaur specimens found in northern China.

The idea that pterosaurs (which lived from around 228 million years ago to the Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago) may have had some kind of furlike coat is not by itself new. Researchers have proposed as much since the discovery of the first known pterosaurs in the 19th century. But the exact character of this covering has been difficult to determine from the short, filamentlike structures—called pycnofibers—preserved in pterosaur fossils. The new study set out to fill in that gap with the help of a battery of advanced technological tools. As a result, the authors characterize what they say are

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Fur or feathers? The four proposed pterosaur skin structures.

four different types of pycnofibers, distributed around the animal’s body in ways that suggest different types of pycnofiber performed different functions: thermal insulation on the neck and head, for example, or reducing drag on the wings. One type of pycnofiber is a simple, hairlike monofilament. But three others appear to be branched in a way the authors describe as “remarkably similar” to bird feathers. The similarities go beyond shape, or morphology, they say, to resemblance at chemical and cellular levels.

Based on this finding, the study also argues “featherlike branching integumentary structures” may have evolved first not in dinosaurs, as generally thought, but in some primordial archosaur—a common ancestor of both pterosaurs and dinosaurs, including modern birds. This would mean the ancestor even of decidedly nonavian dinosaurs like Stegosaurus might have been covered in quills, rather than scales. It would also push the origin of feathers out of the Jurassic period and back 60 or 70 million years to the dawn of the Triassic period.

That early date for the appearance of feathers would fit, says Michael Benton, senior author of the new study and a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, with the transition from a sprawling to an upright stance and to warm-bloodedness in many animal groups—along with other evidence indicating “the pace of life sped up” as Triassic species struggled to recover from the Permian–Triassic mass extinction, in which 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrates had vanished some 252 million years ago. It would also fit with evidence most of the genes controlling feather production were present in vertebrates before the origin of dinosaurs.

The counterargument, Benton says, is that big dinosaurs like Stegosaurus or Brontosaurus lacked feathers. But that is no more strange, he says, than elephants or whales having little or no hair—even though both evolved long after the evolution of hair in mammals.

In a commentary published in the same issue, behavioral ecologist Liliana D’Alba of Ghent University in Belgium, who was not involved in the new study, remains skeptical. The study demonstrates that the chemical composition of the pycnofibers is similar to that of feathers, she wrote, and both scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy show the fibers contain melanosomes—the same pigment packets that impart color to feathers and to mammal hairs. But the assertion some pycnofibers are branched like feathers is based, she says, on subjective interpretation of “gross filament morphology,” or shape. She notes that a previous attempt by other researchers to characterize pycnofibers as featherlike failed to persuade most paleontologists. It may require developments in other advanced technologies, she suggests, to resolve the question.

“Does this work show that archosaur skin was more complex than we knew? Yes,” says Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, whose extensive knowledge of feathers was the basis for his prize-winning 2017 book The Evolution of Beauty. (Prum also was not involved in the new study.) “Does it show that archosaurs grew all sorts of interesting stuff from their skin? You bet. All you have to do is look at a turkey beard to see that genuinely new stuff can evolve on the skin of an archosaur.” But Prum says the authors’ big conclusion is “flawed” because they overlook this evolutionary knack for novelty; just because pterosaurs produced some weird featherlike structures does not automatically imply feathers must have emerged in some common ancestor of pterosaurs and dinosaurs. “These pterosaur skin appendages are cool,” Prum says, “but their branched structure is not homologous with that of feathers”—that is, they do not have a shared evolutionary origin. “And they are probably not homologous with feathers at all,” he says. “In short, they ain’t feathers.”

Most of them are not even pycnofibers, says pterosaur specialist David Unwin at the University of Leicester in England, who was not involved in the study. “These are fantastic specimens, and they did a brilliant job of imaging them,” he adds. But he contends the researchers are mistaken when they use keratin content to identify certain structures as external pycnofibers. Those structures, he says, are almost certainly pterosaur wing tissues called actinofibers, which may also contain keratin. None of the new study’s nine authors has experience with soft-tissue preservation in pterosaurs; perhaps as a result, Unwin says, they fail to reference other relevant studies—for instance, of pterosaur melanosomes. Their interpretation of the evidence, he adds, “is problematic, to say the least.”

Benton challenges critics to show “the structures in pterosaurs are morphologically or chemically different from feathers.” Meanwhile, he says, “we are taking a parsimonious view” that they are in fact feathers. He likens the new study to putting up a kite: “We are just setting up a hypothesis that can be tested.”

Attempts to bring down that kite—by rhetorical shotgun fire—have now commenced.

Cities Are For People, Not Cars

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Yes, there are people in those cars. But not many for the space they occupy.

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

In many of the major cities of the world, it has begun to dawn even on public officials that walking is a highly efficient means of transit, as well as one of the great underrated pleasures in life. A few major cities have even tentatively begun to take back their streets for pedestrians.

Denver, for instance, is proposing a plan to invest $1.2 billion in sidewalks, and, at far greater cost, bring frequent public transit within a quarter-mile of most of its residents. In Europe, where clean, safe, punctual public transit is already widely available, Oslo plans to ban all cars from its city center beginning next year. Madrid is banning cars owned by nonresidents, and is also redesigning 24 major downtown avenues to take them back for pedestrians. Paris has banned vehicles from a road along the Seine, and plans to rebuild it for bicycle and pedestrian use.

Yes, car owners are furious. That’s because they have mistaken their century-long domination over pedestrians for a right rather than a privilege. The truth is that cities are not doing nearly enough to restore streets for pedestrian use, and it’s the pedestrians who should be furious.

Many American cities still rely on “level of service” (LOS) design models developed in the 1960s that focus single-mindedly on keeping vehicle traffic moving, according to Elizabeth Macdonald, an urban design specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Hence improvements for other modes (walking, cycling, transit) that might increase vehicle delay are characterized as LOS. impediments,” she and her co-authors write in The Journal of Urban Design. The idea of pedestrians as “impediments” is of course perverse, especially given the word’s original meaning: An impediment was something that functioned as a shackle for the feet — unlimited vehicle traffic, say.

The emphasis on vehicle traffic flow is also a perversion of basic social equity, and the costs show up in ways large and small. Vehicles in cities contribute a major portion of small-particle pollution, the kind that penetrates deep into the lungs. (Thepercentage can reach as high as 49 percent in Phoenix and 55 percent in Los Angeles. It’s just 6 percent in Beijing, but that’s because there are so many other pollution sources.) People living close to busy roads, particularly infants and older people in lower-income households, pay most of the cost in respiratory, cardiovascular and other problems. A 2013 M.I.T. study estimated that vehicle emissions cause 53,000 early deaths a year in the United States, and a study just last month from Lancaster University in Britain found that children with intellectual disabilities are far more likely to live in areas with high levels of vehicle pollution.

Among the smaller costs: Most people in cities from Bangalore to Brooklyn cannot afford to keep a car, and yet our cities routinely turn over the majority of public thoroughfares to those who can. They allow parked cars to eat up 350 square feet apiece, often at no charge, in cities where private parking spaces rent for as much as $700 a month. And they devote most of what’s left of the street to the uninterrupted flow of motor vehicles.

But that’s not really such a small cost, after all: It means that we often cannot afford room for parks or shade trees, which other studies have repeatedly shown to be an important factor in the health and mental well-being of residents. Even when car-mad cities leave enough room on the side to squeeze in trees, they tend to be miniaturized, lollipop versions of what street trees used to be. Hardly anyone plants the towering oaks or maples that used to intertwine their branches overhead and make the sidewalks feel like a leafy grove in the heart of the city.

Urban walking has thus deteriorated from a civilized pleasure to an overheated, unshaded, traffic-harried race to a destination. It’s like what the art historian Vincent Scully once said about the demolition of the old Penn Station and its replacement by the commuter hell squeezed beneath Madison Square Garden: “One entered the city like a god; now one scuttles in like a rat.”

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Copenhagen (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Happily, some urban planners are waking up to the idea that we can, in fact, do better. Copenhagen has already largely accomplished the shift in focus from vehicles to human beings, thanks considerably to a 40-year campaign by the architect and urban thinker Jan Gehl. I was stunned during a recent visit to the city center when an armada of bicycles actually came to a stop at a red light and waited patiently for pedestrians to cross. I was accustomed to the United States, where cyclists often pay no attention to traffic laws, and cars turn right on red with little regard for either cyclists or pedestrians. Stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks that are not controlled by traffic lights is a legal requirement in only nine states and the District of Columbia.

Maybe we can’t turn every street into a pedestrian paradise. Urban planners in London now follow a sort of zoning plan, with some streets developed primarily for moving vehicles, and others focused on the richer (and more retail-friendly) urban life of the pedestrian. In this country, Berkeley’s Professor Macdonald and her co-authors have recently published a simple system for urban planners to identify — and presumably prioritize — factors that make streets pedestrian-friendly. For instance, on large arterial roadways, walkers feel comfortable only if the sidewalks are at least 15 feet wide.

But we don’t have to wait for governments to wake up to the idea that a street without pedestrians is, as Mr. Gehl put it, “like an empty theater: Something must be wrong with the production since there is no audience.” City residents can stage their own lessons in livability. The “Walk Your City” movement, for instance, provides a tool kit for neighborhood organizations to post signs giving the distance on foot or by bike (with directions via scannable QR code) to local attractions: “It’s just a 10-minute walk to …” a nice park, a sunset viewpoint, a great art museum. Since its start in 2012 in Raleigh, N.C., “Walk Your City” has spread to more than 400 communities in 55 countries.

Likewise, the Better Block Foundation helps neighborhoods stage pop-up events to demonstrate their potential to become more livable, with bike lanes and curb extensions (known as “bump-outs”) in place of parking spaces, and lots of benches, bus stop shelters, kiosks, sidewalk cafes and playgrounds. Sadly, pop-ups aren’t permanent. These temporary displays come down again after a few days. But seeing the possibilities sometimes leads city leaders to make the vision a reality.

This is the fundamental common sense rule: Cities and their streets are about people, not cars, and all urban design should think first about the only transit equipment that comes factory-standard for the average human being — our feet.

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Richard Conniff (@RichardConniff) is the author of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties and the Story of Life on Earth” and a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times.