Richard Conniff's Blog, page 9

U.S. Cities Are Losing Tree Cover Just When They Need It Most

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 by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Scientific evidence that trees and green spaces are crucial to the well-being of people in urban areas has multiplied in recent decades. Conveniently, these findings have emerged just as Americans, already among the most urbanized people in the world, are increasingly choosing to live in cities. The problem—partly as a result of that choice—is that urban tree cover is now steadily declining across the U.S.

A study in the May issue of Urban Forestry & Urban Greening reports metropolitan areas are experiencing a net loss of about 36 million trees nationwide every year. That amounts to about 175,000 acres of tree cover, most of it in central city and suburban areas but also on the exurban fringes. This reduction, says lead author David Nowak of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), translates into an annual loss of about $96 million in benefits—based, he says, on “only a few of the benefits that we know about.” The economic calculation looked at just four such benefits that are relatively easy to express in dollar terms—the capacity of trees to remove air pollution, sequester carbon, conserve energy by shading buildings, and reduce power plant emissions.

Nowak and a USFS colleague, co-author Eric Greenfield, found tree cover had declined in metropolitan areas across 45 states. The biggest loserson a percentage basis were Rhode Island, Georgia, Alabama and Nebraska, together with the District of Columbia. Only three states—Mississippi, Montana and New Mexico—saw increased metropolitan tree cover, all by “nonsignificant” amounts. (State-by-state figures are available here.) The research team used Google Earth imagery to examine 1,000 randomly chosen points in each state for a before-and-after comparison over a five-year period, generally ending in 2014 or 2015.

Nowak attributes the losses to factors including development to accommodate the expanding urban population, natural aging and death of trees, storms (Hurricane Katrina knocked out a third of the shade trees in New Orleans), insect damage (emerald ash borer has killed thousands of ash trees in Detroit), individual property owners converting forests to lawns or other uses, and fire.

The USFS study expands on a 2012 study by the same authors that looked at 20 individual cities, and found 17 of them had experienced significant tree loss. The question is whether the back-to-back declines in the two studies represent a temporary dip, Novak says—“or is it a line that keeps going down? If it keeps going down, I think we’re going to be in trouble. Cities will warm up, we might have more pollution, people will be more unhealthy.”

Novak is referring to robust and rapidly accumulating evidence that urban trees help reduce blood pressure and heart rate, decrease stress, elevate mental engagement and attentiveness, and improve a sense of safety, comfort and overall happiness, among other social and physiological benefits. A stunning 2011 study—since questioned by one study but replicated by several others—found having good tree cover in the immediate vicinity of a pregnant woman’s home sharply reduced the likelihood she would have a low-birthweight baby, possibly by lowering stress levels. “There’s almost no public health, crime or environmental quality metric that you can look at that isn’t made better by the presence of trees,” says Deborah Marton of the New York Restoration Project, a nonprofit organization focusing on New York City’s disadvantaged neighborhoods.  “Trees are infrastructure, and they are the cheapest way” cities can make a difference in the lives of residents, Marton says.

But that message has not gotten through to many municipalities. “Too many people think that living in closer contact with nature is nice, it’s an amenity, it’s good to have if you can afford it,” says William Sullivan, head of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Landscape Architecture department, who studies the effect of tree cover on urban crime and was not involved in the new study. “They haven’t got the message that it’s a necessity. It’s a critical component of a healthy human habitat.”

Urban tree planting programs—even the heavily promoted “million tree” campaigns taking place in many U.S. cities—have not kept up with losses. Some of these initiatives have failed because of inadequate funding, or fading interest. The American Bar Association, for instance, ended its nationwide million tree program in 2016 with only 52,693 planted. Others met their targets but the saplings are still too small to be picked up by Google Earth images; Nowak notes these recent efforts may pay off in a few years as the young trees mature. Still other organizers reached the million mark, “but took no interest in caring for the trees over time,” Marton says. “It’s slow. It’s not sexy. If you plant a new tree, that’s exciting. If you water it for five years…maybe it will grow a few inches.” American culture, she says, is “all about the quick fix.”

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Baltimore’s North Carrolton Avenue (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Other experts suggest cities are becoming more attuned to the value of trees, in part because of climate change. “Right at the moment, the urban heat island effect seems to be the most persuasive” for city governments, says Eric Sanderson, a Wildlife Conservation Society ecologist who focuses on urban habitats and did not take part in the USFS work. Densely developed areas typically experience higher temperatures. But shade from trees, together with evaporation of the water their leaves transpire, can help reduce peak summer temperatures in their vicinity by 2 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 5 degrees Celsius). In Davis, Calif., researchers found shade trees reduced the surface temperature of asphalt by up to 36 degrees F (20 degrees C), and of the passenger compartments of parked cars by 47 degrees F (26 degrees C). For elderly people in homes without air-conditioning, the cooling effect of trees can make a life-or-death difference.

Some cities are also using trees to retain water and reduce runoff. Philadelphia, for instance, faced a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mandate to deal with the problem of storm water overwhelming sewage treatment plants. Officials considered building an underground tunnel as a temporary reservoir for the overflow. But after subtracting construction costs, a consultant estimated this approach would produce a net benefit over 40 years of just $122 million. Instead the city opted—with EPA approval—to plant trees and install other green infrastructure to soak up rainwater and keep it from getting into the sewer system in the first place.  The same consultant projected this approach would yield a net $2.8-billion benefit in the form of improved property values, increased recreational opportunities and avoided heat-stress deaths.

Finally, pressure for environmental justice is also likely to drive the urban tree planting movement—especially because heat-stress deaths, low-birthweight babies and other effects associated with the absence of tree cover now tend to be concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Cities have plenty of room to improve. New York City has room for another 200,000 street trees, according to Jennifer Greenfeld, the city’s assistant commissioner for forestry, horticulture and natural resources. And a study of urban California estimated that it has 236 million vacant tree sites.

Adding tree cover will, however, require a shift to long-term thinking—especially to plan ways to make room for nature while also accommodating new growth. “We’re urbanizing like crazy,” says Sullivan, the landscape architect. “And it takes a lot more than a few cities with million tree programs to replace the trees that get chewed up by office buildings and big box stores and parking lots.” Living well in an increasingly urbanized world, he adds, will require “nature at every doorstep. It’s not enough to have a phenomenal world-class park three miles from your home. It’s not enough to have these incredible national parks five states away.” A tree needs to grow, he says, outside every window and doorway.

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

Our Love for Exotic Pets is Emptying Forests and Oceans

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(Photo: FLIGHT Protecting Indonesia’s Birds)

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Conservation biologist David S. Wilcove was on a birding trip to Sumatra in 2012 when he began to notice that house after house in every village he visited had cages hanging outside, inhabited by the sort of wild birds he had expected to see in the forest. Nationwide, one in five households keeps birds as pets. That got him thinking, “What is this doing to the birds?”

Wilcove, who teaches at Princeton University, made a detour to the Pramuka bird market in Jakarta,

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White-rumped shama (Photo: Shanaka Aravinda)

Southeast Asia’s largest market for birds and other wildlife, from fruit bats to macaques. “It was this sort of Wal-Mart-size space filled with hundreds of stalls,” he recalled recently, “each stall of which was filled with

hundreds of birds. An awful lot of them were in very poor condition, with signs of disease, feathers frayed, behaving listlessly–or thrashing around in their cages, because a lot of these are wild birds that are not at all suited to living as caged birds.” Some were species that even zoos with highly trained professional staff cannot maintain in captivity; they would die soon after purchase, “the cut flower syndrome,” he remarked.  “It was really a shocking site. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Research by Wilcove and his colleagues subsequently linked demand for birds in Indonesia’s pet marketplace to the decline of numerous species in the wild. Prices in the pet market, they suggested, in a 2015 study in Biological Conservation, can even serve as an alarm system for species declines that might not show up in field studies until years later, if at all:  When the average price for a white-rumped shama, a popular species in Indonesian songbird competitions, shot up 1500 percent from 2013 to 2015, the shift tipped conservationists off for the first time that these birds were vanishing from the wild.

Follow-up field studies in Indonesia by co-author Bert Harris, now at the Rainforest Trust, found no trace of shamas even in seemingly intact habitats where they should thrive, such as in national parks and in forests five kilometers from the nearest roads.  Buyers were paying especially high prices for distinctive island populations, some of them likely unrecognized species or sub-species. The pet trade, said Wilcove, thus has “the potential to drive species to extinction even when they have suitable habitat, and drive them to extinction without anyone being aware of it.”

The problem isn’t just about birds.  Nor is it limited to

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Greater slow loris at the Minnesota Zoo. (Photo: Joel Sartore)

Indonesia or other developing nations.  The trade in wild-caught pets is driven at least as much by demand from collectors in the United States and Europe. Home aquariums in the U.S., for example, are the final destination for about 11 million fish and other marine creatures plucked from coral reefs every year.  American pet dealers annually import 225 million live animals on average, and brought in more than three billion over the first 14 years of this century.

Despite the widespread belief that our love of pets is one of the finer aspects of human nature, researchers increasingly suggest that it has become a major force in what they call “defaunation,” the great vanishing of wildlife from habitats of all kinds, almost everywhere.  In places, our appetite for pets ranks with habitat loss, black market poaching, and the bushmeat trade as a factor in the growing silence of the natural world.

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For decades conservationists emphasized the role of ecosystem destruction in driving biodiversity decline. But the booming trade in wild animals, with more species taken to meet international demand for pets than for any other purpose, has caused increasing alarm. “The idea that habitat loss is the greatest threat to species survival is starting to be questioned, “says Crawford Allan of the wildlife trade-monitoring network TRAFFIC, a collaboration between the WWF and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “There are certain species that have plenty of habitat; however, they are being sucked up from the wild at alarming rates.”

Consumer demand for rare species has made the pet trade a source of special concern among conservationists. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species already includes many species pushed to the brink by trapping for the pet trade, among them birds (the Bali myna and South America’s Spix’s macaw), a primate (Southeast Asia’s greater slow loris), ornamental fishes (Asia’s red line torpedo barb), and reptiles (Madagascar’s radiated tortoise and ploughshare tortoise).  And these are just the well-studied species, according to Wilcove and Harris. For the vast majority of vertebrates sold in markets and pet stores, researchers have not even begun to study how the pet trade affects wild populations.

Field studies to answer such questions inevitably progress slowly, but the market for pets can move with devastating and unpredictable speed. In one notorious case from the 1990s, researchers published the first scientific description of the Roti Island snake necked turtle, including the standard details about where it lives–an island in southern Indonesia.  Collectors pounced, and the species is now critically endangered.

Having learned this painful lesson, biologists withheld precise locality information in 2011 when they described the new Matilda’s horned viper from the highlands of southern Tanzania. Dealers nonetheless had the snakes on the market that same year at more than $500 apiece, according to a recent study of the European reptile trade published in Biological Conservation. Collectors did not seem deterred even by the likelihood that their purchases could cause a species to become extinct in the wild. In 2010, for example, a Russian language journal reported the rediscovery of a snake subspecies from northern Vietnam last seen in the 1930s and presumed extinct. One year later, online dealers in Europe were advertising specimens, ostensibly “farmed” in Vietnam, at prices up to $1750 a pair.

Dealers and collectors  justify the pet trade under the guise of conservation, says a reptile trade investigator who asked not to be named. “They say ‘We are maintaining insurance populations.’ Or, ‘The wild habitat is being destroyed so we are protecting these animals.’  In the vast majority of cases, that’s not true.”  Rather, the investigator asserts, the pet trade itself is decimating wild populations.

For instance, the critically endangered ploughshare tortoise, a handsome species with a domed, golden shell, lives only in Baly Bay National Park in northwestern Madagascar. Commercial exploitation has been banned since 1975 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and conservationists have worked for decades to rebuild the population in the wild.  But over the past five years a surge in poaching to supply collectors has reduced the ploughshare population at Baly Bay to fewer than 100 adults.  In countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, and China, which tend to honor CITES rules on paper but not in practice, speculators have driven the price for a large ploughshare adult up to $100,000.

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Pet shop residents in Beijing

Financial speculation was also the apparent motivation in 2015, when a Chinese businessman paid more than $200,000 for a red-necked pond turtle, a species from southern China now thought to be extinct in the wild. “The more rare species get, the closer to extinction, the more these dealers promote that as a sales thing, and the higher the prices become,” said Rick Hudson, a herpetologist and president of the Texas-based nonprofit Turtle Survival Alliance.

The same players who supply the trade in wild animal parts–from rhinoceros horn to crocodile skin–are also fueling the pet trade. “Many of these people who were doing the traditional medicine trade are now branching out because the high-end pet trade in China has grown immensely, and has caused escalating prices in Europe and the United States,” said Brian Horne, a herpetologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Criminal elements have also gotten involved, at times targeting the captive breeding facilities set up by conservationists to rebuild populations of imperiled species.  Thieves broke into one such facility in Thailand and stole six ploughshare and 72 radiated tortoises.They also target collectors. In Hong Kong, for instance, robbers broke into one family’s home twice in three months, the second time scaling drainpipes and bypassing security cameras to steal 23 endangered turtles worth an estimated $116,000.

Catching and prosecuting people who traffic in illegal wildlife is one obvious way to slow the emptying of natural habitats. In 2016 a judge sentenced a Pennsylvania man to two years in prison in a scheme to export North American wood turtles, a threatened species.  According to federal investigators, John Tokosh, then 54, collected 750 of them from a small area south of Pittsburgh, immobilized them with duct tape for shipping, and sold them at $400 apiece to middlemen supplying the pet trade in Hong Kong.  That case also led to jail terms for a postal worker in Louisiana, and collaborators in Chicago, and California.

But such prosecutions are relatively rare. The enormous scale of the pet trade, both into and out of the country, inevitably overwhelms port inspectors working to spot contraband. “We do a lot of these blitzes, we call them, and it’s such an absolute needle in a haystack,” said one U.S. Fish and Wildlife inspector who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the press.  “We have all the tools. We’ve gotten more equipment and more people. We have a great intelligence unit.  It just seems like we’re always behind the eight ball.  By the time we figure it out, everything has changed. You can make as much money dealing in illegal wildlife species as you can dealing in arms and heroin and cocaine, but your chances of going to jail or being caught are less.”

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Burmese star tortoise

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Indian star tortoise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sheer variety of species being traded also reduces the likelihood of detection.  “There’s nobody out there that knows all the birds,” said Eric Goode, a naturalist with the nonprofit Turtle Conservancy. “Tropical fish, unless you get the world’s top ichthyologist, they don’t know how to identify all those species. In the case of turtles [and tortoises], there are only 340 species on the planet,” but inspectors typically “can’t tell a Burmese star tortoise from an Indian star tortoise, or one soft-shelled turtle from another.” CITES may ban all trade in a critically endangered turtle or parrot, but traffickers “just label it as a more common variety” and go on about their business. In one case, a dealer smuggled an orangutan into the country by trimming its hair, dyeing it brown and mixing it into a legal shipment of other primates.:

Goode and others argued that if the pet trade cares about conservation, suppliers should stop harvesting animals from the wild and focus on breeding them in captivity. “There’s a point when you have to walk the walk,” he said. “Let’s really stop the importation of wildlife, stop the importation of wild birds, stop the Russian tortoises,” a species from Central Asia commonly sold in U.S. pet stores.  “Go to any of these warehouses and see the staggering mortality that occurs every day. Why do you need this constant flow of animals into the United States that are caught in the wild?”

Captive breeding could also be the answer to the bird trade in Indonesia, where many households already keep captive-bred lovebirds, said Princeton’s David Wilcove.  A program aimed at increasing availability of inexpensive budgerigars, canaries, and other pet-friendly birds might help persuade people that they don’t “need to own a shama, or to buy some of these wild-caught birds that are not suited to living in a cage.”  As a child, he added, he used a recording by “the Pavarotti of the canary world” to train his pet canary to sing. “There’s no reason canaries couldn’t become fierce competitors” in Indonesian singing competitions, he added.

But captive breeding can also be harder than it might seem. In 2014, EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit, established its EcoHealthy Pets website, modeled on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, to alert consumers to the best and worst choices in exotic pets.  The list emphasizes captive breeding as a way to reduce both health risks and pressure on the natural world.  But lack of financial support has so far limited the list to just 52 species, not nearly enough to satisfy even many beginning hobbyists.

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Pet shop residents in Beijing (Photo: Richard Conniff)

The pet industry has remained ambivalent about a broad commitment to captive breeding, in part because no one has figured out how to breed many animal groups that are popular as pets.  And when they do figure it out, they may find that raising an animal to maturity is far more expensive than simply catching it from the wild.  When breeders in the lucrative saltwater aquarium fish trade learned how to rear colorful mandarinfish, for instance, “the mass market didn’t want to pay $40 for a captive-bred fish they could get for $12 from wild-caught sources,” Scott Fellman, an aquarium trade retailer, complained in an online forum. “Shame on us, as a hobby, for not doing more to support efforts like this,” he added.

Further complicating matters, many self-styled captive breeding facilities actually replenish their stock from the wild and may thus serve merely to launder the wholesale removal of wildlife from habitats. For instance, the number of “captive bred” Papuan hornbills being exported “far exceeds what breeding facilities can hold or yield, given the species’ slow reproductive rate,” conservation geneticist Laura Tensen of the University of Johannesburg reported, in a survey of wildlife farming published in 2016 in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation. Likewise, many frog and chameleon species appear to be economically unsuited to breeding programs because of low reproductive success in captivity, and yet, Tensen noted, “they are being traded as pets in their thousands under the guise of captive breeding.”

Even if traders could figure out how to breed all the species people want as pets in captivity, not all conservationists thing they should. When Australian herpetologists Daniel Natusch and Jessica Lyons made a detailed investigation of the trade in green pythons from Indonesia, all supposedly from captive-bred stock, they found that many facilities did not actually know how to breed reptiles successfully. Some did not even have premises on which to attempt breeding.  The researchers estimated that 80 percent of these snakes exported to the pet trade are in fact caught in the wild. But the wild-caught trade in green pythons appeared to be sustainable because of the abundance of these snakes in the wild.

`In such cases, Natusch said, the wild-caught trade may be better for conservation than captive-breeding. “You can incentivize people to protect the habitat. If you can harvest these animals sustainably, you can have an income from the forest, and you don’t have to cut down the forest.”

Natusch, who works as a consultant to the IUCN, acknowledged that exporters can do horrible things for the trade–for instance, cramming snakes into suitcases and soda bottles to smuggle them through customs. He also agrees that taking snakes from endemic populations restricted to islands or outcrops can pose a threat to their survival. But the trouble with captive breeding, he said, is that “once you take those animals from the wild, you have completely disassociated” the trade from any reason to care about the natural habitat. In contrast, he said, an entirely illegal trade in green pythons from Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago has motivated islanders to keep their forests intact. (A rare color morph with yellow markings makes the snake trade there particularly lucrative.)

People who collect rare species are often “convinced they are doing wonderful things for animals” by taking them out of the wild and sheltering them from hunger, predation, and other natural threats, said University of Oxford conservation biologist Tom P. Moorhouse, lead author of a 2016 study of consumer attitudes toward exotic pets.  Buyers also typically assume “their ethical duties have taken care of by the time an animal reaches the market.  We need a campaign to convince people this isn’t the case, and that their choices have a massive effect.  If there were no demand, no market for wild caught exotics, there’d be no point paying someone to capture animals from the wild.”

The pet industry has yet to come to terms with the issue of how the trade is affecting animal populations in the wild. But the trade does care about conservation, said Mike Bober, president of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council. “We think there’s a place for wild-caught and captive-bred in most of these communities– the important thing being the methods used for collection,” he said. “When the animals are collected sustainably, especially when they are collected by indigenous people who depend on that for their livelihood, we are proud of that. When they are collected badly, it’s a direct problem for our industry. We rely on healthy ecosystems for healthy animals, and without healthy pets, there’s no healthy pet trade.”

But healthy ecosystems are vanishingly rare in the human-dominated era, and no adequate standards of sustainable collecting exist.  Sooner or later, pet lovers and the trade may need to face up to that reality and devise better ways of sourcing animals in a world where forests, oceans, and other habitats are running empty.

 

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Inside China’s Motherlode of Ancient Monsters

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Junchang Lü and friend (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff/Smithsonian Magazine

Not long ago in northeastern China, I found myself being driven in a Mercedes Benz SUV down a winding country road, trailed by a small motorcade of local dignitaries, past flat-roofed brick farmhouses and fields full of corn stubble. Abruptly, we arrived at our destination, and my guide, a stylishly-dressed woman named Fangfang, slipped out of her high heels into fieldwork gear: pink sneakers with bright blue pompoms on the Velcro straps.

We were visiting a dinosaur dig, but it was also a museum in the early stages of construction—steel beams riveted together to form oddly birdlike layers, stacked one atop another, climbing a hillside in two parallel rows. At the top, a central pavilion connecting the two rows looked like a bird about to take off.  The new museum didn’t have a definite name yet, though it is due to open sometime next year.  But it was unmistakably huge.  It was also expensive (Fanfang thought $28 million for construction alone).  And it was in the middle of nowhere.

[image error]We were in a rural village called Sihetun, in the western part of Liaoning Province.  And in the exuberant fashion of a lot of modern development in China, the new museum is going up in anticipation of visitors arriving by speed train from Beijing, 250 miles to the southwest, except that the speed train hasn’t been built yet.  More sensibly, the new museum is going up to celebrate the epicenter of modern paleontological discovery, an area that is at least as rich in fossils, and in some ways as wild, as the American West during the great era of dinosaur discovery in the late nineteenth century.

Liaoning Province (pronounced “lee-ow-NING”) is an area about the size of Michigan, sandwiched between Inner Mongolia and North Korea.  It used to be known mainly for coal, corn, and decrepit factories, which have given it a reputation as “China’s rust belt.” That’s put it off the usual itinerary for the average tourist. But developments over the past quarter-century have made it a point of pilgrimage for people interested in fossils.

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Liaoning farmer and fossil hunter Lang Shi Kuang (Photo: Stefen Chow)

In the mid-1990s, on that hillside in Sihetun, a farmer planting a tree stumbled onto the world’s first known feathered dinosaur, a creature now named Sinosauropteryx (meaning “the China dragon wing”).  Actually, the farmer found two halves of a slab, each preserving a mirror image of this dinosaur.  In the freebooting spirit that has characterized the fossil trade in the area ever since, he promptly sold half to one unwitting museum, and half to another. It was the start of a fossil gold rush.

Since then, the region has produced more than 40 dinosaur species, and they have inevitably grabbed the headlines. Standing on a hillside a few minutes from the new museum site, my guide pointed out the low hills of a nearby farm where Yutyrannus, a 3100-pound feathered dinosaur, turned up a few years ago. (Think Tyrannosaurus rex, but plumed like a Mardi Gras Indian.)  This was also the former home range of Anchiornis huxleyi, a chicken-size creature with enough preserved detail to become the first dinosaur ever described feather-by-feather in its authentic colors—an event one paleontologist likened to “the birth of color tv.”

What has emerged from beneath the fields of Liaoning (and parts of neighboring provinces) is, however, bigger than dinosaurs: A couple of decades of digging have yielded two ancient worlds preserved in miraculously complete detail. The first, called the Yanliao Biota, is from 160 million years ago, in the late Jurassic period.  The second, called the Jehol Biota, is early Cretaceous, from 131 to 120 million years ago.

The Jehol is more famous, at least among paleontologists, and far more diverse. Among the ancient biota—or plant and animal life—found so far: Four turtle species, eight amphibians, 15 fishes, 17 mammals, 24 of the winged reptiles called pterosaurs, and no fewer than 53 ancient bird species, the latter shedding dramatic new light on the dinosaur origin of birds and on the evolution of feathers and flight.  That’s in addition to some of the earliest flowering plants, plus assorted pines, cypresses, and gingko trees, algae, mosses and ferns, snails, clams, crustaceans, insects, spiders, and almost endlessly onward.  It’s a measure of this diversity that, in addition to its other displays, the new museum in Sihetun will house 26 different specimens—from fish to a parrot-faced dinosaur called Psittacosaurus–all partly excavated but still embedded in the hillside where they were originally discovered.

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Museum under construction in Sihetun. (Photo: Stefen Chow)

Here’s another measure of that diversity: Liaoning already has at least ten other fossil museums to celebrate this paleontological bonanza, some with important collections, others mainly products of local boosterism, or bureaucratic career-building.  There’s typically lots of money for new buildings, much less for acquiring collections, and none at all, at least in the provinces, for scientific staff to make sense of the collections. So many of the best specimens also turn up in Beijing, or at the Shandong Tianyu Nature Museum seven hours south of the capital, described by one knowledgeable paleontologist as “the best place to see Liaoning fossils” and ranked by Guinness World Records as the largest dinosaur museum on Earth.

At first glance, the fossils of Liaoning might not wow visitors whose idea of paleontology is limited to massive dinosaur reconstructions at other natural history museums.  What Liaoning typically produces are slabs of stone, not—as is common in the American West–a jigsaw puzzle of disarticulated bones suitable for piecing together dramatic reconstructions.  When I first encountered these slabs at the Beijing Museum of Natural History, each one lay flat in a glass display case, too high off the ground for children to see, and often obscured, for adults, by lighting ingeniously positioned in precisely the wrong spot.

Then I looked more closely: The backgrounds of the slabs, in mottled shades of beige, brown, and ochre, were like old monochrome watercolors, or like a landscape scroll painted in the Tang Dynasty.  The preserved fossils stood out against this background like bold strokes of calligraphy, and they were stunningly intact. “It looks like somebody’s chicken dinner.” a friend remarked, when I showed him a photo of one such fossilized bird.  It looked, in truth, as if something had swatted the bird out of the sky and instantly entombed it in rock, which is more or less what happened, over and over, to vast numbers of such creatures, across tens of millions of years.

One chilly December morning I woke up in the city of Chaoyang and watched from my hotel window as the mist rose off a wide bend in the Daling river and the rising sun lit up the mountains on either side. Chaoyang is said to have gotten its name from an old poem about a mythological bird singing to the rising sun. It’s known today as a city for fossils, and some of its most celebrated inhabitants are extinct birds and other ancient creatures.

In the Mesozoic era, northeastern China was mostly forest and lake country, with a temperate climate. But it was prone to ferocious volcanic eruptions spewing deadly gases across the landscape.  Lakebed mud and volcanic ash quickly entombed victims without the oxygen necessary for decomposition, and these fine-grained sediments preserved not just bones, but feathers, hair, skin tissue, organs, and even stomach contents.  The Chaoyang native Microraptor, for instance, is a small, four-winged dinosaur, a tree-dwelling glider built for short predatory plunges from branch to branch.  Researchers examining one specimen recently found evidence in its abdomen that its last meal was a bird swallowed whole.  (They also identified the bird.) A specimen of a mammal called Repenomamus, resembling a modern bulldog, turned out to have eaten a small dinosaur.

For paleontologists, the value of Liaoning fossils lies not just in the extraordinarily preserved details, but also in the timing:  The Jehol has opened a window on the moment when birds broke away from other dinosaurs and evolved new forms of flight and ways of feeding, filling the world with new species.  “These spectacular fossils have radically transformed our understanding of the lives of birds,” from the base of the avian family tree on up nearly to the origin of modern birds, Luis Chiappe and Meng Qingjin write in the 2016 book Birds of Stone. “Indeed, these discoveries have detailed one of the most astounding evolutionary transitions in the history of life …” including most of the digestive, respiratory, skeletal, and plumage adaptions needed to take the bird line from big, scary meat-eating dinosaurs to something like a modern pigeon or hummingbird.

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Confuciusornis (Photo: Stephanie Abramowicz)

Moreover, they detail this transition in abundance. For instance, specimens of Confuciusornis, the oldest known bird to have evolved a modern beak, number in the thousands.  By contrast, Archaeopteryx, the 150-million-year-old primitive bird first described in 1861 has been both revered and debated ever since as critical evidence for the evolution of birds from reptiles.  But it’s known from just a dozen fossils, all found near Solnhofen, Germany.

Liaoning has produced so many specimens of some species that paleontologists study them not just microscopically, but statistically.  “That’s what’s great about Liaoning,” says Jingmai O’Connor, an American paleontologist at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP). “When you have such huge collections, you can study variation between species and within species.  You can look at male-female variation.  You can confirm the absence or presence of anatomical structures. It opens up a really exciting range of research topics not normally available to paleontologists.”

But the way fossils get collected in Liaoning also closes off research possibilities. Scientifically managed excavations were never common there, and they are now on the decrease. That’s partly because even the most prominent Chinese paleontologists lack adequate funding. But they say it’s also because it has become too difficult to deal with provincial bureaucrats, who may be hoping to capitalize on the fossil trade themselves. Instead, an army of untrained farmers do much of the digging illegally.  They focus on rare and wonderful fossils, which grateful paleontologists rush to describe.   But in the process, the farmers typically destroy the excavation site, without having recorded such basic scientific data as the exact location of a dig and the depth, or stratigraphic layer, at which they found a particular specimen.  Unspectacular invertebrate fossils, which could provide clues to the date of a specimen, instead get cast aside as worthless.

As a result, professional paleontologists may be able to measure and describe hundreds of different Confuciusornis excavated by farmers from the Jehol Biota. But they have no way to determine whether individual specimens lived side by side or millions of years apart, says Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. That makes it impossible to track the evolution of different traits—for instance, that toothless modern bird beak—over time.

Forgery is also a routine challenge.  Late one afternoon in Chaoyang, I visited a darkened, minimally heated apartment to find fossils–the kind Western collectors would gladly kill for–stacked on every available surface.  On the coffee table, next to some vitamin pills and a water bottle was a 160-million-year-old Anchiornis, its dinosaur tail and its plumy smudge of feathers preserved in exquisite detail.  Nearby, the twin halves of a split fossil lay side by side, and a fish now seemed to be perpetually swimming toward itself.  A child’s sparkle-painted pink bicycle stood on the balcony, and it occurred to me that the only way its owner could get it to the front door would be by wheeling it through a treasure house of perfectly preserved life forms from scores of million of years in the past. The apartment belonged to the child’s father, a museum director, who was holding the specimens in readiness for the new museum at Sihetun.

Junchang Lü, a paleontologist visiting from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, picked up a specimen from the floor and, pointing to different parts of the anatomy, said, “This part is real, this part is not.” To me, the difference was indiscernible, but to Lü’s eye, it leapt out: “I think someone went to find another specimen, cut a groove,” and cemented in a suitable looking wing bone. The museum, he said, would have a preparator remove the fake parts and preserve what’s authentic for study, or display. Other museums are less fussy. Chiappe has estimated that 50 percent of the specimens in regional museums have been “enhanced” in some fashion.

“It’s just a fact,” adds Jingmai O’Connor, “that most of the people buying these specimens are not scientists, or they are scientists with quotation marks. I’m constantly being shown a specimen by someone who says, ‘You have to describe this. This is a Jeholornis with a weird furcula’”—that is, a wishbone—“and it’s actually a Jeholornis with a Sapeornis furcula.” In the early days, forgers actually painted feathers on some specimens, she adds. “You’d do the water test and the feathers would come right off. Then they switched to inks that aren’t water-soluble.” Researchers also rely on ultraviolet light to reveal faked sections, which reflect the light differently from authentic sections of the same slab.

But fraud is hardly new to the discovery of fossils. What’s more important about Liaoning Province is the genuine fossil wealth being revealed there. One morning in the basement of Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, I watched the people who prepare fossils at work.  A young man stared through the dual lenses of a microscope as he worked an air-pressure tool along the length of a wingbone. The needle-pointed tip whined, and flecks of stone flew out to the sides, gradually freeing bone from matrix. Nearby a woman at another microscope used an old credit card to apply a tiny drop of 502 superglue to a tiny break in a fossil, then went back to work with a needle-like pick in one hand and an air pump like an atomizer in the other.  Eight preparators were working at that moment at different fossils. It was an assembly line, dedicated to opening old tombs and bringing whole empires of unimaginably strange and beautiful creatures almost back to life.

END

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

How Cities Could Still Save Us

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(Illustration: Lan Truong by permission)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Before the environmental activist and gay rights lawyer David Buckel set himself afire in Prospect Park in Brooklyn on April 14, he wrote a letter explaining that he had chosen his “early death by fossil fuel” as an act of protest against the environmental catastrophe that we are bringing upon ourselves and the planet. It was a horrifying end, not least because in life Mr. Buckel had successfully taken on issues as seemingly intractable as the legalization of same-sex marriage. If someone so capable had given up on the environment, one woman remarked to a Times reporter, “What does that mean for the rest of us?”

I was thinking about Mr. Buckel and about despair a few nights later, over a drink with Joe Walston of the Wildlife Conservation Society. As director of that organization’s worldwide field conservation work, Mr. Walston routinely comes face-to-face with the dark forces of human overpopulation, mass extinction of species, climate change and pollution. But he is also the co-author of a paper being published this week in the journal BioScience that begins with the uplifting words of Winston Churchill to the British nation in June 1940, under the shadow of the Nazi conquest of France: “In casting up this dread balance sheet and contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye,” Churchill declared, “I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair.”

Mr. Walston and his co-authors go on to argue against the increasingly common view that these are the end times for life as we know it. Instead, they suggest that what the natural world is experiencing is a bottleneck — long, painful, undoubtedly frightening and likely to get worse in the short term — but with the forces of an eventual breakthrough and environmental recovery already gathering strength around us.

Mr. Walston sipped his beer and listed what he called “the four pillars” of conservation in the modern era — a stabilized human population, increasingly concentrated in urban areas, able to escape extreme poverty, and with a shared understanding of nature and the environment — “and all four are happening right now.” He singled out the trend toward urbanization as the biggest driver of environmental progress, bigger perhaps than all the conservation efforts undertaken by governments and environmental groups alike.

Cities have of course endured a reputation for much of the industrial era as a blight, the stinking antithesis of conservation. “But what happens in urban areas?” Mr. Walston asked. New arrivals from the countryside “get better access to medical care, they experience decreased child mortality and in time that leads them to have fewer children” — the so-called demographic transition — and those children go on to better schooling and potentially more rewarding work lives.

The pace of the global movement away from rural areas and into urbanized areas — a category that includes suburbs and small towns as well as city centers — is startling. In my own lifetime, we have gone from 30 percent of the world’s population living in urban areas to 54 percent today, with the likelihood that the number will rise as high as 90 percent later in this century.

Unfortunately, that means the bottleneck will get worse over the next few decades, according to Mr. Walston and his co-authors, because urbanization imposes short-term costs, including an increase in overall consumption. But it also leads to reduced per capita energy consumption, as well as reduced birthrates, and it reopens old habitat in abandoned rural areas to wildlife.

That’s already begun to happen in Europe, where wolves, bears, lynx, bison and other species have moved out of protected areas to re-wild a densely populated (but highly urban) continent. If we can hold on into the next century, Mr. Walston said, urbanization could set up the conditions for that sort of recovery worldwide.

Holding on for another century is of course no easy thing. It will require the kind of “intense vigilance and exertion” Churchill called for in the dark early hours of World War II. We will need to undertake a far more concerted effort not just to establish protected areas, Mr. Walston said, but to ensure that they still contain the species said to be living there, as the stock for an eventual recovery. (“Protected area” is now often a euphemism for empty forests and oceans.)

It will demand significant action to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and slow the rate of climate change, because recovery will not happen if we cook the planet in the meantime. Finally, it means working to improve the cities of the world and their ability to provide the basic ingredients of public health — and the demographic transition — including sewage disposal, garbage removal, clean water delivery and a continuing connection to the natural world.

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Buckel

That thought brought me back to David Buckel. After retiring as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Buckel devoted himself to exactly the kind of work Mr. Walston and his co-authors talk about. He made city life better by developing compost programs and collaborating with urban gardeners around New York City, with a particular focus on low-income neighborhoods.

Maybe in the end he believed his work was too modest. Or maybe he shared in the widespread sense of depression and futility because our decidedly un-Churchillian federal leadership seems intent on actively worsening problems like species extinction, climate change, public health, you name it.

Ultimately, we have no way of knowing if Mr. Buckel’s suicide was a pure act of protest or one partly influenced by other factors, like mental or emotional illness. But those looking to find meaning in it should emulate his life, not his death. They should stand up in ways large and small to help life on Earth through the current dreadful bottleneck. They should act now so some future generation — our grandchildren of the breakthrough — will look back at what we have done with something bordering on gratitude.

It’s a stretch to imagine anyone ever saying of us, “This was their finest hour.” But at least they will know that we lived in such a way as to avoid utterly laying waste to the planet.

Celebrated Dodo Died by Shotgun Blast

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Shotgun pellets in flesh of the Oxford dodo.

The story long told was that Oxford University Museum’s rare specimen of the extinct Dodo, a native of the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, had been an exotic pet in the seventeenth century kept in a London townhouse. But new research using methods pioneered in criminal forensics tells a very different story. Here’s an account from the Museum and the University of Warwick:

If ever the Oxford Dodo were to have squawked, its final squawk may have been the saddest and loudest. For the first time, the manner of death of the museum’s iconic specimen has been revealed: a shot to the back of the head.

This unexpected twist in the long tale of the Oxford Dodo has come to light thanks to a collaboration between the Museum and the University of Warwick. WMG, a cutting-edge manufacturing and technology research unit at Warwick, employed its forensic scanning techniques and expertise to discover that the Dodo was shot in the neck and back of the head with a 17th-century shotgun.

Mysterious particles were found in the specimen during scans carried out to analyse its anatomy. Further investigation of the material and size of these particles revealed them to be lead shot pellets of a type used to hunt wildfowl during the 1600s.

The Oxford Dodo specimen, as it has come to be known, originally came to the University of Oxford as part of the Tradescant Collection of specimens and artefacts compiled by father and son John Tradescant in London in the 17th century. It was thought to have been the remains of a bird recorded as being kept alive in a 17th-century London townhouse, but the discovery of the shotgun pellets cast doubt on this idea, leaving the bird’s origins more mysterious than ever.

Dodos were endemic to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The first European accounts of the bird were made by Dutch explorers in 1601, after they rediscovered the island in 1598. The last living bird was sighted in 1662.

The story of the Oxford Dodo is especially significant because it represents the most complete remains of a dodo collected as a living bird – the head and a foot – and the only surviving soft tissue anywhere in the world.

This discovery reveals important new information about the history of the Oxford Dodo, which is an important specimen for biology, and through its connections with Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland of great cultural significance too.

– Professor Paul Smith, Museum director

The Oxford Dodo represents the only soft tissue remains of dodo in the world. This iconic specimen was taken from the Museum to WMG at the University of Warwick for CT scanning.

WMG’s CT scans show that this famous symbol of human-caused extinction was shot in the back of the head and the neck, and that the shot did not penetrate its skull – which is now revealed to be very thick.

The discovery of such a brutal demise was quite a surprise as the scans were actually focused on discovering more about the Dodo’s anatomy, as well as how it lived and died. This work will continue, but we now have a new mystery to solve: Who shot the Dodo?

What’s the next step? It is possible that the isotope of lead in the shot could be analysed and traced to a particular ore field. This might tell us what country it was mined in, and perhaps what country is was made in, and ultimately reveal who shot the Dodo.

 

 

Back from Extinction: Baja’s Very Cute Kangaroo Rat

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Last year, I wrote about a major international effort to rediscover lost–and supposedly extinct–species.  This one isn’t part of that effort, run by the group Global Wildlife Conservation, but they’ll be as delighted by the discovery as I am. Here’s the press release from … well, you can figure it out from the first eight words :

Researchers from the San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) and the non-profit organization Terra Peninsular A.C. have rediscovered the San Quintin kangaroo rat (Dipodomys gravipes) in Baja California; the Museum is partnering with the organization and local authorities on a conservation plan for the species.

The San Quintin kangaroo rat was last seen in 1986, and was listed as endangered by the Mexican government in 1994. It was held as an example of modern extinction due to agricultural conversion. In the past few decades, San Quintin, which lies 118 miles south of Ensenada, has become a major agricultural hub, converting huge areas of native habitat into fields and hot houses for tomatoes and strawberries.

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Vanderplank in Baja

Despite active searches and monitoring over the years, there had been no sign of the animal until this past summer, when Museum Mammalogist Scott Tremor and Research Associate Sula Vanderplank were in the field conducting routine monitoring of small mammal communities. Having read the field notes of the person who had seen it decades ago, they were aware of its former occurrence in the area, but were amazed to find four individuals by using traditional field techniques and live traps.

This animal is about 5 inches in length with a tufted tail. It is an herbivore that lives in arid lowlands and gets its name from its large, powerful hind feet that propel the animal in large bounds (like a kangaroo). It is larger than other kangaroo rats in the region, and is feistier than its relatives.

“Not only is this discovery a perfect example of the importance of good old-fashioned natural history field work, but we have the opportunity to develop a conservation plan based on our findings,” said Tremor. “The ability to take our research and turn it into tangible conservation efforts is thrilling. It is a commitment to preserving the uniqueness of the Baja California Peninsula.”

The discovery will be highlighted in an article by Tremor, Vanderplank, and Dr. Eric Mellink of the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada, Baja California (CICESE) in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Since the initial discovery, the San Quinton kangaroo rat has been found to also persist inside the Valle Tranquilo Nature Reserve just south of San Quintín, which is owned and managed by the local non-profit organization Terra Peninsular A.C. This reserve is recognized as an area voluntarily destined for conservation by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) and will protect the future of the species into perpetuity.

The Nat will work with Terra Peninsular and Dr. Exequiel Ezcurra, director of the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), on a conservation plan for the small mammal communities of the area, with an emphasis on the San Quintin kangaroo rat.

“Terra Peninsular has been monitoring the nature reserves looking for this species. You can’t imagine how happy we are to find out that after all these efforts and with the help of The Nat we can be part of this rediscovery and continue working on its protection,” said Jorge Andrade, adaptive manager coordinator at Terra Peninsular, who has also been involved in the project. “It’s very gratifying for us to think that the San Quintin kangaroo rat persists in the area to some extent, thanks to the efforts of the staff, board members, and associated researchers of our organization.”

This plan, which is made possible with critical support from The JiJi Foundation Fund at the International Community Foundation, will be developed cooperatively with a working group created by Terra Peninsular and composed of local authorities, academic institutions and staff members. It will be written in both English and Spanish, will include restoration strategies, habitat improvements, molecular analysis of population health, land protection strategies and outreach and educational materials, and will identify key concerns for the future of the species.

[image error]The Museum’s research department, the Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias, conducts field explorations and engages in collections-based research to document and conserve our region’s natural history and biodiversity. This is the third mammal that was thought to be extinct that museum staff have rediscovered in the Baja California Peninsula in the recent past: others include the high elevation California vole (Microtus californicus huperuthrus) and the round-tail ground squirrel (Xerospermophilus tereticaudus apricus).

“These rediscoveries speak to hope and resilience in a changing world,” said Vanderplank, who is also a science advisor at Terra Peninsular. “We are learning so much about this animal and its ecology, and we’re delighted to know that it is permanently protected in the Valle Tranquilo Nature Reserve.”

 

Back from the Dead: Baja’s Very Cute Kangaroo Rat

[image error]

Last year, I wrote about a major international effort to rediscover lost–and supposedly extinct–species.  This one isn’t part of that effort, run by the group Global Wildlife Conservation, but they’ll be as delighted by the discovery as I am. Here’s the press release from … well, you can figure it out from the first eight words :

Researchers from the San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) and the non-profit organization Terra Peninsular A.C. have rediscovered the San Quintin kangaroo rat (Dipodomys gravipes) in Baja California; the Museum is partnering with the organization and local authorities on a conservation plan for the species.

The San Quintin kangaroo rat was last seen in 1986, and was listed as endangered by the Mexican government in 1994. It was held as an example of modern extinction due to agricultural conversion. In the past few decades, San Quintin, which lies 118 miles south of Ensenada, has become a major agricultural hub, converting huge areas of native habitat into fields and hot houses for tomatoes and strawberries.

[image error]

Vanderplank in Baja

Despite active searches and monitoring over the years, there had been no sign of the animal until this past summer, when Museum Mammalogist Scott Tremor and Research Associate Sula Vanderplank were in the field conducting routine monitoring of small mammal communities. Having read the field notes of the person who had seen it decades ago, they were aware of its former occurrence in the area, but were amazed to find four individuals by using traditional field techniques and live traps.

This animal is about 5 inches in length with a tufted tail. It is an herbivore that lives in arid lowlands and gets its name from its large, powerful hind feet that propel the animal in large bounds (like a kangaroo). It is larger than other kangaroo rats in the region, and is feistier than its relatives.

“Not only is this discovery a perfect example of the importance of good old-fashioned natural history field work, but we have the opportunity to develop a conservation plan based on our findings,” said Tremor. “The ability to take our research and turn it into tangible conservation efforts is thrilling. It is a commitment to preserving the uniqueness of the Baja California Peninsula.”

The discovery will be highlighted in an article by Tremor, Vanderplank, and Dr. Eric Mellink of the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada, Baja California (CICESE) in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Since the initial discovery, the San Quinton kangaroo rat has been found to also persist inside the Valle Tranquilo Nature Reserve just south of San Quintín, which is owned and managed by the local non-profit organization Terra Peninsular A.C. This reserve is recognized as an area voluntarily destined for conservation by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) and will protect the future of the species into perpetuity.

The Nat will work with Terra Peninsular and Dr. Exequiel Ezcurra, director of the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), on a conservation plan for the small mammal communities of the area, with an emphasis on the San Quintin kangaroo rat.

“Terra Peninsular has been monitoring the nature reserves looking for this species. You can’t imagine how happy we are to find out that after all these efforts and with the help of The Nat we can be part of this rediscovery and continue working on its protection,” said Jorge Andrade, adaptive manager coordinator at Terra Peninsular, who has also been involved in the project. “It’s very gratifying for us to think that the San Quintin kangaroo rat persists in the area to some extent, thanks to the efforts of the staff, board members, and associated researchers of our organization.”

This plan, which is made possible with critical support from The JiJi Foundation Fund at the International Community Foundation, will be developed cooperatively with a working group created by Terra Peninsular and composed of local authorities, academic institutions and staff members. It will be written in both English and Spanish, will include restoration strategies, habitat improvements, molecular analysis of population health, land protection strategies and outreach and educational materials, and will identify key concerns for the future of the species.

[image error]The Museum’s research department, the Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias, conducts field explorations and engages in collections-based research to document and conserve our region’s natural history and biodiversity. This is the third mammal that was thought to be extinct that museum staff have rediscovered in the Baja California Peninsula in the recent past: others include the high elevation California vole (Microtus californicus huperuthrus) and the round-tail ground squirrel (Xerospermophilus tereticaudus apricus).

“These rediscoveries speak to hope and resilience in a changing world,” said Vanderplank, who is also a science advisor at Terra Peninsular. “We are learning so much about this animal and its ecology, and we’re delighted to know that it is permanently protected in the Valle Tranquilo Nature Reserve.”

 

Plant Messiah Among the Living Dead

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Magdalena and his beloved water lilies

by Richard Conniff/ Wall Street Journal

Not long ago, while teaching a couple of college courses about the natural world, I plucked a random selection of tree leaves on my way into class and asked my students to identify them. These were Yale and Wesleyan students, all highly educated and aware of the world around them—and most of them could not even name oak leaves.

They were suffering from what botanists call “plant blindness”: the tendency to take plants for granted as the undifferentiated green backdrop to our lives. It’s an epidemic, compounded by our penchant for plowing down forests and meadows everywhere, oblivious that what we are destroying is ourselves.

[image error]“Plants are the basis of everything, either directly or indirectly,” Carlos Magdalena writes in “The Plant Messiah.” “Plants provide the air we breathe; plants clothe us, heal us, and protect us. Plants provide our shelter, our daily food, and our drink.” He counts 31,128 plant species used by humans, and adds that without plants “we would not survive. It is as simple as that.”

Mr. Magdalena, a botanical horticulturalist at London’s Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, writes that he got dubbed “the plant messiah” by a Spanish journalist, for his work “trying to save plants on the brink of extinction,” and also for his “post-biblical (but pre-hipster) beard and long hair.” Taking the name to heart, Mr. Magdalena writes that curing us of plant blindness is the miracle he would like to accomplish.

Thankfully, he does not do much sermonizing on behalf of this mission. Instead, he takes the reader on a lively account of his own transformation from bartender in Spain to Kew horticulturalist in training, clinging much too far up a chestnut-leaved oak in a windstorm, “trying to comfort myself by musing on the tracheids, ray cells, and lignin—which I had seen on the microscope slides—that ensure the trunk won’t snap.”

Mr. Magdalena soon makes a reputation for obsessively experimenting with the arcane sexual behaviors of plants that are the last of their kind and unable to reproduce on their own—the Lonesome Georges of the botanical world. His first case is the café marron tree, considered extinct until a solitary example turns up in 1979 beside a road on the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues. Someone promptly chops it down, an appallingly common outcome in Mr. Magdalena’s stories. But a few branches re-sprout from the stump and get shipped off to intensive care at Kew.

By the time Mr. Magdalena arrives at Kew 20 years later, 10 café marron trees are producing “masses of flowers” year-round—without ever setting fruit. Scientists diagnose a mysterious blockage in the flowers that keeps the sperm cells in the pollen from reaching the ovule. They set the species aside as one of “the living dead.” But Mr. Magdalena balks. “Surely there had to be a way to make it produce seed,” he writes. Reasoning from his own allergies, and the way pollen begins to germinate in contact with the fluid in his eyes, he sets about operating on flowers with a scalpel, aiming to bypass the blockage and give pollen a place to germinate in the moist incision, en route to the ovule.

After several hundred attempts—and lots of flak from colleagues who think he should be using his time more productively—he gets a single fruit. Further heroic manipulations finally yield seeds, then seedlings, and ultimately restoration of the species on Rodrigues. Better still, he writes, the experience has helped the island’s forestry department move away from the sort of non-native ornamentals found everywhere in the tropics—hibiscus, heliconia, and the like—and instead focus on the species that make the island unique.

Mr. Magdalena dreams up the remedy for another recalcitrant species one evening at home while cooking tortellini. The world’s smallest water lily (Nymphaea thermarum) is native to a hot spring in Rwanda. A single plant also grows in a botanical garden in Bonn, but its seedlings always die. Mr. Magdalena obtains some seeds and, after multiple failed experiments, the bubbles in his pasta water finally inspire him to try filtering carbon dioxide through the floating mat in which seedlings grow. Figuring out what makes plants tick “is a bit like cooking,” he writes. “You have to have a recipe. It is not magic; it’s logic,” and it works.

Later, a visitor from the Bonn botanical garden stops by and is stunned to find more than 100 of these tiny water lilies flourishing at Kew. “A hundred!?” he cries. The water lily has gone extinct in the wild—“finished, expired, gone”—after local people dug a canal from the hot spring to use the water for washing. Worse, the visitor confesses, a rat has gotten into the greenhouse at Bonn and eaten the last surviving plant. “At the time of my tortellini moment,” Mr. Magdalena writes, “I had been playing with the last five seedlings on the planet.”

Mr. Magdalena tells his story well, and the cliffhangers aren’t just about the plants. Collecting specimens from an unexpectedly tall plant in Mauritius, he takes the top spot on a four-man human ladder. “The problem was that below us there was a 300-foot drop into the valley,” he writes. At the top, the Mauritius bulbul, a rare bird, makes a surprise appearance. “As I reached for my camera, the human ladder wobbled alarmingly.” In Australia, he wades neck deep to collect a water lily from what turns out, only by dumb luck, not to be crocodile habitat.

For anyone who might have considered plants dull stuff, Mr. Magdalena delivers a thrilling and inspirational account of adventures in the botanical world. At times, I found myself wishing for more detailed explanations of the importance of a particular species or how it fit into a larger habitat. A better account of our self-destructive tendency to prioritize economic interests over the survival of supposedly useless species would also have helped. The classic example of our shortsightedness is the Pacific yew, considered a trash tree by loggers for most of the 20th century. Then its bark became the basis for the lifesaving—and extraordinarily lucrative—breast-cancer drug Taxol.

Unfortunately, Mr. Magdalena writes, “plants can’t speak, they can’t plead their cause, warn of the folly of their destruction, or remind us of their importance.” The plant messiah becomes their voice instead, and his passion for his subject could just be enough to help the rest of us shed the scales from our plant-blind eyes.

##

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

 

 

Can We Fix Climate Change by Pumping More Oil?

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At the Petra Nova power plant in Texas, carbon capture technology reduces CO2 emissions from one of four coal-fired units

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

At first glance, it sounds like something cooked up after too many martinis by a K Street lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry: Take legislation making it more profitable for oil companies to pump oil, and easier for coal-fired power plants to continue to operate — and then sell it as a climate change remedy. Calling it “counterintuitive” might sound like an understatement.

In fact, though, the proposal became law in February, as a little-noticed — but remarkably bipartisan — piece of the deal to pass a budget and reopen the United States government. Among the leading sponsors was Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, rated 0 percent in 2017 by the League of Conservation Voters­­­­­.  But joining her was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, with a 100 percent rating.

Environmental groups backing the initiative, which substantially increases tax credits for projects that capture carbon emissions, included the Clean Air Task Forceand the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, among others. “In terms of reducing emissions, it’s probably the most consequential energy and climate legislation in a generation,” said Brad Crabtree of the Great Plains Institute, a nonprofit focused on decarbonizing the power industry.

But other environmentalists argued that one provision of the new law — promoting use of captured carbon dioxide for “enhanced oil recovery” — would serve, as Greenpeace put it, “to promote oil supply and keep us hooked on fossil fuels.” The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which actively supported the legislation up to the final buzzer, acknowledged that projects encouraged by the new incentives will cut carbon pollution and create jobs.  But ultimately the NRDC backed away from the bill, with staffers David Doniger and Danielle Droitsch saying in a blog post,“We don’t support subsidies for fossil fuel production, including subsidies for enhanced oil recovery” when the urgent need is “to reduce our dependence on those fuels.”

The new law boosts tax credits for projects that capture carbon emissions and store them by any of three means:

Pumping them into geological formations deep underground, with the tax credit gradually rising over 10 years to $50 a ton, up from $20 under existing law. The new law extends eligibility for this tax credit to smaller facilities, potentially making carbon capture and storage by industrial manufacturers more attractive.
Use of captured emissions to manufacture other products, including chemicals, concrete, and algae-based biofuels, with a tax credit of $35 per ton of emissions removed from the atmosphere (minus the tonnage released over the lifecycle of the product). It’s a category not previously eligible for any tax credit.
Enhanced oil recovery (or EOR), with captured carbon dioxide emissions pumped into depleted oil wells to recover “stranded oil” not accessible by conventional means. The captured emissions then get sequestered underground, for a tax credit of $35 a ton — more than triple the old $10 credit. The Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and other groups objected that this provision amounts to “the single biggest subsidy to the fossil fuel industry in the United States,” with a price tag they estimated at $2.8 billion a year. But environmental backers countered that a barrel of oil produced in this fashion is responsible for 37 percent fewer carbon dioxide emissions — after factoring in the emissions sequestered in the production process —than a barrel produced by conventional means. It also uses existing wells instead of pushing companies to drill new ones.




 

Carbon capture and storage (or CCS) technology has been around for decades. But it has recently attracted increasing support from industry, some environmentalists, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a tool for reducing emissions during the critical transition away from fossil fuels over the next few decades. Worldwide, 17 large-scale CCS facilities are now in operation, mainly at natural gas processing plants, but also at factories producing hydrogen, ethanol, fertilizer, and steel. Another 20 are in various stages of development or construction. In one major setback for carbon capture, the utility Southern Company last year walked away from a costly CCS-based attempt to make “clean coal” a reality at a power plant in Mississippi. (It decided to continue burning natural gas.)

Several companies, along with university research laboratories, are developing technologies to capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. A Canadian company, Carbon Engineering, is now operating a pilot plant using the captured carbon to manufacture a liquid fuel that it says could eventually become price-competitive under California and British Columbia’s low-carbon fuel standards. (The new U.S. legislation also makes carbon capture from the atmosphere eligible for tax credits for the first time.)

Last year, the U.S. utility NRG partnered with JX Nippon, a Japanese oil and gas company, to open a carbon capture facility at the W.A. Parish power plant outside Houston. It now captures 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a day, representing up to 90 percent of the emissions from one of the plant’s four coal-fired units. Also in the Houston area, NetPower, a startup, uses a different carbon capture and storage technology — again combined with enhanced oil recovery — to remove all of the emissions from a new natural gas-powered generating plant.

High cost has always been the main obstacle to wider deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.  The only way to amortize that expense has been to make a buck on the captured carbon — typically through enhanced oil recovery.  The new NRG facility, for instance, cost $1 billion, including $190 million in federal support. The recovered emissions get piped 80 miles and pumped underground at the West Ranch oil field to drive the production of about 5,000 barrels of oil a day, up from 300 barrels by conventional means. But even that income hasn’t added up, according to NRG spokesman David Knox. In 2014, when the price of oil topped $110 a barrel, the carbon-capture facility would have been “basically printing money,” he said.  But at the current price of $60 to $65 a barrel for West Texas crude, “it’s just paying for itself,” and NRG has no plans to try it again any time soon.

Proponents argue that the new federal incentives will help to close that gap and kick-start carbon capture and storage as existing federal and state incentives have done for renewable energy. “ said Bob Perciasepe, a deputy administrator of the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency and now president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Tax incentives, he added, enabled “even the wind industry to drop the cost to the point where it can now almost compete straight up” with conventional power sources.  Developing cheaper carbon capture and storage technologies will be particularly critical, he said, as India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa continue to build new coal-fired power plants.

Apart from cost, one potential caveat with carbon capture is uncertainty about whether underground storage will be permanent.  Greenpeace has argued that carbon dioxide emissions injected underground for enhanced oil recovery come “back up the well with the oil.” But Kurt Waltzer of the Clean Air Task Force notes that the new law requires monitoring and verification to ensure that that doesn’t happen.  Greenpeace has also argued that carbon emissions stored in the saline aquifer formations considered ideal for permanent sequestration “could uncontrollably make its way back to the surface.”

But the 2015 MIT study it cites as evidence doesn’t make that case.  In place of conventional thinking that exposure to saline turns all of the injected carbon dioxide into rock, the co-authors merely argue that mineralization may occur only at the interface between the two materials, trapping the rest of the carbon dioxide in a “carbon-encrusted bubble.”  The  co-authors have since published an update calling “the ultimate fate” of sequestered emissions “an unresolved question that is not addressed in our paper.”

“We have stored about 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide in subsurface formations in the United States since the 1970s,” said Crabtree of the Great Plains Institute, with “very few incidents of any leakage whatsoever. We have decades of experience and a tremendous track record in terms of oil and gas formations, and the federal regulations for saline formations are more stringent, recognizing that less is known.

“If you care about climate,” Crabtree added, “you can’t pick and choose the science and the technical facts that you work with. It can be very frustrating to see a lot of attention being devoted to the risks of storing carbon dioxide in the subsurface, when the great risk that we have to focus on is what’s happening with carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.” Opposition to the new tax incentives came not just from environmentalists, he noted, but also from people in industry “who see carbon capture and storage as basically ceding a climate agenda to the left. You had diametrically opposed camps opposing the same legislation for opposite reasons.”

That makes passage of the new incentives a triumph — and a necessary one if we hope to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to Waltzer. The scientific consensus is that “we need to zero out” emissions from the global electricity system by mid-century “and then begin to have negative emissions,” meaning more carbon dioxide being taken out of the atmosphere than we put into it.

“That’s a heckuva challenge,” said Waltzer, “and having carbon capture infrastructure will be crucial” to making it happen.

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