Editor’s note: When we engage in any form of activism, building leadership capacity helps people become more confident and proactive. It means the leader of the group doesn’t have to be responsible for every task and can delegate other important tasks to members. In this case, the author talks about climate change, we at DGR think that climate change is one of many problems and stems from our destructive industrial culture. But you can exchange the word for any other that would describe a dire situation today – the strategy of leadership capacity still applies. DGR disagrees with 350.org’s belief that electrifying everything will “solve” climate change. It is, in fact, impossible, and attempts to do so will only make matters worse.
Learn how organisers recruit and build the leadership capacity of others with the Ladder of Engagement.
This article has been sourced from Daniel Hunter’s book published by 350.org called The Climate Resistance Handbook. Daniel explains the Ladder of Engagement with a story from South Africa about an environmental justice group. Read below or see Chapter 3 on Growth and pages 40 – 46. The images have been added by the Commons Library.
The Ladder of Leadership
Growing groups face a challenge. Organisers are often the ones doing much of the work of the group — and they get tired of doing everything…One option for the organisers getting tired is they keep sacrificing more and more. They give up sleep. They sacrifice school and work. They stop social activities — it always becomes about the activism.
For most people, that’s just not sustainable. So what’s the alternative?
Getting new people to step into leadership!
A story from Ferrial Adam in South Africa provides us an example. She was part of an environmental justice organisation working with folks at the grassroots. Led largely by women, they were challenging a government policy called “Free Basic Electricity.” That policy guarantees the government will pay for a certain amount of electricity to poorer households (currently 50 kWh, about 5% of what the average US home uses).
This is a major issue, as the lack of access to energy often dooms whole districts to poverty. For example, those lacking electricity often rely on carbon-intensive paraffin, candles, or cutting down trees. This leads to a host of negative environmental and health effects.
Building relationships is key
This policy was widely credited as a successful social justice policy. But those who were most impacted by this policy weren’t part of the debate. So Ferrial began a research study to learn more about the actual impacts this had for households, which meant going to the poor districts in the city of Johannesburg.
She started where the people were. Her first step was finding a group of women who were keen and already working on energy struggles. It was important to start by explaining the intention and need for the work. She started by getting people to monitor their use of electricity. She spent time building relationships with mostly women, who ran the households. It took many months of weekly workshops to teach people to calculate the energy consumption of different household items.
Increased confidence
Her report was done. And she could have been the person presenting the report in front of national bodies. But when public hearings were planned to increase costs, the people Ferrial had been working with wanted more. She asked the women if they would testify on their own behalf. They jumped at the chance. Ferrial says, “It was so amazing and powerful watching people go to a hearing and speak as a collective on why the government should not raise the price of electricity.”
“They became part of the organisation and took their own leadership. Ferrial wasn’t calculating people’s consumption for them and writing the report and talking before the national bodies. She was organising. She wasn’t doing things that people could do for themselves.”
The women were supported through steps of engagement over the months. This way, they gained expertise about their own electricity usage and education on national policy and the impacts of climate change. Each step gave them increased confidence to not only testify but be strong community activists.
This concept is called the “ladder of engagement.”
The women wouldn’t have been ready to testify as their first step. Instead, they needed to learn more about their own situation. Then they needed to connect to others’ stories and see they weren’t alone. The ladder helps us think about what to do when people say, “What you’re doing is great, how can I help?”
“In our minds, we have our to-do list and things we need done. But that’s not where to start. We have to think from the perspective of that person.”
That probably means our first response is, “Let’s talk about what you’re up for doing.” And we find out what kinds of tasks they might be willing to help us with — ones that match their interest and involvement (not our long to-do list).
“This isn’t a science, and each person is different. Some people have absolute terror making phone calls but would happily risk civil disobedience. So chatting with people about their interests is important.”
Thinking about newer activists in our group with the ladder of engagement in mind helps us think about the next step for them.
And as Ferrial did, we can offer steps to keep increasing their level of commitment and involvement. This cultivates relationships and helps people move up the ladder of engagement, which is how you, too, will increase your group’s involvement.
Recruit People Outside your Circle
“Of course, to get more people into leadership, you have to have lots of conversations with them — about the goals of the campaign and the work you’re doing. You have to build trust. And you have to find them!”
Sometimes it’s hard to recruit new people, because we get used to talking the same way about an issue. You may have some ways you talk about climate change that you’re used to.
But someone you want to recruit may not talk about it that way. They may not care about climate change, but they may care about cats. You can tell them that climate change is increasing the habitat for fleas, ticks and mosquitoes. That’s bad news for pets. It exposes them to new diseases, like West Nile, Lyme disease and heartworm. Or maybe they care about football. Climate change isn’t going to end football soon, but it will change the game. With more erratic climactic events, you will see more games like the snowy 2013 World Cup qualifying match between USA and Costa Rica. It was a disaster. Or, since the spread of Zika (and other diseases) increase with the rise of temperatures, Brazil’s warmer temperatures threatened to derail the Rio 2016 Olympics.
How to organize?
Or maybe they just don’t like being angry! A study on climate and conflict showed that warmer temperatures increase people’s personal conflicts (by 2% amongst friends, and by 11% outside their social circle). So hot temperatures can cause more anger.
But even when we get more flexible in talking about climate change, many groups often mistakenly believe they’ve tapped all the people who are passionate about their issue. “Nobody in my school cares about climate change.” The problem is often not that we have exhausted the possibilities in our city or small town — it’s how we are organising.
Building leadership capacity
When it comes to recruitment, many of us think of people just as individuals. We imagine there is a scattering of people out there from whom to recruit.
The reality is different. Most people are not attracted to groups simply as individuals. Ask around, and you’ll find that very few people get involved in a cause because they receive a flyer, get sent an e-mail, see a poster, or see a Facebook post.
Most people join a group or get involved because someone they know personally invited them.
That’s because society is better understood as clusters of “social circles”. Social circles may be organised as formal or informal groups — religious communities, gangs, tight-knit neighborhoods, etc. Social media can show you the number of people who are friends of friends many times over.
The quickest way to build a group is to ask people in your net works of friends or family. Those people are the most likely to say yes to you. But a group stops growing when it reaches its maximum potential of people from its members’ initial social circle. Continuing to reach out within that circle may not bring in many more people.
The trick is to jump out of your social circle and find people connected with other social circles.
Ways to recruit in social circles
Show up at the events and meetings of people outside your circle. This is a great chance to meet others, see how they work, and find out where their values overlap with your campaign.
Stop doing the tactics you’ve always been doing, and try new ones that might appeal to different audiences. If your tactics are marches, strikes, and massive, disruptive direct actions, and it’s not working, then it’s time to adapt. Ritualising our actions makes us predictable and boring. People want to join fresh and interesting groups.
Notice when other groups make overtures toward your movement, and follow up with them. For example, if we are seeing reluctant corporate and government allies taking steps towards us, maybe with some of them there are relationships we can build to keep them moving faster.
Do lots of one-on-one meet-ups with leaders from other movements and groups. Meet with different people — not to recruit them, but to learn from them.
What are their values?
What interests them?
What strategies recruit people like them?
Do direct service. Gandhi was a big fan of what he called the “constructive program,” which means not only campaigning against what we don’t want, but also building the alternative that we do want. Climate disasters provide large-scale and small-scale chances for us to be part of that. Direct service to disaster survivors and other community-based projects put us shoulder to shoulder with others who want to make things better. Who better to hear a pitch about joining your campaign?
Growing outside of your social circle takes time, but when it comes to building successful groups, it’s worth the effort.
This article is from the Climate Resistance Handbook which brings together a wealth of learnings from the climate justice movement. It starts with breaking social myths about how social movements win. Then dives into campaign tools and frameworks you can use. It closes with how to grow your group and use creative, impactful actions and tactics. This book is full of stories of climate warriors from around the globe and historical movements. It’s filled with practical wisdom and inspiration to make you more effective, more active, and ready for what’s next.
Derivative of graphic by parasoley/Getty Images Signature via Canva.com
Burning wood to generate electricity — “biomass energy” — is increasingly being pursued as a renewable replacement for burning coal in nations like the U.K., Japan, and South Korea — even though its emissions aren’t carbon neutral in practice.
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, reporter Justin Catanoso speaks with Rachel Donald about the single largest emitter of CO2 in the U.K., biomass firm Drax, which is trying to open two wood pellet plants in the state of California.
Catanoso explains how years of investigation helped him uncover a complicated web of public relations messaging that obscures the fact that replanting trees after cutting them down and burning them is not in practice carbon neutral or renewable and severely harms global biodiversity and forests.
“When those trees get ripped out, that carbon gets released. And that comes before we process this wood and ship it … then we burn it and don’t count those emissions. This is just [an] imponderable policy,” he says on this episode.
Justin Catanoso is no stranger to wood pellet plants, as he lives near four of them in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where biomass giant Enviva has several facilities. While that company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, it remains the single largest producer of wood pellets globally.
This firm is one of several (alongside Drax in the U.K.) seeking to expand its global stake in the shift to renewable energy — a category of energy generation that industry and regulators insist burning biomass belongs in. However, a recent analysis shows it’s not renewable and adds more carbon to the atmosphere than coal and gas. But due to complicated language in the Kyoto Protocol treaty that extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, several nations and the European Union still allow the burning of wood pellets to be counted as such, and thus made eligible for subsidies, too. This is a tremendous problem for global efforts to slow the biodiversity and climate crises, Catanoso says.
“In my area of North Carolina, which is the mid-Atlantic, we will have the climate of northern Florida in about 15 years. That’s how fast our climate is changing here,” Catanoso says. “It’s upon us, and we are not pulling the levers fast enough. To slow this down and cutting down trees, calling it carbon neutral … that’s just one of those loopholes that is just completely man-made.”
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website, or download our free app for Apple and Android devices to gain instant access to our latest episodes and all of our previous ones.
Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found at 𝕏 via @CrisisReports and at Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.
Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.
Editor’s note: While renewable energies won’t save the climate and need to be fought against, it’s as neccessary to keep on fighting against fossil fuels. Because the oil and gas industries will continue with their business as usual – even if they promote an energy transistion from fossil to renewables. This is a lie, all technology inventions for new energy extraction are added up. That’s why it’s effective when people organize in order to continue the abolition of burning fossil fuels, be it in court or outdoors.
Judgment could have profound implications for new fossil fuel projects, including Cumbrian coal mine and North Sea oil and gas fields, says Friends of the Earth.
United Kingdom. Surrey County Council acted unlawfully by giving planning permission for oil production at Horse Hill in the Surrey countryside without considering the climate impacts when the oil is inevitably burned, the Supreme Court has ruled today.
Planning permission for four new oil wells and 20 years of oil production at Horse Hill will now be quashed.
The landmark judgment follows a legal challenge against Surrey County Council’s decision to grant planning permission for oil drilling at Horse Hill, near Gatwick airport in the Surrey countryside.
The case was brought by former Surrey resident Sarah Finch, on behalf of the Weald Action Group, and supported by Friends of the Earth.
It could have enormous impacts on all new UK fossil fuel developments – including proposals for a new coal mine in Cumbria and North Sea oil and gas projects.
Not included
Finch argued that the environmental impact assessment carried out by Surrey County Council – which declared a climate emergency in 2019 – should have considered the climate impacts that would inevitably arise from burning the oil, known as ‘Scope 3’ or ‘downstream’ emissions.
More than 10 million tonnes of carbon emissions would be produced from burning the oil, but this was not included in the environmental impact assessments.
Scope 3 emissions are increasingly being left out of environmental impact assessments when planning applications are made for fossil fuel projects, including plans for a new coal mine on Cumbria and new North Sea oil developments, despite the huge impact they would have on the escalating climate crisis.
Justice Leggatt said: “I do not accept the premise that it would be wrong for a local planning authority, in deciding whether to grant planning permission, to take into account the fact that the proposed use of the land is one that will contribute to global warming through fossil fuel extraction.”
FoE called the ruling “groundbreaking”, and “a heavy blow” for the fossil fuel industry. The judgment is very clear that the inevitability of the end-use emissions of this oil project meant they were indirect effects of the development, and so needed to be factored into the environmental impact assessment, FoE pointed out in a statement.
Friends of the Earth lawyer Katie de Kauwe said: “This historic ruling is a watershed moment in the fight to stop further fossil fuel extraction projects in the UK and make the emissions cuts needed to meet crucial climate targets. It is a huge boost to everyone involved in resisting fossil fuel projects.
“Gas, oil and coal companies have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid having to account for all the climate-harming emissions their developments cause,” she said.
Developers of the Whitehaven coal mine and the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea also did not provide information on downstream emissions in their environmental statements.
This historic ruling is a watershed moment in the fight to stop further fossil fuel extraction projects in the UK. Gas, oil and coal companies have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid having to account for all the climate-harming emissions their developments cause.
Both are currently subject to legal challenges, and today’s judgment strengthens the cases against them, FoE believes.
The Stop Rosebank campaign is also bringing legal action on the grounds that the emissions from burning the oil and gas had not been taken into account. Its case was on hold pending the Supreme Court decision.
In a statement, the campaign said: “This now means that we can proceed with our legal case against the Rosebank oil field on very strong grounds and with more confidence than ever. We expect to get the official permission to proceed with the Rosebank case, along with a date for our hearing, very soon.”
Grit
De Kauwe added: “This is a stunning victory for Sarah Finch and the Weald Action Group, after nearly five years of grit and determination, in going to court year after year against adversaries with far greater financial resources than they have. Despite setbacks in the lower courts, they never gave up.”
Campaigner Sarah Finch said she was“absolutely over the moon” to have won the case. “The oil and gas companies may act like business-as-usual is still an option, but it will be very hard for planning authorities to permit new fossil fuel developments – in the Weald, the North Sea or anywhere else – when their true climate impact is clear for all to see,” she said.
In a statement, Surrey County Council said: “Council officers at the time of the planning application assessment believed that they acted in compliance with the law. The judgement makes it clear that local planning authorities must have regard to downstream emissions.”
A new decision on the planning application will need to be made in due course.
Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She tweets at @Cat_Early76. This article is published under Creative Commons 4.0
A new study concludes that chimpanzees displaying a range of ailments seek out plants with known medicinal properties to treat those ailments.
The finding is important because it’s a rare instance where a species is shown to consume a plant as medicine rather than as part of its general diet.
The study identified 13 plant species that the chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest relied on, which can help inform conservation efforts for the great apes.
The finding could also hold potential for the development of new drugs for human use.
Wild chimpanzees actively seek out plants with medicinal properties to treat themselves for specific ailments,a new study has found.
While most animals consume foods with medicinal properties as part of their routine diet, few species have been shown to engage in self-medication in a way that suggests they have basic awareness of the healing properties of the plants they’re feeding on.
Until now, the challenge has been to distinguish between normal consumption of food that has medicinal value, on the one hand, and ingesting such foods for the purpose of treating a condition, on the other.
“Self-medication has been studied for years, but it has been historically difficult to push the field forward, as the burden of proof is very high when attempting to prove that a resource is used as a medicine,” Elodie Freymann, a scientist at the University of Oxford in the U.K. and lead author of the study, told Mongabay in an email.
To deal with the challenge, the study adopted a multidisciplinary approach, combining behavioral data, health monitoring, and pharmacological testing of a variety of plant materials chimpanzees feed on. It pooled together 13 researchers comprising primatologists, ethnopharmacologists, parasitologists, ecologists and botanists.
A chimpanzee in Uganda’s Budongo Forest, which is home to roughly 600-700 chimpanzees, including three groups habituated to humans. Image by Maciej via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
According to the study, pharmacological data interpreted on its own is important for establishing the presence of medicinal resources in chimpanzee diets. However, this study also relied on observational information and health monitoring to determine whether chimps were deliberately self-medicating.
Over a period of eight months, the scientists monitored the feeding behaviors of two communities of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) familiar with humans around them in Budongo Forest in Uganda.
They collected samples from plant parts associated with chimpanzee behaviors that previous research had flagged up as possibly linked to self-medication: consuming bark, dead wood and bitter pith.
The researchers collected samples from 13 plant species known to be consumed at least occasionally by the Budongo chimpanzees, testing the samples for their ability to suppress bacterial growth and inflammation (testing for antiparasitical properties was beyond the scope of the study).
The researchers also tracked the health of individual chimpanzees, analyzing fecal matter and urine and monitoring individuals with wounds, parasite infestations or other known ailments.
They observed that individuals with injuries or other ailments such as parasite infestations, respiratory symptoms, abnormal urinalysis or diarrhea ingested plants or parts of plants that laboratory testing found to have healing properties.
A Budongo chimpanzee feeding on the fruit of Ficus exasperata, one of the plants analyzed as part of the study. Image courtesy of Elodie Freymann (CC-BY 4.0).
“We describe cases where chimpanzees with possible bacterial infections or wounds selected bioactive plants,” Freymann said. “We also describe cases where wounded individuals selected rarely consumed plants with demonstrated anti-inflammatory properties — suggesting they could be ingesting plants to aid in wound-healing, a novel finding.”
In addition, unlike previous studies that focused on single plant resources, this one identified 13 species with medicinal potential.
“This greatly expands what we know about chimpanzee medicinal repertoires. This study also highlights the unique medicinal repertoires of two chimpanzee communities with no previous systematic research on their self-medication behaviors,” Freymann said.
According to Freymann, identifying plants that could have medicinal value for chimpanzees is important for the conservation of the species.
“If we know which plants chimpanzees need to stay healthy in the wild, we can better protect these resources to ensure chimpanzees have access to their wild medicine cabinets,” she said. “If these plants disappear, it could leave our primate cousins susceptible to pathogens they could previously defend against.”
This is also important, Freymann said, because “we could learn from the chimpanzees which plants may have medicinal value which could lead to the discovery of novel human drugs.”
The study adds to a growing body of research on primates using medicinal plants to treat sickness. In another recent report, a wild orangutan in Sumatra was observed treating a facial wound with a plant known for its healing properties. Erin Wessling, co-lead of the working group on chimpanzee cultures at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, said part of the reason for the recent attention to these types of medicative behaviors is because they’re relatively rare and can only be identified in species that have been closely monitored over long periods of time.
“It takes years to be able to watch apes in the wild to this level of detail, and even more years after that to be able to identify with any certainty what are core components of an ape’s diet versus the much more rare medicinal use cases,” she said.
Wessling, who was not part of the study, told Mongabay that while it’s been known that chimpanzees have these rare cases of medicinal use, scientists are finally getting to a level where they can point to self-medication as a widespread and diverse behavior used across medicinal contexts.
She said the Budongo study “points out really nicely that conservation is more than just a numbers game — that there’s real value in thinking about how organisms interact with the ecosystems they reside in, and that even the most uncommon components of those ecosystems can be critical for an organisms’ survival.
“Further, results such as these offer a nice insight into the intrinsic value of chimpanzees, demonstrating what we’ve suspected for a long time — that chimpanzees have the capability to recognize and treat an ailment with plants that have natural (and measurable) medicinal properties,” Wessling said.
“It shows we have a great deal left to learn about the natural world, not only our ape cousins, and provides even more reason to make sure there is a future for them.”
Editor’s note: A pandemic in our backyards – The squirrel walked a bit wobbly, it wasn’t as agile and funny as these small creatures often move. It had its eyes rather closed which gave it a tired look. I was concerned and called a squirrel rescue station, luckily there was one closer to me. The poor squirrel got worse meanwhile and couldn’t jump anymore. Lastly, it just sat in the corner of the roof with its head down.
When I brought the tiny animal to the rescue station, its leader Mrs. Heimann told me that the symptoms she saw were those of an unknown virus. She said it was terrible for her to watch two cute squirrels per week die in her care because of that virus. In the last years the health of squirrels got a lot worse, she explained to me – broken bones, malnourishment, paralysis, or DNA damage. Sick animals are more prone to get infected than healthy ones. As I can see the pandemic isn’t over for birds and mammals, it’s right in our backyard and should concern us all.
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
First signs of a pandemic
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
Poultry production must change
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
Diana Bell is a Professor of Conservation Biology, University of East Anglia
