Editor’s note: We believe that the UN are an elitist organization and more part of the problem than offering vital solutions. Ecological restoration however will become much more important in the near future, and learning from indigenous peoples and their ways to connect to their landbases may be our only chance of survival.
“Today let’s start a new decade, one in which we finally make peace with nature and secure a better future for all” declared António Gutteres, the UN Secretary General, on June 5 during the virtual opening event of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. With environmental degradation already affecting almost half of humanity, and with every major scientific body declaring the next 10 years are critical to confront the climate crises, the urgency to restore the health of our landscapes has never been greater. Having worked professionally as an ecological restoration planner in my home state of New Mexico for 13 years, I sat eagerly at the edge of my seat to learn from my global community of practice.
We learned about restoration efforts around the world that involved massive community efforts, such as the million-tree initiative in Pakistan and the ambitious project called Green Wall of Africa. Touted as the “largest human-made living “structure” on earth”, this ecofriendly wall, we are told, will contain the sand dunes of the Sahara and support local livelihoods. Although containing the Sahara desert with any wall seems questionable, or that building another wall, even the green kind, seems like the last thing us humans need to do, at least there is a clear mandate that restoration has to collaborate with and support the local indigenous communities.
Several weeks after the UN event, on June 21st, Dr. Robin Kimmerer, the well-known Potawatomi restoration ecologist, gave a deeper perspective on this mandate to work with indigenous communities during the opening plenary talk of the 9th World Conference of the Society of Ecological Restoration: “This idea of mutual healing, of cultures and land, is the practice under the really big idea of how do we enact land justice. Justice for the more-than-human beings, justice for the people who are so often dispossessed from their homelands, to return people and their practices to the land as part of that sacred moral responsibility to care for the land.” The most challenging and crucial aspect of my own restoration work is reviving these cultural practices and relationships with the land.
The mentioning of ‘culture’, however, was surprisingly absent from the televised UN event. This glaring omission, however, became ridiculously blinding during the finale world premier music video by Ty Dolla and Don Diablo called “Too Much to Ask” tailored to appeal to the #generation restoration. None of what I am about to explain was provided to the viewer. The music video contained high-quality panoramic footage taken by drone showing hundreds of Maasai people in Kenya, spread out over hundreds of acres of barren red land, constructing half-moon shaped structures called bunds, about 15-feet long with shovels, hoes and lots of sweat. Thanks to this earth-shaping community work, which saved water and fertile top-soil from being washed away after a storm, the barren land became covered with vegetation. Importantly, this community bund-making event is one of many old cultural practices across Africa to harvest rainwater, promote plant growth, and take care of the land. While there was hardly a peep about cultural practices on the land, it was all over the music video! There is a tendency to describe restoration work as a ‘new relationship’ to nature, as based on a ‘very young’ science, but actually, it is a very old human relationship to the land, a very old community-based science, albeit maybe a forgotten one.
Stimulated by the climate crises, examples of this old land-human relationship are popping up everywhere. Just beneath the cloud-piercing mountains surrounding Lima, Peru, about a hundred communities are removing 500-years worth of mud and rock that have filled in a network of stone ditches constructed during the Incan civilization and abandoned after the arrival of the Spanish. This network of ditches, known as amuna in Quechua, are designed to harvest and store rainwater underground so that water is available during dry periods. Just reviving 10 miles of the amuna, a small sample of the existing infrastructure, the nearby communities are already seeing more water flowing out of their domestic wells regardless of the changing climate. Since reviving these ancient cultural infrastructures, more crops are planted and more families are able to maintain good hygiene during the pandemic.
Along the northwest coast of North America, from Alaska to Washington State, various researchers, academics, and resource managers have teamed up with Canada’s First Nations communities to learn how to sustainably grow clams using an old ocean gardening technique. These clam gardens, which First Nation communities have been building and managing for longer than five thousand years, involves constructing rock terraces along the shoreline when the ocean is at low-tide. Not surprisingly, a slew of scientific studies have proven that clam gardens work, with one study showing the growth of several clam species improved by 151% to 300%. In a time of plummeting fisheries and shellfish production worldwide, these clam gardens stick out as a shining star, shedding light on the importance of knowing history and culture when it comes to cultivating food from the ocean. Another amazing example of cultivating food along the edge of the ocean comes from Hawaii, where applying old indigenous land management practices at the He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve has recently shown to not only increase food for both people and animals, but has also brought back endangered shorebirds that even the oldest of elders have never seen before.
Then there is the example of indigenous fire, which has rightfully received lots of press lately. Indigenous fire, sometime called cultural fire, are some of the oldest land management practices common to almost every ethnic group on every continent. Yet only when faced with the threat of megafires these last couple of years do forest-managing agencies finally want to listen and learn from indigenous people. Every forest on earth vulnerable to catastrophic fire can trace its start date to when colonization dispossessed the original peoples from the land. “We are fortunate here”, says Marianne Ignace who has been reviving cultural fire practices on their traditional territory of the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, “that some of that [cultural fire] knowledge still exists in the older generations although it has been undermined and outlawed for over a hundred years.” These cultural fires have brought back important plants not seen since indigenous culture was outlawed. All this is taking place not far from where the remains of 215 children were recently found buried next to the old Kamloops Indian Residential School. The horrors and pain of genocide, and the beauty and resilience of culture, remind us how connected it all is: restoring justice, healing, and the land.
Another example comes from my home state of New Mexico. As hotter temperatures melt the mountain snow much earlier than before, the nourishing waters are passing by the farmlands before the farmer has even planted. Consequently, Federal land agencies are in discussions right now with local farming organizations to build micro-dams or mini-reservoirs in order to capture this water in the mountains for when the farming is ready. In turns out, this same idea and concept was practiced by New Mexico’s Pueblo communities for millennium. They built water harvesting structures and ancient gardens out of local rock and earth almost everywhere water could be collected, “inviting the rain to stay” as one scholar put it. Through people power, the Pueblo communities created wetlands in the desert, and even grew water-loving crops like cotton in places that today’s experts emphatically say would be impossible.
When you put these examples of cultural revival, land restoration, and community healing together, it shows us that restoration is not so much about “finally making peace with nature”, as it is about finally making peace with our cultural past. As my mentor would say we are living in a time when “all the old is new again”.
The global call to heal the earth’s wounds is a powerful moment of cultural recognition for everyone. As Dr. Kimmerer explained, every person is indigenous to some place, and every place is the homeland to someone. Especially for indigenous communities across the continents of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, whom for generations have been denied their rightful place at the table of humanity, it is a time of reconciliation and of pride, where their cultural practices are recognized as a means to heal a wounded earth and a wounded people. As the young poet, Jordan Sanchez, said during the UN conference, “resilience, we stand on our own two feet, I’ll tell you, reimagining the future has never tasted so sweet…The promise of restoration lives within us”. It does indeed.
The Congolese government has officially recognized community ownership of a conservation area linking two national parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, giving hope for the survival of the Grauer’s gorilla, a critically endangered species.
The gorilla, found only in DRC, faces threats from habitat loss, poaching for bushmeat, and the effects of lingering civil unrest in the region.
The Nkuba Conservation Area is co-managed by local communities and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, with the latter providing jobs and training initiatives for women.
The years-long effort to develop the conservation area and now to maintain it points to the importance of engaging local communities in conservation.
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri) share their forest home with rural communities – which could help save their shrinking populations and habitat.
The DRC government officially recognized community ownership of three forest concessions, which combined are called the Nkuba Conservation Area, in April. The 1,580-square-kilometer (610-square-mile) patch of protected area, about twice the size of New York City, is situated between the Maiko and Kahuzi-Biéga national parks.
The formal recognition of Nkuba Conservation Area represents a win for community rights and conservation both, increasing the area of community-owned forests in the Walikale territory by more than 70%, according to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a non-profit that has worked with local leaders since 2012 to secure the area, a biodiversity hotspot, for protection.
Under the DRC legal framework implemented in 2016, each community-managed forest concession can be no larger than 50,000 hectares, amounting to the three concessions that form Nkuba Conservation Area. While the official land titles are not designated as conservation sites, the communities at Nkuba have entered a 25-year agreement to co-manage the area for conservation with the Fossey fund, which is responsible for the management plan and management decisions with approval from a union representing the communities.
In exchange for protecting gorillas by not hunting them and alerting authorities of poaching activity, the fund’s leadership say they provide education, jobs and conservation training to locals to aid protection efforts for the Grauer’s gorilla and other threatened species that live in the forests.
Now that locals own the forest concessions for themselves, they have a better incentive for protecting them and recognize their value, Tara Stoinski, CEO and chief science officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, told Mongabay.
“They’re using them [forest concessions] in a way that’s sustainable for them in the long term and for wildlife in the long term,” she said.
Safeguarding the Grauer’s gorilla
Nkuba’s strategic location acts as a haven for some of DRC’s most threatened and rarest species, including the Grauer’s gorilla, which is only found in eastern DRC. The species, also called the eastern lowland gorilla, faces poaching; habitat loss from widespread deforestation; and the effects of civil unrest from armed rebel groups fueling illegal mining operations, Stoinski explained.
Scientists estimate close to 17,000 Grauer’s gorillas existed in the wild prior to the civil war in DRC in the mid-1990s. Now, only 6,800 remain in the wild, according to the most recent estimates.
“They’re found nowhere else on the planet, so conserving them here is the only way to ensure that the species survives,” Stoinski said.
Researchers at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund estimate about 200 individuals live within Nkuba, but the majority of Grauer’s gorillas — an estimated 75% — live outside of protected areas. Nkuba makes up about 10% of the gorilla’s total habitat in DRC, said Urbain Ngobobo, the Congo programs director for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Research indicates that the greatest number of Grauer’s gorillas live in the Oku community forests, located near Kahuzi-Biega National Park.
As ecosystem engineers, gorillas help keep the entire ecosystem healthy. They play a vital role in seed dispersal by eating fruits and seeds that they defecate throughout the forest, and they clear paths for other animals, Stoinski said.
If they go extinct, so too might other wild animals and tree species in the area, Ngobobo added, so protecting gorilla habitat also ensures the protection of other wildlife.
Recent studies show that Grauer’s gorilla populations have suffered decreased genetic diversity from habitat fragmentation, making Nkuba’s role as a wildlife corridor between the two national parks crucial. A 2018 study found that Nkuba’s Grauer’s gorillas, a centrally located population, were more genetically diverse than populations living at the edges of its habitat range, bolstering the importance of Nkuba for forest connectivity.
“It’s playing the role of an ecological corridor, ensuring connectivity, allowing wildlife [to move] from one point to another point,” Ngobobo said.
Habitat fragmentation occurs when contiguous habitat, such as a forest, is sliced into smaller patches of habitat, often due to human activities like deforestation for logging operations or oil palm plantations. Animals living within those patches are thus reduced to a smaller area of suitable habitat, which can threaten those populations’ survival and decrease genetic diversity by restricting the number of potential mates.
“You don’t want these island populations, if you can help it,” Stoinski said. “One disaster could have a significant effect, so maintaining connectivity is really important.”
Seven globally threatened mammal species are protected within Nkuba Conservation Area’s borders. Red circles indicate its IUCN-designated conservation status as vulnerable (VU), endangered (EN) or critically endangered (CE). Images by (clockwise from top left) Canva, Nik Borrow via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0), Bart Wurston via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), Mulhouseville via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0), Laila Bahaa-el-din/ Panthera, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, David Brossard via Flickr (CC BYe-SA 2.0.). Graphic by Marlowe Starling using Canva.
Biodiversity at stake in the Congo Basin
Central Africa’s Congo Basin, the second largest tropical rainforest in the world, stretches across an area of 3.7 million km2 (1.4 million mi2). The rainforest is home to a rich diversity of endemic and endangered species, from the charismatic mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) that U.S. primatologist Dian Fossey studied in Rwanda, to more than 600 tree species that play a critical role as one of the Earth’s largest carbon sinks.
But in recent years, scientists have warned that the ability of Africa’s forests to store carbon is projected to decline due to deforestation and climate change. Satellite data show that deforestation is now occurring at higher rates than before in northern DRC.
The Congo Basin receives a smaller share of forest conservation funding than the Amazon or forests in Southeast Asia, according to the Central African Forestry Commission. Stoinsiki said more funding is needed in Central Africa to protect the forest ecosystems people depend on.
“Ultimately, the health of these forests depend[s] on intact ecosystems,” Stoinski said. “Then we, in turn, depend on these ecosystems to keep our planet intact.”
Although climate change does threaten species living in tropical rainforests, biodiversity in the Congo Basin is mostly threatened by human activities and the direct killing of wildlife.
“Behind all poaching activities is a business,” said Dominique Endamana, the IUCN Regional Forest Program for Central and West Africa officer, in an interview with Mongabay. “People kill for money. People kill for [eating].”
For example, elephants no longer live in the area because they were poached to extinction for ivory. That’s a fate the Fossey fund is working to help the Grauer’s gorillas avoid.
Mining sites are a main cause of deforestation and poaching in eastern DRC, where the critically endangered Grauer’s gorilla lives mostly outside of protected areas. Image by Marlowe Starling/Mongabay.
Working with communities to champion conservation
Prior to the civil war, people depended on agriculture and small business for their livelihoods, Ngobobo told Mongabay in an email. But rampant violence left communities in eastern DRC in acute poverty, Endamana said, forcing them to hunt for bushmeat or work for environmentally damaging mining operations that harvest minerals used to make electronics sold in the Global North.
Rebel groups in mineral-rich DRC control artisanal mines and often poach gorillas for their high volumes of meat. Ngobobo said he and his team were kidnapped four times by rebel groups. Each time, however, locals living at Nkuba negotiated for their release, which he said was a sign of local support for their conservation work.
Plus, widespread food insecurity in the area caused locals to overexploit forest resources like medicinal plants and hunt for bushmeat, which Stoinski said was the greatest cause of wildlife decline.
Now that communities own the forests for themselves, they have a better incentive to protect them, motivated by the steady employment, health care, payment of school fees and improved living conditions the Fossey fund provides, Ngobobo said. He added that locals now alert Fossey fund staff when they notice a suspected poacher roaming their forest.
“Ultimately, for conservation to work, people need to be invested in it,” Stoinski said.
The charity has employed 70 full-time staff members from the local community at Nkuba and hires about 250 part-time employees every month, according to Stoinski. Survey teams conduct field work for gorilla research, unarmed rangers patrol the forests for signs of poachers, and several ex-poachers are also employed as Fossey Fund staff.
But establishing Nkuba as a community-managed forest wasn’t a simple process, and convincing people who earned income from mining to switch to conservation wasn’t easy, Ngobobo said.
“Mining offered direct benefits while people felt that without tourism, there was no other material benefit to be gained from conservation,” Ngobobo said in an email.
For example, elephants no longer live in the area because they were poached to extinction for ivory. That’s a fate the Fossey fund is working to help the Grauer’s gorillas avoid.
In addition to initial community pushback, it is legally difficult to obtain a community concession, so support from an NGO, such as the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, can help communities navigate the process.
Fossey Fund leadership says that its training and conservation programs have helped alleviate those pressures by providing an alternative source of income and focusing on sustainable harvesting techniques. For example, some community members are analyzing Grauer’s gorilla fecal samples to find out what kind of food they eat. Gorilla diets can provide clues to what types of wild fruits are edible, so cultivating those seeds in the community eliminates the need for harvesting fruit and other non-timber forest products in gorilla habitat, according to the Fossey fund.
Forest-dependent communities play a critical role in addressing climate change, say researchers at Human Rights Watch, who make the argument for placing such communities at the center of climate policies.
Similarly, Endamana warned against scientists like himself ignoring the needs, knowledge and values of local and Indigenous communities when making management decisions.
“We can’t talk [about] conservation without local communities,” Endamana said. “It’s impossible. We can’t conserve without them.”
Through educational programs, the Fossey fund is now training the next generation of conservationists, Ngobobo said, supporting 240 students. More young people than before, including women, are earning high school diplomas and attending college, he added.
“We’re very excited for Nkuba to be a field site where young Congolese biologists can come and do their master’s thesis, or their Ph.D., or just get a better understanding of the biodiversity that’s in their backyard,” Stoinski said.
As climate change and extractive activities continue to place pressure on Central Africa’s dense and biodiverse forests, scientists stress the need for continuous action and more community-managed protected areas like Nkuba.
“Me, as Congolese, I think it’s my responsibility to give my life, to give my knowledge, to give my energy, to give my time to protecting [gorillas],” Ngobobo said. “We need to act now. Now, and not later.”
Citations:
Baas, P., Van der Valk, T., Vigilant, L., Ngobobo, U., Binyinyi, E., Nishuli, R., … Guschanski, K. (2018). Population-level assessment of genetic diversity and habitat fragmentation in critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 165(3), 565-575. doi:10.1002/ajpa.23393
Hubau, W., Lewis, S. L., Phillips, O. L., Affum-Baffoe, K., Beeckman, H., Cuní-Sanchez, A., … Zemagho, L. (2020). Asynchronous carbon sink saturation in African and Amazonian tropical forests. Nature, 579(7797), 80-87. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2035-0
Nnoko-Mewanu, J., Téllez-Chávez, L., & Rall, K. (2021). Protect rights and advance gender equality to mitigate climate change. Nature Climate Change, 11(5), 368-370. doi:10.1038/s41558-021-01043-4
Plumptre, A. J., Kirkby, A., Spira, C., Kivono, J., Mitamba, G., Ngoy, E., … Kujirakwinja, D. (2021). Changes in Grauer’s gorilla ( gorilla beringei graueri ) and other primate populations in the kahuzi‐biega National Park and Oku community reserve, the heart of Grauer’s gorilla global range. American Journal of Primatology. doi:10.1002/ajp.23288
Plumptre, A. J., Nixon, S., Kujirakwinja, D. K., Vieilledent, G., Critchlow, R., Williamson, E. A., … Hall, J. S. (2016). Catastrophic decline of world’s largest primate: 80% loss of Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) population justifies critically endangered status. PLOS ONE, 11(10), e0162697. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162697
Réjou-Méchain, M., Mortier, F., Bastin, J., Cornu, G., Barbier, N., Bayol, N., … Gourlet-Fleury, S. (2021). Unveiling African rainforest composition and vulnerability to global change. Nature, 593(7857), 90-94. doi:Scientific Reports, 8(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-018-24497-7
Walters, G., Sayer, J., Boedhihartono, A. K., Endamana, D., & Angu Angu, K. (2021). Integrating landscape ecology into landscape practice in central African rainforests. Landscape Ecology. doi:10.1007/s10980-021-01237-3
Editor’s note: The Brexit gives the UK the chance to become independent from the very destructive EU agricultural policy. This is the time for UK activists to step up for rewilding.
Featured image: Forest in Somerset, UK. Photo by Deb Barnes
By Lisa Malm, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Umeå University, and Darren Evans, Professor of Ecology and Conservation, Newcastle University
After a particularly long week of computer based work on my PhD, all I wanted was to hike somewhere exciting with a rich wildlife. A friend commiserated with me – I was based at Newcastle University at the time, and this particular friend wasn’t keen on the UK’s wilderness, its moorlands and bare uplands, compared to the large tracts of woodland and tropical forests that can be found more readily abroad.
Luckily, I count myself among many who are charmed by the rolling heather moorlands and sheep grazed uplands, whose colours change beautifully with the seasons. But my friend had a point – there is something very different about many of the UK’s national parks compared to those found in much of the rest of the world: the British uplands are hardly the natural wilderness that many perceive.
These upland habitats are in fact far from what they would have been had they remained unaffected by human activity. In particular, grazing by livestock has been carried out for centuries. In the long run, this stops new trees from establishing, and in turn reduces the depth of soil layers, making the conditions for new vegetation to establish even more difficult. Instead of the woodlands that would once have covered large areas of the uplands, Britain is largely characterised by rolling hills of open grass and moorlands.
Government policy has long been to keep these rolling hills looking largely as they do now. But the future of the British uplands is uncertain. Regulations and government policy strongly influences land management, and the biodiversity associated with it. In fact, the management required to maintain British upland landscapes as they are now – management that largely involves grazing by sheep – is only possible through large subsidies. And due to Brexit, this may change. A new agricultural policy will soon replace the often-criticised Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
What this will look like remains unclear. There are a range of competing interests in the uplands. Some wish to rewild vast swathes of the land, while others want to intensify farming, forestry and other commercial interests. The rewilders tap into the increased interest in restoring natural woodland due to its potential in carbon uptake, increased biodiversity and reintroduction of extinct species such as wolves and lynxes, while some farmers argue that this will be bad for the economy. The UK stands at a crossroads, and interests are rapidly diverging.
Whatever path is taken will obviously have an impact on the unique assemblages of upland plants and animals, many of which are internationally important. But upland birds and biodiversity have for a long time been on the decline. Whether rewilding is the answer to this or not has long been debated: some claim that we need to stop grazing animals to allow the natural habitat to reassert itself, while others claim that some species, such as curlews, rely on such grazing practises for their survival.
But our new research, published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, provides the first experimental evidence to our knowledge, that stopping livestock grazing can increase the number of breeding upland bird species in the long term, including birds of high conservation importance, such as black grouse and cuckoo. This is interesting, as it is often argued that land abandonment can result in lower biodiversity and that livestock grazing is essential for maintaining it.
Our research shows that, depending on how the uplands are managed, there will be bird “winners” and “losers”, but overall when sheep have gone the number of bird species returning increases.
A subsidised landscape
Before going into the research itself, it’s important to consider the history of British upland land management. Truly “natural” habitats in the UK are few and relatively small. Deciduous woodland, and to a lesser extent coniferous forests, used to cover most of the British uplands below the treeline. For example, only about 1% of the native pine forests that once covered 1.5 million hectares (15,000km²) of the Scottish Highlands remain today.
These woodlands provided homes for charismatic species such as pine marten, red squirrel and osprey, together with now extinct species such as lynx and bears. But centuries of farming has shaped most of the upland landscape to what it is today: a predominantly bare landscape dominated by moorlands, rough grasslands, peatlands and other low vegetation.
These marginal areas tend to have low financial profitability for those who farm the land. And so a range of other activities, such as grouse shooting and commercial forestry, exist to boost rural community incomes.
Despite their low profitability, however, many grazed areas are considered to represent “high nature value” farming. This seems paradoxical, but basically means they are considered important as habitats to protected species benefiting from open upland landscapes. One such species is the iconic curlew.
Because farming is tough in the uplands and it’s a struggle to make a profit, landowners receive, and often rely on, subsidies to maintain their farms. The form of these subsidies has changed over time, in line with the current perception of appropriate land management for food production. At the moment, the scale of these subsidies are based on the size of the farm, but they also require that the farmer maintains the land in a good agricultural state. This leaves little room for shrubs or trees, except along field edges, especially in England where there is no financial support for agroforestry (where trees are integrated in agricultural land).
But these subsidies will soon no longer be allocated through the EU – and so it’s time to reconsider what kind of land management should be supported. It seems sensible to consider introducing financial support for other land management types, such as reforestation, natural regeneration or wildflower meadows. Such habitats have other public and nature conservation benefits.
It’s not just farming and aesthetics that are at stake here. Challenges such as climate change and air pollution should also inform how financial support for appropriate land management is managed. For example, floods are predicted to become more common as the climate gets warmer. Reforestation can help to diminish floods, the roots channelling water down through the soil instead of letting it run off the land. Re-establishment of woodlands can also improve air quality: the leaves absorb harmful gases such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
But rewilding, or any form of restructuring land management, can be costly. It therefore needs to be based on the best scientific evidence, preferably from well-designed experimental research studies. In controlled experimental studies, the cause for any effects found can more easily be determined, as opposed to observational studies, which risk being biased by other, confounding, factors. But due to the cost and complexity of maintaining them, long-term, experimentally manipulated land use studies are rare, and with it the necessary evidence base for long-term management decisions.
Experimental grazing
I’ve been lucky to be involved in one such long-term experiment. The Glen Finglas experiment, managed by the James Hutton Institute, was set up in 2002 in Scotland’s Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. The experiment examines the long-term ecological impacts of different livestock grazing intensity levels on plants, arthropods (insects and spiders), birds and mammals. These grazing levels reflect the conventional stocking rate in the region at the start of the experiment (about three ewes per ha), low intensity grazing at a third of the conventional stocking rate (with sheep only or both sheep and cattle), or no grazing at all.
The experiment has six replicates of four grazing treatments and covers around 0.75km² of land, with 12km of fencing. This may not seem large, but in experimental terms, it is. According to Robin Pakeman, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute who manages the project, the experiment constitutes “an unrivalled resource to understand how grazing impacts on a whole range of organisms”.
Since the start, the Glen Finglas experiment has shown that grazing intensity affects plants and the amount of insects and spiders. The highest amount of plants, insects and spiders were found in the ungrazed areas. This was not too surprising as grazing livestock removes vegetation, which results in reduced habitat conditions for insects and spiders overall (although some species benefit from grazing).
There have also been studies on carbon storage, vole abundances and fox activity within the experiment. These have shown higher carbon storage and higher fox activity in the ungrazed areas.
Meanwhile, the research on birds within this experiment has, from the start, focused on meadow pipits. These small, brown birds are the “house sparrows of the uplands”, yet often go unnoticed. But they are the most common upland bird and an important part of upland food webs, forming key prey for birds of prey such as hen harriers and a common host for cuckoos. The experiment has provided unique insights into the ecology of this fascinating little bird, and a much clearer understanding of how it is affected by grazing.
In just the first two to three years, it became clear that meadow pipits could be affected by grazing intensity. My PhD supervisor, Darren Evans, found that the breeding density and egg size were both positively affected by low intensity mixed cattle and sheep grazing. But there were no differences in how many meadow pipit chicks were produced and fledged between the grazing treatments, at least not in the very early phase of the experiment.
I wanted to test whether these results changed in the longer term. Together with colleagues from Newcastle University, the British Trust for Ornithology, The James Hutton Institute and The University of Aberdeen, we looked at whether 12 years of continuous experimental grazing management had affected the breeding success of meadow pipits.
We assumed that low intensity grazing, compared to high intensity or no grazing, was most beneficial for pipit breeding productivity. We found the low intensity grazed areas did indeed seem to be better for meadow pipits, but the effects were not clear enough to be statistically significant. And there seemed to be potentially more important factors, such as predation, affecting their breeding outcome.
But although we did not initially set out to test it, we found other, more significant, effects on the wider bird community.
When the experiment started, there were almost no bird species other than meadow pipits in and around the treatment areas, hence the focus on them. But in 2015, while looking for meadow pipit nests, we came across a few other beautiful nests in the low intensity grazed areas. These nests had colourful blue eggs or eggs that appeared to have been painted with dark brown watercolour paint. These turned out to be stonechat and reed bunting eggs, two bird species that had not previously been seen in the experiment.
Later on, we saw that they had fledged successfully: the parents would call them to warn about human intruders. If we didn’t get too close, the newly fledged young would curiously nudge their heads up through the vegetation. By this stage of the experiment – 12 years in – the vegetation had actually become quite dense and high in the ungrazed and some of the low intensity grazed areas.
We also detected several black grouse nests, mainly in the ungrazed areas. Most of them were already hatched, but one had a female who bravely stayed put on her eggs every time we visited this area until they hatched.
Another great discovery was when we found a meadow pipit nest with one egg that seemed oddly big in comparison to the rest of the clutch. We were really excited to realise that it had been visited by a cuckoo that had laid an egg there, which hadn’t happened during the early years of nest monitoring in the experiment. This egg had a brown spotted pattern which was fascinatingly similar to the meadow pipit eggs. (As exciting as this all may seem, nest searching should only be carried out under permit. I also had a bird ringing permit covering my research activities).
Thanks to all these encounters, we decided to test how the different grazing treatments affected the species richness of breeding birds. Over the first two years, we found that there was basically no difference. But another decade on and there were clearly more bird species found in the ungrazed areas compared to the other experimental plots.
A fractious debate
It was not only bird species richness that needed time to respond to the change in grazing management. Although plant structure responded early, it was not until 2017 – 14 years since the experiment began – that an effect on plant species richness could be detected. In this case, the variety of species was greater in the intensively grazed areas, probably because the livestock holds back fast-growing plants from dominating. Whether this would remain the same in another decade is far from clear.
The ungrazed areas in our study, meanwhile, showed more shrub and tall-growing plants after a bit more than a decade. There were also patches of deciduous tree species, which were not there when the experiment commenced.
Rewilding is such a fractious debate because of the difficulty in obtaining solid scientific evidence on which to base decisions. It takes a very long time – far longer than our political cycles, most research studies, perhaps even a lifetime – to determine what the ultimate effects of large scale land management on the environment are. In our experiment, changes have been very slow. Pakeman explained to me that this is partly expected in cold and infertile habitats but another reason for slow responses is that plant communities exist in a sort of “mosaic”, with each community having a different preference for the grazers. He continued:
The long history of grazing has meant that the most highly preferred communities show little response to grazing removal as they have lost species capable of responding to this change.
There is no one management practice which creates the perfect environment. Some bird species (skylark and snipe) were only found in grazed areas. Other species were more abundant in the ungrazed areas. There is no one size fits all.
But much more consideration and effort needs to be given to unattended land and its potential for boosting biodiversity. There is no single answer to what is the best alternative, but our experiment indicates that a mosaic of different grazing types and shrub or woodland would be more suitable if the aim is to increase biodiversity, carbon uptake and habitats for endangered species.
The experiment also showed that changing the management had no effects on plant diversity and bird species richness in the first years. But this may only be the beginning of the transformation. Another decade of no grazing may result in even higher, or lower, species richness. This shows how important it is to be patient in receiving the effects of land management on plants and wildlife.
Using existing evidence
Our results bring some experimental evidence to the debate around sheep farming versus rewilding. Hopefully, decisions around new policies and subsidy systems will be based on such evidence. As new policies are formed, there will inevitably always be winners and losers, among both humans and wildlife, according to which habitat types receive more support.
Biodiversity is incredibly important. It creates a more resilient ecosystem that can withstand external stresses caused by both humans and nature. It also keeps populations of pollinators strong. At the moment, perhaps the most current and urgent reason is that it could be instrumental in protecting us from future pandemics. A wider range of species prevents unnatural expansions of single species, which can spill over their diseases to humans.
But preserving biodiversity is just one element of long-term environmental aims. Other processes, such as increased flood protection and carbon storage, which both can be achieved through more vegetation, may soon become more prevalent.
There are therefore several biological processes pointing towards public gain from increasing the area of unmanaged land. Across Europe, land is being abandoned due to low profitability in farming it. There are predictions that the amount of abandoned land in Europe will increase by 11% (equivalent to 200,000km² or 20 million ha) by 2030. This is often reported negatively, but it does not have to be. The problem most people see with land abandonment or rewilding is the decrease in food productivity, which will have to increase in order to feed a growing human population.
But as Richard Bunting at the charity Rewilding Britain explained to me, a decline in food production could be avoided, while increasing the areas subject to rewilding to 10,000km² (a million hectares) by the end of the century:
We’re working for the rewilding of a relatively small proportion of Britain’s more marginal land. One million hectares may sound like a lot, but there are 1.8 million hectares [18,000km²] of deer stalking estates and 1.3 million hectares [13,000km²] of grouse moors in Britain. In England alone, there are 270,000 hectares [2,700km²] of golf courses.
As farmers and other upland land owners may be opposed to the idea of rewilding, I also asked him how this would work in practice. He told me that he believes farming and rewilding could work well together, but he had some caveats:
We do need conversations around fresh approaches to the way farming is carried out and how land is used. A key point here is that for farmers, engaging with rewilding should always be about choice, as we seek a balance between people and the rest of nature where each can thrive.
There are many ways to rewild. The Woodland Trust have been successful in restoring ancient woodlands and planting new trees by protecting them from large herbivores such as deer and livestock. Another method is to let “nature have its way” without intervening at all. This has been successful in restoring natural habitats, including woodland, such as the Knepp estate in West Sussex, which Isabella Tree has made famous in her book Wilding.
After 19 years of no conventional management, The Knepp estate now hosts a vast range of wildlife, including all five native owl species, the rare purple emperor butterfly and turtle doves. Large herbivores, including both livestock and deer, graze the area on a free-roaming level. These animals are replacing the large natural herbivores such as aurochs, wisent and wild boar which would have grazed the area thousands of years ago.
So there is room for discussion on what environmental and financial benefits there may be of different rewilding, or woodland restoration projects, and where they are most suitable.
The first thing to do, I think, is to diversify the types of land management championed by the government through subsidy. Natural habitats could be increased through more financial benefits to landowners for leaving land unattended, while improving public interest in visiting woodlands and thereby the support for preserving wild habitats.
Meanwhile, long-term research of land-use change would give us a better evidence base for future decisions. But this must go hand in hand with much needed serious evaluations of rural communities’ long-term income opportunities under alternative management scenarios, which will always be a cornerstone in land use politics.
Editor’s note: Of course this proposal has to be framed with the usual politicians blabla and pledges about “prosperous agriculture”, “affordable, reliable clean energy” and “revitalizing the economy”, which are all bright green lies. Apart from that, any dam that will really physically be removed is a step into the right direction and an absolutely necessary measure to save the last remaining wild salmon.
This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute
Featured image: chinook and orca – NOAA Fisheries
By Amy Souers Kober
It’s hard to put into words what wild salmon mean to the Pacific Northwest. They are the heartbeat of the region’s rivers, and the annual return of salmon from the Pacific Ocean helps sustain a web of life in the Columbia River Basin that includes more than 130 species, from eagles to black bears to orcas. These incredible fish have been a cornerstone of Indigenous cultures for thousands of years.
“Our story, and that of the salmon, is one of perseverance and resilience and thriving,” said Dr. Sammy Matsaw, a Shoshone-Bannock tribal member, veteran and co-founder of the nonprofit River Newe. “We’re still here and we’re still strong. This is about who we are and who we want to be.”
Migrations are common among many species, but the journey that the salmon make is one of the most amazing. Salmon hatch from eggs laid in the gravel of clear, cold mountain streams. After hatching, the young salmon ride swift river currents downstream to the ocean. Their bodies undergo amazing physiological changes as they transition from living in freshwater to saltwater. And then they eventually go back to freshwater: After a couple of years in the ocean, the adult salmon find their way back to the same spawning beds in the same rivers where they were born.
Idaho salmon make one of the world’s most epic migrations, swimming 900 miles and climbing over a mile in elevation from the Pacific Ocean up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to mountain streams where they spawn and die, beginning the circle of life again.
But salmon runs in the Columbia and Snake Rivers are in trouble, in large part because of the damage to their natural habitat by hydropower dams.
‘Inexcusable’
The Snake River was historically the biggest salmon producer in the Columbia Basin, with an estimated “2 million to 6 million fish… [returning to] the Snake River and its tributaries” each year, according to Russ Thurow, a fisheries research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Boise, Idaho, who was quoted in the Idaho Mountain Express. But “[b]y 1995, only 1,200 wild Chinook reached the Snake River basin,” said Thurow.
According to scientists, the steep decline in the wild Snake River salmon population can be attributed to the construction of the four lower Snake River dams in eastern Washington, built “between 1955 and 1975 to turn the inland town of Lewiston, Idaho, into a seaport.” These four federally owned and operated dams have caused a precipitous decline in wild salmon and steelhead trout in the Snake River Basin, driving some populations to extinction and landing the rest on the endangered species list. “Sockeye salmon from the Snake River system are probably the most endangered salmon,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey. “Coho salmon in the lower Columbia River may already be extinct.”
As Chinook salmon grow ever more scarce, they are pulling another Northwest icon—Southern Resident orcas—toward extinction. This population of orcas migrates back and forth between Puget Sound, the Salish Sea and the Washington and Oregon coasts. One of the main factors for the Southern Resident orcas being critically endangered is the lack of food, with Chinook salmon making up “more than 80 percent of their diet.” In the U.S., the Columbia-Snake River watershed is the most important source of salmon for orcas. The four lower Snake River dams not only interrupt the free-flowing water but also kill “millions of Chinook juveniles” as the salmon attempt to make their way to the ocean.
One orca mother, Tahlequah, made national news in 2018 when she carried the body of her dead calf for 17 days. The region mourned with her. The heartbreak galvanized people across the Northwest to demand solutions.
Over the past 20 years, the federal government and Northwest taxpayers have made massive investments in salmon recovery in the Columbia-Snake River Basin, totaling more than $17 billion. These actions, including modifications to dam operations, have been necessary to reverse the impacts of historic habitat loss, overharvest, and the damage caused by hydropower projects, but have not been sufficient to recover salmon and steelhead to healthy, harvestable and sustainable numbers.
In the short documentary film The Greatest Migration by Save Our Wild Salmon, Ed Bowles, who has run the fish division of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for the past two decades, said, “Historically, the Columbia River was the biggest salmon producer in the world… We are now struggling at around 1 percent of their historical potential. That is inexcusable for a system that is so iconic, a species that is so iconic, a system that is so magnificent.”
‘We Choose Salmon’
For decades, Northwest tribes have been spearheading salmon recovery solutions in the Columbia-Snake River Basin and regionwide. The Nimíipuu, or Nez Percé, Tribe adopted its first resolution advocating for the removal of the four lower Snake River dams in 1999. Removing these dams would restore 140 miles of the lower Snake River and improve access to more than 5,000 miles of pristine habitat in places like Idaho’s Salmon and Clearwater River systems.
In a 2020 statement, Shannon F. Wheeler, then chairman of the Nez Percé Tribal Executive Committee, said, “We view restoring the lower Snake River as urgent and overdue. To us, the lower Snake River is a living being, and, as stewards, we are compelled to speak the truth on behalf of this life force and the impacts these concrete barriers on the lower Snake have on salmon, steelhead, and lamprey, on a diverse ecosystem, on our Treaty-reserved way of life, and on our people.”
Today, tribal leaders are raising their voices again. In May 2021, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians—a group representing 57 Northwest tribal governments—passed a resolution calling for the breaching of the lower Snake dams. The resolution calls on Congress and the Biden administration to “seize the once-in-a-lifetime congressional opportunity to invest in salmon and river restoration in the Pacific Northwest, charting a stronger, better future for the Northwest, and bringing long-ignored tribal justice to our peoples and homelands.”
“Restoring the lower Snake River will allow salmon, steelhead and lamprey to flourish in the rivers and streams of the Snake Basin,” said Kat Brigham, chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) Board of Trustees in a February 8 press release. “This has long been a priority because these are the CTUIR’s ancestral traditional use areas, such as the Grande Ronde, Imnaha, Lostine, Minam, Tucannon and Wallowa Rivers and their tributaries.”
“We have reached a tipping point where we must choose between our Treaty-protected salmon and the federal dams, and we choose salmon,” Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman Delano Saluskin, was quoted saying in a press release.
‘America’s Most Endangered River’
My organization, American Rivers, named the Snake River “America’s Most Endangered River for 2021” because of the urgent need for action to save the salmon—and the opportunity to come up with a bold, comprehensive solution. In February, Congressman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) proposed a $33.5 billion package of infrastructure investments, including removing the lower Snake dams, to recover salmon runs and boost clean energy, agriculture and transportation across the region.
Showing his personal compassion toward the cause of salmon recovery, Simpson described salmon as “the most incredible creatures, I think, that God has created,” according to a 2019 article.
Meanwhile, a presentation titled, “The Northwest in Transition: Salmon, Dams and Energy,” on Simpson’s website states, “The question I am asking the Northwest delegation, governors, tribes and stakeholders is ‘do we want to roll up our sleeves and come together to find a solution to save our salmon, protect our stakeholders and reset our energy system for the next 50 plus years on our terms?’ Passing on this opportunity will mean we are letting the chips fall where they may for some judge, future administration or future [C]ongress to decide our fate on their terms. They will be picking winners and losers, not creating solutions.”
Since Simpson released his proposal, other members of the Northwest congressional delegation have joined the conversation. In May, Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) spoke in favor of a comprehensive solution, saying, “People in the Pacific Northwest [need to] engage with one another.”
“Let’s dive in and do it rather than pretend that somehow this is going to go away. … That’s just not going to cut it,” he said.
Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Washington Governor Jay Inslee also released a statement in favor of a collaborative, comprehensive solution for salmon and the region.
No matter which proposal ultimately gains traction, American Rivers and other salmon advocates believe that we need meaningful immediate action and funding to remove the lower Snake dams and replace their benefits. Prioritizing the following five goals is essential to long-term solutions for salmon recovery and improving the present Northwest infrastructure:
1. Healthy rivers, abundant salmon: Restoration of the lower Snake River, along with the funding and implementation of habitat restoration and fish protection projects, will provide the most favorable river conditions possible for salmon, steelhead and other native fish species.
2. Honoring promises to tribes: Restoring abundant, harvestable salmon will honor the promises made to Northwest tribes by upholding their right to access fish and will benefit tribes from the inland Northwest to the coast.
3. Prosperous agriculture: Infrastructure upgrades will ensure irrigation from a free-flowing lower Snake River continues to support the farms that currently rely on surface diversions and wells for their orchards, vineyards and other high-value crops. Investments in the transportation system will allow farmers, who currently ship their grain to market using river barges, to transport their products via rail.
4. Affordable, reliable clean energy: The energy currently produced by the four lower Snake River dams can be replaced by a clean energy portfolio that includes solar, wind, energy efficiency and storage. Diversifying energy sources will improve the electric system’s reliability. Funding for energy storage, grid resiliency and optimization would allow the Northwest to maintain its legacy of clean and affordable energy.
5. Revitalizing the economy: Infrastructure investments in energy and transportation would mean more family-wage jobs, the impact of which ripples out in communities throughout the region. A restored lower Snake River would strengthen local economies by creating new opportunities for outdoor recreation, which will help support local businesses, including outfitters, lodging and restaurants.
A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity
Time is of the essence. Climate change is warming Northwest rivers, creating deadly conditions for endangered salmon. Meanwhile, the salmon runs continue to decline. Northwest tribes have called for a major salmon summit this summer to underscore the urgency of these issues.
It is time for bold action from Northwest leaders. The region’s congressional delegation has a strong history of crafting innovative, bipartisan solutions to challenging water and river issues. And we’ve seen powerful, collaborative dam removal efforts come together on other rivers across the country, from Maine’s Penobscot to Oregon and California’s Klamath. Now, with President Biden considering a national infrastructure package, the government has an opportunity to secure significant regional investment—and advance the biggest river restoration effort the world has ever seen. A well-crafted solution on a swift timeline would benefit the nation as a whole by restoring salmon runs, bolstering clean energy and strengthening the economy of one of the most dynamic regions in the country.
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“The salmon are a life source that we all depend on. Just as we are united with each other, we are also united with the salmon,” said Samuel Penney, Nez Perce chairman. “We are all salmon people.”
Amy Souers Kober is the vice president of communications for American Rivers.
“Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.”
– Mark Twain
It doesn’t take too long once you’ve left the greater Los Angeles area, away from all the lush lawns, water features, green parkways, and manicured foliage to see that California is in the midsts of a very real, potentially deadly water crisis. Acres and acres of abandoned farms, dry lake beds, empty reservoirs—the water is simply no longer there and likely won’t ever be back.
What’s happening here in California is far more than a ‘severe drought’ as the media labels the situation. The word ‘drought’ gives the impression that this is all short-lived, an inconvenience we have to deal with for a little while. But the lack of water isn’t temporary, it’s becoming the new norm. California’s ecology as some 39.5 million residents know it is forever changing—and climate change is the culprit. At least that’s the prognosis a few well-respected climatologists have been saying for the last two decades, and their predictions have not only been accurate, but they’ve been conservative in their estimates.
UC Santa Cruz Professor Lisa Sloan co-authored a 2004 report in which she and her colleague Jacob Sewall predicted the melting of the Arctic ice shelf would cause a decrease in precipitation in California and hence a severe drought. The Arctic melting, they claimed, would warp the offshore jet stream in the Pacific Ocean. Not only have their models proved correct, Prof. Sloan told Joe Romm of ThinkProgress she believes “the actual situation in the next few decades could be even more dire” than their study suggested.
As they anticipated fifteen years ago, the jet stream has shifted drastically, essentially pushing winter storms up north and out of California and the Northwest. As a result, snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, which feeds water to most of Southern California and the agricultural operators of the Central Valley, has all but disappeared. Winters are drier and springs are no longer wet, which means when the warm summer months roll around there’s no water to be cultivated.
The Los Angeles basin is a region that has long relied on snowmelt from mountains hundreds of miles away to feed its insatiable appetite for sprawling development, but that resource is rapidly evaporating. It is, perhaps, a just irony for the water thieves in Southern California that their wells are finally running dry. Prudence and restraint in water usage will soon be forced upon those who value the extravagant over the practical. It’s the new way across the West as climate change’s many impacts come to fruition.
Not that you’d notice much of this new reality as you travel along L.A.’s bustling boulevards. Pools in the San Fernando Valley remain full, while sun-baked Californians wash their prized vehicles in the streets and soak their green lawns in the evenings. A $500 fine can be handed out to residents who don’t abide by the outdoor watering restrictions now in place, but I’ve yet to see any water cops patrolling neighborhoods for water wasters. In fact, in Long Beach, where I live, water managers have actually admitted they aren’t planning to write any tickets. “We don’t really intend to issue any fines, at least right now,” said Matthew Veeh of the Long Beach Water Department.
Meanwhile in 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown called on all those living in the state to reduce their water use by 20 percent. That’s almost one percentage point for every California community that is at risk of running out of water by the end of the year. Gov. Brown’s efforts to conserve water have fallen on deaf ears. A report issued in July by state regulators shows a one percent increase in water consumption across the state over the past 12 months, with the biggest increase occurring in Southern California’s coastal communities.
“Not everybody in California understands how bad this drought is…and how bad it could be,” said State Water Resources Water Control Board Chairwoman Felicia Marcus when the report was first released. “There are communities in danger of running out of water all over the state.”
Perhaps there is a reason why people don’t understand how bad the water crisis really is—their daily lives have yet to be severely impacted. Unless the winter and spring bring drenching rains, California only has 12-18 months of reserves left. Even the most optimistic of forecasts show a rapid decline in water resevoirs in the state in the decades to come. To put it in perspective, California hasn’t seen this drastic of a decline in rainfall since the mid-1500s.
“This is a real emergency that requires a real emergency response,” argues Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “If Southern California does not step up and conserve its water, and if the drought continues on its epic course, there is nothing more that our water managers can do for us. Water availability in Southern California would be drastically reduced. With those reductions, we should expect skyrocketing water, food and energy prices, as well as the demise of agriculture.”
While it’s clear that the decline in the state’s water reserves will have a very real economic and day-to-day impact on Californians in the near future, it’s also having an inexorable and devastating effect on the environment.
The distinctive, twisted trees of Joshua Tree National Park are dying. The high desert is becoming even hotter and drier than normal, dropping nearly 2 inches from its average of just over 4.5 inches of annual rainfall. The result: younger Joshua trees, which grow at a snail’s pace of around 3 inches per year, are perishing before they reach a foot in height. Their vanishing is a strong indicator that the peculiar trees of this great Park will not be replenished once they grow old and die.
After analyzing national climate data The Desert Sun reported, “[In] places from Palm Springs to Tucson, [we] found that average monthly temperatures were 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter during the past 20 years as compared to the average before 1960.”
This increase in temperatures and the decrease in yearly rainfall are transforming the landscape and vegetation of California. Sadly, Joshua trees aren’t the only native plants having a rough time surviving the changing climate. Pinyon pines, junipers, and other species are being killed by beetle infestations as winters become milder. Writes Ian James in The Desert Sun, “Researchers have confirmed that many species of trees and shrubs are gradually moving uphill in the Santa Rosa Mountains, and in Death Valley, photographs taken decades apart have captured a stunning shift as the endangered dune grass has been vanishing, leaving bare wind rippled sand dunes.”
Plants aren’t the only living organisms being dealt a losing hand. “[California’s] Native fishes and the ecosystems that support them are incredibly vulnerable to drought,” Peter Moyle, a professor at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, noted at a drought summit in Sacramento last fall. “There are currently 37 species of fish on the endangered species list in California—and there is every sign that that number will increase.”
Of those species, some eighty percent won’t survive if the trend continues. Scientists have also attributed the decline in tricolored blackbirds to the drought, which are also imperiled by development and pesticide use.
Salmon runs, however, may be taking the brunt of this human-inflicted mega-drought. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, coho salmon may go extinct south of the Golden Gate straight in San Francisco if the rains don’t come quickly. As environmental group Defenders of Wildlife notes, “All of the creeks between the Golden Gate and Monterey Bay are blocked by sandbars because of lack of rain, making it impossible for salmon to get to their native streams and breed. If critically endangered salmon do not get to their range to spawn this year, they could go extinct. This possible collapse of the salmon fishery is bad news for salmon fishermen and North Coast communities. California’s salmon industry is valued at $1.4 billion in economic activity annually and about half that much in economic activity and jobs in Oregon. The industry employs tens of thousands of people from Santa Barbara to northern Oregon.”
And it’s not just the salmon fisheries that may dry up, so too may the real economic backbone of California: agriculture.
If you purchased a bundle of fresh fruits or vegetables in the U.S. recently, there’s nearly a 50 percent chance they were grown in California. And while we’ve become accustomed to paying very little for such goods compared to other Western countries, that is likely to change in the years ahead.
A study released in by the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California reported the ag industry in California in the first six months of 2014 lost $2.2 billion and nearly 4% of all farm jobs—some 17,000 workers. As we’re only three years into what many believe is just the beginning of the crisis, those numbers are sure to increase.
“California’s agricultural economy overall is doing remarkably well, thanks mostly to groundwater reserves,” said Jay Lund, who co-authored the study and directs the Center for Watershed Sciences. “But we expect substantial local and regional economic and employment impacts. We need to treat that groundwater well so it will be there for future droughts.”
The pumping of groundwater, which is being treated as an endless and bountiful resource, may be making up for recent water loss, but for how long remains to be seen. Until 2014, when the state passed The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, California was the only state in the country that did not have a framework for groundwater management. For decades farmers sucked the desert’s groundwater supply dry, so much so, that the entire sections of California ag country sunk by 60 centimeters.
“We have to do a better job of managing groundwater basins to secure the future of agriculture in California,” said Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “That’s why we’ve developed the California Water Action Plan and a proposal for local, sustainable groundwater management.”
Nonetheless, without significant rainfall, groundwater will not be replenished, the state’s agribusiness and the nation’s consumers will most certainly be hit with the consequences. Rigid conservation and appropriate resource management may act as a bandaid for California’s imminent water crisis, but if climate models remain accurate, the melting of Arctic ice will continue to have a severe impact on the Pacific jet stream, weakening winter storm activity across the state.
It’s a precarious situation, not only for millions of people and the nation’s largest state economy—but it could be the death knell for much of California’s remaining wildlife and iconic beauty as well.
JOSHUA FRANK is managing editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book, co-authored with Jeffrey St. Clair, is Big Heat: Earth on the Brink. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Twitter @joshua__frank.
