United Nations reports on risks to living species

By The Editorial Board, New York Times, May 11, 2019
•
Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatán Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called “The Sixth Extinction,” the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed or diminished by human activities.

This time, she made clear, the asteroid is us — and we will pay heavily for our folly.

Humanity’s culpability in what many scientists believe to be a planetary emergency has now been reaffirmed by a detailed and depressing report compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies. A summary was released last Monday in Paris, and the full 1,500-page report will be available later in the year. Its findings are grim. “Biodiversity” — a word encompassing all living flora and fauna — “is declining faster than at any time in human history,” it says, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades,” unless the world takes transformative action to save natural systems. The at-risk population includes a half-million land-based species and one-third of marine mammals and corals.

Most of the causes of this carnage seem familiar: logging, poaching, overfishing by large industrial fleets, pollution, invasive species, the spread of roads and cities to accommodate an exploding global population, now seven billion and rising. If there is one alpha culprit, it is the clearing of forests and wetlands for farms to feed all those people (and, perversely, to help them get to work: The destruction of Indonesia’s valuable rain forests, and their replacement with palm oil plantations, has been driven in part by Europe’s boundless appetite for biodiesel fuels.)

Add to all this a relatively new threat: Global warming, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels, is expected to compound the damage. “While climate change has not been the dominant driver of biodiversity loss to date in most parts of the world, it is projected to become as or more important,” said Sir Robert Watson, chairman of the biodiversity panel and former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose most recent alarming report on global warming has given that issue new currency in American politics. Rising seas and increased extreme weather events propelled in part by climate change — fire, floods, droughts — have already harmed many species. The most obvious victim is the world’s coral reefs, which have suffered grievously from ocean waters that have grown warmer and more acidic as a result of all the carbon dioxide they’ve been asked to absorb.

As The Times’s Brad Plumer recently noted, many ecologists insist that species are worth saving on their own, that it’s simply morally wrong to drive any living creature to extinction. The new report deliberately adds a powerful practical motive to the spiritual one: Biodiversity loss, it says, is an urgent issue for human well-being, providing billions and billions of dollars in what experts call “ecosystem services.” Wetlands clean and purify water. Coral reefs nourish vast fish populations that feed the world. Organic matter in the soil nourishes crops. Bees and other threatened insects pollinate fruits and vegetables. Mangroves protect us from floods made worse by rising seas.

“Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report says. But humans can stop or at least limit the damage. One critical task is to protect (and if possible to enlarge) the world’s natural forests, which, according to a recent paper by eminent ecologists in Science Advance, are home to fully two-thirds of the world’s species. Intact forests also absorb and store enormous amounts of carbon, so preserving them assists not only the species that live there but also the struggle against climate change. Conversely, cutting trees to make way for farming and other purposes — as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is determined to do in the Amazon — is a disaster for both the species and the climate; recent estimates suggest that deforestation accounts for slightly over 10 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, much smaller than the emissions from vehicles and power plants, but significant (and avoidable) nonetheless.

To Professor Watson and many other scientists, there are two important parallel approaches to the interconnected climate and species crises. One is to transform agricultural practices, the other is to enlarge the world’s supply of legally protected landscapes that cannot be touched for any commercial purpose. As to the first, farmers could figure out how to produce more food on fewer acres, and in ways that help the soil retain carbon; consumers could help by making smarter food choices, like eating more locally sourced food, and cutting back on meat and dairy products that require immense amounts of land for livestock.

Second, governments should mandate a significant increase in protected areas, both on land and at sea. Partly as a result of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty agreed upon in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro along with a landmark agreement on climate change, nations have set aside about 15 percent of the world’s land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up wilderness areas and nature preserves. Because this is only a fraction of the areas needed to protect biodiversity, the authors of the paper in Science Advance recommend a twofold increase in the protected land area and a fourfold increase in marine reserves over the next decade. If rigorously policed (which many parks are not today), that would effectively quarantine about 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans.

This proposal, which its authors call a Global Deal for Nature (echoing the Democrats’ Green New Deal on climate), will be further refined before the next meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2020 in China. Though it always sends a delegation to these meetings, the United States has never ratified the treaty; President Bill Clinton signed it in 1993, but the Republican Senate failed to ratify it for various reasons, including unfounded fears that the treaty threatened American patent and intellectual property rights.

It is hard to believe that the Trump administration and the current Senate will be any more enthusiastic about preserving biodiversity than the Senate was then. This is an administration, after all, that has proposed to shrink national monuments and reduce protections for the imperiled sage grouse in order to accommodate the oil, gas and coal industries; that is moving to open up the species-rich coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling; that plans to make available now-protected waters along America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts for the same purpose; that proposes to sacrifice parts of

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging; that, most tellingly, aims to weaken the Endangered Species Act, approved in 1973 with Richard Nixon’s signature in what seems a distant era when there was fairly deep bipartisan support for environmental values.

Few of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who have spoken about climate change and jumped with varying degrees of enthusiasm on the Green New Deal bandwagon have commented on the biodiversity report, despite biodiversity’s obvious connections to climate. They should read it, and make it part of their post-2020 agenda.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/extinction-endangered-species-biodiversity.html

Photo by Nikki Burch: "Dog gone"

Your pets could be in trouble in the shale region if they: breathe air, drink water, or enjoy being alive

From an Article by Amelia Urry, Grist Magazine, May 5, 2014

Fracking can ruin a lot of things: landscapes, rivers, ecosystems, the climate, your health and safety and that of your family. But have you thought about how it could hurt that other great American institution — the household pet?

Humans love their domesticated animals so much that the cumulative weight of the beasties overwhelms that of Earth’s other land mammals by several orders of magnitude, including humans. (Granted, cows make up a hefty chunk of that poundage, but dogs and their ilk are undeniably popular in the U.S.)

In an upcoming book called The Real Cost of Fracking, veterinarian Michelle Bamberger and Cornell professor Robert Oswald take on the question of how fracked our pets are, as well as the wider effects of natural gas extraction. To keep from hyperventilating with panic (and/or respiratory distress resulting from fracked-up air quality), let’s focus on Fido for now.

Disclaimer: While it’s difficult to prove that fracking causes any of the mysterious, unprecedented, terrible things that happen in rural America exactly when gas companies comes to town, Bamberger and Oswald do just fine with correlation, gathering sad anecdotes of frack-adjacent people and their ailing pets around the U.S.

Hold on to your gerbils, folks, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

Your pets have the most exposure time. Spot may run, but he rarely runs into town for groceries or a movie. He is there, in your house in downtown Fracktown, day in and day out. If methane or hydrogen sulfide or other nasties seep into the air, your pup is probably going to breathe more of it than you are.

What about your pet canary? No need to head to a coal mine to start measuring your toxic environment!

Your pets better get used to diesel fumes. When gas operations move into a town, trucks fume up and down the formerly quiet country roads that your golden retriever frequents. Those diesel belches are full of benzene, a carcinogen that is dangerous for dog AND his best friend.

Your pets are smaller than you, therefore weaker. Less body mass means a smaller dose of pollution packs more wallop. If you like to cry, you can find videos online that claim to show cats and other animals with apparent neurological damage from airborne fracking. (All right, here’s one — but don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Even larger animals can accumulate poisons quickly; Bamberger reports on healthy dogs and horses whose kidneys failed, a possible result of ingesting heavy metals or radioactive materials. Hear that, Misty of Chincoteague? You and Black Beauty better stay away from that aerosoled, irradiated wastewater.

I hope you don’t like puppies or kittens. Baby animals are even more vulnerable to environmental toxins. In some fracking towns, people have reported stillbirths and infant mortality among pets — as well as other cutesy farm critters, like calves, foals, and baby goats. Oh yeah: This may apply to baby humans, too.

Your pets are probably not drinking bottled water. Although we’re normally not big fans of bottled water, if your backyard well is within reach of fracking operations, you’re probably better off with the stuff. But does Kitty get to drink Dasani, too? Does Kitty occasionally lap water from puddles outside, where surface spills or intentional wastewater dispersal have taken place? Does Kitty have a death wish?

Your pet fish are screwed. Unless you’re likely to fill a 50-gallon tank with Poland Spring, your tropical fish hobby could take a hit when your tapwater comes laced with fracking fluid. Ditto that koi pond you carefully stocked last year. In fact, wild fish kills in rivers near fracking operations are also frequent, the result of spills or toxic algal blooms or even just low water levels after creeks are drained to power the thirsty industry.

You can’t prove anything. You may not know what is in the air or the water near fracking sites, thanks to proprietary secrets and poor monitoring. Of course, you can test your own water or air if you have a cool coupla Gs to shell out, but most people rely on industry to police itself. Even if you find the presence of a toxic substance in your tap, it could be hard to prove how it got there. So if your cats and dogs start dropping, good luck with that smoking gun.

Some hazards may include: hydrogen sulfide released during well-drilling; methane that escapes from equipment during extraction; mysterious fracking fluid that seeps into the water table; or the wastewater that flows back to the surface with whatever it happened to absorb from the underworld, and is often spread on roads or left to evaporate in ponds.

So, to sum up, if your pets perform any of the following activities in a shale-rich region, they could be in trouble: breathe air, drink water, enjoy being alive.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Reference:  Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald, “The Real Cost of Fracking: How America’s Shale Boom is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food,” Beacon Press, August 5, 2014, 256 pages.  Cloth bound, $26.95.  www.beacon.org