Speciose Weekly - January 29th, 2021
In Brief: Biden's Climate Plan in Motion; Rivers of a Different Color; Cicada Boom Due This Year; The Irony of Wood Pellet Production; and much more...
Welcome to this week’s edition of Speciose Weekly, a newsletter about biodiversity and why it matters, by me, Nick Minor.
For more about the Speciose Weekly newsletter, check the about page and my recent post on the stakes for biodiversity in 2021.
Friends, this newsletter has now existed for nearly one month, and already, so much has happened that matters for biodiversity. With a new U.S. administration, worldwide efforts to initiate a green recovery from the pandemic, and the 15th conference of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, efforts to “mainstream biodiversity” are looking more timely than ever.
Still, we’re in the early stages. But the available auguries are encouraging. So far, the Biden-Harris appears to be making good on many of its environmental promises, as we’ll learn more about below. They have acted quickly and prolifically, just what is needed from a President whose best chance at success may be to “blitz”.
And boy is he blitzing. Take a look the comprehensive list compiled by David Roberts at the Volts newsletter.
At this rate, Speciose Weekly will have plenty to share in the coming weeks and months. That’s why, after letting the newsletter play out and evolve for a month, it’s time to make some tweaks, and to start ramping up other parts of the project. More of that below or in future dispatches.
For now, though, let me just say that I am deeply grateful to you, my first group of followers. Like all creative projects, this one is a work-in-progress, which makes the earliest followers of Speciose Weekly extra special. So really, thank you!
With that, let’s get to this past week’s happenings.
News
Simple, concrete connections between biodiversity and current events.
1. Call and Response: Biden Takes First Steps in his Climate Plan
Environmental activists are still enjoying the afterglow of Biden’s first steps toward climate solutions. But now, economic and political crosswinds are surfacing, some more encouraging than others.
Policy-wise, Biden’s most significant action for the fossil fuel industry is his upcoming suspension of new oil and gases leases on Federal Land (that’s about 640 million acres of land protected from any further encroachment by fossil fuel developers). Perhaps in response to this, along with other, more diffuse economic pressures, Exxon Mobil Corp announced that it will reshuffle its board in the hopes of reducing its carbon footprint. It’s hard to know exactly what this may mean. But it’s clear, after a year when oil prices dropped just after an unluckily timed investment in production, the oil giant is in an uncomfortable position.
With a similar ethos, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock Investing—one of the world’s largest investment firms, managing nearly $9 trillion—focused his annual letter to corporate leaders on the climate crisis, calling on all recipients, “to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net-zero economy.” This is one of many actions taken by BlackRock that have increasingly brought climate change into the corporate conversation—and have also incentivized sustainability as a norm.
Of course, business and financial actions like these will still be too little too slowly. Nothing short of sweeping, legislative action will produce the green recovery and just transition we need. That’s why, if you click on and read nothing else in this newsletter, I strongly encourage you to get the state-of-play from this New York Times analysis. It will come up again and again here at Speciose Weekly and elsewhere.
(New York Times 1, 2, & 3, Wall Street Journal 1 & 2)
2. Bipartisan Coalition Challenges Biden-Harris Administration to Protect the Amazon
Since the beginning of his term in 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has made development of the Amazonian rainforest a central tenet of his platform. Meanwhile, to the chagrin of Bolsonaro’s nationalist impulses, world leaders have called out for stricter preservation of the rainforest, especially in a time when ecosystem services like carbon storage are direly needed.
Among those world leaders was then-candidate Biden, who pledged “$20 billion to stop the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and impose significant economic consequences if deforestation continued.” Just today, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. climate leaders submitted an “Amazon Protection Plan” for bringing substance to Biden’s pledge. Remarkably, the plan focuses on trade agreements, financial regulations, and corporate commitments.
It remains to be seen the extent to which this plan—and Biden’s campaign pledge—is acted on. But after the past four years, just having a plan to begin with is something worth celebrating.
3. One-Third of U.S. Rivers Are a Different Color Now than Forty Years Ago
Benefitting from a database of satellite images taken between 1984 to 2018, research published late last year revealed that more than 22,000 miles of river look different than they did some 40 years ago. Many rivers have gone from clear blue or green to murky brown or yellow.
These color changes reflect a variety of ecosystem-level changes, including habitat destruction, which changes how much topsoil rain washes in rivers, as well as industrial pollution or river damming. Another potential cause is eutrophication, often a result of agricultural fertilizers running off into nearby watersheds.
4. Immense Cicada Emergence on the Calendar for 2021
Insect fans, this might be the year.
In 2004, a rare profusion of cicadas emerged in New York, Ohio, Illinois, and twelve other states. The offspring of these cicadas, a species that lies dormant for 17-year intervals, have been hidden inside trees ever since. If all goes according to schedule, this species should emerge once again in the spring of 2021—exactly 17 years later.
Members of this species, with striking red eyes, orange wings, and gunmetal bodies, make mating calls that can be incredibly loud, sometimes as loud as a revving motorcycle.
5. Eminent Domain: A Potent Weapon for Grabbing Land from Black Communities
To solve both the extinction and climate crises, well-managed land is a precious asset. Unfortunately, politicians seeking to fast track the construction of oil pipelines see it differently: as an expendable source of short-term profit.
The investigation linked below showed that, by taking residents of Southwest Memphis to court, pipeline building company Byhalia Connection has used eminent domain to steal land from Black communities, many members of which consider land a generational inheritance. These tactics—skirting proper environmental review and exploiting disenfranchised communities—appear to be common for pipeline developers. This same story echoes further north in the cases of Line 3 and the Dakota Access Pipeline, both of which encroach on Native land.
“It’s even more than just the loss of land, it’s the process and the theft that’s occurring that is also very degrading and painful for the people in this community,” he said. “They have spent their lives caring for and building a sense of place. And for an almost all-white leadership of a company to come and take it is a type of violence that permeates into people’s spirits. That can’t be quantified by the cost of a piece of land.”
(MLK50)
6. Land and Sea-based Ice Currently Melting as Fast as Worst-Case Scenarios, New Report Shows
Though these estimates from a global satellite survey are new—and newsworthy—I won’t dwell too much on them here. After all, they represent years of measurements, years of awareness on the part of climate scientists that the climate is changing fast, especially in the Arctic. It should come as no surprise that, as the articles below report, we are right in line with the worst-case scenario climate scientists have long warned about.
This melting rate could translate to immense ecological transformation, inundating coastal wetlands and cities, intensifying hurricane storm surges, and re-orienting ocean currents that supply nutrients to marine species.
(Wall Street Journal, InsideClimate News)
7. So Far, So Good: Biden-Harris Administration Keeping Promises Related to Environmental Justice
On Inauguration Day, President Biden signed to executive orders with direct relevance to environmental justice. The first,
…called for a “whole-of-government” approach to embedding equity across federal policymaking, which would encompass everything from how data is collected to whether agencies allocate resources fairly.
The second, previously covered here on Speciose Weekly, called for review and reversal of more than 100 Trump-era environmental rollbacks. These rollbacks, especially those aimed at the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, disproportionately affects impoverished Black and Brown communities. More insidiously, they perpetuated a culture where cases like that reported on in news item 5 could occur in the first place.
Focusing on environmental justice doesn’t just mean a healthier environment for communities suffering from systemic racism. They also mean less pollutants on the planet as a whole, less little fires to put out, less population sinks and extinction accelerants. Solving ecological breakdown for some of us can only mean solving ecological breakdown for all of us.
8. Coal Communities Demonstrate How Economic and Ecological Recovery Can be One and the Same
Long subject to disdain from environmentalists, coal communities are subject to the same economic incentives as the rest of us: find available jobs, and do what you can to achieve economic security for yourself and your family.
However, the coal industry’s decline has picked up steam in recent decades, leading to falling population sizes in coal communities (falling population size is, by the way, one of the strongest predictors of whether a precinct voted for Trump in 2020). Fall population sizes means less business, a smaller tax base, and fewer cultural or education opportunities—an unsustainable social state where Appalachian biodiversity is more likely to be exploited than conserved.
As such, coal communities are perfectly situated to benefit from a green recovery, where government investment lifts up communities while also prioritizing clean energy and ecological restoration. That’s why last week, a coalition of “coal state” organizations submitted a letter to President Biden, calling for a just transition that includes, rather than leaves behind, coal communities.
9. Wood Pellets Subsidized as a Renewable “Transition Fuel” in EU, Placing Burdens on Forest Biodiversity and Black Communities
No person should have to live near wood pellet plants, which produce 24/7 wood-splintering noise, cloud whole towns in saw dust, and trap workers with limited job options. But such is the case in majority-Black towns across the U.S. South, where industry has shifted toward producing wood pellets to be shipped overseas to the European Union. There, demand has exploded for the fuel source, which, by virtue of less-than-foresightful policy choices, is subsidized as a renewable “transition fuel.”
Of course, wood pellet production places immense pressure on other species too—namely, a variety of hardwood tree species that normally prosper in the climate zone of the South. Forest biodiversity is under pressure in Europe itself too, where ~25% of trees harvested trees went toward energy.
The irony that clean-energy policy has lead to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice offers a lesson: we should expect that sometimes, our best-of-intentions efforts will misfire. Our only solution is to document and amend these misfires swiftly. It remains to be seen whether “swift” will accurately describe the E.U.’s response to these reports.
(The Daily Climate, The Guardian)
10. Black-throated Blue Warblers Migrate 5.5 Days Earlier in the Spring than They Did in 1965
In our last past of news for this week, we focus on a wonderful little species called Black-throated Blue Warbler. Each year, populations of this species migrate as much as 2,000 miles between Central America and eastern deciduous and boreal forests, a journey that must be expertly times in order to ensure survival.
In response to climate change, insect declines, and other possible cues, the species has, on average, arrived to the breeding grounds one day earlier per decade since 1965.
There are around 54 species of wood-warblers that breeding in North America, many of which occupy similar niches and breeding distributions to the Black-throated Blue Warbler. It remains to be seen how many of these similar species show similar shifts in their migration timing.
(Audubon)
Science
Your finger on the pulse of research from ecology, evolutionary biology, conservation, economics, and other fields where biodiversity counts.
Four steps for transforming humanity's relationship with nature - This May, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity's will meet in Kunming, China for its 15th Conference of the Parties—an event expected to set the agenda biodiversity management in the coming decade, a period when the world’s nations must commit to going “Nature Positive”.
A crucial part of this goal is for participating countries to “mainstream biodiversity, recognizing that unless businesses, investors, all government ministries (particularly finance and trade), and the general public are engaged, nature conservation will remain a niche interest and biodiversity will continue to decline.”
In this study, the authors illustrate concrete, multi-sector ways that any country can 1) retain pre-existing biodiversity, 2) minimize and reduce impacts of biodiversity loss, 3) restore and remediate impacts, and 4) renew biodiversity. You can visualize these steps more clearly with this figure—or by reading the open access study as a whole! Otherwise, check out this short summary. (One Earth)
Plastic trash heaps in deep-sea trench support surprisingly diverse ecosystem - Deep-sea trenches, like the Mariana Trench or the Xisha Trough, have become hotspots for large plastic debris. The plastics either sink into trenches from the sea surface above, or are “blown” in by ocean currents. Surprisingly, a new study finds that these plastic hotspots are also biodiversity hotspots. The plastics provide additional texture to the seafloor, with more nooks and crannies (more microhabitats) in which species can shelter or from which they can ambush prey items.
The authors of the study report large fungi, scyphozoan polyps, juvenile brachiopods, endemic soft corals, aplacophoran molluscs. The plastics also provide spawning habitat for gastropods, rare parasitic flatworms, and deep-sea coronate jellyfish. (Environmental Science & Technology Letters)
Simply having more trees around is correlated with lower demand for antidepressants - Using a database of antidepressant prescribing for 9751 residents of Leipzig, Germany, researchers found that residents with low socio-economic status are significantly less likely to be prescribed antidepressants when they live within 100 meters of densely packed trees. This finding is, of course, correlative. But confounding variables aside, it is reasonable to presume that there are mental health benefits from simply being around trees, making people less likely to pursue treatments like antidepressant use.
This finding dovetails nicely with a previous edition of Speciose Weekly, which reported on research showing that bird diversity benefits mental health a similar amount to a pay raise. (Science Reports)
Note to readers: Lots of cool new science came out this past week. In addition to the above, it included research on how cities contribute more than previously thought to regional biodiversity, a horizon scan of the most important emerging conservation issues, guidance on “climatic debts” and “climatic credits,” and more.
But, in an effort to keep the main Speciose Weekly newsletter at a manageable length, I will be putting the full list of weekly science updates in a separate issue of Speciose Weekly. For now, the science-only issue will be free and open to all. However, If you’re here mainly for cool science, and are interested in getting every dispatch, be sure to subscribe—it’s just the price of one Starbucks latte per month!
Media that Matters
This past week, Nat Geo released a short film (~15 minutes) about the Bird Genoscape Project, which aims to map bird populations with genome sequencing. The poster child of the film is the southwestern subspecies of Willow Flycatcher, which has declined precipitously in recent decades. By catching Willow Flycatchers during migration or in the wintering grounds, plucking a feather, and sequencing the DNA in that feather, members of the Bird Genoscape Project hope to identify where Willow Flycatchers go during migration and where they spend the winter—all crucial information for zeroing in on what’s causing the subspecies’ rapid decline.
All said, this is a beautiful little film, with plenty of footage to make your inner birdwatcher’s mouth water.
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With gratitude,
—Nick