The Revelator

From the edge of a cliff in southern Peru, I watched as three Humboldt penguins made their way from their nests down a steep rocky slope, slipping at times, stopping and then starting again, tentatively navigating around sunbathing sea lions until they arrived, an hour later, on a precipice overlooking crashing waves, where they finally belly flopped into the water.

Penguins skirting sea lions. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission.

That hour was more exciting than any hour of television, their successful dive into the ocean better than any Hollywood ending.

I could see why so many people love penguins. They exhibit qualities we often see in ourselves: Penguins are social, vocal, occasionally clumsy, and organized around parental units. Penguins, like us, try to mate for life. When they young they practice co-parenting; one penguin stays at home with the chicks while the other forages. They switch roles, a child-rearing tag team, until the chicks leave home.

That’s why this journey into the sea — and back again — is so dramatic and so critical. Should one penguin fail to forage and return in time to relieve their partner, the other parent is forced to abandon the nest, leaving chicks to fend for themselves, often to die, a generation lost.

And it is here, on the desert cliffs of Punta San Juan, that penguins who were once part of the largest Humboldt colony on the planet take a valiant stand against extinction.

Punta San Juan is a small, jagged peninsula along the Peruvian coast, 320 miles south of Lima. I traveled here in May to spend time with penguin researchers at the Punta San Juan research station, which is funded by a consortium of zoos in the United States in collaboration with Cayetano Heredia University in Lima. I spent three days shadowing Kevin Farfán as he and his small team of interns monitored penguins across more than a dozen locations.

Along the way I became vividly aware of the many threats these penguins face.

A pair of Humboldts. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission. The Humble Humboldt

Unlike the remote Antarctic penguins of Happy Feet and March of the Penguins, most of the 18 penguin species on this planet live uncomfortably close to humans, along the southern coastlines of South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) is one of the four “banded” penguins, known for distinctive black patterns that curve across their chests like upside-down horseshoes. The other banded species are African, Galápagos, and Magellanic penguins. Years ago I visited the Patagonian coast of Argentina where a tourist trail winds through a colony of tens of thousands of Magellanic penguins — but among Humboldts, colonies typically number fewer than 500, scattered across 20 or so islands along the coasts of Peru and Chile.

What surprised me most about Humboldts was how skittish they were around humans, as if they were trying to escape prying eyes or just terribly modest. While Magellanics are mostly unfazed by human researchers and paparazzi, Humboldts will make themselves scarce the moment they spot a human, even from a safe distance.

I couldn’t help but wonder if this was less instinct than learned behavior. Humboldts were once killed in great numbers by nearby guano harvesters in need of an easy meal. It was guano — bird excrement — that brought humans to bird colonies for hundreds of years, and this mission continues even today.

Walking on Guano

The Punta San Juan research station sits next to a mile-long, decaying wall that divides the peninsula from the mainland. It was constructed back in the 1940s to keep predators away from the hundreds of thousands of seabirds that blanketed the peninsula, primarily the guanay cormorant, named after the “white gold” the birds left behind in great quantities.

This was not an act of conservation as much a business decision. Bird guano is the one of the planet’s best fertilizers, high in both nitrogen and phosphorous. Peru has harvested guano for export around the world since the 1800s, and it was once the country’s most valuable commodity.

Even today the number of researchers at Punta San Juan is dwarfed by the number of guano harvesters. While harvesting is now strictly regulated — the central plateau where penguins cross from nests to sea remains off limits — AGRORURAL, the government agency that manages harvesting, has pushed to ease restrictions. Since avian flu decimated the seabird population in 2023, there are no more guanay cormorants on the plateau, and pelicans are only just beginning to return. This void has heightened the call for more aggressive harvesting.

While I was there, I spoke with one of the employees of AGRORURAL; when I lamented the loss of the cormorants, she said, “This is good news. Because now we can harvest more guano.”

Bags of guano ready to ship. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission.

Today most of the guano is used domestically to supply the growing international demand for organic food. While synthetic fertilizers may be far less expensive, it is the demand for organic food in wealthier countries that fuels demand for guano. The organic Peruvian coffee we enjoy — as well as table grapes, asparagus, quinoa, and more — may well have been fertilized by birds that once lived on Punta San Juan.

Counting Penguins

Every morning the penguin researchers are up before dawn to make their separate treks to more than a dozen cliffside overlooks. Each location is given a label, such as S2, for the second beach on the southern side of the peninsula. At each stop they count penguins at every nest (via binoculars or spotting scope) and, while I visited during May’s breeding season, try to count eggs within the nests. When food is abundant, a Humboldt penguin couple will raise two chicks.

Walking with Kevin across the plateau felt like exploring another planet. First there was the smell, an acrid odor of guano that stung my eyes and clung to my clothing (we were required to change out of our field clothes after every outing). Then there was the landscape, bleached white and mostly flat, the layers of dried guano spongy under my shoes. Strong persistent winds whipped dust into my face. I realized on that first morning why so many of the guano harvesters wore masks.

We stopped at the edge of a cliff, where a small wooden hut functioned as a viewing blind. Inside, intern Sandra Alcantara was doing her morning counts. Using a handmade map for reference, she zoomed in on each nest and noted what she saw on a clipboard: which nests were occupied, whether there were one or two penguins, and any signs of eggs.

A viewing blind at Punta San Juan. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission.

The scene was alive with activity and noise. Down on the beach, hundreds of sea lions were play-fighting, swimming, or snoozing. Above them darted flocks of Inca terns, while pelicans glided above me. Turkey vultures perched along the cliff edges, on alert for any dying animal below.

On the opposing cliffs we could see penguin nests carved into the guano. Nearby more than 100 artificial nests created by researchers dotted the horizon like miniature cabanas. These nests were created to make up for the harvested guano, the loss of which prevents the penguins from nesting in the ground.

View from the blind. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission.

That morning Kevin brought a drone, which he used to photograph nests from above, the penguins unbothered by the buzzing bird over their heads. He was on the lookout for the numbers on metal tags they had banded onto a small number of birds. Each number unlocks a life story: the age of the penguin, the number of chicks raised, the preferred nesting spot. But not every number returns safely to shore.

While walking back to the station, I was jolted by an explosion in the distance. Kevin pointed to a large expanse of sand-colored mounds beyond the wall, created by the largest open-pit iron ore mine in Peru. Owned by China’s Shougang Group, the mine rattles the peninsula with daily explosions that, on occasion, send the penguins scurrying to sea.

Walking on the bones of pelicans and cormorants, hearing detonations in the distance, felt like living in a dystopian future.

That made it all the more remarkable that penguins continue to nest here. Yet the reason why they have nested here for thousands of years has less to do with the land itself, but what lies just off the coast — the richest marine ecosystem on the planet.

Abandoned cormorant nests. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission. Humboldt Feast (and Famine)

The Humboldt penguin shares its name with the Humboldt current, an ocean phenomenon that runs along the coastline of Chile and Peru, pushing up cold water from the deep. The process, known as upwelling, brings rich nutrients to the surface that feed anchovies and sardines and squid, who in turn provide an easy-to-reach buffet for penguins, seals, and countless other birds. On land the current is invisible except for the ever-present wind that powers it while keeping clouds and rain at bay.

The land may be desert, but the ocean is an oasis of life.

Humboldt penguin headed out sea at sunset. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission.

Humboldt penguins are endemic to this area due to its current; however, if there’s no current, there are no penguins.

That’s why periodic El Niño weather events can be so devastating. El Niños effectively shut down the airstream and, with it, the upwelling. Sardines and anchovies are forced to move deeper into the ocean in search of nutrients, and they swim out of reach for the penguins. In 1972, a major El Niño and overfishing crashed both the anchovy and seabird populations to such an extent the government got involved, regulating fishing and making the Humboldt penguins a protected species.

But these changes were too little too late; since then, climate change has resulted in more acute El Niño events, and the fishing industry (legal and illegal) continues to take its toll.

Remains of pelicans and cormorants on the plateau. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission.

The year 2023 was particularly grim for Punta San Juan. Not only did avian flu wipe out vast numbers of birds but an El Niño left the peninsula devoid of penguins for the first time in recorded history.

Penguins began to return a year later, albeit in diminished numbers. Twenty years ago, Punta San Juan was home to more than 5,000 penguins. When I visited in May just 300 remained.

It’s not just the ups and downs of the food supply that puts penguins in further danger. It’s the humans who compete with them for that same source of food.

Of Fishing Nets and Penguins

In my brief time at Punta San Juan, I noticed several small fishing boats just offshore, despite the protected status of the waters that surround the peninsula.

Yet the larger danger lurks even farther offshore, in unprotected waters, where industrial trawlers cast nets a mile long that sweep up hundreds of tons of anchovies and mackerel — the penguins’ main source of food.

The nets also catch the penguins themselves.

As Kevin’s team knows well, penguins don’t see the borders between protected and unprotected waters; they (like the boats) go where the fish are. When a team of marine researchers surveyed about 800 small-scale fishing operators in Peru and Chile during the 2023 fishing season, they found that more than 3,000 penguins were caught up in nets. And these numbers were conservative, not just because they did not include the larger fishing trawlers, but because many operators intentionally underreport bycatch.

Peru boasts one of the most highly regulated fishing industries on the planet, which allows these fisheries to label their catches as “sustainable” — a label that makes it onto the fish oil products we see on the shelves at Costco and Walmart.

Millions of Americans take fish oil supplements including, including 1 in 5 Americans over the age of 60, according to Harvard Medical School. And more than 20% of the world’s fish oil originates from waters shared by penguins along the coast of Peru. The fisheries based in a port just a mile from Punta San Juan reported 31 dead penguins in January 2023 — a month when penguins are most actively feeding chicks.

The penguins who elude fishing nets don’t have it any easier, as they compete with the trawlers for a declining food supply. Over the past year, approximately 5 million tons of fish, mostly anchovies, were pulled from Peruvian waters, most of it to supply the growing demand for supplements.

Yet human health need not come at the expense of animal health, because we don’t need fish oil to get our allotment of Omega-3s. Alternative sources such as flax seed oil, nuts, and other plant-based foods are even better: Many experts say that fish oil supplements offer dubious health benefits because the process of extracting mercury and other toxins from fish oils renders them minimally effective. The most potent alternative is lab-grown algae, which is free of contaminants and “statistically non-inferior compared to fish oil supplements,” according to recent research published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.

Humboldts returning to the sea. Photo: John Yunker, used with permission. A Species on Edge

Two weeks after returning to the United States, I emailed Kevin and learned that the colony of 300 penguins had since fallen in half, primarily due to the acute El Niño now enveloping the region.

A drop such as this naturally leads to the question: How many Humboldt penguins are there across all of Peru and Chile? The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates 23,800 globally, labeling it a “vulnerable” species; yet given how quickly penguin populations can fluctuate, this label may be more optimistic than realistic.

The truth is we don’t know exactly how many Humboldt penguins there are. There aren’t enough researchers like Kevin and his team working across all the colonies to know with confidence how stable this species is.

Humboldt penguins live on the edge — of a continent and of a species. Every year their entire world can rise or fall based on factors outside of their control — fishing vessels, warmer waters, and humans taking the guano they use for nests.

On my last day there, we visited several cliffside nests, most of them empty. Kevin remained optimistic. He found several occupied nests with eggs, a sign that this colony may rebound yet again.

The researchers themselves remind me of the penguins — tenacious and tireless. Kevin and other researchers can protect these birds on land, he told me, but “We cannot protect them out there.”

We who live half a world away do have the power to protect the penguins out there — through the choices we make. The demand for seafood and fish oil supplements ensures that some penguins will die in nets. Remove the demand and more penguins stand a chance at making it home to their nests. And we can help protect penguins on land by seeking out imported organic food that doesn’t rely on guano.

We all have a role to play in protecting penguins on land and at sea; as with all animals, for penguins, peace begins on our plates.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Speak of the Devils: The Animals We Fear the Most Are Fading Away

The post The Plight of the Desert Penguin: Caught Between Extraction and El Niño appeared first on The Revelator.

In 2019 a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup conducted a major test of technology designed to remove plastic pollution from the water.

It appeared to work, and the nonprofit released photos proclaiming its success.

But some scientists noticed something else among the accumulated plastic in the Ocean Cleanup’s publicity photos.

“Earlier this year I warned that @TheOceanCleanup would catch and kill floating marine life,” marine ecologist Dr. Rebecca Helm wrote on the social media platform then known as Twitter. “This week they announced they’re collecting plastic, and their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.”

The Ocean Cleanup team appeared to be oblivious to this consequence of their test before this public criticism.

It’s not surprising that any attempt to remove plastic from here would catch, and likely kill, many marine organisms, because the waters of this region aren’t a trash-filled biological desert. The area is full of neuston, marine life that lives right at the sea surface — species that may not be as charismatic as dolphins or sea turtles but are extremely ecologically important.

“This region in general has very high densities of several key species,” says Helm, now an affiliate faculty member at Georgetown University. “This ecosystem is ecologically important to species that we do care about. We can’t just go disrupting it in the name of conservation and imagine that everything is OK and that you’re doing a good thing.”

Other scientists agreed.

“Honestly, if that was me, I would have totally stopped,” Dr. Kim Martini, a physical oceanographer and founder of the oceanography equipment designer and supplier Tini Scientific, says of the incident. “Because the whole point is supposed to be about how you’re saving animals that live in the ocean.”

But while Ocean Cleanup adapted — the organization claims its latest designs have a “low adverse impact” on ocean wildlife (something its own data contradicts) — it hasn’t stopped. It continues to conduct plastic-removal operations at great financial cost, garner worldwide publicity and social media attention, and attract millions of dollars of donations.

All for an idea that, almost from the day it was announced, scientists have warned could do more harm than good.

A Meteoric Launch

It all began in 2012, when Boyan Slat, an 18-year-old Dutch aerospace engineering student, gave a TED talk announcing a bold scheme to scoop plastic trash out of the ocean. Slat envisioned building what would be the largest human-made structure ever deployed in the ocean (by far), a device that would collect plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and remove it, saving countless marine organisms.

This idea has since attracted a loyal social media following and become a nonprofit that generates millions of dollars in donations a year, a fundraising and media juggernaut in the ocean conservation space.

What you wouldn’t know from most of the media coverage and social media posts is that experts in ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering have long been skeptical of Slat’s model, raising concerns about a fundamental misunderstanding of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and local ecology, a misunderstanding of why plastic pollution is a problem, and a lack of experience with the complex marine engineering required to pull off something like this.

That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup, despite the fact that to date it hasn’t accomplished what it set out to do, for exactly the reasons that ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering experts said it wouldn’t work.

After building and testing expensive prototypes that led to failed tests — which failed exactly the way ocean plastic pollution and ocean engineering experts said they would — the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015. Now they mostly intercept plastic when it first leaves rivers and enters the ocean instead of trying to scoop it out of the middle of the ocean, though the open ocean work is still mentioned on their website and generates praise-filled uncritical media coverage.

Experts say The Ocean Cleanup’s history and current reality represent a useful case study in the role of evidence and expertise in solving complex global environmental problems, and why we should be skeptical of “Only I can fix it” public figures and their self-proclaimed revolutionary inventions.

Misunderstanding of the Background Issues: Ocean Plastic Pollution and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

There’s no doubt that ocean plastic pollution is a huge problem. Some organisms ingest smaller pieces of plastic, which will either choke them, poison them, or block their digestive tracts (essentially filling their stomachs with items they can’t digest so there’s no room for actual food). Larger pieces of plastic pose entanglement hazards, immobilizing and drowning marine life. This plastic has been found all over the world, and thanks to patterns of global ocean currents, it aggregates in regions called gyres.

But when most people think about the ocean plastic pollution problem and the famous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” they picture a huge and dense plastic island so thick that you can walk on it. That’s not the case — it’s more like a soup full of tiny bits of plastic, sometimes so small that they’re invisible to the naked eye.

“If you go to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, what you see is not a big collection of trash, but ocean, and it looks pretty normal,” says Dr. Miriam Goldstein, who did her Ph.D. on this region and is now the executive director of the National Ocean Protection Coalition. “When I was doing research out there, we were looking at many, many pieces of plastic — each about the size of a crumb.”

In any situation, if you don’t understand the problem, you’re unlikely to come up with a workable solution. For example, if you incorrectly believe that there are giant mountains of dense plastic floating in the ocean, it’s easier to wrongly believe that we can engineer a way to easily just scoop that plastic out of the ocean. It’s much harder to remove lots of tiny crumb-sized pieces of plastic … at least if your goal is avoiding killing everything else that’s swimming and living nearby.

“I was extremely skeptical of the whole idea, in part because the original TED talk was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Pacific Garbage Patch and gyres,” says Dr. Clark Richards, a physical oceanographer with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “That’s the kind of picture that you get from introductory textbooks.”

It’s Hard to Build Things That Can Survive in the Ocean

A major reason why experts were skeptical of the Ocean Cleanup from the beginning was the team’s lack of experience with ocean engineering.

For one thing, the ocean is a rough environment, and it destroys human-made structures.

“You have a lot of concerns for any kind of instrumentation or large hardware that goes into the ocean,” says Dr. Martini. “Waves put a really large stress on anything mechanical. And you have issues with biofouling; anything you put in the ocean acts like a little raft and everything likes to grow on it, which makes it heavy and pulls it down.”

Dr. Richards also stressed the corrosive effect of seawater on anything metal and pointed out the complexity and expense of even getting a large structure in place.

“Equipment capable of being moored in the open ocean must be deployed from large capable offshore vessels, which typically cost about $100,000 per day,” he says.

In other words, there’s a reason why no one had built an object as large as the original vision for the Ocean Cleanup before, and it’s not because no one else had ever thought of it before.

“When I first saw the idea, I thought ‘This is very well-intentioned and heartfelt, but it won’t scale, it won’t work,’ ” Dr. Goldstein says.

At the time Goldstein and Martini, writing for the ocean blog Deep Sea News, performed a detailed technical review of proposed plans for the Ocean Cleanup, using their expertise to point out why the device could not function as claimed.

“We were trying to do them the courtesy of taking them seriously,” Dr. Goldstein said. “And also, as ocean communication people, we thought it was our duty to talk about this, since it was getting so much attention.”

Sure enough, a 2016 test run of a small-scale prototype broke for exactly the reasons Dr. Martini said it would and failed to collect a significant amount of plastic for exactly the reasons Dr. Richards said it would.

And by breaking, the Ocean Cleanup system itself became ocean pollution.

A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they were receptive to expert criticism they received and made substantive changes to the design based on that criticism. The experts I interviewed for this article disagree.

More Issues

After fixing some of the structural issues, subsequent Ocean Cleanup designs began to collect small amounts of plastic trash — nowhere near the amount they claimed they were going to be removing and nowhere near enough to make a substantive difference — while also apparently killing enormous numbers of marine organisms.

Dr. Miriam Goldstein was not surprised by this.

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you try and catch things in that part of the ocean,” she says. “This was wholly predictable from a basic knowledge of that ecosystem — predictable and predicted. Our concern was a lack of fundamental understanding of both the oceanography and the animals that live among the plastic.”

A representative for the Ocean Cleanup acknowledged via email that their efforts kill some marine life but asserted that their research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests plastic pollution kills more marine life than their cleanup attempts. They further claimed that “a majority of species caught as bycatch are invasive species.” The experts interviewed for this article did not agree with either claim.

The supplementary materials of their Scientific Reports paper, meanwhile, catalogued thousands of marine animals killed during Ocean Cleanup operations, including threatened species of sharks, bony fish, and sea turtles — none of whom are invasive. It found that 84% of animals identified as “incidental catch” in their cleanup efforts were fish, including three species of sharks. The paper also detailed how “Species classified as Vulnerable or Endangered, such as sea turtles (e.g., loggerhead, green and olive ridley), have also been encountered as incidental catch during cleanup.”

Pivots

Later designs of the Ocean Cleanup moved on from the free-floating boom and net design and transitioned into what it called System 002 and System 03 — essentially a large net towed behind a pair of boats. Ocean plastic pollution experts, once again, were not impressed. Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, this new design was just slightly modified fishing gear.

“This organization was so focused on ‘technology development’ that they would adopt whatever they found and claim that they invented it, such as rebranding trawl fishing as trash removal technology,” Dr. Richards says.

In 2019 the Ocean Cleanup team also added a new element to their portfolio: trying to stop plastic from entering the ocean by intercepting it at river mouths.

While intercepting trash in this way is a good idea (and one that had been suggested by critics of earlier designs for years), the way they went about it left a sour test in many people’s mouths.

“The river interceptor design was clearly based on existing solutions” like Mr. Trash Wheel, Dr. Richards says. “Rather than work with the organizations who had successfully been removing trash from rivers for years, they ‘reinvented’ a similar design, at a much higher cost, and claimed to be innovators.”

A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that their river interceptors are custom-designed for each river.

Other Solutions

So if we can’t scoop all the plastic trash out of the ocean without killing large numbers of marine animals, what can we do instead?

One effective (and cost-effective) solution is the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup. This amazing program has removed more than 400 million pounds of trash from beaches, where it’s much easier to access than in the middle of the ocean, before it gets swept back to sea. They do this at incredibly low cost, because more than 19 million people around the world have volunteered to help.

“Our total annual budget for all our plastics advocacy work, which includes cleanup, science and policy efforts, is about $6 million,” says Jordana Lewis, director of communications for the Ocean Conservancy Director of Communications. “Every organization contributing to the International Coastal Cleanup does things a little differently, but for every $2 invested Ocean Conservancy can remove a pound of trash from the environment and invest in scientific research and upstream policy solutions to prevent plastics from being produced and/or entering our ocean in the first place.”

As of this writing, The Ocean Cleanup reports it has removed 117.3 million pounds of waste from the ocean and (mostly) rivers. The nonprofit spent more than $72 million across its 2022-2024 fiscal years, according to tax filings.

Meanwhile Dr. Richards points out that in 2024 Ocean Cleanup’s System 002 “was out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day, picking up less plastic than a bunch of volunteers on beaches.” (A representative for the Ocean Cleanup told me via email that they are working on improving the cost efficiency of their operations.)

Ultimately the solution to the ocean plastic pollution crisis is going to be changes to our manufacturing and waste storage and treatment processes, which will take international agreements and lots of hard work. Or we could use less plastic — which would solve all these problems at the source.

Lessons Learned?

One of the most important lessons from this is that it shows the public understands the problems that plastic pollution poses to marine life — and that they’re willing to support solutions.

Unfortunately, it also shows how some people can take certain ideas too closely to heart — and take it personally when those ideas are criticized. When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.” (Note that this was being said to people who devoted their lives and careers to evidence-based solutions to cleaning up the ocean).

Another recurring theme was “You’re just jealous that someone solved a problem you didn’t.” (Of course, this was being said to people pointing out that the Ocean Cleanup had not solved the problem).

Ironically the criticism seemed to cause defenders to double-down on Ocean Cleanup.

“We were cast as the haters who just didn’t want to believe, and there’s a certain personality that sees criticism itself as validation that the idea is a good one,” Dr. Goldstein said.

Of course, sometimes when experts say something doesn’t work, it’s because it doesn’t work — not because critics are jealous of an idea.

Critically, trying to help is not the same thing as actually helping, and some popular solutions either make problems worse, or fail to solve them while squandering limited resources. For example, much “Save the bees” rhetoric focuses on nonnative honeybees and not the native species that are actually endangered; far too many well-intentioned online petitions aim to solve problems that have already been solved.

Dr. Helm, who worked on the United Nations High Seas treaty as a scientific advisor, knows how complicated effective solutions to complex issues really are. There are no shortcuts to putting in the work.

“There was this spirit at the time that a few well-meaning young people with a lot of passion would find solutions, but for complex problems like this one, the teenage geniuses and their billionaire backers aren’t going to save us, and they’re going to take us on a wild and expensive ride along the way,” Helm says.

Indeed, very few complex global problems will be solved by “imported magic,” a silver bullet technological solution that requires no one to make any sacrifices or changes.

Fixing these problems will require hard work, cooperation, expertise, and evidence. It may not make for snappy social media posts, but in the end, it’s the only thing that will help.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Reflections on What Endures in Conservation

The post Why The Ocean Cleanup Hasn’t Solved the Plastic Pollution Crisis appeared first on The Revelator.

How quickly we forget — if we allow ourselves to.

For journalist Jason Dove Mark, bald eagles represent what the planet can lose, what it can regain, and what it can still lose in the process.

His new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet (W.W. Norton, published July 14), examines what scientists call “shifting baseline syndrome”: how we quickly forget the way things used to be.

For example, skies that once abounded with bald eagles — or the skies from which they once nearly vanished.

The Revelator is proud to present this excerpt from The Earth Said Remember Me. We don’t think you’ll forget it easily.

For hundreds of thousands of years, during those long centuries when the New World was still old, bald eagles lived nearly everywhere in North America, their one and only natural home. Eagles flew over the tidal estuaries of the Atlantic Coast and the rugged seashore of the Pacific. They built their nests in the folds of western basin and range, on the prairie, throughout the north woods. There were likely a half million of them, an eyrie perched every few miles along fish-rich rivers like the Schuylkill, the Hudson, the Columbia, the Colorado. Up to 14 pounds in weight and with a wingspan that can stretch eight feet from tip to tip, the bald eagle was sovereign of the American sky, the apex predator of the air.

The First Nations perceived a great power in the bird. Many Native cultures considered bald eagle feathers as sacred and used them in ceremonies or for ritual healing practices. For the Lenape people of the Delaware River region, it was considered a sign of courage and good luck to wear an eagle feather that had been plucked from a living bird. In the Southwest, the Pueblo and Zuni kept domesticated eagles in large aviaries. Across diverse cultures, Indigenous lore esteemed the eagle as a chief, the bird of heaven. “In an eagle there is all the wisdom in the world,” the twentieth-century Lakota spiritual leader Lame Deer (aka John Fire) once said. “Eagle” was very likely the most common animal clan name continent-wide.

When the newcomers arrived from across the sea and encountered this bird they had never known, they also apprehended its strength. Perhaps it was just anthropomorphic projection. Bald eagles mate for life and carefully tend their young, and maybe the settlers imagined some kind of puritanical family values. Bald eagles also have a passion for building — their nests can weigh up to a ton and last for decades — and maybe the restless settlers appreciated the bird’s industriousness. At the very least, the new Americans liked the bird’s military bearing, with its steely gaze, broad chest, and bone-white crown. In 1782, the bald eagle became the central symbol of the Great Seal of the United States, the unofficial national bird — George Washington in feathers.

But it was a conflicted relationship. The eagle had become a symbol of America, yet many Americans didn’t like the actual animal. “He is a Bird of bad moral Character,” Benjamin Franklin famously wrote. “He does not get his Living honestly.” Franklin was referring to the bald eagle’s habit of stealing fish from the smaller osprey, its penchant for poaching, and its taste for carrion. Settlers complained that eagles often snatched their lambs and chicks. Against all common sense, the myth spread that bald eagles could carry off human babies from the crib.

A campaign of ecocide began. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans murdered eagles mercilessly. Farmers and ranchers shot them on sight — “We kill all the eagles we can,” one sheep farmer said — while some state and local governments paid bounties for dead eagles. In Alaska alone, hunters killed some eighty thousand eagles to cash in on the territory’s bounty. By the turn of the last century, the birds were vanishingly rare in most of the country. “Twenty years ago, I used to see a dozen or more along the river in the spring” the nature writer John Burroughs noticed in the early 1900s, “where I now see only one or two, or none at all.”

Image by Hans Toom from Pixabay

Eventually, the American public realized the country’s mistake. In 1940 the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act outlawed killing the bird. But the protection came almost too late. A new danger worse than bullets and buckshot threatened the species: the powerful insecticide DDT, which government agencies and farmers were spraying all over the place. The bald eagle — along with osprey, peregrine falcons, and pelicans — became collateral damage in the war against insects. DDT weakened the eagles’ eggshells and lowered females’ hormone levels, impacting the species’ ability to procreate. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote, “Something is at work in the eagle’s environment which has virtually destroyed its ability to reproduce.  The reports differ in detail, but always repeat the theme of death.” By 1963, there were just 417 nesting pairs outside of Alaska.

In a spate of legislative urgency that these days feels like some-thing out of legend, lawmakers rushed to address the crisis. Congress banned DDT, which was pulled off the market in 1972. When the Endangered Species Act became law in 1973, the bald eagle was among the first species to come under its protective umbrella. The Clean Water Act helped too. An eagle can’t survive if it has nothing to eat, and by the 1960s many of the United States’ rivers served “as little more than sewers to the sea,” in the words of one senator. The Clean Water Act prohibited industries from using streams, rivers, and lakes as dumps for their chemical crap. Freed from pollution, the waters slowly came back to life. Fresh waters again furnished the food web.

The descendants of the destroyers became the restorers.

State fish and wildlife agencies launched captive breeding programs in which biologists, often assisted by volunteers, pantomimed the behavior of eagle parents to raise chicks. Using a technique called “hacking” that was already common among keepers of trained falcons, biologists reintroduced young eagles to lakes and rivers. Citizen scientists kept vigil over nests and helped count bald eagle numbers. Popular attitudes changed. For many Americans, to kill a bald eagle came to be something akin to burning the flag.

The heroic labor paid off. In 2007, the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list. Between 2009 and 2021, the number of bald eagles in the lower 48 quadrupled, from about 72,000 to more than 300,000 — a figure not all that far from the estimated baseline before European arrival in the Americas. In the space of a couple human generations, the nearly extinct became common again.

It was as if the great hoop of time had spun all the way around. Once — that word that weighs the scales of every shifting baseline — could be used in celebration instead of lamentation.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

After an absence that stretched beyond memory, the bald eagles arrived at Madison’s Warner Park in the summer of 2020. Warner Park is one of the largest parks in the Wisconsin state capital, one of those jewel boxes of city nature that — like New York’s Central Park or Audubon Park in New Orleans — forms an eco-tone where the urban, the cultivated, and the undomesticated meet. Braceleted by the tracks of the Wisconsin & Southern Railroad, encircled by modest middle-class neighborhoods, and just a five-minute drive from the local airport, Warner Park is no wilderness. But it’s still a wild place, home to beaver and muskrat, deer and fox. An unruly copse — locals call it “the Big Thicket” — is packed with red maple, ash, and walnut. A massive bur oak, some 250 years old, has lived there since well before the first settlers appeared. Warner Park is one of those spots where people can watch wildlife and the wildlife are just comfortable enough with humans to watch back.

For the eagles, Warner Park had what they needed to make a home. When a mated pair began building a nest on an island in the park’s cattail-ringed lagoon, neighbors quickly spotted them. The birds became minor celebrities, symbols of hope in that eerie season of pandemic lockdown. “It was this brilliant beacon of light during a very dark time,” Beth Sluys, a Warner Park neighbor and amateur naturalist who had long been involved in local conservation issues, told me. “Observing the birds living their lives, there’s something magical about that.”

A neighborhood teenager named Elsie Olmanson who had started watching the eagles with her father after hearing about them from Beth also found joy in their arrival. “You’re happy that they are able to have a recovery, and that they’re coming more and more back into the world,” she told me. The eagles, she said, were “adorable creatures.” The nesting eagles seemed to her “like a married couple — they will bicker with each other.”

By the time of autumn leaf fall, the nest was impossible to miss: a lump of sticks and branches some thirty feet up, the whole mess wedged in the crook of two limbs, like a leather sofa had been dropped from the sky. The calendar flipped to 2021, and that March the bald eagle couple hatched a single eaglet. At which point a minor controversy broke out. Just a few hundred yards from the eagles’ home lagoon sits “the Duck Pond” — a small stadium that is home to the Madison Mallards, a collegiate summer baseball team. Every Fourth of July the Mallards stage a big fireworks display, and some of the eagle fans feared the fireworks would scare away the birds. A few folks petitioned the baseball team to halt the pyrotechnics or, at the very least, post-pone them until after fledging time. “We were concerned that this might potentially impact the fledglings at a critical time,” Elsie’s father, Eric, said.

Other eagle enthusiasts were nonplussed. Patrick Hasburgh, a passionate outdoorsman who owns a fishing bait and tackle shop on the edge of the park, was among the first people to spot the nesting eagles, and he felt like the fireworks controversy was overblown. “I’ve been watching the nest since it was built,” he told me, “and the eagles don’t seem to mind [human activity] at all. They are used to people. It’s an urban environment.”

In an age of mass extinction, the dustup over whether a fireworks show would disturb an eagle family seemed to me like something of a First World problem. Fifty years ago, there were just 108 eagle nests in all of Wisconsin; by the time an eagle pair started stacking sticks in Warner Park, that number had climbed to nearly 1,700. With eagle survival no longer in doubt, the question had become how best humans might help eagles to thrive. Here was another form of shifting baseline syndrome — an example of how progress, every bit as much destruction and diminishment, can be difficult to remember.

Too much of environmental history is a litany of losses. Ghost stories haunt the landscape: the passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian tiger, the ivory-billed woodpecker. But running parallel to the string of disappearances are stories of recovery and resilience. The bald eagle is not alone.

Image by Dave Eslinger from Pixabay

Think about the forests of North America: there’s more forest in New England today than there was in 1850. Consider the air and the water: both are clearer now than before the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were passed. Recall the beaver — now numbering in the millions across North America — or loggerhead turtles, whose population increased by nearly two orders of magnitude in the last twenty-some years. The California condor, at one point on the doorstep of extinction, is on the wing again. Take a breath and remember the whales, saved from annihilation. Seen from one vantage, many of those success stories could also be evidence of shifting baselines, of how our ideas of abundance contract generation by generation. Sure, there are more wolves on the American landscape now than there were fifty years ago — and there are also far fewer wolves than there were 150 years ago. But Mia Monroe, the co-founder of the Western Monarch Count, often brings up such wildlife recoveries as examples of the possibilities that also exist for her beloved butterflies. If we could save the bald eagle, what else can we save? “In my life I’ve watched the gray whale return and the peregrine falcon and the otter,” Mia told me once. “I don’t know what’s ahead for monarchs. But I do know that when people realized there was a problem, and we did something different, then nature responded. I always remember those examples.”

I remember them, too. They remind me that baselines some-times shift in virtuous directions. The British writer Robert Macfarlane suggests a name for this: lifting baselines. “We can normalize betterment as well as decline and then wish for betterment’s increase,” he has written. “We can run the reel backward.” The bald eagle’s comeback is proof that the passage of time doesn’t always mean loss and decay. Growth and increase are also expressions of time. So is healing.

There is, however, a danger that can come with lifting baselines and the normalization of betterment. To grow accustomed to abundance risks obscuring all the hard work and long years it took to achieve that abundance. Without collective memory, improvements can also be difficult to see. Rebecca Solnit made a similar point in an essay a few years ago when she warned that “forgetting is everywhere.” Solnit wrote that she feels like “a tortoise at the mayfly party,” and cautioned that “change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change.” The indivisible present can cloak the march of progress just like it provides cover for the grind of destruction.

Environmental progress is especially vulnerable to becoming invisible since, more often than not, it leaves no trace. Many environmental victories are triumphs of harm avoided: the proposed oil pipeline denied, the forest kept free from the loggers, the fossil fuels unburned. Pollution, once cleaned from the air and the water, is another one of those absences that the mind struggles to recognize and remember. Without memory, environmental well-being is always at risk of being taken for granted. To endure, progress requires vigilance — the long view of history.

When I was growing up, the bald eagle was a rarity; the first time I saw one, I was in my mid-twenties. Now, I live in a place where bald eagles are common to the point of mundane. I make an annual winter-solstice pilgrimage to the North Fork of the Nooksack River, where bald eagles stage big convocations. From the small bridge there I can spot scores of eagles perched in the December-bare alder and cottonwood, their calls — skreee, like a door on rusty hinges — echoing off snow and ice. It’s a thrill to watch them scrimmage over salmon carcasses. For me, an eagle sighting never gets old.

My daughter has a different relationship to the bald eagle, especially having grown up in a place where you can spot them at the county dump (He does not get his Living honestly). She barely registers them as special, and she all too often greets her dad’s glee with an eye roll. What is a bald eagle to a child who has never known them as endangered? About as interesting as a wren.

I got a welcome corrective to these worries after spending a morning with the family of Patrick Hasburgh, the bait store owner who has been involved with the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance’s formal Bald Eagle Nest Watch since the mated pair showed up Warner Park. The Hasburgh boys — Fletcher, then sixteen, and Ranger, eleven — had spent count-less hours with their parents monitoring the eagles. But the commonplace had not dulled excitement. If anything, their regular eagle-watching had made them fascinated with the birds — appreciation earned through intimacy. Fletcher told me he “absolutely” knew the story of the fall and rise of the bald eagle, in part “because I have, you know, a kind of field knowledge.” Ranger, who was sporting a skater’s cut and an Off-the-Wall black hoodie, said he liked to “see the birds up close and see their whole life cycle.” He liked how, when he uses his dad’s spotting scope to check out the nest, he can “pretty much see every individual feather.”

We strolled the park, and the family shared with me some of its natural wonders: a killdeer nest on the railroad tracks, a pair of sandhill cranes coming in for a landing. The birds were like giraffes on the wing, tumbling earthward and honking madly. It quickly became apparent that the Hasburghs were involved in all sorts of neighborhood-scale environmental stewardship projects. Here was an ordinary American family who intuitively, organically, was embodying the antidotes to environmental amnesia — going outside in all weather and all seasons, emotion-ally encoding their relationships with the living world, writing them down, and transmitting their experiences back and forth between generations. This focus group of four seemed the very model of Emerson’s “practical naturalists.”

As a family, they go outside all the time. When Patrick and his wife, a nurse practitioner named Ashley, started a family, they committed to get their kids outdoors as much as possible because, as Patrick said, “they have more than enough reasons to stay inside.” The family made a point to visit every state park in Wisconsin. They hiked a lot, fished a lot. And they adopted Warner Park as their backyard wilderness. “This park has been a constant through my life,” mop-headed Fletcher said as we walked the paths not far from the eagle nest. “Now, when I’m going through this park, there’s a million stories.”

Over time, the family attuned themselves to the urban wildlife, began to notice things that other people seemed to miss: the cranes and the eagles, tiny frogs in the lagoon, a big snap-ping turtle laying its eggs on the railroad tracks. “For me, it’s one of those things where it’s like: Is it that I’m more aware, or are things changing?” Ashley said. “I see more nature than I remember seeing when we first started walking.   Maybe I’m more in tune, or maybe it’s that it’s actually just kind of started becoming more wild. Or both. Probably both.”

The Hasburghs had made a record of their experiences in Warner Park. In addition to the eagle nest monitoring, Patrick enlisted the family in an initiative to protect the area’s bluebirds, believing that a formal citizen-science project would be a way of “sneaking some education in  without it being their lame dad preaching to them.” On a weekly basis the family checked on eleven bluebird nesting boxes, evicted any sparrow squatters if necessary, and then sent to the Bluebird Restoration Association of Wisconsin information about the number of eggs and chicks. When he was a little kid, Fletcher had taken the work very seriously. Equipped with a clipboard, he studiously went from box to box making observations. “Pretty much half of my entire summer was spent just checking bluebird boxes,” he told me as we inspected one nest box that, it turned out, was empty. By now, Ashley said, the bluebird stewardship was “built into our lives.”

Both boys had become crackerjack birders who could tell a sparrow nest from a chickadee nest from a bluebird nest at a distance. They could see a bluebird chick and tell how many days old it was. With familiarity came emotional attachment: the family imprinted on the birds. “Maybe it’s just in my head, but you build sort of a relationship with them,” Ashley said. “I love it, and it’s fun to see, like, the evolution. And you kind of feel like, you know, a little mama bird.”

Passing on their naturalist knowledge to other kids was a big-ger lift. Fletcher — whose great passion is video games, especially Call of Duty — said he didn’t exactly advertise his conservation endeavors. “I don’t really want to have a big prom sign that says, Come to the prom with me — I look at birds.” And as much as Ranger was psyched about outdoor activities like fishing — the previous winter, he had caught a “monster” thirty-eight-inch pike and a twenty-nine-inch walleye — most of his free time was spent skateboarding.

If anything, the boys had passed their environmental passion not outward to peers but upward to their parents. Patrick said one of the reasons he had gotten into birds is because Fletcher, when he was very young, kept asking for their names. “And I wouldn’t have an answer,” Patrick said. “So then I got curious and then we started looking at other birds and we started a life list.” A child’s inquisitiveness, it turned out, could be a parent’s spark bird.

When we first spoke, Patrick told me that one his great inspirations was Aldo Leopold, whose writings he had been exposed to during a brief stint in college and who moved him to seek out “an engagement with the landscape.” It was A Sand County Almanac that spurred Patrick to start keeping a fishing journal, which turned into a birding journal, and then into an all-around phenology journal that is now entering its twenty-fifth year. “It’s mostly birds and animals and stuff like that,” he told me. “And at the end of the year I go through my journals and notes and send out a little report to friends.”

A famous line in Leopold’s canonical book comes as the author declares, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on the land is quite invisible to laymen.” The Hasburghs’ tour of Warner Park made me think that maybe it was time to turn Leopold’s insight onto its head. Perhaps it’s equally true that one of the benefits of an ecological education is that one might, together with friends and family, inhabit a world of wonders. Much of the abundance that remains on the land is made visible by sharing it.

Isn’t this how the world might turn toward environmental progress, one workaday relationship with nature after another? The Hasburgh family was living proof that the task of ecological remembering isn’t necessarily difficult or esoteric; it can be as simple and as easy as a walk in the park. And as much as the Hasburghs demonstrated how to make memories of the living world, they also illustrated why it’s worthwhile to do all this physical, mental, and emotional work. Remembering isn’t about dwelling in the past, but a way of casting oneself forward in time, into the future tense. It was Ranger who helped make this clear. “I like just seeing the eagles and just watching the nest,” he said as we wrapped up our loop around the park and stood, again, not far from the eagle eyrie “That’s, like, a memory that will stay with me for a while.”

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By Mariah Meek, Michigan State University and Karrigan Börk, University of California, Davis

It wouldn’t make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out their habitat.

But that’s what the Trump administration is doing by changing how one word in the Endangered Species Act is interpreted: harm.

For 50 years, the U.S. government has interpreted the Endangered Species Act as protecting threatened and endangered species from actions that either directly kill them or eliminate their habitat. A new federal rule change, announced July 10, 2026, keeps the first part – protecting against the direct killing of the species – but removes habitat destruction.

That matters, because most species on the brink of extinction are on the Endangered Species list because there is almost no place left for them to live. Their habitats have been paved over, burned or transformed. Habitat protection is essential for their survival.

Green sea turtles, like this hatchling in Florida, are endangered due in part to habitat destruction and fishing nets. Keenan Adams/USFWS

As an ecologist and a law professor, we have spent our entire careers working to understand the law and science of helping imperiled species thrive. We recognize that the rule change could green-light the destruction of protected species’ habitats, making it nearly impossible to protect those endangered species.

The Legal Gambit

The Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, bans the “take” of “any endangered species of fish or wildlife,” which includes harming protected species.

Since 1975, regulations have defined “harm” to include habitat destruction that kills or injures wildlife. Developers and logging interests challenged that definition in 1995 in a Supreme Court case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon. However, the court ruled that the definition was reasonable and allowed federal agencies to continue using it.

In short, the law says “take” includes harm, and under the regulatory definition at the time, harm included indirect harm through habitat destruction.

The Trump administration has now changed the definition of “harm” in a way that leaves out habitat modification.

Critical habitat throughout the U.S., including many coastlines and mountain areas. Note: Alaska is not to scale. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

This narrowed definition unravels the most significant protections granted by the Endangered Species Act.

Why Habitat Protection Matters

Habitat protection is the single most important factor in the recovery of endangered species in the United States – far more consequential than curbing direct killing alone.

A 2019 study examining the reasons species were listed as endangered between 1975 and 2017 found that only 17% were primarily threatened by direct killing, such as hunting or poaching. That 17% includes iconic species such as the red wolf, American crocodile, Florida panther and grizzly bear.

In contrast, a staggering 81% were listed because of habitat loss and degradation. The Chinook salmon, island fox, southwestern willow flycatcher, desert tortoise and likely extinct ivory-billed woodpecker are just a few examples. Globally, a 2022 study found that habitat loss threatened more species than all other causes combined.

As natural landscapes are converted to agriculture or taken over by urban sprawl, logging operations and oil and gas exploration, ecosystems become fragmented and the space that species need to survive and reproduce disappears.

The Catalina Island fox is endemic to Catalina Island. Habitat loss, diseases introduced by domestic dogs, and predators have diminished the population of these small foxes to threatened status. Catalina Island Conservancy/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Currently, more than 107 million acres of land in the U.S. are designated as critical habitat for Endangered Species Act-listed species. Industries and developers have called for changes to the rules for years, arguing it has been weaponized to stop development. However, research shows species worldwide are facing an unprecedented threat from human activities that destroy natural habitat.

Under the new change, development could be accelerated in endangered species’ habitats.

Gutting the Endangered Species Act

The definition change is a quiet way to gut the Endangered Species Act.

It is also fundamentally incompatible with the purpose Congress wrote into the act: “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved [and] to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species.” It contradicts the Supreme Court precedent, and it would destroy the act’s habitat protections.

The golden-cheeked warbler breeds only in Texas, primarily in Texas Hill Country. It has been losing habitat as development expands in the region. Steve Maslowski/USFWS, CC BY

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has argued that the recent “de-extinction” of dire wolves by changing 14 genes in the gray wolf genome means that America need not worry about species protection because technology “can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.”

But altering an existing species to look like an extinct one is both wildly expensive and a paltry substitute for protecting existing species.

The administration has also didn’t conduct the usual analysis of the environmental impact that changing the definition could have. That means the American people won’t even know the significance of this change to threatened and endangered species until it’s too late, though wildlife groups are already planning to sue over the change.

The ESA is Saving Species

Surveys have found the Endangered Species Act is popular with the public, including Republicans. The Center for Biological Diversity estimates that the Endangered Species Act has saved 99% of protected species from extinction since it was created, not just from bullets but also from bulldozers. This regulatory rollback seeks to undermine the law’s greatest strength: protecting the habitats species need to survive.

Congress knew the importance of habitat when it passed the law, and it wrote a definition of “take” that allows the agencies to protect it.

This is an update to an article originally published May 13, 2025.

Mariah Meek, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, Michigan State University and Karrigan Börk, Professor of Law, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Ebola is once again making headlines and has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern — the World Health Organization’s highest level of alert — after cases crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of the Congo into Uganda.

For many people this feels too distant to be of concern, but scientists and public health experts have been warning us that the conditions that allow Ebola and other diseases to spread from animals to humans have been building for decades.

Around 60% of known infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic (diseases that are transmitted between animals and people), and up to 75% of new and emerging infectious diseases have animal origins, mostly from wildlife. Nearly all WHO Public Health Emergencies of International Concern have been caused by diseases of animal origin: H1N1 (2009), Ebola (2014), Zika (2016), Ebola (2019), COVID-19 (2020), Mpox (2022 and 2024), and now this 2026 Ebola outbreak, which is spreading across the region at an alarming pace and scale.

To understand the potential threat, consider that the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the largest since the virus was reported in 1976. There were more cases and deaths in that outbreak than all others combined; more than 28,600 people became infected and 11,325 died.

This current outbreak is particularly concerning because this strain of Ebola (Bundibugyo) has no approved vaccine or therapeutics, and available diagnostic tests often fail to detect it. This means case numbers are very likely underestimated, and the true scale of transmission is uncertain. The ongoing humanitarian crisis in the region, high population mobility, including urban spread, and confirmed cross-border transmission create the perfect conditions for quick escalation. Ebola has devastating consequences once it infects people, with previous outbreaks recording case fatality rates ranging from approximately 30% to 66%, underscoring the importance of preventing spillover before it occurs.

How Spillover Happens

Fruit bats are one of the natural reservoir hosts, meaning they can carry the virus long term without becoming sick themselves. But it’s not just bats: Great apes, monkeys, duikers, chevrotains, pangolins, and other species are intermediate hosts, meaning they can carry and pass the virus on to humans.

It’s no coincidence that many of these species are also commonly hunted, traded, and sold in bushmeat and wildlife markets across Central and West Africa. Recent research by my organization, World Animal Protection, documented the pangolin trade on TikTok in West Africa and highlights how wildlife trade networks are increasingly operating both in physical markets and online, expanding opportunities for zoonotic disease spread. People who handle or eat the bushmeat can become infected through direct contact with the blood, bodily fluids, or tissues of infected animals, with the virus spreading through communities, person-to-person.

The risks are man-made and wholly preventable. When wild animals are captured, transported, confined, and slaughtered under stressful and inhumane conditions, we create the perfect storm for disease. At every stage of the trade chain, from capture and transport to sale and slaughter, wild animals are exposed to stress, injury, deprivation, and close confinement with other species they would rarely encounter in the wild. This weakens animals’ immune systems and increases opportunities for pathogens to spread between species, including to humans.

Why Habitat Loss and Wildlife Exploitation Matter

One major driver of Ebola risk is habitat destruction. When people clearcut or fragment forests for logging, mining, road building, and agricultural expansion, the chance of disease spillover increases. Studies of previous Ebola outbreaks (2004–2014) confirm that infection hotspots tend to occur in areas with greater forest fragmentation. As people gain access to previously undisturbed habitats, human activities such as hunting and bushmeat consumption increase the risk exponentially.

Commercial wildlife trade is another key driver of the high-risk conditions that produce spillover events. Wild animals transported across regions and borders, contained and slaughtered in markets with inadequate biosecurity and poor health conditions, and handled by people with little or no protective gear, pose an ongoing threat. Each time an animal is handled is an accident waiting to happen.

Species linked to Ebola spillover, including pangolins and primates, continue to be hunted and traded for meat and other purposes throughout the region despite the well-documented public health risks.

Although surveillance is a critical part of managing diseases, it only works when a disease is already present and people are showing symptoms. But with a disease like Ebola, this is already too late; by the time symptoms arrive, we’re playing catchup to limit further spread. Taking upstream action to prevent diseases from spilling over to people is the most meaningful way to prevent outbreaks and pandemics in the first place.

So here we are again talking about pandemic prevention. It’s significantly less costly than response in both economic and societal terms — a recent study estimates that a decade of pandemic prevention measures would cost around 2% of the economic damage caused by COVID-19 alone. Taking preventive action — including protecting habitats, ending commercial wildlife trade activities, and reducing human–animal interactions — is a smart, cost-effective investment.

From Evidence to Policy Action

The scientific community has been warning us of this growing risk for years. In 2020 the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) convened a panel of experts who concluded that land-use change, wildlife exploitation, and biodiversity loss are the primary drivers of pandemic emergence — and called explicitly for reducing the commercial exploitation of wild animals.

The report also reinforced growing scientific understanding that animal, human, and ecosystem health are inseparable. Poor treatment of wild animals is not only an ethical issue. It is also a public health issue.

Research by World Animal Protection has gone further, demonstrating that the commercial wildlife trade does not create isolated risks. Instead it generates feedback loops between poor animal welfare, pathogen transmission, ecosystem degradation, and governance failures.

Ending commercial wildlife trade — not simply regulating it or monitoring it — is what will break the cycle. If wild animals continue to be exploited, commodified, and transported through commercial supply chains, the conditions for future spillover events will remain.

At the international level, momentum has been building. The WHO Pandemic Agreement, adopted in 2025 after years of negotiation, recognizes the critical role of prevention and addressing drivers at the human–animal–environment interface. It also enshrines the One Health approach, recognizing that human, animal, and ecosystem health are interconnected — a landmark achievement.

For wildlife the impact is significant. Protecting forests and ending the commercial exploitation of wild creatures helps keep them within their natural habitats and can help keep them safer from disease and exploitation. For people, prevention not only saves lives but is far less costly than responding after an outbreak has begun.

Ultimately, if we want to save lives — of both people and animals — we need to look at doing things differently. Prevention is the only cure.

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Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. (2020). Workshop report on biodiversity and pandemics of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. IPBES Secretariat. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4147317

Lee, Y.-W. (2026, April 22). Uganda cave predation and tourism drive Marburg spillover risk. ChosunBiz. https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-science/2026/04/22/AYHE53E3YFH3ZBMU5LDJEDR624/

Leendertz, S. A. J., Wich, S. A., Ancrenaz, M., Bergl, R. A., Gonder, M. K., Humle, T., & Leendertz, F. H. (2017). Ebola in great apes – current knowledge, possibilities for vaccination, and implications for conservation and human health. Mammal Review, 47(2), 98–111. https://doi.org/10.1111/mam.12082

Le Guenno, B., Formenty, P., Wyers, M., Gounon, P., Walker, F., & Boesch, C. (1995). Isolation and partial characterisation of a new strain of Ebola virus. The lancet, 345(8960), 1271-1274.

Lindenmayer, J. M., & Kaufman, G. E. (2021). One health and one welfare. In T. Stephens (Ed.), One welfare in practice: The role of the veterinarian (Chapter 1). CRC Press.

Olivero, J., Fa, J. E., Real, R., Márquez, A. L., Farfán, M. A., Vargas, J. M., Gaveau, D., Salim, M. A., Park, D., Suter, J., King, S., Sheil, D., Leendertz, S. A., & Nasi, R. (2017). Recent loss of closed forests is associated with Ebola virus disease outbreaks. Scientific Reports, 7, Article 14291. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-14727-9

United Nations Environment Programme & International Livestock Research Institute. (2020). Preventing the next pandemic: Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission. UNEP. https://wedocs.unep.org/items/426976c7-ee73-4cd8-a3f2-8659d1e88b04

Vora, N. M. (2022, November 16). Hunting for the next pandemic virus. Microcosm. https://asm.org/magazine/2022/fall/hunting-for-the-next-pandemic-virus

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World Health Organization. (2026, May 17). Epidemic of Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda determined a public health emergency of international concern [News release]. https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-disease-in-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-and-uganda-determined-a-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern

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Two incidents that generated worldwide headlines in recent months have called attention to the often-overlooked plight of India’s captive elephants.

In the first, an elderly female elephant died three months after she was painted pink by a Russian photographer.

Then, this May, a young tusker attacked an older, tuskless male elephant at a camp run by the forest department, leading to the death of a tourist and the elder elephant.

Although media around the world carried news about these two sad events, they’re not exactly isolated occurrences. Over the past year alone, multiple distressed elephants used in temple festivities have gone on rampages and killed people, or have suffered immensely and died.

The deaths underscore a hidden reality: Despite India’s designation of the elephant as the national heritage animal, the country allows the animals to be privately owned, which has created opportunities for them to be trafficked and exploited.

“India has an ancient cultural relationship with elephants,” says Kartick Satyanarayan, CEO and co-founder of Wildlife SOS, an animal-welfare and conservation organization headquartered in New Delhi. “But in today’s day and age, captive elephants live in a highly compromised situation as their physical, social and psychological needs are not met. Many elephants succumb to serious health and welfare issues over time.”

 

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An estimated 3,000 elephants live in captivity across the country. Of these, about 70% are privately owned – either by individuals or institutions – with a majority spending their lives in horrific conditions. Owners use these elephants for providing rides to tourists, parades at religious festivals, begging, and other exploitative activities, despite the serious concerns raised by animal-welfare activists.

The rest are owned by the various forest departments in the country, where they’re mainly used for anti-poaching patrols or forest-management activities and are better cared for than privately owned elephants.

A subspecies of the Asian elephant, Indian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus) are classified as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). They’re native to 11 countries in south and southeast Asia, and India is home to nearly 75% of the subspecies’ population. The latest census in India (2021-2025) estimated the wild elephant population to be 22,446.

Elephants receive the highest level of protection under Indian law. Yet traffickers take advantage of longstanding legal loopholes and continue to poach calves from the wild, torture them into submission, and exploit them in captivity.

“The law, though strong in intent, has enough structural gaps to render its protections largely ineffective in practice,” says advocate Rishabh Karan Mehta, who practices at India’s Supreme Court.

“Every elephant removed from the wild is a loss to the gene pool and genetic diversity of the wild population,” says Satyanarayan.

According to Mehta, a 2020 response to a Right to Information petition revealed that roughly 1 in 4 privately owned captive elephants lacked proper supporting documentation.

“That’s how widespread the problem is,” he says.

Captive Elephants in Tourism

Elephant riding continues to be touted by some travel agents as a must-do experience in India. Over 100 elephants ferry eager tourists to Amer Fort in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, for example.

“Tourists who ride elephants are often misled,” says Satyanarayan. “Their cultural experience is built entirely on the suffering and abuse of the elephant and causes irreversible damage to its spine and back.”

Several of the elephants at Amer Fort are blind, crippled, and have scores of wounds and abscesses. “These injuries are masterfully concealed beneath colorful decorations, velvet fabrics and paint,” says Satyanarayan.

Snatched from their mothers at an early age, elephant calves undergo a brutal “breaking-of-the-spirit” process involving severe beatings and starvation. Once they’ve submitted to their captors, they spend decades of their lives in chains, abused and neglected until death saves them from their daily suffering.

Two Cases That Ignited Firestorms

In November 2025 a Russian photographer visiting Amer Fort asked for a captive elephant to be painted bright pink for a photoshoot. The owner of an elderly elephant named Chanchal agreed. When the images of the “pink elephant” were shared on social media, a global furor erupted about the ethics of using animals in such projects.

“It’s deeply troubling that people don’t hesitate to use elephants as props and abuse them in the process,” says Satyanarayan. “It shows how little consideration there is for the elephant’s welfare,” he adds.

Three months later, Chanchal — who was in her mid-60s — died. Though the post-mortem said that she died of age-related issues, a lifetime of captivity and neglect would have had an impact on her health and wellbeing, Satyanarayan says.

“Chanchal spent decades without ever knowing a day of true freedom, a victim exploited by people for greed and profit,” he says.

Another gruesome incident in the southern state of Karnataka reignited the conversation around elephant captivity. In May, during an elephant bathing activity in the Cauvery River at the forest department-run Dubare camp, a 26-year-old tusker named Kanjan attacked an older tuskless male, Marthanda.

“These situations can occur when captive bull elephants are in proximity to each other,” says Satyanarayan.

The older elephant lost his footing in the water and fell on a female tourist standing nearby, killing her instantly. Marthanda later succumbed to his injuries as well.

“When camps become tourism attractions, then the welfare and safety of visitors and elephants needs to be the highest priority,” says Satyanarayan. “Placing visitors in close proximity to elephants can create dangerous situations for both.”

Though the camp authorities responded swiftly by stopping all close contact activities, including elephant bathing, feeding, and selfies, the measures came too late for the tourist and the elephant who lost their lives in this entirely preventable tragedy.

Captive Elephants at Religious Festivals

The southern state of Kerala has a tradition of parading richly dressed captive elephants as part of festival processions. Some of these elephants are owned by Hindu temples, but most are leased from private owners for the festivities. While churches and mosques in Kerala are not known to own any elephants, some do rent them for festival parades. The approximately 300 privately owned elephants in the state are transported between thousands of local festivals to meet demand.

Physical trauma and exhaustion, psychological distress from prolonged confinement, combined with the loud noises of festival music and fireworks, have driven several processional elephants to run helter-skelter in distress. Since January there have been multiple such incidents involving human fatalities and injuries, as well as the destruction of property.

Each festival gives elephant owners “a lot of money,” says Sangita Iyer, founder of the U.S.-registered nonprofit Voice for Asian Elephants Society and a National Geographic explorer, who notes that an elephant can bring in thousands of dollars a day for its owner. “So they don’t care about the welfare of the elephants,” she adds. “That’s the reason these elephants are constantly distressed.”

Iyer, a practicing Hindu herself, has been outspoken about the cruelty these elephants suffer in captivity.

“When elephants are tied in one spot, their wild instincts are cruelly denied,” she says. “In captivity, they are alone and they suffer like human beings suffer in solitary confinement. It impacts their brain and nervous system, and they’re constantly terrified of what’s going to  happen next.”

Iyer’s powerful 2016 film Gods in Shackles sheds light on the dark reality behind the flamboyant elephant parades at Kerala’s festivals.

“They live a life of misery,” Iyer says. “You see the shackles cutting into their flesh, tears oozing down their face,” she adds.

Loopholes in the System

Wildlife traffickers and traders use many different loopholes — both legal and administrative — to circumvent laws and legalize wild-caught elephants.

“When the [Wildlife Protection] Act was enacted [in 1972], ownership certificates were issued to regularize elephants that were already in captivity at the time,” says advocate Mehta. This was intended to be a one-time measure that was never meant to continue. “Over the decades, this mechanism has been repeatedly misused to introduce newly captured wild elephants into the captive pool by issuing fresh ownership certificates.” Mehta explains that these fresh ownership certificates are often fraudulent or issued in a rush without verifying the origin or history of the elephant.

“The absence of a centralized, tamper-proof national elephant registry and the lack of mandatory DNA-based verification means there is no reliable way to distinguish a wild-caught elephant from a captive-born one,” Mehta says.

The Way Forward

Some Asian countries are leading the way on addressing the exploitation of elephants in captivity.

In early 2026 Indonesia became the first country in Asia to introduce a nationwide ban on elephant rides and forced performances and interactions. In May Bangladesh introduced new regulations banning the use of elephants in any exploitative or cruel activities. While India has banned the use of elephants in circuses, their mistreatment in tourism and religious festivities continues.

India launched a DNA profiling program in 2022 to enable the monitoring of the captive elephants in the country and prevent the trafficking of wild elephants into captivity. Genetic material of nearly 2,000 captive elephants has been collected so far. The profiles — including parentage and ownership information — will eventually be uploaded to a centralized database and app that will make it easy to identify wild-caught elephants from captive-born ones, as well as any illegal transfers or fraudulent ownership cases.

Meanwhile animal welfare advocates hope to make elephant riding less attractive by calling attention to the hidden abuses behind tourism activities, such as the Refuse to Ride campaign that Wildlife SOS launched in 2018.

“The only way to stop the demand is by creating awareness,” says Satyanarayan. “When the demand dies, the abuse and cruelty stops,” he adds.

 

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Wildlife SOS also works closely with the Responsible Tourism Society of India, whose members include thousands of local travel agents. “Many of the big operators have assured us and given us written commitments that they will never promote the riding of elephants,” says Satyanarayan.

Wildlife SOS’ latest campaign focuses on the nearly 300 “begging” elephants in the country, who are forced to walk on hot tar roads for hours and beg for alms, despite their many injuries. The nonprofit is working toward the goal of ending this cruel practice by 2030.

The increasing number of incidents involving distressed elephants running amok during festival processions and causing human fatalities is starting to make people rethink their use. As a cruelty-free alternative to the use of captive elephants in festival processions, two nonprofits — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in India and Iyer’s VFAES — have donated life-size robotic elephants to several temples.

“This elephant can be paraded across the village and the public have really taken well to it,” says Iyer. “They get to touch and feel these elephants and feel safe doing it. I’m hoping that in the next five to ten years, we will see a complete abolishment of live elephants being paraded.”

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Study: Commercial Lion Farming in South Africa Could Be Harming, Not Helping, Wild Lions

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The dive started like any other: hauling tanks out of the truck, helping guests into their gear, and overseeing safety checks. It was a particularly hot day on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, and divemaster Kaitlyn was eager to get into the water to cool off.

The dive would be easy. Salt Pier is one of the most popular dive sites on Bonaire for a reason. Its giant, looming pillars made navigation easy and created an exciting landscape for guests, and the sandbar on the south side is known for spotted eagle rays and green sea turtles. One more easy dive, and then she could take lunch.

But shortly after the dive began, she noticed something in the distance, something lying on the reef. It couldn’t be trash; she was pretty sure she’d just seen bubbles. Could it be a diver who needed help?

She signaled to her group to follow and quickly swam over. There on the reef was a woman. She was lying across the coral, arm outstretched, reaching for an octopus.

“Not again,” Kaitlyn thought, springing into action.

She swam right up to the diver, banging on her tank to draw her attention. But the diver didn’t look up, seemingly intent on getting this octopus into her hand.

Kaitlyn grabbed the diver’s shoulder, signaling that they needed to get off the reef. Adamant to have their “octopus moment,” the diver persisted.

As she told me the story, my friend’s face was flushed with anger. It took several more minutes of persistent interference on Kaitlyn’s behalf before the diver decided to leave the octopus alone. Kaitlyn was furious; not only had the diver invaded this octopus’s space but now the reef beneath her body was left broken beyond repair.

The most frustrating part of all is that we, and other divemasters on the island, were dealing with situations like that every day.

As Kaitlyn told me this story, under a palapa during lunch at the dive shop where we worked, I came to a conclusion: I wish “My Octopus Teacher” had never been filmed.

I recognize that this is a strange thing for a professional SCUBA diver and conservation biologist to say. But ever since the documentary won its Oscar, people across the planet have flocked to the ocean, hoping to form an intimate friendship with an octopus.

Instead of forming that friendship, people end up having unethical wildlife encounters. Sensitive species are disturbed, surrounding habitat is destroyed, and precariously balanced ecosystems are disrupted for the sake of an Instagram post.

A study conducted in the Philippines and Indonesia found that damaging contact with a reef by divers more than doubled when a wildlife encounter occurred during a dive. Whether the contact was intentional or not, these encounters reveal a deeper issue: Even the most well-meaning tourists can be detrimental to the places they visit.

Right now coral tourism is estimated to be worth over U.S. $36 billion annually, despite coral reefs being among the most threatened ecosystems on our planet. Scientists have determined that our oceans have passed a tipping point, meaning they’re quickly becoming unsuitable for sustaining coral life. Warming ocean temperatures, pollution, and ocean acidification are all contributing to the loss of coral reefs, but an overlooked threat is also at play. Increasing research shows that coral-related tourism reduces reef resilience and adds stress to these already vulnerable ecosystems.

A coral reef can take 100,000 years to form, but it only takes a moment for a person to cause irreparable damage to a colony. This is because the coral you see when snorkeling is actually a group of tiny animals called polyps that build their exoskeleton bit by bit using calcium carbonate in the ocean.

Physical contact with the reef is all too common. I’ve witnessed hundreds of instances where divers lost control of their buoyancy or became unaware of their fins snapping chunks of coral. Research has shown that the number of times a diver makes direct contact with a reef is directly correlated with the diver’s SCUBA certification level. The less experienced a diver is, the more likely they are to make physical contact with a reef. Beginner SCUBA divers lack the technical skills needed for precise buoyancy control.

I remember feeling completely out of control underwater when I first started diving. On one of my first dives, I began to float toward the surface, completely unable to figure out how to stop my ascent. When I later began assisting with Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) classes, I had to literally hold down numerous beginner divers struggling with the exact same thing. Good buoyancy is something a diver only acquires through practice. The more you dive, the less likely you are to drag along a reef.

There are, however, instances like the one my coworker experienced with the octopus seeker where contact with the reef is entirely optional. I’ve seen people collect shells and chunks of living coral as souvenirs — all too often, during my time in Bonaire.

In addition to the physical harm, there’s growing scientific evidence that human activity on reefs correlates with the presence of coral diseases. For example, coral disease prevalence on the Great Barrier Reef increased with the presence of an offshore tourist platform that brings hundreds of visitors to the reefs each day. In the Red Sea, physical damage to brain corals by divers increased a coral colony’s susceptibility to predation and disease. Coral growth was found to be five times slower on unprotected reefs with high tourist activity than on protected reefs.

Coral reefs across the Caribbean are currently battling a particularly nasty coral ailment called Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which targets hard corals such as brain and maze and causes irreparable damage to the skeletal tissue of a colony, spreading over an area the size of a sticky note each day. Total mortality of a colony can occur within days or weeks. The disease is highly contagious, and the exact mechanism of transmission is still unknown.

Some evidence  supports the claim that humans can spread SCTLD. Research suggests that contaminated gear can bring the disease to other dive sites and even to different countries or regions if it’s not properly disinfected. Dive shops on Bonaire keep clean rinse tanks available and require anyone diving to rinse their gear before and after each dive. When dealing with such a lethal disease, every small act of prevention can make a difference.

Even the most well-intentioned ocean enthusiast can cause harm to these delicate ecosystems. But what can we do about this problem?

Surely stopping all reef tourism is not the answer. As an ocean enthusiast myself, I wouldn’t recommend removing that snorkel tour from your vacation itinerary. Alienating ourselves from the natural world will never bring us closer to saving it.

Change can start with you on your next vacation. There are simple actions each of us can take to help improve the coral tourism industry.

• • Be picky about your guides. Guides often feel pressured to give their guests exciting, memorable experiences. Look for a local expert who can offer an authentic and respectful experience. Be wary of tour companies that promise close, personal experiences with wildlife. Do not be afraid to tell your guide “no” if they begin doing something you feel is harmful to the environment.
  • Build your water skills. Whether it’s a SCUBA course, swim lessons, or just spending time in a local pool, get yourself and fellow travelers in the water before visiting a coral reef. Not only will you have a more enjoyable experience if you feel more comfortable in the water, but you’re also less likely to cause damage to the reef you are visiting.
  • Rinse your gear. This is one of the simplest ways you can help protect the coral reefs you visit. If you own SCUBA gear, masks, snorkels, and floaties, be sure to thoroughly clean them before entering the water, especially if they’ve been used elsewhere.
  • Hold your travel buddies responsible. Talk to your friends and family (or even your whole tour group, if you’re feeling brave) about the shared responsibility of keeping coral reefs healthy. Encourage those around you to be considerate of all living creatures, including coral reefs.
  • Do your research. Get online and explore what regulations your destination may have for coral reef experiences. Most countries have a government agency, such as a national park service, that provides information on best practices and laws. By better understanding expectations, you can make better decisions in the water.
  • Most important of all, be respectful. Each time you enter the water, frame yourself not only as a visitor but as a steward. Each small action can have a larger impact. You’d be amazed at just how far that positivity can reach.

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What whale are we talking about this month?

Thanks for asking. This time we’re looking at Rice’s whale (Balaenoptera ricei), also sometimes referred to as the Gulf of Mexico whale.

Don’t you mean the “Gulf of America” whale?

Don’t get me started.

Why not? That would actually be pretty good branding.

You know, you’re kind of right. The Trump administration, which insists on calling the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” recently put a target on these rare, uniquely American whales’ backs by prioritizing oil and gas development in the Gulf of Whatever You Choose to Call It. A 15-minute, closed-door meeting of the rarely convened Endangered Species Committee — colloquially known as the “God Squad” for its ability to override the Endangered Species Act — was all it took to remove Rice’s whales’ protection in the name of “national security.”

Many conservationists fear this will push Rice’s whales to extinction.

That sucks. Are they really that rare?

Yup. No one knows exactly how many are left, but current estimates put the population at fewer than 100, probably closer to half of that. (The most commonly used number is 51.)

Geez, that really sucks. How’d their population get so low?

Well, for one thing, these whales were kind of hiding in plain sight, so no one prioritized their conservation. For many years they were (wrongly, it turned out) considered to be a subpopulation of Bryde’s whales (B. edeni), a species with a population so healthy that they were heavily hunted in the 20th century. It wasn’t until 2021 — just five years ago — that a study of the Gulf whales’ genetics and skeletal structures revealed them to be a different species.

Rice’s whale (formerly Bryde’s whale). Photo taken under NOAA research permit #779-1633. (NOAA)

That misidentification probably made it easier to overlook how many whales in this region died from ship collisions, oil pollution, entanglement in fishing gear, and other threats, including ocean noise (which they find particularly disturbing). Those same factors continue to threaten them today, while climate change poses a long-term threat to their prey and other potential factors within the Gulf.

That makes me sad. Tell me something cool about them to pull me out of my depression spiral.

We don’t know a lot about Rice’s whales, but what we do know is pretty cool. They’re a little over 40 feet long — that’s about the length of a city transit bus or as tall as a four-story building. Scientists have documented that they make some unique sounds that resemble long moans. They’re lifelong residents of the Gulf — unlike other species, who migrate — and spend a good chunk of their days hundreds of feet beneath the surface, where they find most of their food.

Speaking of which, they’re also baleen whales, meaning they use their “teeth” to filter out yummy silver-drag driftfish and other prey from the water.

Yeah, I got the “baleen” part from their taxonomic name.

You’re right, that was a dead giveaway. Not all baleen whales are from the genus Balaenoptera, but all Balaenoptera are baleen whales.

Go figure. So speaking of the name, what’s the deal with “Rice’s?”

That’s after whale scientist Dale W. Rice, who first recognized the Gulf whales as something different in 1965, although he didn’t have the genetic tools at the time to ID them as a unique species. (Visually, they’re almost identical to Bryde’s whales.)

Rice himself was an interesting scientist who conducted groundbreaking studies of whales, including 164 scientific publications covering multiple species.

Before that, though, he was part of the team that first banded Wisdom, the world-famous albatross, on Midway Atoll in 1956. That band (a little metal ring with a unique identification number, #Z333) allowed scientists to track her for decades — and boy, have they learned a lot. Wisdom has flown more than 3 million miles over the past 70 years and is still around and active today. In fact she’s the world’s oldest known wild bird, still laying eggs as of last year.

Wow, maybe she could teach Rice’s whales to be better breeders.

I’ll see if Duolingo offers classes in albatross and whale.

Leave the snark to me, dude. So, if I wanted to see one of these amazing animals, could I take, like, a whale-watching boat or something?

Not much chance of that, I’m afraid. Rice’s whales are so rare that even scientists don’t observe them very often.

That said, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has published an excellent guide on how to identify Rice’s whales, and if you do happen to spot one you can report your sightings by calling (877) WHALE-HELP. Every observation provides critical information that can help conserve this species.

Cool. So what else can your average Joe or Jolene do to help ensure Rice’s whales will always be out there?

Great question. The biggest priority is to stand up to the Trump administration’s push for more oil and gas development in the Gulf. Call your local representative to ask for renewed protections for these animals, post-haste. Our publisher, the Center for Biological Diversity, can help you do this by email, as can some other nonprofits.

Beyond that, a less direct but important step includes making sure any seafood you purchase from the Gulf is sustainable.

And, of course, you can make all manner of choices in your life that reduce your consumption of oil and gas. The more we push the transition to renewable energy, the less profitable it will be for the fossil-fuel industry to operate in the Gulf — or anywhere, for that matter. That’s the best possible scenario for Rice’s whales.

Cool. So is that it? What whale will we talk about next month?

Yup, that’s the skinny on Rice’s whales. I’m not sure about next month yet, but I’m thinking about diving into minke whales, a species that doesn’t get a heck of a lot of discussion. Of course you can always write to me at jplatt@therevelator.org to suggest your favorite whale.

Why would I do that when we’re talking about this right now?

Well, that’s really for everyone else out there, reading this.

Everyone else? Now I feel like someone’s eavesdropping on me.

Um … maybe it’s just a few ecologists studying your behavior.

Okay, that makes me feel better. I think.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Songs Whales Sing: The Peculiar History of Commercial Whaling

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It’s not easy being green — especially when you’re a scientist in an environmental field. Sometimes we’ve been at it for so long we lose sight of the many sympathetic folks and resources that surround us.

But there’s much we can do to find local, national, and international colleagues, and more importantly help the public understand the importance of what we do every day.

 

 

Dear Dr. Green,

I’ve been active in the environmental movement ever since high school. I’m a microbiologist studying the ability of bacteria and fungi to break down pollution. I also partner with organizations like Mossy Earth to restore degraded land. I’m seeing a lot of burnout and pessimism in environmentalist circles, but I’m really optimistic about humanity’s odds to beat climate change, habitat destruction, and our other problems. The scientific discoveries I make show me that nature is resilient. I can’t seem to convince anyone, though. My question is: How do people find hope again? Sometimes it feels like I’m carrying a torch in the dark all by my lonesome.

T.F.

Hello T.F.,

First, thank you for your service and dedication to environmentalism. We need people with the optimistic, whole-hearted commitment to our natural world more than ever. Your  optimism is invigorating and your work sounds fascinating and fulfilling.

Loneliness seems to be part of the package, too, but you don’t have to feel alone. Like the discoveries you’ve made about nature’s resilience, you need to nurture your own resilience and gather other environmentalists around you in a vibrant collective.

Let’s look at how we can get you more grounded with others who share your values and work ethic and how you can inspire hope in the process.

Start with yourself, then friends and colleagues, and expand from there.

Do you like to write about your ecological science work in language accessible to the public? That might be a great way to contribute to local and regional newspapers’ editorial sections; or contact the editors of regional media and suggest an environmental section if there isn’t one already. Such pieces can get people involved in local issues that affect their health and wealth.

Look for local events like farmers’ markets and monthly town celebrations where you might try having an informational table or booth and meet and greet. It may cost you a bit, but you can set out a donation jar to offset costs and get friends involved to help. The World Wildlife Fund has a great guide on how to host an information booth.

Next, reach out to your circle of professional contacts, groups and colleagues — even if you haven’t talked to them in ages. I’m not a fan of Facebook, but it can be a handy place to seek out old comrades and colleagues in your field, as can other social media platforms or LinkedIn. You mentioned your work with Mossy Earth; did you make connections there? Reach out and find where they are gathering with other environmental scientists. What are some other environmental circles you have worked or participated in?

Consider becoming an educator and mentor for younger folks interested in the work you do.

Young people — and really, anyone at any age — love learning about cool stuff like using bacteria and fungi to destroy pollutants. Mentor school kids: They might want to follow in your footsteps. Look for some public presentation opportunities at your local library, community and youth centers, the YMCA/YWCA, Rotary and other clubs (Lions Club, Elks, Veterans), local outdoors clubs — like hiking, gardening, surfing, boating — churches, schools (especially science classes), and community colleges and universities. These places are always looking for guest speakers or experts.

Develop a PowerPoint projected slideshow, handouts, and other educational materials. Again, a little out-of-pocket cost for screens, projectors, and your time is cheaper than feeling lonely or despairing.

In giving these talks, you’ll meet people and have a chance to enlighten them. Remember to speak in layman’s terms: Explain any concept in simple easy-to-understand language and don’t get in the weeds with overly academic or scientific terms. Focus on the enthusiasm you have for what you do, and the audience will be enthusiastic too.

People can rediscover hope when you show them good news about new  developments in environmental science.

Shine a light for everyday people who are not scientists, but who are eco-curious. Communicate to them what you and your colleagues are doing to save the environment, such as with Mossy Earth and other organizations and teams. Your rich experience and optimism will get people engaged.

Scientific achievements mean little to the public unless people in the sciences, like us, get out there and talk about what we’re doing.

Let our readers know how it’s going and ask more questions about the dissemination of scientific work to the public. We want to know how you move forward with this!

See you next time!

Cheers, my friend

Dr. Green

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If you are feeling critically depressed and suicidal, it’s time to immediately find professional help. Go to your closest emergency room or call the following numbers to get immediate help in your area:

SUICIDE HOTLINES

Worldwide: http://www.befrienders.org/support/

United Kingdom: http://www.samaritans.org

USA: http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org

1-800-273-TALK

Resources:

“Feeling Hopeless About the Climate? Try Our 30-Day Action Plan” (The Revelator)

“Yes, Your Friends and Neighbors Want to Talk to You About Climate Change” (The Revelator)

WWF: “How to Host a Booth or Table at a Community Event”

The Nature Conservancy: “Ways to Get Involved”

Mossy Earth: A Team Restoring Nature & Fighting Climate Change

American Scientist: “12 Tips for Scientists Writing for the General Public” by Katie L. Burke

Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe

What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

The post Dr. Green: An Environmentalist Scientist Asks About Finding Connections and Inspiring Hope appeared first on The Revelator.

Originally published by Mongabay. 

VJOSA-NARTA, Albania — In late April, heavy machinery began moving into the Pishë Poro-Narta protected landscape on Albania’s Adriatic coast without permits or public notice. Bulldozers and excavators felled coastal pine trees, flattened sand dunes, and cut new roads through previously untouched habitat. Then, barbed wire fences went up along the shoreline.

The incursion was the realization of a luxury resort development backed by Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. The development plans of Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity fund, stretch from the uninhabited Sazan Island into the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape, the delta region of Albania’s Vjosa River that includes Pishë Poro-Narta.

Roughly twice the size of Paris, the Vjosa-Narta area shelters flamingos, Dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus), loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and more than 70 endangered species, among them the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus).

Neither Affinity Partners nor the office of the prime minister of Albania responded to Mongabay’s requests for comment.

Aerial drone video of demonstrators gathering at Dalan Beach on June 6 for a rally near the site of the original resort-construction site. Footage by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

When protesters arrived at the site, security guards confronted them. Video of a demonstrator being dragged across the dunes on May 30 near the village of Zvërnec went viral. Soon demonstrations erupted in Tirana, the Albanian capital, in what has since been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. The protests have grown larger every day, with tens of thousands demanding accountability for corruption, an end to environmental abuses, and the resignation of Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister.

On June 6, hundreds of demonstrators made their way to Dalan Beach for a symbolic rally near the site of the original incursion. The barbed wire fences had been taken down a few days earlier and the machinery was gone. But no one there believed the battle was done.

Protesters spell out “Save Narta” in the sand at Dalan Beach during a symbolic rally June 6 near the original resort-construction site, as the Adriatic Sea and surrounding hills frame what demonstrators are fighting to protect. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

Vjosa-Narta is one of the last intact delta wildernesses in the Mediterranean. Only 4% of the region’s deltas remain in a relatively undisturbed state, and this is the largest and most biodiverse. More than 2,300 species have been documented across a mosaic of lagoons, reed beds, salt flats and coastal dunes that formed over millennia.

“I call it the place where I go to meet the gods,” Hanais Mhilli, a 36-year-old baker and part-time hiking guide living in Vlorë, a city south of the delta, told Mongabay as he joined other protesters there who were boarding a bus to the beach.

At the heart of the delta lies the Narta Lagoon, a vast, shallow body of brackish water stretching more than 40 square kilometers (15.4 square miles) where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea. It hosts more than 20,000 wintering waterbirds and ranks among the most important wetlands on the Adriatic Flyway, the migration corridor along which millions of birds travel each year between Africa and Europe.

 

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“Here we are not just fighting for Albania’s natural heritage, we are fighting for the natural heritage” everywhere, Aleksandër Trajçe, executive director of the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, told Mongabay. “Italy and Spain have destroyed miles and miles of coastline and now they’re trying to restore what they lost. Albania doesn’t have to make the same mistakes.”

Protesters carry an Albanian flag along the beach in the Vjosa-Narta delta after a rally on June 6. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay. A Biosphere Reserve

For more than a decade, the Vjosa River — flowing from the Pindus Mountains in Greece through southern Albania to the Adriatic Sea — was at the center of one of Europe’s fiercest conservation battles. Though dammed near its headwaters in Greece, it runs entirely free through Albania, its channels shifting and braiding across gravel beds in patterns that once characterized rivers throughout Europe.

When the river faced a cascade of proposed hydropower projects, campaigners organized and won a landmark victory in 2023 as the Vjosa became Europe’s first Wild River National Park, pioneering a conservation model in which the river itself, not just the surrounding land, is protected from development.

The Vjosa River braids freely across a wide gravel floodplain in southern Albania. The Vjosa is one of the last major rivers in Europe to flow largely unimpeded by dams. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

But the delta was left out. Campaigners feared that pushing to include it would jeopardize the entire agreement, and it remained under a weaker designation, the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape. Where the national park carries the strictest level of protection under international conservation standards, the protected landscape category permits limited development and human use.

Warning signs quickly stacked up. Maps had already been redrawn to accommodate a new international airport near the lagoon. Then, in early 2024, the Rama government amended the law on protected areas to allow construction of what it vaguely describes as high-end tourism projects, even inside protected zones. Three weeks later, Kushner’s Affinity Partners announced its plans.

“The delta was intentionally left out of the national park,” Trajçe said. “It was part of a political agenda.”

Albania hopes to join the European Union by 2030, a goal that requires closing the environment chapter of accession negotiations. This in turn requires repealing the very amendment that created the high-end tourism exception.

What Trajçe and other conservationists see unfolding now is a race against that deadline. “It’s a rush for development before they change the law,” he said. “It defies the whole purpose of a protected area.”

A cut-out flamingo rises above the crowd at a protest June 9 in Tirana, where the bird has become the unlikely symbol of a movement that Albanians have dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. The ongoing protests were sparked by a planned luxury resort development in the country’s Vjosa-Narta delta region. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

In September 2025, the delta received an additional layer of protection when it was included in the newly designated Vjosa Valley UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a status the EU had supported as part of Albania’s accession process. But in January, Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, visited Albania with architects and met with Rama, a trip widely interpreted as a signal that the Kushner project was moving toward construction.

Rama has made his position clear. Speaking on the sidelines of the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Montenegro on June 5, he dismissed the international attention the project has drawn. “If it wasn’t Jared, they wouldn’t give a shit,” he told Politico.

From Source to Sea

Conservationists say the Albanian government has also failed to honor its legal obligations under the management plan for the wild river national park. While the park has delivered important results — most of all, stopping the dam projects — violations have mounted.

Large quantities of water have been diverted from the Shushicë River, a major tributary within the national park, for irrigation, in direct violation of the plan, with further plans to pipe its water to the coast for tourism development. Crude oil has spilled into the Vjosa near the town of Poçem, where 150 active oil wells line the river’s middle stretch.

Excavators work in September 2025 to divert water from the Shushicë River, a protected tributary of the Vjosa River within the Vjosa Wild River National Park, seemingly in violation of the park’s legally binding management plan. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

Ulrich Eichelmann, a German conservationist who heads the Vienna-based NGO RiverWatch and was a key driver behind the park’s establishment, said the government has treated the designation primarily as a marketing tool. Almost none of the activities required under the management plan have been implemented, he told Mongabay. “All they focus on is getting more tourists into the area,” Eichelmann said. “Three years after the national park was created, the river system is in a worse state than before.”

The threat to the delta is part of a broader global crisis. Deltas are among the most biologically productive ecosystems on earth, the place where freshwater and saltwater mix to create conditions of great fertility. But many deltas have been relentlessly exploited, drained for agriculture and built over for ports and other infrastructure. A 2024 assessment of all 258 river deltas discharging into the Mediterranean found that no large delta — except those in Albania — still qualifies as relatively intact.

“The delta is an integral part of the wild river,” Besjana Guri, founder of LUMI and winner of a 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work to protect the Vjosa River, told Mongabay. “Ecologically, you cannot divide them.”

A sea of protesters fills one of Tirana’s main boulevards on June 9, with crowds calling for the resignation of Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama. The ongoing protests were sparked by a planned luxury resort development in the country’s Vjosa-Narta delta region. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay. Euro Leverage

The Flamingo Revolution shows no sign of losing momentum. The demonstrations have remained largely peaceful, drawing people of all ages — young couples, parents with children, elderly Albanians who lived through decades of communist rule — united by something that has rarely mobilized this society before.

The movement has also attracted the attention of Albania’s anti-corruption authority. SPAK, the independent prosecutorial body that has pursued high-profile corruption cases since its establishment in 2019, has opened a formal investigation into the project, examining not only environmental violations but reportedly extending into questions of land ownership changes and government decisions made in 2024 that cleared the way for development in the protected area.

The EU’s position has sharpened significantly, too. The European Commission has publicly and repeatedly warned Albania that it must terminate the strategic investments law that gives favored projects fast-track treatment, bypassing environmental safeguards. Failure to do so, the commission made clear, could put Albania’s path to EU membership at risk.

“Can the EU really allow Albania to destroy this unique ecosystem on the last stretch before it becomes a member state?” asked Eichelmann before heading out to join other demonstrators on the ninth day of protests in Tirana. “I don’t think so.”

 

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Citations

Miho, A., Bego, F., & Beqiraj, S. (2023). Overview of the Vjosa Delta (Pishe Poro – Narta Landscape Protected Area) – Natural Values and Threats. Albanian Journal of Natural and Technical Sciences, 59(XXVIII), 43–68.

Schwarz, U. (2024). Mediterranean Deltas: Assessment of General Intactness Based on Hydromorphological Criteria and Land Use Obstruction. EuroNatur & Riverwatch, Radolfzell/Vienna.

Schwarz, U. (2025). The State of Balkan Rivers 2025: Hydromorphological Assessment and 13-Year Trends. EuroNatur & Riverwatch, Radolfzell/Vienna.

The post Albanian ‘Flamingo Revolution’ Aims to Stop Kushner-Backed Resort on Protected Delta appeared first on The Revelator.