The Revelator

About a decade ago, I traveled through the Rasuwa region of Nepal as a conservation and environmental protection worker. I remember looking at the Himalayas with a kind of pride that is difficult to explain to someone who has never stood beneath them. The mountains seemed eternal. The glaciers looked like frozen rivers from another age. The valleys seemed impossibly deep, the rivers impossibly powerful. I felt proud that these mountains were part of my country. I felt proud that Nepal, a small and economically poor nation, held a landscape so important to the world.

Today, when I look at the photos and videos coming out of Rasuwa after the region’s devastating and deadly floods, that pride is mixed with grief. The mountains I once saw as a symbol of Nepal’s strength are becoming a symbol of our vulnerability. People have died. Homes and livelihoods have been destroyed. Roads and bridges have disappeared. Communities have been cut off. Families are searching for loved ones.

And behind the immediate tragedy are questions that I cannot escape:

Did the people of Nepal do something to deserve this? Did a Nepali farmer cause the glaciers to melt? Did a Nepali child cause the atmosphere to warm? Did a family living in a remote Himalayan village build the coal-fired power plants that have powered the industrial world for generations? Did the people now mourning their dead choose the fossil-fuel economy that has transformed the planet?

If not, why are they being asked to pay the price?

This is where the story of Rasuwa becomes larger than Nepal. It becomes a story about climate justice. The Himalayas are warming rapidly. Glaciers are retreating. Snow and ice are changing. Permafrost and mountain slopes are becoming increasingly unstable. Warmer air can hold more moisture, while a warming cryosphere can create new hazards and amplify existing ones. Climate change is altering the conditions under which Himalayan disasters occur.

But that scientific reality should not result in political blindness. The immediate cause of the disaster must be investigated carefully. Scientists must determine the precise sequence of geological, hydrological, and climatic events that produced the destructive flood.  At the same time climate change should not be used to overlook other factors such as unchecked development or poor planning that may have contributed to this disaster.

The question, then, is not whether climate change alone caused Rasuwa. The more important question is this: What kind of world have we created when people who contributed least to climate change are increasingly exposed to its most dangerous consequences?

Nepal is one of the clearest examples of this injustice. Its contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions is tiny. Its per-person emissions are among the lowest in the world. Yet its geography places it directly in the path of a warming climate. Nepal has glaciers that are retreating, mountains that are becoming increasingly unstable, rivers that can turn violently destructive, and communities with limited financial resources forced to prepare for what is coming.

The average American produces more than 20 times as much carbon dioxide than the average Nepali. China’s per-capita emissions are many times higher than Nepal’s. India’s are also substantially higher. China is now the world’s largest annual emitter, while the United States remains one of the world’s largest emitters and carries an enormous share of historical responsibility for the carbon accumulated in the atmosphere since industrialization. Yet the atmosphere does not send the bill back to the country that emitted the carbon. It sends the bill everywhere. And in places like Nepal, the bill can arrive as a flood.

This is the great moral failure at the heart of the climate crisis.

The people who benefited most from fossil-fuel-driven economic growth generally have the greatest financial and technological capacity to protect themselves from climate impacts. Those who contributed little often have the least capacity to adapt. That is not merely an unfortunate coincidence. It is an injustice.

For decades, the global economy treated the atmosphere as if it were an unlimited dumping ground. Coal could be burned. Oil could be extracted. Gas could be consumed. Factories could grow. Cars could multiply. Cities could expand. The benefits were measured in economic growth. The costs were pushed into the future.

That future has arrived in the Himalayas. It has arrived in the Pacific islands. In drought-stricken Africa. In South Asian floodplains. And it is arriving in the homes of people who never had a meaningful share in creating the problem.

The Himalayas deserve particular attention because what happens there will not remain there.

The mountains are often described as the roof of the world. They are also one of Asia’s great water towers. Their glaciers, snow and rivers support hundreds of millions of people across Nepal, India, China, Bhutan and Bangladesh. They feed agriculture, drinking-water systems and hydropower. They sustain forests, wetlands, wildlife and entire human cultures.

When the Himalayas become unstable, the consequences travel downstream. A mountain disaster can become a water crisis. A glacier crisis can become an energy crisis. A flood can become an economic crisis. And repeated climate disasters can eventually become a migration and security crisis.

The world should therefore stop treating Himalayan climate risk as a remote Nepalese problem. It is a global problem with a Himalayan address.

This is also why China and India cannot be left out of the conversation. China is the world’s largest current annual emitter, but it is also a country that has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty and is investing heavily in renewable energy. India faces a different but equally difficult dilemma: It must expand energy access and economic opportunity for a huge population while trying to avoid locking itself into decades of high-carbon development.

The answer cannot be to tell developing countries that they are forbidden from pursuing the prosperity that wealthy countries achieved through fossil fuels. That would be hypocritical. But neither can the developing world repeat the same carbon-intensive development pathway and expect the poorest and most vulnerable countries to absorb the consequences.

Every country has a responsibility. But every country does not have the same responsibility.

That distinction is at the heart of climate justice. The United States, Europe and other historically high-emitting economies have an enormous obligation to reduce emissions rapidly and provide financial and technological support to vulnerable countries. China has a responsibility commensurate with its present influence on the climate system. India and other rapidly growing economies have a responsibility to pursue development without reproducing the most destructive elements of the old fossil-fuel model.

And Nepal has a responsibility too. We must protect our forests. We must build safer infrastructure. We must stop treating fragile mountain slopes as empty spaces for roads and construction. We must strengthen disaster preparedness. We must invest in science. We must listen to local communities. But Nepal cannot adapt its way out of a crisis created by a warming planet.

There is a limit to what a small country can do when the atmosphere continues to heat because of decisions made elsewhere. That is why climate finance must stop being treated as charity.

Nepal does not need pity. Nepal needs justice.

It needs predictable resources to monitor glaciers and glacial lakes. It needs early-warning systems capable of reaching remote communities before floodwaters arrive. It needs high-altitude scientific research. It needs resilient roads, bridges and hydropower systems. It needs access to satellite data and international scientific networks. It needs effective mechanisms for loss and damage when climate-driven disasters destroy lives and development gains.

Justice also includes recognition that the people standing beneath melting glaciers are not merely victims waiting for international assistance. They are citizens of a world whose climate system is shared by everyone. The international community should establish stronger Himalayan climate cooperation involving Nepal, India and China. Glaciers do not recognize political boundaries. Rivers do not stop at checkpoints. Atmospheric warming does not respect national sovereignty.

The countries that share the Himalayas therefore have a common interest in monitoring its transformation and protecting the people downstream. But this responsibility must extend beyond Asia. The countries that have historically emitted the most carbon cannot simply send condolences after every disaster. They must help prevent the next one. Every country should have measurable climate obligations. Every government should be accountable for meeting them. Every major emitter should be required to do more, not less. And the countries with the greatest historical responsibility should contribute proportionately.

Climate agreements should not become annual rituals in which leaders make promises, take photographs and return home to business as usual. The world needs climate protocols with consequences. It needs transparency. It needs accountability. It needs finance that actually reaches vulnerable communities.

Most of all, it needs recognition that climate responsibility is not simply about tons of carbon. It is about people. It is about the child in Rasuwa who no longer has a home. It is about the mother searching for a missing family member. It is about the farmer whose land disappeared in a flood. It is about the community whose road to the outside world vanished overnight. It is about the people who did almost nothing to heat the planet but are now being forced to live with a climate they did not choose.

When I think back to that journey through Rasuwa more than a decade ago, I remember how proud I felt standing beneath the Himalayas. I still feel that pride. But now it is accompanied by other emotions. Fear. Not only fear for the mountains, but fear for the people who live among them. And anger. Not anger at one country or one government, but at a global system that has allowed responsibility and vulnerability to become so badly separated.

The question I asked myself after seeing the destruction in Rasuwa was painfully simple: Why should Nepal pay for a crisis it did not create?

I do not think Nepal is asking the world to answer with sympathy. I think Nepal is asking the world to answer with responsibility. The Himalayas belong to Nepal, but they are not only Nepal’s. The water they store sustains Asia. The climate they are experiencing is the product of a global atmosphere. And the consequences of their destabilization will eventually cross every border that politics has drawn across the mountains.

For years, the world has described Nepal as a vulnerable country. Perhaps that language needs to change.

Nepal is not simply vulnerable. Nepal is exposed. Exposed to a crisis created by a global system in which it had almost no voice.

The people of Rasuwa did not choose the carbon economy. They did not burn the coal. They did not fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. They did not decide how fast the planet should warm. Yet they are the ones standing in the floodwater. That should trouble every government on Earth.

Because if climate justice means anything, it must mean this: No country should be left to bear alone the consequences of a crisis it did little to create. And if the world continues to ignore that principle, the Himalayas will not be the last place to send us the bill. They may simply be one of the first places where the bill has become impossible to ignore.

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

The Last Breath of the Himalayas: Can We Stop the Collapse?

 

The post The Himalayas Didn’t Cause the Climate Crisis. Why Are Nepalis Paying the Price? appeared first on The Revelator.

The sound of rubber sandals crunching on dry bamboo leaves echoes in the fading light of Sumur Bendung. Maia Ruda, a 58-year-old mother, walks down a steep, tricky path toward a narrow riverbed in Gunung Batur village, Cilegon, carrying an empty 15-liter (4-gallon) plastic jug on her back. The path gets slipperier and more dangerous as it winds down the valley, where it cuts through mossy stone and damp earth.

Photo: Garry Lotulung

As the sun sets, other women with their own 15-liter jugs are already waiting, talking in Javanese as they gather around small drips of water coming from the rocks. The villagers use hollow bamboo stalks and large antap (Sterculia oblongata) leaves to guide the trickle into their containers. Filling a 15-liter jug takes a difficult 30 minutes.

Photo: Garry Lotulung

For Maia and her neighbors, waiting for water at dusk is now part of daily life. Since there are no wells nearby, they rely completely on this underground water and spend hours in the gorge to collect enough water for their families.

“We’ve been living like this for the past four months,” Maia tells me in early August, resting briefly while her container fills. “We have to walk a kilometer from our village down a steep, slippery path to reach this riverbed source. And as we enter August, the water is dripping slower and slower.”

She explains that they use old mineral water containers because they’re light, strong, and can be carried home in cloth without breaking on the sharp rocks. By nightfall she will carry eight heavy jugs back up the cliff, enough to last her family almost a week.

As things get harder, the community has had to ration water strictly. At the local Al-Ma’ruf prayer house, a schedule called the sif system controls water collection. Groups of 15 households take turns in 12-hour shifts, from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn. Each week a family might get just two turns, one in the morning and one at night, approved by the neighborhood chief.

But the situation is getting worse every day. Four months ago a family could collect 20 gallons each turn. Now the water flow is so low that they get barely eight. “By September we don’t know what we’ll do if the water stops dripping altogether,” says Ali Asmudin, another resident.

Villagers get a small government relief package of two gallons per week, but this is far from enough for their daily needs. A permanent pipeline is still just a dream for a community that has faced droughts for many years.

The Rings of Fire and a Looming Super El Niño

While places like Gunung Batur are rationing every drop, meteorologists warn that this local hardship is just a sign of a much bigger climate problem.

Across Indonesia worsening water shortages are expected to deepen significantly in the coming months. The stakes this year extend far beyond crippled agricultural yields. As the drought intensifies, it threatens water supplies, compromises hydropower generation, and drastically increases the risk of widespread forest and land fires.

According to the Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency, the country is bracing for a drier-than-normal season, with 437 seasonal zones — nearly half of Indonesia’s total land area — predicted to endure an unusually long and severe drought.

In June the World Meteorological Organization officially announced the start of El Niño, a major climate phenomenon where tropical Pacific waters warm significantly, disrupting weather worldwide. Current measurements show ocean temperatures are running far above average, officially placing this El Niño in the “strong” category with the potential to trigger severe droughts, heat, and extreme weather in the coming months. The announcement warned countries everywhere to prepare for record heatwaves, severe droughts, and more extreme weather.

 

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Teuku Faisal Fathani, head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysical Agency, points to alarming macro-indicators. “Based on our monitoring, current El Niño conditions have reached a strong category, driven by sea surface temperature anomalies.”

Adding to these worries, climate researchers from China’s State Key Laboratory of Satellite Ocean Environment Dynamics and Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency have found a new weather pattern. Warming is happening at the same time in three Pacific regions — near Indonesia, Central America, and South America — creating a large “warm ring” that covers areas usually kept cool by ocean currents.

“We have not observed a pattern this intense in the past 40 years,” says Dr. Widodo Setiyo Nugroho, a senior climate researcher at BRIN.

Ghosts of the Past Re-emerge From the Depths

About 99 kilometers (61 miles) from the capital of Jakarta, the disappearing water reveals strange reminders of past projects. As reservoirs shrink across Banten Province, pieces of human history are reemerging from the bottom of the lakes.

At the Somang pier in Lebak Regency, boatman Hussein waits for passengers who want to see what remains of the past. Since June falling water levels at the large Karian Dam have uncovered the remains of villages.

Photo: Garry Lotulung

Built between 2015 and 2024, the Karian Dam project flooded 11 villages in four sub-districts: Sajira, Cimarga, Maja, and Rangkasbitung. People were moved to make way for a 1,773-hectare (7-square-mile) artificial lake meant to supply water to Jakarta and its suburbs. Now, as water levels drop by one to three meters (up to 10 feet), the roofs and yards of these submerged villages are starting to appear again.

Hussein steers his small wooden boat past brick foundations that stick out of the water. “I’ve lived here since I was a child,” he says quietly, watching a motorboat take visitors to see what remains of Somang. “Four years ago, we had to leave when our homes were flooded. For the past two years, I’ve worked as a ferryman, charging people five to ten thousand rupiahs to see what’s left of our old lives.”

Photo: Garry Lotulung

Where families once farmed and children played, people now use the shrinking edges of the reservoir to wash clothes because their wells have dried up. Below the water, only brick foundations are left. Wooden doors, windows, and roof tiles were removed before the valley was flooded.

A Bleak Horizon

The problems seen in Cilegon and Lebak are expected to get much worse. Erma Yulihastin, a climate researcher from the National Research and Innovation Agency, says that models predict a Super El Niño from late 2026 to early 2027, which will supercharge global weather systems and trigger severe storms, droughts, and wildfires. Forecasts from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts show the peak will come in December 2026, with sea surface temperatures rising more than 4 degrees Celsius.

“Even February 2027 will still classify as super,” Yulihastin warns. If these predictions come true, Indonesia could face a long seven-month struggle with poor crop yields, serious food shortages, and high wildfire risks.

For people like Maia Ruda in Gunung Batur and Hussein, who watches his old village reappear in Somang, that future is already here, seen in every drop of water that grows scarcer.

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

Photo Essay: Climate Change and Deforestation Collide in Indonesia’s Deadly Floods

The post Photo Essay: As a Super El Niño Looms, Indonesia’s Crippling Drought Deepens appeared first on The Revelator.

What whale are we talking about this month?

Today we’re looking at the elusive narwhal (Monodon monoceros), the “unicorn” of the sea.

Oh, come on. There’s no way those are real.

I get your skepticism, but narwhals exist. They live in the Arctic, where relatively few people see them. And yes, just as you might see in cartoons, male narwhals have a single spiraling “horn” on the front of their faces. Technically it’s called a tusk, but it’s actually a really long tooth.

 

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Only males? Unfair, if you ask me.

It’s not completely exclusive. A few female narwhals have been documented with tusks, although it’s rare.

If it’s any consolation, male narwhals take about twice as long to reach maturity as females — as much as 20 years.

That tracks. So what are the tusks for?

Biologists are still not entirely sure. Some sources say the tusks help to attract mates or achieve dominance among males (who often cross tusks like two swordsmen preparing to duel, a behavior known as “tusking”).

 

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Other research points out that they’re jam-packed with nerve endings — millions of ’em — that may help narwhals understand what’s going on around them, especially temperature changes.

Still other sources say tusks are for fighting or feeding.

Feeding? Do they spear their prey?

No — it would be hard to get a fish back off the tusk to eat if they did that. But the reality is even weirder: Some narwhals have been observed whacking cod with their tusks, stunning them or knocking them out and making them easier to eat.

We learned about that in 2016 — after 400 years of wondering what the tusks are for — thanks to drone-mounted remote cameras, which continue to help with narwhal research. A 2025 study observed narwhals chasing an Arctic fish species called char and “using their tusks to hit, manipulate, and influence the behavior of fish.” Some of this could almost be described as playing with your food. They didn’t always get to eat the char, though; gulls sometimes stole the fish, a behavior called kleptoparasitism.

That should be on one of those word-a-day calendars. Hey, what’s the deal with narwhals’ name? It’s kinda different from most other whales.

“Narwhal” comes from their Old Norse name, nárhval, which translates to “corpse whale.” It seems their gray, mottled skin resembles … well, you can probably connect the dots.

Gross.

Well, that’s the Vikings for you.

That Norse name seems to have stuck in the public consciousness worldwide, but these whales had a few other names around the Arctic. The Inuit call them tuugaalik, qilalugaq, or qilalugaq qernertaq.

You said people don’t see them very often. Why not?

Well for one thing, they live in remote, ice-covered parts of the Arctic: central Canada, Greenland, and Russia. The mostly Indigenous peoples in those regions have long traditions of living with narwhals — they figure into a lot of cultural traditions dating back millennia. But the Arctic’s still not a popular tourist destination (although several narwhal sightseeing tours operate on Baffin Island and other Arctic sites).

They’re also deep divers and have been known to swim more than 7,000 feet below the surface, which isn’t exactly hospitable territory for you and me.

And, of course, narwhals — like all whales — don’t do well in captivity, so if you don’t see one on TV you’re probably not going to see one. The few attempts to display them in aquariums ended in tragedy (some might say predictably) more than 50 years ago.

That sucks. Are they endangered?

Not officially. The IUCN, which assesses the extinction risk of species around the world, used to list them as “near threatened.” The latest assessment, published in 2017, moved them up the scale to “least concern,” with an estimated global population of at least 123,000 mature individuals. But that report cautioned that we don’t know the health of several subpopulations, especially in Russia.

A more recent study published in 2022 found that one narwhal population in Greenland shrank between 2007 and 2019. This is one of the few areas where narwhals have experienced much hunting, and that’s caused a decline in the percentage of females (who are slower and easier to catch) and juveniles (who need moms to begin with, obviously).

It’s great they’re not at risk right now. Still, climate change must pose a threat for an Arctic species like this.

Most likely. Narwhals live in icy environments. We just don’t know how well they’ll fare if ice patterns keep changing. Research suggests they’ll be vulnerable, though. A 2010 paper found that they species’ “extreme morphological and physiological adaptations enabling year-round Arctic residency … limit behavioral flexibility for responding to alternations in sea ice.” Specifically, the paper found narwhals have a narrow temperature preference — they avoid areas about 35 degrees (2° C). They can also only travel about nine-tenths of a mile before coming up for air, which is fine under “normal” conditions, but climate change could cause more ice to break free and congregate into large, impenetrable masses. If climate change alters temperature levels and changes ice patterns, the whales could be in trouble.

More recent research, published in 2020, studied narwhal genetics and found that they have low genetic diversity, presumably due to geographic constriction during the last glacial period. That suggests they’ll be vulnerable in the future.

Right now, though, the biggest threats to them seem to come from oil and gas development and commercial shipping. Human activities like this really stress them out — and narwhals don’t do well under stress.

That sounds like the other whales we’ve discussed. Any other cool facts to share?

A few! They’re closely related to beluga whales — in fact, if you take off the tusk and paint a narwhal white, they’d look pretty much the same.

(PS: Don’t do that.)

One of their physical similarities between the two species is their large melons, a mass of fatty tissue seen in all toothed whales (including dolphins and porpoises, who aren’t really whales, but don’t get me started).

The melon remains a bit of a mystery, but scientists have linked it to communication, which for narwhals includes echolocation.

Like bats?

Yup. It helps them find prey and avoid barriers — a useful tool deep underwater, past where the sun can reach.

Narwhals also have a wide range of other vocalizations, and they’re one of the whale species that seem to have different calls from pod to pod, a sign that they have learned behaviors that might be akin to culture in humans.

On a more physical level, narwhals are uniquely adapted to Arctic life, with slow-twitch muscles that reserve oxygen — I’ve seen them described as “greyhound-like” — and a thick blubber that protects them from the cold.

So what’s your favorite thing about narwhals?

Well, for me, it’s just that they’re so damn easy and fun to draw. They don’t have prominent dorsal fins (or many other extraneous details), they have big goofy heads, and the tusks are just magical. I’ve drawn them as cartoons and done several narwhal paintings, which always lead to fun conversations about whales and conservation in general.

 

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Go figure! So what whale are we talking about next month?

Haven’t decided yet. There are just so many interesting whale species, both in the news and out of the public eye. I guess you’ll just have to wait and see…

Can I sing the narwhal song now?

Sure, just wait for me to leave the room.

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

Whale of the Month: Minke Whale

The post Whale of the Month: Narwhals appeared first on The Revelator.

The change of seasons gives us a chance to reflect on the environmental issues that affect us all.

Here are several new books about wildlife, climate change, and biological diversity that offer intriguing insights into the transformations occurring in our world and ways we can enjoy, protect, and observe the transformation from summer to autumn.

We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You can also find any of these titles through your local bookseller and library.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness

by Cal Flyn

From the black sand beaches of Iceland and rivers of the Amazon to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wildernesses make up some of the world’s more alluring natural landscapes. Flyn sees a powerful, ancient concept at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. For thousands of years, people have sought out uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from daily life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans.

This book takes us into the breathtaking wilds — dark forests, mountaintops, and the hearts of deserts — asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.

Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change

by Kyle Devine

Can music save the world? We’re witnessing a climate-oriented transformation of what music is and how it comes to be. Recomposed shows how musicians around the world are using the cultural power of music to link climate awareness to climate action.

Award-winning author and academic Kyle Devine profiles EarthPercent, founded by Brian Eno and others to help funnel money from the music business to climate causes. Devine enrolls in a course led by ClimateEQ, which teaches carbon literacy for the music industry. He investigates a platform to help musicians finance solar energy and embeds himself in a dynamic cast of manufacturers and inventors seeking ways to make records more sustainable, from recycling old vinyl to making discs from bioplastic. At the center of this multifaceted story is the climate impact of music festivals and touring musicians.

End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World

by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

As the planet burns and shared reality melts, a new iteration of the far right is on the march. How can we understand this dangerous new development, and what resources can we draw on to resist it? In their assessment of the contemporary scene, activists and authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explore how the religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists, and ethno-nationalists who make up this apocalyptic alliance share more than one might think: They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, whether through the manifestation of messianic prophecy, the rampages of a resource- and job-consuming artificial intelligence, or the purported existential threat of immigration and cultural replacement. Rather than avoiding this conflagration, they welcome it, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side.

End Times Fascism is the ideology of the actors who strive to make the world unlivable and then seek to protect themselves from the fallout — whether by repairing to luxurious private islands, rocketing off to Mars, or bunkering the nation to keep their enemies at bay. The new survivalists have accumulated power, but they are far from impregnable. As Klein and Taylor show via original reporting and analysis, their many internal conflicts and contradictions and their nihilistic inability to envision a shared future, even for their ostensible allies, leave them vulnerable to a new kind of “pro-life” politics — rooted in reverence for our shared existence and regard for the earth we inhabit and must protect.

Water Lines: A Life on Marshes, Rivers, Seas and In the Rain

by Riverhorse Nakadate

A collection of essays from Riverhorse Nakadate — angler, musician, conservationist, and lifelong nomad — whose devotion to wild places and the healing power of water pulses through every page. For readers of Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, and Jim Harrison, this book is a soulful invitation to step off the grid and into the current.

Across 32 essays Nakadate paddles, hikes, casts, surfs, and canoes through landscapes as varied as the alpine lakes of Colorado, the salt marshes of his native Texas, the trout streams of Minnesota, and the mangrove swamps of the Yucatán. Whether he’s chasing redfish in a hurricane, rescuing baby squirrels or migrating monarch butterflies, or honoring his mother’s legacy with a canoe ride and a slice of sweet potato pie, Nakadate reflects on solitude, friendship, loss, and the quiet heroism of those who strive to protect our wild spaces. A celebration of living deliberately and listening deeply to the rhythms of the earth.

The Shell Seeker: Encounters With Thirty Seashells

by Juli Berwald

Seashells are marvels; beachcombing adults and children alike are transfixed by their natural beauty and striking architecture. Discover all the incredible details of these stunning homes for mollusks and other marine life. Renowned science writer Juli Berwald draws on her passion for the ocean and its great treasures to reveal the remarkable and surprising features of 30 shells found on the shorelines of North America and oceans around the worl

Books for kids and young readers, including titles that can be paired with several of the selections above.

The Green Kids Club Books

Kids will love this collection of engaging wildlife-centered stories that help them understand the importance of nurturing our planet and its animal inhabitants. Founder Sylvia M. Medina saw a need to introduce kids to a range of animal species from around the world, exploring real issues related to habitat protection, wildlife survival, and the people working to help them.

This eye-opening book collection features stories from the wolf matriarchs of Yellowstone to a family of red foxes in the San Juan Islands to a baby elephant in Botswana and lion cubs in the African savanna. Many of the books are based on true stories, including the popular Grizzly 399 titles, one of the most famous and heavily reported-on bears in the world. All Green Kids Club titles include a science section in the back with photos and animal facts. Many have documentary films for kids to watch in synch with reading the books. The company also offers books that use Noah Text® to help make the stories accessible to all kids, including those with dyslexia as well as young English language learners.

This Book Will Make You a Scientist

by Dr. Sheila Kanani, with Ellen Surrey (Illustrator)

This book encourages kids to get excited about and become scientists by exploring 25 different scientific concepts inspired by ground-breaking scientists through history.

Children can learn to measure the speed of light like Albert Einstein, or train to be an astronaut like Mae Jemison and communicate with chimpanzees like Jane Goodall. This fact-filled book of step-by-step science experiments for kids are easy to try at home so children can explore subjects like DNA, electricity, evolution and gravity. This imaginative book is jam-packed with ideas for aspiring scientists everywhere.

Felix Powell, Boy Squirrel

by Erin Entrada Kelly and illustrated by Erin Entrada Kelly

Felix Powell loves to climb trees. He loves to run and jump and hide. But he’s never shoved acorns into his cheeks. He’s never gnawed at twigs to build a nest. And he’s certainly never worried about being eaten by hawks. Until now.

When his magic blanket turns Felix from an eight-year-old aspiring zoologist into a squirrel, Felix discovers that there’s more to squirrelhood than meets the eye. Will Felix triumph, avoiding predators and helping his new squirrel friend? Will he learn to jump and leap and climb? And will he turn back into a boy in time for dinner with his grandmother?

We Are the Keystones: Animals That Hold Habitats Together

by Katy S. Duffield with Hannah Salyer (Illustrator)

Meet keystone species — the hidden heroes of the natural world — and learn about the ecosystems they support in this marvelous nonfiction picture book.

Keystone species are plants, animals, or other organisms that have a huge effect on the environments around them. From beavers to elephants, alligators to hummingbirds, keystones help themselves and other species survive. Whether it’s creating habitats for themselves and other animals, leaving behind leftovers that fertilize the soil, or clearing out harmful algae, keystones live up to their name in their essential contribution to the harmony of our natural world.

That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives to help make the end of summer fun and engaging for yourself and the young people around you.

And let us know what you’re reading: Drop us an email to ccrary@biologicaldiversity.org

The post New Environmental Books: Summer-to-Autumn Reads for the Whole Family appeared first on The Revelator.

In 2024 a team of scientists with a dry sense of humor announced the name of a newly discovered but extinct species: the obliterated whitefish.

Extinction is deadly serious, but you have to admit that’s a brilliant name for a species — a name that makes us sit up and take notice of the fact that we wiped that creature out of existence.

Wordplay like that, along with other forms of comedy and satire addressing critical issues, can cut through the crap and make us think about things from angles we hadn’t considered.

They can also help release some of the damned tension and get us out of our seemingly endless cycles of doomscrolling.

Plus, sometimes it feels like laughter itself is an endangered species. In a world where political lampoons, criticism of authority, and free speech are increasingly under threat — just look at the void left by the end of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show — we need the edginess of humor more than ever.

The Revelator isn’t a comedic publication, but over the past nine years we’ve used humor more often than most other environmental publications to mock, educate, inform, or blast through the noise. Obviously all humor is subjective — one person’s comedy is another’s tragedy, or a demagogue’s perceived insult — but here are some of our favorites:

Living Will Template for Critically Endangered Species by Elizabeth Preston — Satire wielded like a scalpel.

Wasted Water: The Crappiest Places in America — Literally by Dipika Kadaba — Visuals that go a long way toward making a distasteful story more palatable.

Pattie Gonia: Nature’s Warrior Queen by Gabrielle Faust — This climate-fighting drag queen is a hoot (and a force of nature).

Critical Critters Call for Gonzovationists — Artist Ralph Steadman and writer Ceri Levy make us laugh while worrying about extinction.

Global Warming Funnies — An interview with cartoonist Tom Toro discussing humor as fuel for resistance. (For ongoing Tom Toro cartoons, subscribe to our newsletter.)

Time to Let This Conservation Jargon Go Extinct? — In which I mock some overused but underdeveloped language to make a point or six.

A Cartoonist Finds Hope Amid the Apocalypse(s) — A dual interview with Peter Kuper about his two new environmental books.

A Gulf of Misunderstanding by Karl Meyer — A journalist blasts righteous anger as President Trump tries to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico.

Here There Be Monsters (Made of Coal, Plastic and Pesticides) — Artists Laura and Gary Dumm challenge viewers with images of pop-culture monsters facing ecological collapse.

Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife — The reviews aren’t so funny, but check out the books.

‘Three Rivers of Woe’ — David Quammen on Climate Change, Extinction, and Epidemics — Okay, I’ll admit it, this one doesn’t sound like a laugh riot, but Quammen (a bestselling author) talks about the value of humor in getting readers to care about environmental issues. (Similarly, wildlife journalist Jason Bittel discussed the role of humor in his writing when I interviewed him about his book, Grizzled.)

Let’s Rename the Day After Thanksgiving ‘Extinction Friday’ — Commercialism seen through the lens of its inanity.

Let’s Put More Effort Into Investigating and Prosecuting Environmental Crimes — Sometimes the photo accompanying an article serves an extra purpose.

A Steal of a Deal: How Ranchers Take Advantage of Public Lands by Dipika Kadaba and John R. Platt — A fun video on an unfun practice.

The Earth Reviews Her Activists by Rev. Billy Talen — One of many essays we’ve published by this singular activist, who headlines an artistic activist group and choir. Talen, whom we’ve also interviewed, and his partner Savitri D are masters at using confrontational humor.

Finally, here are some book columns that include a few tomes satirizing the people and systems causing climate change and other environmental problems:

• • Summer Reads: Lost Birds, Pummeled Pumas and Climate Anxiety
  • Revelator Reads: 15 Random Books That Every Environmentalist Should Read
  • 12 Environmental Novels We’re Reading This Fall
  • ‘We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us’ — December’s Most Important Environmental Books

What are your favorite examples of using humor to help the planet? Send your suggestions to comments@therevelator.org — and look forward to (or look out for) more satire or outrage from us in the weeks ahead.

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This June customs officers in Hong Kong intercepted eight cartons supposedly containing frozen fish fillets on their way from Mexico to Vietnam. The packages, they found, also included 149 kilograms (about 330 pounds) of dried fish bladders suspected to come from protected totoaba, a critically endangered fish species that swims in the Gulf of California.

Officials estimated the smuggled fish bladders — organs that help with buoyancy and that are known as fish maw after they’ve been dried — had a street value of more than $3 million.

The international trade in fish maw, which can come from many fish species, is responsible for the bycatch deaths of countless other marine organisms, including the vaquita, one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals, whose population currently numbers fewer than 10.

Fish maw is one of the most valuable seafood products in the world, and that demand is spurring increased catch of a growing number of large and threatened fish species, according to a 2020 report from TRAFFIC, a nongovernmental organization addressing wildlife trade.

Dried fish maw for sale at a market in Hong Kong. Photo credit Yvonne Sadovy, PhD

Scientists and conservationists continue to raise the alarm about huge increases in the catch of these species, which has mostly gone unrecognized, unreported, and unregulated.

A Rapid Expansion

Though the fish maw trade is expanding in terms of the numbers of species and countries involved, it has a long history of human consumption.

“In prepared form, it’s used primarily by those from Southern China,” says Dr. Yvonne Sadovy, the emeritus chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Groupers and Wrasses Specialist Group. “It’s a seafood delicacy long used for special family and business dining occasions. In more recent years it’s been heavily promoted for health and beauty uses because of its collagen content. In the past it’s even been used in many countries … for beer and wine clarification.”

Experts now say the fish maw trade, which is poorly studied and mostly unregulated, is exploding in size.

A fish market in Brazil with hundreds of fish bladders from various species for sale. Photo credit: Patricia Charvet

“Our situation now is similar to the early days of the shark fin trade,” says Stan Shea, the marine program director of BLOOM Association Hong Kong. “In the past nobody understood the scale of the shark fin trade, volumes and values, which countries and territories were involved. It’s the same for fish maw now.”

Indeed, as successful conservation regulations for the shark fin trade come into effect in Hong Kong and elsewhere, the fish maw trade seems to be replacing much of it.

“I don’t remember seeing a lot of fish maw in the dried seafood markets that I visited during the 1990s and 2000s, but it’s striking that today fish maw is visually far more abundant than shark fin,” says Sarah Fowler, the scientific advisor for the Save Our Seas Foundation. Fowler also pointed out that the fish maw trade involves lots of the same trade routes as the old shark fin trade and has a similarly devastating impact on both target species and bycatch species.

Dangerous Effects on the Wild

Many of the fish species targeted for their swim bladders — especially large fish — are themselves overfished or endangered, including sturgeon, totoaba, and bahaba. As with the shark fin trade, rarer species are more valuable.

“A century ago just a handful of species were used for the fish maw trade,” Dr. Sadovy tells me. “Today all of those original species are of conservation concern, and the number of species used in the trade has greatly increased.”

Dried fish maw from many species for sale at a fish market in Hong Kong.
Photo credit: Animal Welfare Institute, courtesy Sue Fisher

Dried fish maw from many species for sale at a fish market in Hong Kong. Photo credit: Animal Welfare Institute, courtesy Sue Fisher

And the gillnets used to catch these fish are indiscriminate, resulting in bycatch issues similar to those facing the vaquita. In a paper titled “Maw Money Maw Problems,” scientists documented bycatch of critically endangered sawfish, sea turtles, and dugongs in nets targeting fish for their fish maws in Papua New Guinea. In Bangladesh scientists documented bycatch of critically endangered sharks and rays.

The lack of data on this trade and its impacts is itself a conservation problem, making it difficult to target effective conservation interventions.

“Because the huge increase in demand for fish maw is still very recent, the impacts of new fisheries popping up all over the world to supply this booming trade have mostly not been assessed,” Fowler tells me.

First Steps to Address This Problem

Even with data gaps, what we know so far is alarming and shows a clear need for urgent conservation intervention. And the scope of the trade suggests a clear path for intervention: The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

“Given that the trade involves over 110 countries that we know of, CITES is very important to help regulate it,” Stan Shea told me.

Searching for “fish maw” online yields store results. Revelator screenshot July 15, 2026

While CITES only hosts a Conference of the Parties every three years, this July, its Animals Committee met  to discuss the agenda for the next COP. In March a coalition of environmental nonprofits called on the committee to establish a working group focusing on documenting the fish maw problem in support of future solutions, and to put the fish maw trade on their agenda as a standing item.

“The Animals Committee can play an important role in improving scientific knowledge of maw fisheries and their impacts,” says Sadovy. “Several IUCN specialist groups are ready to contribute to the proposed working group to compile information on the species in trade, trade dynamics, and conservation status.”

Many of the scientists’ requests — including establishing a formal working group to focus on fish maw issues and putting the fish maw trade on the agenda as a standing agenda item — did not receive enough support at the Animals Committee meeting.

But one of the requested action items — asking major fish maw fishing nations to document what species are targeted and their conservation status, along with trade routes — was successful.

The experts I spoke with were broadly happy with the outcome.

Meanwhile, the calls for change proceed on other fronts. A recent TRAFFIC report called for the creation of a dedicated World Customs Organization code for fish maw, training for law enforcement, and drafting national-level conservation legislation to regulate the fish maw trade.

We still have a long way to go before we can fully understand and regulate the fish maw trade, but the experts interviewed with this article agree that it’s now a race to protect affected fish populations and species.

“There is a real need to manage fisheries which heavily target species for their maw,” Sadovy says, “because these include some of the most valuable and vulnerable exploited fish species in the world.”

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

Saving the Vaquita: New Promises and New Threats

 

The post Fish Maw: An Emerging Ocean Conservation Nightmare appeared first on The Revelator.

On Sept. 16, 2025, an estimated 100,000 people flooded the streets of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third-most populous city, in one of the largest environmental mobilizations in the country’s recent history. Protesters marched under a simple slogan: “We are water.”

The demonstration was aimed at stopping mining projects in Quimsacocha, a fragile, high-altitude ecosystem that supplies water to hundreds of thousands of people across southern Ecuador. But beneath the immediate conflict over mining lies a deeper struggle over how people understand their relationship with the natural world.

For decades Ecuador has been at the center of a global experiment. In 2008 it became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its Constitution, transforming ideas rooted in Indigenous cosmologies into enforceable legal principles. Yet translating those ideas into political reality has proven far more difficult than writing them into law.

To understand how environmental movements bridge radically different worldviews — from Indigenous understandings of territory to the language of constitutional law, science, and public policy — I spoke with David Fajardo Torres, an environmental activist, lawyer, and member of Yasunidos, a movement defending Ecuador’s ecosystems from extractive industries.

Our conversation explored how narratives shape environmental conflicts, why metaphors such as “We are water” can mobilize entire communities, and what Ecuador’s experience reveals about the challenges of communicating across competing visions of nature, development, and progress.

This interview was conducted during a research visit in Ecuador in November 2025, carried out as part of the research field work for a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy and social communication.

Environmental movements often struggle to turn complex ecological issues into stories that people can relate to. Yet in Cuenca the slogan “We are water” helped mobilize more than 100,000 people. What makes that metaphor so powerful?

In Cuenca one of our most powerful narratives connects the city — not merely as an urban center, but as a territory shaped by a long and ancient history — to water. We are water people. That idea has become the central metaphor that unites communities and guides our resistance to mining projects.

These projects threaten the páramos, the high-altitude Andean ecosystems that serve as natural water reservoirs. The páramos regulate water flows, sustain extraordinary biodiversity, and supply freshwater not only to Cuenca, but also to the Amazon basin and Ecuador’s Pacific coast.

El Cajas National Park is a high-altitude wetland area with many lakes, streams, and páramo ecosystems that store and filter water. Photo by Alice Deliau.

For us the phrase “We are water” is both symbolic and literal. Human beings are made largely of water, but the expression goes beyond biology. It reflects how we understand ourselves: as part of rivers, lakes, forests, and páramos rather than separate from them. It allows us to connect three dimensions of Cuenca at once — Cuenca as a city, Cuenca as a territory, and Cuenca as an ecosystem.

This narrative has proven remarkably effective. During the mass mobilization in September, many people referred to the protest as Cuenca’s Fifth River, a reference to the city’s historic nickname, Santa Ana de los Cuatro Ríos — the City of Four Rivers. The metaphor captured something deeper than political opposition to mining. It expressed a biocultural identity in which water is not merely a resource but a defining part of who we are. Without its rivers, Cuenca would not exist.

On Sept. 16, 2025, an estimated 100,000 people flooded the streets of Cuenca with the message “Kimsa cocha no se toca” (“Quimsacocha Is Not to Be Touched”), uniting communities to protect one of Ecuador’s most important water sources from pollution from mining activities. Photo by Alice Deliau.

Cuenca’s identity is rooted in conflict between nature and industry?

Cuenca was founded three times: first by the Cañari people, then by the Incas, and later by the Spanish colonizers. Despite these very different civilizations, all three settlements shared one essential foundation: water.

The valley is crossed by four rivers and countless smaller waterways known as quebradas, which remain just as important to the region’s ecological health. Water has shaped every chapter of Cuenca’s history and every layer of its identity.

This is not a new conflict. As early as the colonial period, local authorities faced a choice between gold and water. Extracting mineral wealth often threatened the water sources on which communities depended. Time and again, Cuenca chose water.

That choice continues today. For more than three decades, local communities have defended water sources in areas such as Quimsacocha and Río Blanco against mining projects, gradually building support far beyond rural communities and into the city itself.

In 2021 nearly 80% of voters in a local referendum supported a ban on mining in the páramos that supply water to the region. Four years later, tens of thousands of people returned to the streets to reaffirm that decision. For us this is not simply an environmental debate. Water remains the foundation of our identity, and defending it means defending the future of Cuenca itself.

Cuenca, Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. During the mass mobilization in September 2025, many people referred to the protest as Cuenca’s Fifth River, a reference to the city’s historic, colonial nickname, Santa Ana de los Cuatro Ríos — the City of Four Rivers. Photo by Alice Deliau.

One of the recurring tensions in environmental politics is whether nature should be protected because it serves human needs (anthropocentric view), or because it possesses intrinsic value and rights of its own (biocentric). Is this a real conflict, or are we dealing with different ways of understanding the same relationship between humans and nature?

That’s a very good question. In Ecuador we are increasingly realizing that it is impossible to fulfill human rights without also respecting the rights of nature. Most human rights ultimately depend on healthy ecosystems.

If we destroy the ecosystems on which we depend, we undermine the very conditions that make a dignified life possible. For us, that is the central horizon: living with dignity.

This idea is deeply connected to the philosophy of Sumak Kawsay. It is often translated as “good living,” but that translation is incomplete. A better interpretation would be vivir en plenitud — living in fullness or living in harmony. At its core, Sumak Kawsay is about flourishing alongside nature, not apart from it.

From this perspective, there is no fundamental separation between humanity and nature. We are one species within a much larger web of life. Ecology, after all, is the sum of the relationships that sustain life on this planet. Every species, every ecosystem, plays a role within that network.

The problem is that modern capitalist societies have encouraged us to see not only a distinction between humans and nature, but a hierarchy. Humans are placed at the top, while nature is reduced to an object that exists to serve our needs.

You mentioned anthropocentrism and biocentrism. In Ecuador, however, we increasingly speak about ecocentrism. Ecocentrism shifts the focus away from individual actors — whether humans or nature — and toward the relationships that connect them. It is not about separating humanity from nature, but about understanding the complex web of relationships that makes life possible.

Scientific concepts such as ecology increasingly emphasize relationships, ideas that seem to resonate with many Indigenous worldviews. Can scientific language serve as a bridge between Indigenous knowledge and the modern industrial world?

It can, and I think it is one of the keys — but not the only one. In many cases Western science is only now beginning to understand ideas that Indigenous peoples have lived with for centuries: the importance of relationships, diversity, and interdependence. The difference is that modern science often seeks universal explanations, a single framework capable of describing the world as a whole.

Indigenous worldviews tend to operate differently. They do not necessarily aspire to explain everything through one universal lens. Even among Indigenous peoples, there is enormous diversity. The Shuar and the Amazonian Kichwa, for example, have distinct ways of understanding the world.

For the Shuar, the forest is not an external environment but a community to which they belong. The Amazon is so rich and biodiverse that it provides everything necessary for life. Because they see themselves as part of that living system, the goal is not endless accumulation or growth but maintaining the relationships that sustain life.

Mining companies often argue that modern science allows them to extract resources responsibly. They present environmental studies and technical expertise as evidence that mining can coexist with ecological protection. How persuasive is that narrative?

One of the biggest mistakes is to focus only on what can be measured. Statistics and technical reports are important, but they never tell the whole story.

In Ecuador we work with a concept known as the dialogue of knowledges — a conversation between different ways of understanding the world. This idea is reflected in our Constitution, particularly in the articles recognizing the Rights of Nature.

Take the concept of Pachamama. It is often translated as “Mother Earth,” but that translation is incomplete. Pacha refers not only to the Earth, but to the space-time in which life unfolds — the Earth, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the cycles that connect them. Mama means mother. In that sense, Pachamama is closer to a living cosmos than to a simple environmental concept.

Nature, by contrast, is a concept that emphasizes relationships. Those relationships are not confined to the planet itself. Life on Earth depends on the sun, the moon, and countless natural cycles that can be observed scientifically — from the tides to seasonal rhythms. In Ecuador’s Constitution, Pachamama and nature are treated as equivalent concepts, allowing us to defend the Rights of Nature through both scientific and Indigenous knowledge.

As a lawyer specializing in the Rights of Nature, I build cases using multiple forms of knowledge. We rely on science, Indigenous knowledge, and the knowledge of rural and peasant communities, all of which are essential for understanding and defending ecosystems.

The problem is that many mining companies rely on a very narrow understanding of science. Their science is designed primarily to facilitate extraction and economic growth. It leaves little room for dialogue between different ways of knowing.

I am not criticizing science itself. There is a science that seeks to understand nature, question its own assumptions, and engage with other forms of knowledge. That kind of science is indispensable. But there is also a science that serves capital, markets, and extractive industries. The challenge is to distinguish between the two.

For us, the Rights of Nature are possible only through a genuine dialogue between scientific and Indigenous knowledge. Otherwise we risk reducing Pachamama to a slogan or falling into simplistic narratives about nature that fail to address the complexity of the living world.

Rivers Puyo and Pastaza, November 2025. Puyo and Pastaza rivers support Amazonian aquatic ecosystems: provide habitats for fish, amphibians, insects, and riverside plants. They also help maintain rainforest biodiversity, but are sensitive to pollution, deforestation, and urban growth. Photo by Alice Deliau.

What do you mean by the narrow narrative of Pachamamismo?

For us, Pachamamismo can become a shallow narrative when it reduces complex realities to slogans. Much of the contemporary discourse around Pachamama risks becoming symbolic rather than transformative.

To challenge the narratives of mining companies and extractive industries, we need something deeper: a genuine dialogue between different forms of knowledge. And when I speak of science, I do not mean only biology or physics. I also mean anthropology, sociology, law, and other disciplines. Indigenous peoples, too, possess their own systems of knowledge, law, and social organization. What matters is the conversation between them.

This is important because knowledge itself is never fixed. What a society considers rational, scientific, or legitimate changes over time. The challenge is not to replace one worldview with another, but to create a dialogue between them.

At the heart of the conflict over mining and extractivism lies a struggle between two competing visions of development. One assumes that development follows a universal path, with nature treated primarily as a resource and humans placed above it. The other begins from a different premise: that humans are part of nature and that development should strengthen, rather than undermine, the ecological relationships on which life depends.

For us the key question is not whether development should occur, but what role human societies should play within the ecosystems they inhabit. The answer will be different in every territory. The ecological realities of Cuenca are not the same as those of Poland, just as their histories and relationships with nature are different.

In Cuenca our responsibility is to protect water sources, páramos, rivers, and lakes. That requires adapting our institutions and planning systems to ecological realities rather than forcing ecosystems to adapt to economic demands.

Today, we have powerful tools that help us think this way. The Ecosystem Approach developed by the IUCN and the concept of planetary boundaries developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre both remind us that human societies operate within ecological limits. Those limits are not obstacles to development; they are the conditions that make life possible.

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How does a young wolf learn how to be a wolf?

Genetics certainly plays a role, but so do the knowledge and techniques passed on by the previous generation of wolves, who teach their young how to hunt, what areas to avoid, and how and when to howl (and what each variation in those howls means).

And much like human dialects and accents, wolf howls vary depending on where a wolf grows up. Research published a few years ago found that wolves around the world have at least 21 different types of regional howls.

In other words, wolves — and many other species — have unique regional cultures, just like people.

Should preserving those nonhuman cultures be a more important element of wildlife conservation?

A new short communication in the journal Oryx argues just that — and suggests how to make it happen.

Written by David Jennings, Heather Harl, and Andrew Carter of Defenders of Wildlife’s Center for Conservation Innovation, the paper does a deep dive into how behavior is reflected in decision-making for the Endangered Species Act and other conservation laws in the United States.

Behavior, they write, is one factor in a list of five that can be used to designate a distinct population segment of a vertebrate species as a discrete and significant group worthy of conservation (rather than or in addition to protecting a species as a whole). It can’t be the only factor, but in theory it could be a major one. (Other factors include physical, genetic, or ecological differences and international boundaries.)

Distinct population segments don’t receive Endangered Species Act protection very often — Atlantic salmon in the Gulf of Maine are a noteworthy example — and the authors didn’t find many examples where behavior played a deciding role to date. “[N]on-human animal culture was considered in distinct population segment listing determinations only twice,” they write, “both of which were for discreteness findings; once for the orca Orcinus orca in 2005, and once for the false killer whale Pseudorca crassidens in 2012.”

They found more evidence of nonhuman culture being used in the recovery plans required to be written for each species protected under the Endangered Species Act — but again, those were all restricted to whales.

The authors argue that it may be time to change that and start using nonhuman culture more often as a component of the best-available science required by the Endangered Species Act, because preserving culture may make animals more likely to survive. “Recognizing and conserving these cultures is important because socially transmitted behaviors can contribute to fitness, as well as indicate the extent to which groups may be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions,” they write.

On the other hand, they say using culture to establish a distinct population segment should “be used sparingly and not solely to divide a species and delist a specific population.”

Either way, it wouldn’t be easy. And as a strategy, it’s not immediately ready for widespread adoption because there aren’t many guidelines for using animal culture in this way — and because culture evolves rapidly. “Implementing the ESA for a distinct population segment based on distinctive cultures would potentially be challenging, given, for example, that cultures can be dynamic, and that conserving them may not always be as straightforward as simply protecting habitat,” they write.

Still, they provide several recommendations on how to start rolling it out, including integrating nonhuman culture into broader concepts of biodiversity protection in the Endangered Species Act and other laws and policies.

That seems unlikely to happen quickly given the Trump administration’s ambivalence, apathy, and antipathy toward wildlife conservation and the Endangered Species Act. But the paper serves as an important reminder that culture is worth preserving — whether it’s in our cities, our neighborhoods, or in the wild.

Here’s some additional recent research about nonhuman culture:

Patricia Izar, Erica van de Waal, Martha M. Robbins; Integrating culture into primate conservation. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 1 May 2025; 380 (1925): 20240135. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0135

Greggor, Alison L., ‘Animal Culture in Biodiversity Conservation’, in Jamshid J. Tehrani, Rachel L. Kendal, and Jeremy Kendal (eds), Applications, in Jamshid J. Tehrani, Jeremy Kendal, and Rachel L. Kendal (eds), Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution, Oxford Library of Psychology (2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Feb. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198869252.013.74

Whiten, Andrew, et al. “Collective Knowledge and the Dynamics of Culture in Chimpanzees.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, vol. 377, no. 1843, 2022, pp. 1–9. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27096992

Nöbel, S., Jacquet, A., Isabel, G., Pocheville, A., Seabright, P. and Danchin, E. (2023), Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture. Biol Rev, 98: 132-149. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12899

Fredriksen, A. (2025). Re-sounding spring: listening to planetary crisis and survival in recombinant birdsong. Cultural Geographies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474025138686

Pilar Roncero, Olivia de Mendonça-Furtado, Patrícia Izar, Human-induced rapid environmental change: A case study showing negative impact on animal culture, Journal for Nature Conservation, Volume 74, 2023, 126424, ISSN 1617-1381, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnc.2023.126424

Fitzpatrick, S., Andrews, K. Animal cultures matter for conservation, but also to animals. Learn Behav 54, 163–179 (2026). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-025-00700-4 

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

Species Spotlight: The Straw-Headed Bulbul Sings About Extinction

 

The post Conserving Culture in Endangered Species appeared first on The Revelator.

Originally published at the “Earth Chxrch” page of Neil Young’s Times-Contrarian. Talen is the religion editor at the Contrarian.  

The distance between our realization and actualization has changed — and it is a tragic dangerous thing that you and I share. Realizing can come in many forms. With the environmental movement the realization was the reading of Silent Spring. (For others among us, it was Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.) That book by Rachel Carson made the danger from toxic chemicals in the air, water and soil — and our bodies — very real. We saw the danger. We could imagine and fear it. We were motivated to act.

We need to study the distance between realization and actualization, between oppression and revolution, between information and fight-or-flight. That distance, the billionaires and captains of the investor class have discovered, is the key to their control.

The old belief in journalism, and in the courts, and in the common sense of democracy is “If we have the facts, we can act.” In the United States the distance between realization and actualization has become an impassable distance. Our sensory experience of a thing has been blown up and filled with light, with attention-manipulating vibrating light, a bubble of signals the size of Grand Central Station, and we float around inside its delicious weightlessness — and we can’t kill the screen and get out of our chair.

If we become aware of the global heatwave that flared into fires and droughts in the summer of 2023 and is still overheating us, then we have before us endless pages of pixels, featuring the agony and suffering of the innocent of the world. We struggle to walk thousands of miles with climate refugees. We cry with parents of a child overcome by heat. We listen to wise biologists, as systems of natural life die and extinction looms.

So far all this reality on the screen amounts to one big human hesitation. We keep wondering why there is no uprising against the current increasingly silent spring. We are lost in the over-developed realization of danger. Ironically, the realization is increasingly unreal. We are growing a vivid and very convincing realization of a mass mortality event, but we can’t kill the screen and rise from our chair.

The strongmen and the billionaires are aware that AI will gives us as never before the sensation of democracy while pushing any action off the horizon. All-information, all-the-time will leave us overloaded and listless. Big money learned long ago to handle the irony of that in the age of AI. The ordinary computer users would know much more about the truth of their toxins and bullets, union-busting, and tax-evading. But the masters of the universe are secure in the knowledge that we will stay put in our dopamine drop.

Meanwhile the revolution against the Earth killers cannot be put off another day. The disappearance of life of all kinds is only accelerating. The climate change may be irreversible now, but if we don’t try, if we continue to put our hopes in the COP parlays with big oil, if we go on believing that our radical standing up cannot happen — then consumerism, the products and the screens and nonsense wars must prevail. Realize a dead planet with the occasional billionaire bunker…

Now is a moment in our history we cannot get wrong. And there is a battle that can set things right. The data centers multiplying now like an international rash are plundering energy and water, buying off local politicians, and daring us to cross from our realization to our action. The all-partisan uprising against the ugly super-warehouses is heartening. But the State of Virginia already hosts over 600 data centers. This battle may go on for years against the might of Silicon Valley, but in the struggle we will dramatize a clear message… and escape from that cathedral size bubble of pixels.

Will we escape that AI mind-prison? Will we take what we realize over into what we actually do? It’s like remembering how to love.

Remembering How to Love

There would be a moment in the realization-actualization cycle where we could be independent, kill the screen and stand up and walk into media-free reality…. and let’s call that moment The Decision. As the realization becomes the actualization there is a border, a moment when all the information is gathered and we stop, we make the decision to act. We commit.

We shut down the information which favors inactivity, sluggish consideration, endless assessment (although with AI maybe it’s more like a happy druggy sort of drifting… ). When we are finally free of all that, we say “Got It! Let’s Do It! Let’s Go!”

We are simplifying, aren’t we. We are consciously sharpening that learn-decide-act sequence. Why is this important. It’s that this preventable mass mortality event that is taking place — we’re sitting in a chair watching a screen. We could be organizing a drama at the door of Gaza-financing and AI-financing JPMorgan Chase, or we could be singing at a data center-resisting rally, or we could be screaming through the cyclone fence at an ICE concentration camp.

But the screen addiction takes our body far away from the global emergency. In our consumer society nowadays, with the screen the main product, consumerism is in a battle with the crisis of the physical environment. This is a battle for the attention of the consumer.

If the product wins, we lose our lives.

That is the message we tell ourselves at the moment of The Decision, at the start of action. So far for most of us, The Decision and the start of action continue to be a watching-only experience. Even if The Decision is consciously a turning away from this strong medium; even if we know we won’t be able to do our work for the Earth unless we turn away from the screen — chances are we are still watching. Oh yes, lots of the most powerful condemnation of the computer is done at the very computer that is being condemned.

The Revolution Will Not Be Computerized. In the end, we need to sober up. And for most of us, The Decision can’t be vague and shaky. We must make the decision to act with computers or iPhones not in the room.

Let’s practice. Demonstrate to ourselves that we can do it. Practice ending the incoming information. Practice stopping and making the decision. Practice obeying the decision, moving into the action.

Go to the wild Earth every day, walk in the woods, float in the lake. The infinite mystery of the Earth saves us if we let it. That’s the way that the Earth will save herself, taking the humans off-line. Letting us remember how to love.

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