Light Pollution Is an Environmental Disaster Unfolding
Author
Stephen R. Dujack - Environmental Law Institute
Environmental Law Institute
Current Issue
July-August 2023
Issue
4

The very first science was astronomy. After all, the sky is a laboratory open to everyone. It also has always been an environmental domain—people inhabit the ecosystem that embraces both the stars above and the Earth below and have long endowed both realms with important properties affecting the human condition. Mastering the two domains was important to the emergence and survival of early civilizations.

Ancient humans populated the heavens with immutable figures from their environment, such as bears, rams, bulls, whales, and more. Early civilizations identified the planets as wandering deities, finding meaning in their movements. They tracked the motions of the Sun through their versions of the zodiac. They observed the equinoxes and solstices. They found portents in comets, eclipses, and meteor showers. Civilizations in present-day China, Japan, Iran, and the Americas recorded the supernova of 1054 as full of tidings for their societies.

Humanity discovered both messages and inspiration in the realm above. In the Christian tradition, it was an astronomical event of great eminence that drew the three Wise Men to Bethlehem. And Christians, Jews, Muslims, Chinese and other societies alike still time at least some of their holidays using a lunar calendar.

With the advent of agriculture, communities needed to know when to sow seed and relied on the stars to tell them. Eventually, astronomers counseled kings and queens and potentates. They calculated eclipses and enforced the calendar. In Great Britain, there is still an Astronomer Royal, a post established in the 17th century. Today the Astronomer is paid 100 pounds a year and is considered a member of his majesty’s household. The nocturnal sky is so important to today’s society that the view of the heavens is a tourist attraction in planetariums. In that regard, the irony is that for most in the audience, the night outdoors has been all but lost.

Astronomy today is a vastly more powerful science than even a century ago, when humanity didn’t yet realize we inhabit just one galaxy of hundreds of billions, all rushing away from each other in an expanding universe. Those discoveries came from data gathered by astronomer Edwin Hubble starting in 1924, working the powerful telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California.

That great instrument and countless others throughout the world are now threatened by the pervasive light pollution that blankets much of the planet. Not only astronomy is at risk. Indeed, humanity is losing its connection to the night sky because of too much ground-based light, which reflects off atmospheric molecules to create a dim, pervasive haze that obscures all but the brightest stars. It is now all but impossible to see the Milky Way except in remote areas.

Importantly, a great deal of this light is waste—producing excess greenhouse gas emissions beyond reasonable needs for illumination. Indeed, the haze problem has worsened considerably just in the last few years, fueled in part by the lower operating cost of LED bulbs. Many buildings and facilities are illuminated all night, and citizens clamor for additional lighting to combat crime and make driving safer.

This is not just a problem for astronomers and amateur star gazers—it is a profound environmental problem that is just beginning to crest.

Many animals and plants depend on the solar cycle to orient their behavior. When night becomes day, that is a problem. Some burrowing animals avoid going out for feeding except when it’s really dark, forcing them into starvation. Many turtles use the moon to steer by when they come on land to lay their eggs. They are often confused by the lighting coming from beach houses; their spawn similarly become disoriented and end up as prey. Coral reefs bloom all at once with genetic material as a mating strategy timed to the phases of the moon—but now are often confused by onshore lighting. Many migrating birds steer by the stars, sometimes going off course because of too much light—helping to drive the plunge in avian species worldwide.

Moths, who are vital pollinators, in their brief life, time their mating to darkness; where there is too much light, pheromones change from positive to negative and romance becomes impossible. Whenever you see insects around your porch light, it is a sign that your convenience is disrupting their mating.

Scientific American explains how the loss of nighttime pollinators is important. In a 2017 experiment testing that hypothesis, scientists wearing night-vision goggles observed cabbage thistle plants. But the light haze “deterred nocturnal pollinating insects from making their rounds. . . . The plants bore less fruit, suggesting that the effects of brightening nights could eventually show up in supermarket aisles.” In the words of the magazine, “Artificial lights send the natural world a bewildering array of ill-timed signals—Wake up! Hide! Hunt! Fly this way! Change your metabolism!”

Scientists have recently calculated that the planet has lost 75 percent of its insect biomass, and researchers believe light pollution is an extinction driver for many insect species. Accompanying this loss is the vital role insects play in the planetary ecosystem, where seemingly insignificant organisms can prove essential to the health of the environment. And that is important to humanity, along with getting back the majesty of the night sky and the ability of any person to penetrate its eternal truths and mysteries by contemplation and close observation.

To view the night sky as environmental, consider the words of John Muir: “The floods of light from the stars . . . must always be wild, for man can change them and mar them hardly more than can the butterflies.” In the words of the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank: “He was wrong. Man found a way to blot out the floods of light from the stars.” According to Milbank, “Light-polluted skies cover an estimated 80 percent of the world’s population and 99 percent of the U.S. and European populations.”

Into this crisis comes a writer who some feel should rank with Rachel Carson. The book is The Darkness Manifesto (Scribner), by Johan Eklöf, a biologist from Sweden. The insect biomass decline cited earlier comes from his book, as do some of the examples above about the needs of organisms to have dark nights and clear skies. According to Eklöf, that list of organisms includes Homo sapiens.

In a review of the book, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik shows he has a way to pick anecdotes. For instance, in Britain one can rarely find bats in belfries anymore. The reason is that most churches shine bright lights on their steeples and bell towers all night, and the bats have left for somewhere darker.

Eklöf decries not just illuminated steeples but, according to Gopnik, especially “the ‘sky beam’ atop the Luxor Hotel, in Las Vegas. Creating forty-two billion candlepower [emphasis in original] of light every night, meant merely as a come-on to tourists and gamblers, it unintentionally excites and undoes flocks of birds, genetically programmed by evolution to fly toward bright light—and, in 2019, attracted clouds of grasshoppers, who flew toward the pseudo-Egyptian pyramid with all the horror of a pseudo-Egyptian plague.” That is an example of just deserts to a menace, but most light haze is caused by ignorance, carelessness, and pursuit of dark avoidance without care to the spillover effects.

The good news is that most of this excess light can be eliminated by best practices for cities and facilities. Street lights can be designed so no light shines upward, which sharply cuts operating costs to achieve the same advantages in traffic safety. Additionally, LED lights can be tuned to omit certain frequencies that cause the light haze bedeviling astronomers or that produce unwanted animal or plant responses, without inconvenience to the citizen, business, or municipality. Milbank advocates local campaigns to change over exterior lights for household crime prevention to bulbs that only turn on when they detect motion. The retrofit is painless and also provides energy savings.

According to Scientific American, astronomers at the Kitt Peak observatory formed the Dark Sky Association to combat this modern plague. The scientists succeeded in getting nearby Flagstaff, Arizona, to install new streetlamps and undertake other measures to help the telescope facility remain working. Such programs often save money for localities, businesses, and homeowners in addition to benefitting ecosystems and even avoiding greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. Sounds like an enlightened solution.

However, in a disturbing article, New Scientist reported last fall that “adverts in space are now economically viable.” The magazine notes that “companies could use constellations of satellites that reflect sunlight to Earth to create advertisements in the sky at a commercially viable cost of $65 million per mission.” The figure is the result of a feasibility study done by two experts. They claim that groups of as few as 50 satellites in low Earth orbit, each equipped with a reflector, could for a few days act as pixels to show an image. The ads would be viewable for a while after sunset for most of humanity. Imagine a corporate logo or a politician’s name. The image could be three times bigger than the full Moon.

Notice & Comment is written by the editor and represents his views.

SpaceX Launch System Allows Debris to Shower Texas Town

SpaceX’s high-profile rocket explosion on April 20 has angered environmental and civil liberty groups who are furious about the level of damage caused to the local environment in Texas. The explosion created significant pollution that impacted local communities, and could threaten endangered species on Boca Chica Beach near Brownsville, Texas. . . . .

Many people immediately took to social media to jab Elon Musk, the CEO, chairman and chief technology officer of SpaceX. While the launch wasn’t considered a complete defeat by the company (nor are explosions uncommon when testing rockets), the extreme damage caused by this one could have likely been prevented with a flame diverter, a structure that fits below a rocket launchpad that channels a rocket’s extreme heat and exhaust in a controlled way. The lack of a flame diverter scorched the landscape and plant life near the rocket pad, as post-launch pictures reveal. —Salon.com

Even now, with the sea level around Boston about a foot higher than it was a century ago, major storms have caused flooding in the Green Line near Fenway Station and at Aquarium Station on the Blue Line. But as seas rise another 1.4 feet by 2050, as NOAA has projected, even a relatively mundane storm—the kind that hits every two years—could cause massive damage to the T, inundating vast portions of the system. —Boston Globe

Nightime Light Pollution Is an Environmental Disaster Unfolding.

Science of Federal Air Regulation and State Wildlife Management
Author
Craig M. Pease - Former Law School Professor
Former Law School Professor
Current Issue
July-August 2023
Issue
4
Craig M. Pease

The wildlife management science underlying hunting and fishing regulation by the states is rather different from the science of federal toxics, wetlands, and carbon dioxide regulation. So too, the political milieu wherein science enters wildlife regulation is quite unlike the politics of science found in federal environmental regulation.

Connecticut deer management is governed by its own specific state statute, the White-tailed Deer Management Act of 1974. To document its implementation of that statute, the Connecticut Department of Energy and the Environment’s Wildlife Division publishes annually a “Deer Program Summary.” The herd is about 120,000, with about 8,000 killed annually by hunters, and about 18,000 deer killed in collisions with autos.

It is a complex regulatory scheme, with 12 deer management zones, and specific regulations pertaining to rifles, muzzleloaders, shotguns, revolvers, bows, crossbows, does, landowners hunting their own property, Sunday hunts, wearing orange, and hunting near dwellings. Layered over this are additional regulatory provisions specific to the urban areas in the southwest of the state that have way too many deer, including sharpshooters, tree stands, and special permit provisions to incentivize hunting there. The typical hunter is unsuccessful. But in theory, a hunter who carefully followed the regulations could, in a single year, take 14 deer.

As laid out in the most recent summary, the Wildlife Division bases the hunting regulations on data from prior year harvest record, hunter surveys, habitat studies, road kills, and acorn crop size, all indirect proxies for just counting deer. Extrapolating to deer herd size from these indirect data is not entirely straightforward. That said, by employing a mix of formal data analysis and qualitative judgment, I am confident that the Wildlife Division has an excellent understanding of the Connecticut deer herd, looking across the entire state.

Yet the state’s hunting regulations are specific and numerous. There is much more limited and uncertain data supporting any given specific regulation (e.g., a bow hunt on private property, in one specific management zone). In essence, the regulatory scheme itself has created its very own scientific uncertainty.

This scientific uncertainty is an entirely different situation from that which arises in federal regulation of particles known as PM2.5. There the scientific uncertainty arises because the regulations are working at the limit of the scientific frontier—the regulators are trying to regulate PM2.5 simultaneously as scientists are pushing back the PM2.5 scientific frontier. By contrast, there is not much of a Connecticut deer herd scientific frontier. The role of the Wildlife Division is not so much to purse new scientific knowledge, but rather, year-after-year, to gather the same data and apply the same analysis methodologies.

This is not a criticism of the Wildlife Division; it is a good thing, from the viewpoint of regulatory consistency. Indeed, although I have referred to the Wildlife Division’s deer population work as science, its role is more akin to engineering or medicine. Scientists seek new knowledge. Engineering and medicine apply existing knowledge.

In federal regulation, opposition to the regulation itself often masquerades as opposition to the underlying science. For PM2.5, and much federal environmental regulation, that opposition typically consists of corporate and other economic interests. This is perhaps unsurprising, as essentially all federal environmental regulation is rooted in the Commerce Clause.

By contrast, much opposition to state hunting regulation, and the underlying recommendations of wildlife managers, comes from non-economic perspectives, especially animal rights activists. It is instructive to read the Humane Society’s toolkit, “Coexisting With Deer: An Advocate’s Guide for Preventing Deer Culls in Your Community,” side-by-side with the Wildlife Division’s “Managing Urban Deer in Connecticut.” These publications differ on many points, including immunocontraception (deer birth control), Lyme disease, fencing, and deer-vehicle collisions. It is not so much that the Humane Society has the science wrong; rather, they repeatedly fail to forthrightly acknowledge the high cost, impracticalities, and ineffectiveness of the policies they espouse.

We have too much PM2.5, and often have too many deer. Whereas the wide prevalence of PM2.5 makes its regulation more difficult, the wide prevalence of deer makes their regulation easier, by providing the regulator with a broad array of regulatory options to choose among, hopefully in ways consistent with the governing statute and science.

Science of Federal Air Regulation and State Wildlife Management.

Urban Bird Treaty Cities Address Dramatic Avian Population Decline
Author
Linda K. Breggin - Environmental Law Institute
Environmental Law Institute
Current Issue
July-August 2023
Issue
4
Linda K. Breggin headshot

The city of Nashville has signed up for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Urban Bird Treaty program—joining 30 other municipalities committed to conserving migratory birds and their habitat. The UBT, which was launched over two decades ago in New Orleans and now includes large and small cities across the country, is based on the premise that urban areas can provide sanctuaries for nesting, overwintering, and migrating birds. In addition to protecting and enhancing urban habitat, the program reduces bird hazards and fosters community engagement. It also includes a matching-grant component that supports community-based conservation projects in amounts up to $50,000.

Cities participating in the program are addressing the dramatic decline in bird populations. A 2019 study published in Science estimates a net loss of 3 billion birds over the last 48 years in North America alone—a drop to only 29 percent of the 1970 population. The precipitous loss is due in large part to development-driven habitat loss and degradation.

Urban hazards are also responsible. According to FWS, key hazards include building glass, as well as the lighting that attracts birds to the buildings. Free-roaming cats are also a leading cause of annual bird deaths. In addition, urban pesticide use can poison birds and limit their food supply, in part by reducing insect populations. Similarly, invasive plants can edge out native plant habitat that provides shelter and food, including indirectly by supporting insect populations. Trash represents another hazard, as birds ingest or become entangled in plastic and other materials.

But UBT projects aren’t “strictly for the birds” so to speak. They’re intended to serve people as well. Noting that “birds contribute aesthetically, culturally, scientifically, and economically to America’s communities,” FWS emphasizes the benefits of bird-friendly landscapes to the health and environs of urban dwellers. Bird-watching activities, for example, are associated with increased levels of well-being and, more generally, preserved open spaces can provide opportunities for physical activity and relaxation and their attendant health and quality of life benefits. Among the myriad ecological functions that birds serve are pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, and controlling insects.

To apply for a UBT designation, cities must establish a “city team” that includes at least three organizations and submit a “bird agenda” that includes a description of the strategies, actions, and tools the city plans to undertake, including both site-based and long-term systemic changes.

In practice, the program is implemented in a variety of forms. For example, habitat conservation projects in Anchorage include installing a bird viewing platform; building a native plant garden to attract hummingbirds; implementing a bioengineering project to protect creek and lagoon banks; and adopting dog-free zones to protect nesting birds.

In Chicago, efforts to reduce building glass and light hazards include expanding the Lights Out Chicago program that encourages building owners to turn off decorative lights during the migratory season and working with the U.S. Green Building Council to distribute bird-safe design guidelines for architects, such as using bird-safe glass that is fritted, angled, or non-reflective.

But preserving habitat and removing hazards can also bring unintended consequences. UBT’s newest member, Nashville, experienced this first-hand in 2021 when 100,000 migrating purple martins roosted in the trees in front of the symphony center for the second year in a row, causing considerable and costly damage to buildings and trees over a two-month period. The center—after working with local groups to identify options, including turning off bird-attracting lights and broadcasting competing bird calls—ultimately defaulted to cutting down many of the trees. In a New York Times guest essay entitled “A Flock of Beautiful Birds in a City Is a Miracle, a Disaster, and a Conundrum,” Margaret Renkl observed: “This conflict is a perfect example of how complex it can be to make urban settings welcoming for wildlife, even when all invested parties are proceeding with good will.”

Laurel Creech, The Nature Conservancy’s Tennessee State Director, hopes that her organization and its UBT partners can help prevent situations in which providing habitat inadvertently leads to property damage or other problems. She explains: “We want to educate communities about the types of trees that may attract migrating birds, so that businesses and residents can tailor their landscaping choices and management practices.”

As the UBT program recognizes, community education and engagement not only build support for protecting bird habitat and reducing urban hazards, but ultimately influence “the daily choices” individuals can make to support bird conservation.

Urban Bird Treaty Cities Address Dramatic Avian Population Decline.

Avian Decline: “Endangering the Engine of the Natural World”
Author
Lynn Scarlett
Current Issue
July-August 2023
Issue
4

In September 2019, headlines announced that North America had lost three billion birds since 1970. Reporting on a study in Science by Ken Rosenberg of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and others, media pronouncements sounded the alarm. The number was stunning. So, too, were the extensive amounts of research, technology, and complex analysis required to generate the total. The report was a wake-up call. Despite over a century of conservation efforts, bird populations are declining dramatically.

What has gone wrong? What could be done? Why does it matter? In A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds, journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal take us around the nation as they probe these questions with scientists, technology experts, conservation entrepreneurs, federal agencies, and others. Their journey reveals a challenge summed up by the Cornell Lab’s executive director emeritus, John Fitzpatrick: “It’s not rocket science. It’s vastly more complicated than rocket science.”

Fitzpatrick’s exclamation applies to more than the science, which includes ecology, ornithology, biostatistics, computer science, acoustic engineering, genomics, satellite imaging, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and more. It also applies to the practices of conservation.

Sometimes, observers of the nation’s conservation saga tell the tale as passage of a series of laws, from the Lacey Act in 1900 that prohibits trade in illegally taken wildlife and plants to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and many others. Sometimes the saga tallies up the extent of publicly protected lands, dollars spent, or species listed as threatened or endangered. All are part of the story, but conservation complexities emerge in looking at the stories of individual species, individual places, and the myriad decision dynamics of implementing laws, spending money, and managing places.

The Gyllenhaals help us see these complexities by zeroing in on particular birds in particular locations—grasshopper sparrows, Florida scrub jays, red-cockaded woodpeckers, greater sage-grouse, Hawaii’s palila, the cerulean warbler, and others. What becomes immediately evident is that, as Fitzpatrick says, “We’re not going to find a master solution.” The threats vary—from loss of habitat, climate change, pesticides, and diminishing water supplies, to the ravages on bird populations by domestic cats that roam outside. Some birds have a need for precise vegetation at a very particular time. The places requiring action stretch from the Arctic to the southern tip of South America.

But some common threads across these individual stories increasingly make up the tapestry of modern conservation initiatives. First is that public lands conservation is simply not enough to sustain birds and biodiversity. Second, as a corollary, private landowners are key participants. Third, conservation innovations that create tools that link conservation with sustaining livelihoods help engage farmers, ranchers, and others as environmental stewards. Fourth, conservation laws are not self-executing—sometimes laws are unclear, their meaning is contested, resources are insufficient, and capacity to act is constrained.

Regarding the first thread, public lands are, of course, phenomenally important. Creation of the national wildlife refuge system, for example, may explain why, of all bird species trends, wetland species—ducks, for example—constitute the only group not in decline. But, as Archibald Biological Station executive director Hillary Swain tells the Gyllenhaals: “A conservation strategy that just protects public lands will never succeed, because it will not have the connectivity among those islands of public land.”

Swain wears another hat, one that contributes to insights about the second and third strands in the tapestry—the importance of landowners and innovations that link conservation and livelihoods. The Archibald station owns and operates a commercial ranch on Buck Island in Florida. The idea? Demonstrate to other ranchers how to blend conservation with ranching that generates enough income to sustain the ranch.

Buck Island is not an outlier. Ranchers in states across the nation are undertaking practices, informed by science, that enhance soil health, improve water quality, and increase biodiversity, including bird habitat on grasslands that have seen among the greatest declines in bird populations over the past fifty years.

The balancing act, though, is not easy. Sometimes figuring out how to make conservation actions work in tandem with landowner economics requires new tools, sometimes derived from the marketplace. As the Gyllenhaals recount, California’s Central Valley once had “more than 4 million acres of marshes, bogs, and swamps.” Millions of migrating shorebirds used the area as a stopover. Today, just 200,000 acres remain, with much of the lands under agricultural production, including for rice-growing. The Nature Conservancy, working with scientists, figured out that if they could just get the farmers to keep the lands wet for a very short time, the birds could successfully migrate through the Central Valley. The Conservancy came up with the idea of “leasing” fields during the bird migration. Now, write the authors, over 100 farmers participate.

Building on the notion of linking conservation and livelihoods, Sarah Sawyer, who oversees California spotted owl conservation for the U.S. Forest Service, sees a “cautionary tale” in the nation’s history of protecting the northern spotted owl, a trajectory that put owl protection on a collision course with the local timber industry and others. The collision resulted in decades of legal battles that left just about everyone feeling angry and frustrated and deflected time and money away from owl recovery. The Gyllenhaals sum up the experience as a “roiling mix of politics, science, violence, and sabotage.”

Sawyer, who worked for a time with local people in Africa, concluded from that experience, as reported by the Gyllenhaals, that forests “need to be shared for recreation, timber sales, wildlife protection, and water.” “What I learned in Africa,” opines Sawyer, “is that’s how it has to work when people are relying on those resources for survival—day-to-day survival. How do we create the science that helps us sift through all those opinions and then use it to manage in the best way?”

The tale of the northern spotted owl illuminates the fourth strand in the tapestry—laws alone, including listing species as threatened or endangered, are not enough. Partly, the challenge is funding. Though the Gyllenhaals point to the money gap, they seem not to appreciate that sometimes the seeming inattention to species recovery by the Fish and Wildlife Service is not a matter of attitude. My own experience suggests utter lack of resources, not attitude, as a central challenge.

But even where laws are in place and resources are available, achieving the purposes of the laws is extraordinarily challenging. This is where conservation really becomes more complicated than rocket science. As the Gyllenhaals emphasize, how birds live and how they die present a “complicated mosaic.” Sometimes conservation choices are extremely difficult, as is the case with the California spotted owl, where the biggest threat is the invasion of barred owls that are decimating spotted owl populations. To remove the threat of this invader (the invasion itself a consequence of human decisions that have, in essence, created a pathway east to west for the undesired bird), agency officials are shooting the barred owls.

And sometimes working at the requisite scales and blending the needs of multiple species can be both challenging and complex, requiring partnerships across agencies, between public and private landowners, and with federal, state, local, and tribal governments. Sage-grouse habitat, for example, spans multiple states. Maximizing sage-grouse habitat may not be ideal for other grassland birds, such that success may require a balancing act to benefit multiple species.

Despite challenges and complexities, there are a few poignant success stories, as in the rebounding of the nation’s symbol, the bald eagle. Eliminating the pesticide DDT, along with other protections, has resulted in a 650-fold rebounding of nesting pairs of eagles.

The iconic eagle arouses the nation’s attention. More challenging is the fate of so many other birds, many hidden from sight. Throughout their narrative, the Gyllenhaals and those they interview ask: How can we get people to care? “How can people care about something they never see or even know exists in the first place?”

These questions matter because birds matter in fundamental ways. Loss of birds and biodiversity, in general, are “endangering the engine of the natural world.” Birds pollinate plants; they improve soils; they devour insects; their intricate beauty inspires us—they are, as John Fitzpatrick says, “among nature’s masterpieces.” They are also “an excellent indicator for measuring sustainability,” observes Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, Cornell Lab’s assistant director of Avian Population Studies.

Still, generating the needed funding to reverse steep population declines remains elusive. And some entities—public and private—circumvent conservation responsibilities. Though the Gyllenhaals applaud the military’s actions to protect the red-cockaded woodpecker, that record is mixed, as are actions at other military installations and some private-sector entities.

If there is one overarching message in A Wing and a Prayer it is that we have the knowledge and tools to reverse the trends of bird populations, even amid so much ecological, social, economic, and political complexity. Putting this knowledge and tools to work is the challenge before us. As ornithologist Peter Marra tells the Gyllenhaals, “If we can save the birds, we can save ourselves.”

Lynn Scarlett served both with the U.S. Department of the Interior and with The Nature Conservancy.

On the race to save our vanishing birds.

Anthropocentrism Is a Key Root Cause
Author
Sparsha Saha - Harvard University
Harvard University
Current Issue
September-October 2022
Issue
5
Parent Article
The Root Causes We Ignore
headshot of Sparsha Sana

THE hallmark of our reign on Earth might be that we caused the sixth mass extinction and the collapse of the planet’s climate system. It’s true that we have not been able to make much progress on the environmental front because we are ignoring root causes. But, why are we ignoring these? And, what will it take for us to start paying attention?

We ignore these root causes because we humans believe we are the most mentally superior and moral species that ever existed, and whether other species live or die is our decision. This, in turn, shapes our attitudes toward human birth and life, the evaluation of “our morality” as superior (instead of limited), and our relentless belief that our progress can be infinite.

Believing that human beings are superior morally and mentally compared to other beings comprises a set of norms, attitudes, and constructed beliefs called anthropocentrism. It parades around as a set of facts, baked into our politics, our economy, and our handling of the environmental crisis, yet it goes almost completely unnoticed for what it is: an arbitrary intergroup hierarchy imposed by the most powerful species through cruel, systematic, extensive, and violent domination. If the causes and consequences of anthropocentrism continue to go unnoticed, the root causes will remain untackled.

If anthropocentrism inoculates us from the stress of grappling with uncomfortable truths, then our relationship with animals provides a way through. Dismantling this system of domination can start with who, as opposed to what, is on our plates. Three times a day, by choosing to go plant-based those of us who are privileged and fortunate enough to have dietary options (we also tend to have the largest environmental footprints, so it is a win-win) can engage in daily acts of revolution against this dangerous, yet invisible status quo belief in human moral and mental superiority.

Mark it for what it is: a political act of rebellion, for those who are brave, relating to so much that is wrong, including concentrated, powerful interests, sexism, racism, and post-colonialism (look up systems thinkers like Marion Nestle, Michele Simon, Aph Ko, Breeze Harper, Christopher Sebastian, Carole Adams, and Nivi Jaswal).

There are also tremendous environmental and health benefits from reducing consumption of animals and animal products, benefits that are often overlooked, but are gaining attention. Environmentally, if we expand our lens and consider the three other planetary boundaries we have exceeded in addition to climate change—land-system change, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and biodiversity—we can properly understand how animal agriculture is at the heart of our problems. Recent research tells us it is the leading cause or a driver of humans exceeding four of the nine planetary boundaries.

One unique set of statistics gives real insight: animal agriculture uses 83 percent of all available farmland on the entire planet, contributing 56 to 58 percent of food’s different emissions, yet it produces just 18 percent of our calories and 37 percent of our protein. These numbers are according to the most comprehensive analysis of agriculture to date, published in 2018 by Poore and Nemecek in Science.

Eating animals and animal products the way that western people do and have imposed on others has increased cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and more. For communicable diseases, most experts will not be surprised if the next big viral pandemic is traced directly to a factory farm.

We could start to dismantle anthropocentrism by not putting another being on the plate—which can also greatly contribute to moving us away from the brink of collapse. Once we dismantle anthropocentrism, we might be capable of complex, public conversations around life, why our taken-for-granted moral systems could use some work, and how we can liberate ourselves from a politically, economically, and socially legitimized system built on myth.

The Next Pandemic is Here
Author
Nicholas A. Robinson - Elizabeth Haub School of Law
Elizabeth Haub School of Law
Current Issue
November-December 2020
Issue
6
The Next Pandemic is Here

Coping with the COVID-19 pandemic is a shared experience. Importantly, we are learning that we share the biosphere. Indeed, the coronavirus came to us from animals, a process called zoonosis. But it was not the first serious disease to do so. Veterinarians have long joined with physicians to treat viruses and bacteria afflicting humans and other vertebrate animals. Public health experts have also been concerned by infectious diseases moving from animals used in commerce to humans. These experts know that hiding in plain sight is the next pandemic. It is already among us.

When it comes to emerging infectious diseases, policymakers seemingly face a Hobson’s choice: suffer through pandemics, or organize to avert them. The latter recourse is stated ironically; it too is a difficult choice because society has not done well in the past in organizing to fight emerging pandemics, either long-term or short-term. Strands of unifying concepts for a healthy Earth (including humanity) resonate through veterinary science, medicine, ecology, environmental law, and ethics. Indeed, some veterinarians and physicians have organized around a concept they call One Health, upon which this essay expands — see the box on the adjacent page. But that is just a first step in bringing all stakeholders to work in concert. And who is not a stakeholder? We are learning that lesson with COVID-19.

There are many other lessons to learn. But inconveniently, popular memory forgets the horrors of past pandemics. For instance, these verses from eight centuries ago:

The world is changed and overthrown,

That is well-nigh upside down,

Compared with days long ago.

This dismal observation is by the mentor and friend of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, who served two kings as England’s poet laureate. He lived through the Great Pandemic of 1348, a bubonic plague which rats carried to humans and which continued into the 1390s. He witnessed English society descend into civil strife and misery, lacking means to cope with the disease.

That wasn’t the only affliction to wipe out vast segments of society. Recall the Brucellosis bacterial infections from cows igniting the Plague of Athens (430-426 BCE), or the Antonine Plague of 172 killing one of every ten persons in the Roman Empire, or the Great Smallpox Epidemic during the American Revolutionary War, or the bubonic Third Plague Pandemic in China (1855), or the Russian Flu Pandemic (1889-90). And another lesson is that some zoonotic diseases persist. Tuberculosis takes 1.5 million lives annually. HIV-AIDS is still a scourge. The 1918 Influenza Pandemic has morphed into the viruses that we live with as the common cold and annual flu shots. Who knows what spinoffs COVID-19 will have.

The frequency with which these infectious diseases emerge from the animal kingdom to afflict humans is accelerating. This is a function of greatly increased human population, disruption of animal habitat in the wake of development, and the expanding interface humans have with animals that shed their microbes because they are stressed by the above. The result is that pandemics are constantly emerging, some taking on serious dimensions.

For example, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Academy of Sciences published a report entitled “Prevalent Eurasian avian-like H1N1 swine influenza virus with 2009 pandemic viral genes facilitating human infection.” Humans working on pig farms are infecting other humans in China with G4 EA H1N1, a new virus. Pre-existing immunities appear ineffective against this infection. The report found that its “infectivity greatly enhances the opportunity for virus adaptation in humans and raises concerns for the possible generation of pandemic viruses.” The G4 EA H1N1 virus spreads among humans in parallel with a raging animal pandemic of African swine fever virus, known as AFS. AFS is forcing Asians to kill their domestic pig herds. The virus is now in 17 European nations and threatens to spread across all continents. No one knows now how to contain the pandemic among animals and the hope is that it will not leap to human transmission. The AFS pandemic in domesticated pigs also threatens extinction of the remnant wild pig populations in Asia.

Even if public health systems can contain the spread of novel coronavirus G4 EA H1N1, as Ebola has been contained for the moment in Africa, there is always another infectious disease emerging. For the foreseeable future, our reality is to live in an era of escalating numbers of zoonoses, with animals shedding viruses onward to humans the more they are stressed by human activities. Zoonosis accounts for 61 percent of all human diseases and 75 percent of the new infectious diseases of the past decade. Spill-overs of infection are natural: Zoonotic diseases emerge from the animal kingdom, the terrain of the countryside, the lands and places of biodiversity. Development invariably degrades animal heath as it displaces wildlife habitat and diminishes biodiversity. When an animal can no longer serve as a heathy host for microbes, it sheds bacteria and viruses, which can then infect a new host — a process called spill-over. Humans are infected either directly, as when handling meat, or indirectly through intermediate vectors such as rats and mice or ticks and mosquitos.

When the Plague of Athens raged, Earth held only some 190 million people. When Gower wrote, the 13th century’s Great Plague killed 40 percent of Earth’s then 500 million inhabitants. Demographers estimate that Earth will hold 8,000 million humans in 2024 — more than a magnitude higher. The biomass of humans today is estimated to be 10 times that of all wild animals. If trends continue, theoretically there could be 9 billion people in 2038, 10 billion in 2056, and 11 billion in 2088. There are plenty more humans to host viruses and bacteria, and society’s needs will result in disrupted habitat and ecologies.

Biodiversity declines precipitously as human population grows. Twenty percent of the Amazon forests have been lost in the past five decades. Half the world’s ecosystems are degraded. Populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have, on average, declined by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014. Dislodged from healthy habitats, distressed animals shed their microbes. Of the millions of viruses yet to be studied, perhaps some 700,000 are capable of zoonosis. Bacterial infections are also worrying, with some resisting antibiotic treatments. There are doubtless many spill-overs to come because the interface between humans and animals has never been greater.

The COVID-19 virus warns us that humanity has already taken the proverbial step too far. This world is changed and overthrown, by us and the virus. The coming succession of new emerging infectious diseases will cement our common fate. Benjamin Franklin counseled that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In a world overthrown, are not the escalating costs of infectious diseases the best evidence that all countries need to rethink how they act, and to fund measures to prevent the next pandemic? Because that pandemic is already among us.

To cope with spill-overs from animals to humans, the process starts by differentiating the measures appropriate for each of three stages of zoonotic infectious disease emergence.

The first stage is when animals live within healthy ecosystems. Intact habitat dilutes the risk of spill-overs because microbes are then stable within their wild animal reservoirs. In a vibrant ecosystem, predators keep in check the numbers of animals that host microbes. However, nature conservation, though vastly less expensive than the costs of a pandemic, is chronically underfunded.

The second stage is emergence, the spill-overs resulting from disruptions to wildlife. Humans disrupt animal habitats in much of what they do, such as building new settlements and roads, clearing land for commercial development and agribusiness plantations, commercial hunting and marketing of wild animals killed for food, harvesting timber, or mining and other natural resource extraction. Encroachments into natural areas disrupt intact ecosystems, fragmenting habitat. Humans find increased numbers of animals with their microbes living in their midst. But few, if any, governmental resources are devoted to the health of wild animal habitat to avert or contain spill-overs. Environmental laws, such as requiring environmental impact assessments, are rarely deployed to address zoonoses. Governmental capacity in this second stage is weak. There is little funding for surveillance and nearly two-thirds of laboratories capable of identifying zoonotic diseases are in developed nations, with virtually none in the developing countries where many zoonotic diseases are emerging.

The third phase is rapid spread of the disease among humans, as in the 2003 epidemic of SARS, or as in today’s COVID-19 pandemic. In this phase, travel and trade expand the person-to-person infections worldwide. Governments concentrate most of their financing for health care and containment of pandemics in this phase. Their costs, few budgeted in advance, are astronomical. Lyme disease illustrates the importance of sustaining healthy ecosystems. Probably for centuries, the microbes responsible were living in wild animal hosts in this pre-emergent stage. Suburban sprawl after World War II displaced woodlots, wetlands, and other natural areas. The countryside no longer sustained native predators, and small mammals began living amidst humans, enabling spill-overs. In the 1970s the disease was identified in Connecticut. In 1982 ticks were identified as disease vectors conveying a bacterium, a spiroche, from small mammals like mice to infect humans. This emergent second phase became well documented. Since then the incidence of Lyme disease keeps growing, with over 400,000 new cases annually. It is now found in all states except Hawaii. As this third phase persists, there is no definitive cure for individuals suffering from late-stage Lyme disease.

Humans first learned about zoonosis through contacts with domesticated animals. To their credit, veterinarians who noticed this transmission have long urged a collaborative approach to human and animal health. They forged a partnership with physicians and public health specialists, and have scoped out processes by which epidemiologists can pinpoint how and where an animal infects a human. That means governments and public health specialists can build capacity to contain the outbreak in the field, limit human-to-human transmission, find treatments, and of course start the vaccine search. This initial articulation of One Health is practical and instrumental, necessary but not sufficient to avert the next pandemic.

Given the millions of microbes and lack of capacity in most nations to watch for spill-overs and react, or even to care for large numbers of persons infected, attaining the narrow One Health approach at best lies in the distant future. More immediate action to prevent new spill-overs must focus on keeping wild animals healthy in the first place. Stewardship of ecosystems and biodiversity is an essential part of One Health. Medical teams of veterinarians and physicians need to partner also with conservationists, indigenous peoples, and protected area managers. The legal profession is essential too, since the groundwork of environmental law is essential to implement this more holistic objective. Indeed, the ethics of environmental protection can figure prominently in containing zoonoses.

Acknowledging the shared bonds, including the ethical dimensions that link these stakeholders together — often through the principles and processes of environmental law — can generate public support, and budgets, for their work. For One Health successfully to enlist multiple stakeholders beyond the medical professions, it will need to make explicit the human love of nature articulated by Thomas Berry, Edward O. Wilson, or Aldo Leopold. While microbes lack consciences, humans are moral animals. One Health cannot succeed unless it becomes embedded in social and environmental justice and equity among peoples. Ultimately care for the health of nature and the biosphere is a moral imperative. Public acceptance of One Health, and funding, is unlikely to advance based only on scientific rationales or utilitarian benefits of collaboration among health professionals. Ben Franklin’s ounce of prevention will be hard to come by.

The ounce to find and fend-off the COVID-19 pandemic just before its Phase 2 emergence was too little, too late. In 2012, The Lancet published a series on preventing pandemics, emphasizing prediction and prevention of the next zoonosis. Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security held preparedness training in 2015 for “Event 201,” a pandemic. In February 2018, the World Health Organization called for enhanced surveillance to detect the next global zoonotic threat, which it labeled “virus X.”

In 2019, WHO and the World Organization for Animal Health, which since 1924 has led international cooperation on containing zoonoses in farmed and traded animals, joined with the UN Food and Agricultural Organization to publish the “Tripartite Guide To Addressing Zoonotic Diseases in Countries.” This handbook focuses on cooperation between veterinary and public health authorities, and promotes a One Health approach to agriculture, food markets, domestic animals, and human health. But in 2018, the United States discontinued the Directorate for Global Heath and Security, part of the White House’s National Security Council, which monitored emerging infectious diseases capable of pandemics. Unfortunately, this was opposite to what the guide suggests in preventing spill-overs.

Preventive measures depend on collaboration across disciplines and agencies. Proposals to establish close cooperation between veterinary science and human medicine date back to 1964, when Calvin Schwabe posited “One Medicine in Veterinary Medicine and Human Health.” As new zoonotic infectious diseases emerged, such as Hendra (1994) or Nipah (1998), there were further calls for cooperation between animal and human health sectors. After the SARS epidemic, for instance, the Wildlife Conservation Society launched the “Manhattan Principles” for wildlife health.

But cooperation between sectors has progressed haltingly. Most public health departments lack collaboration with veterinary specialists. Financing is inadequate. Between 2009 and 2019, the University of California at Davis operated its PREDICT project, which worked in 30 countries to detect 949 novel virus species from 164,000 samples of wildlife, livestock, and humans. U.S. AID funding for PREDICT terminated just as COVID-19 emerged, and has not been renewed. Since 99 percent of the wildlife virome remains to be identified, even if adequately staffed and funded globally, surveillance remains a daunting task.

It will take decades to fund and build the capacity for the One Health preventative activities scoped out for Phase Two. Scaling up on-going nature conservation in Phase One to add a mission to avert zoonotic spill-overs, which can bring benefits in each part of the world, should begin at once. All nations have protected area laws and managers, albeit underfunded for their missions. The infrastructure exists to avert new pandemics by keeping wild nature healthy. Currently advocates of One Health have not embraced this mission. Their instrumental concepts ignore a century of nature conservation accomplishments, practices, and laws that restore or sustain the health of wild animals and their natural habitats.

Since 1948, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has provided the focus for nature protection worldwide. It is unmatched in its members’ multidisciplinary expertise on preservation of ecosystems and habitats. IUCN’s members are responsible for nature conservation at all levels of government, through national, state, and local parks, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, wildlife migration corridors, and conserved wetlands. Protected areas have kept wild nature healthy across vast areas of the planet. These stewards of natural areas already manage, de facto, the interface between animals and humans, averting spill-overs of zoonotic diseases. IUCN motivated international agreements to back up national conservation work, such as the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the Ramsar Convention of Wetlands of International Importance, the Bonn Convention on Migratory Species, or the Convention on Biological Diversity.

COVID-19 dramatically exposed the lack of contact, much less cooperation, between IUCN and the animal and human health sectors. When the pandemic forced adjournment of the Global Conference on Animal Welfare in Edinburgh and the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille, it became evident that each governing event was scheduled for exactly the same days last June. One Health cannot realize its potential until it unites all the stakeholders that have roles to play across all three of the phases of coping with emerging infectious diseases.

The One Health divide between a veterinarian and public health focus and the nature conservation sector also surfaced in June, when the UN Environment Programme issued its own zoonosis guide. “Preventing the next pandemic — Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission” focuses primarily on the health of domesticated animals in close contact with people. UNEP’s guide oddly neglects both the assessments in its Global Environmental Outlook on the crisis in biodiversity, and the UNEP Assembly’s Resolution 4 of 2017, which endorsed the united, holistic approach to One Health to address zoonotic risks and biodiversity conservation. UNEP and IUCN collaborate closely, but not it seems on scoping out how to cope with zoonotic spill-overs in the wild.

For its part, IUCN has been too parochial in focusing on nature conservation without addressing zoonosis. The organization’s lack of strategic collaboration is short-sighted. The Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, last year reported that zoonotic diseases are significant threats to human health, requiring stronger protection. But IUCN has yet to include pandemic prevention among its traditional conservation missions, although it would have much to contribute. For example, IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law can add its expertise on how best to apply the environmental laws in each nation to avert zoonotic spill-overs. IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas has long recommended use of buffer zones to curb human interface with wildlife habitats.

The core for a One Health approach exists. In 2019 the German Foreign Office and the Wildlife Conservation Society convened a conference to draft and endorse the Berlin Principles. These are not expressions of legal devices, but of best practices. They urge an ecosystem approach with integration across all sectors. The core value is both ethical and scientific: “Retain the essential health links between humans, wildlife, domesticated animals and plants, and all nature,” and “Ensure the conservation and protection of biodiversity, which interwoven with intact and functional ecosystems provides the critical foundational infrastructure of life, health, and well-being on our planet.”

Governments can use existing international law to implement the Berlin Principles. Nations can readily incorporate One Health standards and implementing measures into WHO’s International Health Regulations. Binding on all WHO member states, these regulations can establish standard rules and focus local and regional actions appropriate to avert zoonotic spill-overs. Moreover, governments can coordinate such national measures through the decisions in the UN General Assembly and the multilateral environmental agreements, such as the biodiversity and climate conventions. Governments can avail themselves of Article XX in the 1947 General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, and the 1998 Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, to establish new standards for curbing the spread of zoonotic diseases in air travel and commerce. States can enforce the 1973 Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species by preventing trade practices that spread zoonotic diseases.

National and local governments and states do not need to wait for such international developments. They can apply One Health within their own jurisdictions. Most of these levels of government already have enacted laws that can implement a holistic approach. Governments can deploy three bodies of existing law to secure its benefits: laws for nature conservation, for environmental impact assessment, and for spatial planning and land use.

For example, state and municipal parks, wetlands, and open space can be managed to minimize zoonotic risks. Healthy natural areas are essential to bacteria and viruses remaining relatively stable in their natural hosts. Doing so dilutes the chances of spill-over to humans. Wild animals prefer to “shelter in place” in their natural homes. Environmental laws help them to do so. Stewardship of existing parks and protected areas should be enhanced, and buffer zones delineated around each, to minimize the human interface with animals. Urban parks and tree cover need to be expanded.

Governments can deploy their environmental impact assessment procedures to minimize risk of zoonotic spill-overs. Virtually every nation has enacted an EIA law, and under international law, nations are legally obliged to implement EIA procedures. All EIA procedures are essentially the same, and could be revised to assess the health of natural systems where development is proposed, identify possible pathogens, mandate buffer protections for humans, and establish One Health links for continuing stewardship.

Spatial planning of cities and new developments determines environmental security. Cities are front lines managing zoonotic diseases, since most of the world’s people live in cities. Last July, the Global Pandemic Network, a consortium of leading academics, chose cities for their top research focus. As the Stockholm Resilience Center put it, “If the coronavirus has taught urban planners anything, it is that public access to green areas is more important than ever.” Cities and regions can deploy their spatial, town, and country planning, zoning, and building codes to “design with nature.” IUCN’s 2014 guidelines for urban protected areas expressly addressed “emerging infectious diseases.” Urban wetlands and forestry programs can enhance wildlife corridors, by designating overlay zones across suburbia.

All these environmental laws reflect norms about caring for the Earth. The biodiversity crisis has been festering into an open wound for two centuries. Zoonotic diseases are spilling out of the wounds. Restorative, conservation biology is everyone’s obligation in order to contain and manage safely future zoonotic spill-overs. This reality is not yet widely understood. Moving to embrace and implement a holistic One Health approach can expand awareness and induce remedial action. Caring for the Earth will bring us to care for each other.

Past pandemics teach us that human resilience shines through even as disease tears asunder the essential health links between humans, wild flora and fauna, domestic animals, and ecosystems. This adversity can focus our collective vision. During the Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s and into World War II, the ecologist Aldo Leopold arrived at his Land Ethic. He observed that “we abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” In A Sand County Almanac published in 1949, Leopold posited what One Health advocates have since discovered. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Leopold guides us back to health: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. . . . In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

COVID-19 is just the latest pandemic to call on humanity to care for the entire community of life. Only in that way can humanity be saved from continual diseases inflicted by a biotic community that it disrupts at its peril. TEF

It is time to organize in fighting diseases that emerge from animals to impact humans and disrupt society. We can prevent zoonotic infections like the COVID-19 virus by drawing on principles of environmental laws protecting nature and limiting contact with wildlife.

Floodplain Buyouts: An Action Guide for Local Governments on How to Maximize Community Benefits, Habitat Connectivity, and Resilience
Author
Environmental Law Institute, University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment
Date Released
April 2017
Floodplain Buyouts: An Action Guide for Local Governments (Cover)

This Action Guide is designed to help local governments across the country leverage hazard mitigation buyouts to protect, restore, and connect habitats in local communities.

Floodplain Buyouts, Community Resilience and Habitat Connectivity

Since 1993, FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program has funded the acquisition of over 55,000 flood-damaged properties. Under FEMA’s acquisition programs, once properties are purchased following a disaster, existing structures must be removed and the land must be dedicated to open space, recreational, or wetland management uses. These properties can offer opportunities to restore and permanently protect natural habitats and help conserve biodiversity, while also providing community amenities and improving resilience.

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