In this month's special NWF anniversary issue of National Wildlife magazine (full text available here):
Recently in National Wildlife Category
A DOSE OF DIVERSITY
Scientists are discovering that species extinctions fuel the rise and spread of infectious diseases and hinder medical research
ON A RECENT AFTERNOON, Laura Shappell followed a slender deer trail into a thicket of invasive Japanese knotweed. The plants towered over her head, and their deer-trampled stalks crunched under her boots as she vanished into the mass of pale green leaves. "If I'm not out in 10 minutes, send help," she called back.
A graduate student at Rutgers University, Shappell is a member of a research team exploring the link between biodiversity and human disease. Read more in the August issue of National Wildlife.
WILD ANIMALS may always be conservation's poster children, but without plants we would lose the very foundation of our terrestrial ecosystems. Sadly, that diversity is shrinking precipitously. In the United States alone, between 20 and 30 percent of native plant species are now considered at risk of extinction.
The bright spot in this grim picture is the fact that new populations of imperiled plants are being located every year. Some represent a payoff for years of conservation work. Others are the result of fortuitous discoveries. And still others are being found with help of computer modeling. "The thing about rare plant species," explains botanist Bruce Stein, "is that they are often hidden in plain sight." READ MORE IN THE APRIL/MAY ISSUE of National Wildlife.
A rare form of black bear--that is actually white--faces threats to its survival in its British Columbia habitat
by Jessica Snyder Sachs
FROM THE DOCK of British Columbia's Hartley Bay, guide Marvin Robinson looks across the waters of the Douglass Channel to Gribbell Island. The 96-square-mile island--thickly forested in hemlock, cedar and fir--is home to the world's highest concentration of the rare "spirit bear"--a pale color variant of the American black bear. Long revered by the First Nations of British Columbia, scientists dubbed it the Kermode bear in 1905 after one of the first scientists to study the species, Francis Kermode. ... READ MORE at NATIONAL WILDLIFE.
The editors of National Wildlife asked me to report on how wild animals are changing their diets, behaviors, and in a few cases, even their genetic makeup in their struggle to cope with global warming. It's in the December/January issue.
For this month's issue of National Wildlife magazine, I got to delve into some great environmental news. (Welcome change.) It's a feature-length roundup of newly discovered populations or rare and endangered animals--both here in North America and abroad. No random discoveries, these. Many are solid evidence that protective measures are working.
Unlikely Partners in the Sea
Copyright Jessica Snyder Sachs, as first appeared in National Wildlife
Narwhals, among the Arctic
mammals most threatened by global warming, may help scientists track
temperature changes in otherwise inaccessible ocean depths
BIOLOGIST Kristin Laidre sits in her University of Washington office
overlooking Puget Sound's busy Portage Bay. With little prompting she lets her
mind drift to a much larger, colder bay some 2,500 miles to the northeast.
"What stands out about Baffin Bay," Laidre says, "is how you can fly for hours
over the dense ice, a landscape where you wouldn't expect a single living
thing, and then you look down and see a small lead, a tiny crack in the ice,
and there will be a narwhal."
On
the most memorable occasions, Laidre and her colleagues have watched what they
call the classic narwhal ménage à trois--two males crossing and rubbing their 6-
to 9-foot-long tusks above the head of a bobbing female. "It's quite
remarkable," Laidre says. Laidre has spent the past 10 years tagging, tracking
and studying the narwhal--the Arctic's most specialized, range-restricted and
northernmost whale. The narwhals of Baffin Bay account for 80 to 90 percent of
a world population of 50,000 to perhaps 80,000. A second group, of around
5,000, inhabits the northern part of Canada's Hudson Bay. An even smaller
population of unknown number lives east of Greenland.
The
narwhals that winter in the deep water of central Baffin Bay get there by
migrating thousands of miles from summering areas in the shallow bays and
fjords of the High Arctic. Despite the extreme cold and ice cover, winter is a
period of intense activity for this small, highly social whale. Winter is
mating as well as feeding season, a time when narwhals consume the vast
majority of their yearly diet.
On
a typical winter day, narwhals dive almost continually to graze on the
pitch-dark seafloor and there gorge on fatty, energy-rich Greenland halibut, or
"turbot." Many dives reach down to 5,000 feet and last some 30 minutes. At such
depths, narwhals are sustained solely by their highly oxygenated blood and
muscles, the deep-sea pressures having collapsed their lungs. When they surface
to breathe, as all whales must, narwhals zero in on small--sometimes
fleeting--cracks in the thick winter ice pack. Open water can suddenly freeze
during windless conditions and temperatures below minus 30 degrees F.
Come
April, the ice pack begins to loosen, signaling the narwhals to begin their
two-month-long northward migration. It's during this early spring window--when
the ice has loosened but has not yet turned to slush--that Laidre flies east
from Seattle to rendezvous with her longtime colleague, Mads Peter
Heide-Jorgensen of Greenland's Institute of Natural Resources. "Our work has
focused on gaining a fundamental understanding of how this animal uses its
ecosystem," Laidre says. "Only then can we begin to suggest ways that it can be
protected."
That
the narwhal remains so little studied stems directly from the difficulty and
expense of mounting research expeditions across Arctic seas, Heide-Jorgensen
says. "I'm sure a similar effort on almost any other creature would yield a lot
more data, but it's also gratifying to study an animal where every piece of
information you learn is worth its weight in gold."
For
starters, their team has documented the narwhals' faithfulness to their narrow
migratory routes. They've also reported the Baffin population's need to consume
some 880 tons of Greenland halibut daily each winter. Field observations and
autopsies on hunter-harvested whales have likewise confirmed that narwhals eat
surprisingly little during the milder summer months. "We don't know why, but narwhals
depend on their wintering grounds to supply the bulk of their diet," Laidre
says.
Global
Warming Threat
In 2008, Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen's research flashed briefly into public view
with the publication of an international consensus report that ranked narwhals as
edging out even polar bears as the Arctic mammal most vulnerable to
climate-induced habitat change. According to the report, this extreme
sensitivity to global warming stems directly from the whale's small range,
narrow migration routes, limited world population and restricted diet. Combine
these traits with the narwhal's low genetic diversity and, Heide-Jorgensen
says, "I think you can understand what makes them so vulnerable."
Just
how global warming will affect the narwhal's environment remains unclear.
Counterintuitively, one possibility is that warming will further reduce the
scant open water that ensures winter survival for narwhals. Such a cooling
trend could result from the increased rainfall that global warming can produce
in coastal regions. The increased influx of freshwater decreases ocean
salinity, which can slow or shut down ocean currents that would normally
deliver warmth from the Equator. In line with such predictions, in 2005 Laidre
and Heide-Jorgensen reported that Baffin Bay sea ice cover had been steadily
increasing since 1978. During this time, the percentage of open water at the
end of winter had shrunk to an average of just one half of 1 percent. "Now that
seems to have reversed," Laidre says of the last four years. "Instead we're now
seeing less and less ice cover."
Unfortunately,
increased open water could bring its own problems. One major concern is that
rising water temperatures could render the narwhal's ecosystem less
productive--particularly in regard to the cold-water turbot that provide the
whale its primary food source. Another is the possibility that fishing fleets
will begin entering the narwhal's previously ice-locked feeding areas. "Both
Canada and Greenland have looked at extending their coastal fisheries
offshore," Laidre says. "With reduced ice cover, that interest will only
continue." Indeed, the international competition for nearby fisheries has been
so fierce at times as to escalate into armed conflict. During the so-called
Turbot War of 1995, the Canadian Coast Guard used machine guns and water
cannons to disrupt and seize Spanish trawlers plundering Newfoundland's Grand
Banks. Whichever direction global warming takes Baffin Bay, environmental
shifts are already in motion. "The whole ecosystem is changing, not just with
respect to narwhals," Laidre says.
A
Promising Role
Baffin Bay's narwhals may play a pivotal role in better understanding these
changes. Over the past two years, Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen have used a grant
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to harness 10 narwhals
with satellite transmitters. The transmissions relayed the animals' positions
and surrounding water temperatures as the whales made thousands of winter dives
to the bottom of Baffin Bay.
Laidre
tracked the narwhals' daily movements from her computer monitor at the
University of Washington's Polar Science Center. Now that the last of the
transmitters has fallen away and sunk, she is beginning the daunting task of
analyzing the temperature data with the help of the science center's
oceanographers.
Preliminary
analysis suggests that the whales are diving at fronts--areas with large and
rapid temperature changes that stem from warm, upwelling waters. "On its own,
these data aren't going to reveal anything about global warming," Laidre says.
"But they can serve as a baseline for future studies, and, when combined and
compared with historical data, they may show differences from the past."
Already
the data transmitted from the outfitted narwhals are rivaling the meager
information collected through far more expensive, manned expeditions that
require research vessels to venture into iceberg-strewn waters, winch
instruments into the deep on cables and then return months later with the hope
of retrieving them.
Meanwhile,
the narwhal's short-term prospects look good, with populations appearing stable
in the decade since the governments of both Greenland and Canada forged hunting
quotas with the region's native Inuit peoples. The Inuit harvest several
hundred narwhals each year, both for the male's valuable tusk and for the
nutritious meat and vitamin-rich skin that have long helped Arctic peoples
survive on a diet largely devoid of fruits and vegetables.
Today,
Arctic researchers can still watch thousands of migrating narwhals passing by
their coastal camps in a single day--sometimes spaced apart only by the 9-foot-long
tusks of the males. Heide-Jorgensen describes being awed by both the view from
coastal cliffs and the sounds he hears from his tent under a midnight sun. He
describes the noise of a narwhal surfacing to breathe as somehow both
prehistoric and resembling the brake release of a diesel truck. "A kind of
whistle that ends with an airy sigh," he says. "And that's when you forget how
cold it is. It's just you and these ancient creatures with a life so special
and isolated from anything else."
Jessica
Snyder Sachs is the author of Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in
a Bacterial World (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).
The
Tale of the Tusks
Though
technically considered "toothed" whales (as opposed to filter-feeding whales
that have mouths lined with baleen), adult narwhals have no functioning teeth
inside their mouths. The male's tusk, which grows as long as 9 feet, begins as
one of six pairs of teeth inside the mouth of a fetus. Four pairs of those
teeth disappear before birth, leaving two pairs. One of these develops into the
cuspids, or "fangs," and the others into vestigial teeth. In males the left
cuspid continues to grow outward in a counterclockwise spiral, emerging through
the upper jaw and lip to form a spearlike tusk. Typically the right cuspid
remains imbedded in the upper jaw, but about one in 100 males sports double
tusks. Similarly, about one in six females will bear a single, shortened tusk.
Cetacean
Senior Citizen
Although
they live in a dangerous winter environment where the vagaries of sea ice can
lead to sealed breathing holes and death from suffocation, narwhals, according
to a recent study by Mads Peter Heide-Jorgensen of Greenland's Institute of
Natural Resources and his colleagues, has determined that the animals
nevertheless are among the longest-lived mammals.
To
determine the age of narwhals, the researchers studied changes in eye chemistry
that occur predictably as the animals age, using specimens from 75 dead narwhals
collected in West Greenland in 1993 and 2004. The oldest of the whales, a
female, was between 105 and 125 years old. The oldest male was between 75 and
93 years old. However, the animals in the study came from a heavily hunted
population. "The maximum age in other narwhal populations with less disturbed
age structure might be considerably higher," the biologists concluded in a
paper published in the Journal of Mammalogy. "Maximum age also is likely
to increase when more specimens are examined."
Biologists
have estimated the life span for a number of whale species, and some of them,
too, are long-lived. The oldest recorded orca, or killer whale, and the oldest
blue whale were both 90; the oldest fin whale reached 100. The real Methuselah
in the cetacean world is the bowhead, another species of Arctic seas; the
oldest on record lived 211 years.
Two
of the most familiar whales did not win the whale life span sweepstakes. Sperm
whales, the species of titular interest in the novel Moby Dick, live
about 70 years and humpbacks about 48.
Unbridled development and pollution threaten the Chattahoochee's ability to be
all things to the millions who use and abuse the fabled river
Copyright Jessica Snyder Sachs, as originally appeared in National Wildlife magazine
GRIDLOCK seizes metro Atlanta by 8:00 am most weekdays, as traffic grinds to a
halt along hundreds of miles of urban highway. Ironically, it's from this
road-rage-inducing vantage point that millions have fallen under the spell of
the river the Creek Indians called Chattahoochee--"the river of painted
rocks." For as the waterway dips and weaves beneath dozens of the city's
thoroughfares, an ethereal mist rises from its waters, broken only by the
herons and kingfishers that dive from its wooded banks. Look long enough and
you can imagine an ancient hunter in a dugout canoe slipping through the
billowing vapor. Look again and imagine it's you, disappearing downriver, far
away from the exhaust and blaring horns.
Ask anyone who lives in this sprawling metropolis of 3.5 million and you'll be
hard pressed to hear a negative word about their beloved 'Hooch. They boat and
fish in its waters, picnic and play on its banks, draw power from its dams and
drink from its spigots. Even as the river passes through the most
industrialized sections of this city, its banks remain cloaked in the river
birch, sycamore and tulip poplar that inspired southern author Pat Conroy to
describe Atlanta as "where they built a city and left the forest."
But
despite its serene appearance, this same river also flushes metro Atlanta's
toilets and silently accepts the equivalent of a major oil spill in polluted
runoff each year. As a result, the 70-mile section of river south of Atlanta
ranks among the five most polluted waterways in the nation. Meanwhile, the
metro area's breakneck growth continues to devour the Chattahoochee's watershed--the
smallest to supply a major American city--at the unprecedented rate of 50 acres
a day.
Not
that Atlantans stand alone in loving the Chattahoochee to death. Over the last
decade, the state governments of Georgia, Alabama and Florida have remained
locked in a water war over their competing rights to use the river as both
water source and sewer. So great are the demands that not only water quality
but water quantity--an issue more often associated with the arid West--has become
a severe regional problem. So much water is being drawn from the Chattahoochee
along its 540-mile journey to sea that its declining volume threatens one of
the world's most productive estuaries: Apalachicola Bay in the Gulf of Mexico.
"We are at the crossroads," says Sally Bethea, director of the Upper
Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a river advocacy group founded in 1994 by Laura and
Rutherford Seydel, daughter and son-in-law of Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner.
"We have already changed this river forever, with 15 dams from one end to
the other," adds Bethea. "But it still supports an immense diversity
of wildlife. The crucial issue now is whether our leaders will insist the river
be protected as a healthy ecosystem or whether we continue using it as a toilet
and dump."
This
workhorse of a river begins as a weeping-rock spring in the Blue Ridge
Mountains, 80 miles north of Atlanta and a stone's throw from the Appalachian
Trail. Surrounding the headwaters is the lush, 750,000-acre Chattahoochee
National Forest, home to some 500 species of animals.
Several miles downstream, after the river tumbles out of federal land, it flows
south through poultry farms and fertilized fields, picking up a heavy load of
agricultural runoff. This section of the upper Chattahoochee is a magnet for
construction of new, luxurious retirement communities. The development
increases downstream as the river widens to form the aquatic playground of Lake
Lanier, created with the completion of Buford Dam in 1956. By releasing water
from the chilly bottom of its reservoir, the dam transformed the section of
river below its turbines into the nation's southernmost cold-water trout
stream.
Lanier
itself has become the country's most-visited federal reservoir. As a result,
the 38,000-acre lake is now visibly filling with tons of silt. Add to this mix
the discharge of high-phosphorus wastewater from poorly regulated treatment
plants and the tainted runoff from oil-slicked roads and chemically pampered
lawns.
Concluding
that the lake can cope with the onslaught, Georgia's Environmental Protection
Division last year signaled a willingness to permit the rapidly growing
counties bordering the lake to increase their wastewater discharges, contingent
on enforcement of water-treatment standards. "That the state is finally setting
water-quality standards for the lake is a step in the right direction,"
says Russ England, assistant chief of fisheries with the Georgia Department of
Natural Resources. But the environmental pressures on Lanier won't abate as
long as the region's unbridled growth continues, he cautions. "If they
halfway try, a lot of upstream communities can learn from Atlanta's
mistakes," adds England. "But their interests remain with rapid
growth and against anything that would drive up the cost of that growth."
Existing
regulations include a prohibition on disrupting a 25- to 50-foot buffer zone
along the riverbank and requirements for erosion-control barriers on
construction sites within the watershed. But enforcement is lax, claims Bethea.
Part of the problem is lack of manpower. Though Georgia is the largest state
east of the Mississippi River, its Environmental Protection Division staff is
disproportionately small.
Between
Lake Lanier and Atlanta, the Chattahoochee winds for 48 miles through the metro
area's affluent suburbs. The riverfront here lies protected from further
development by dozens of municipal parks and the 4,000-acre Chattahoochee River
National Recreation Area, a string of 13 riverfront units. Even private homes
on this stretch of the river remain largely hidden by the resilient vegetation
that typifies Georgia's Piedmont region.
But
just 50 feet back from the river begins a sea of impervious pavement and brick.
During rainstorms, runoff that would naturally filter through vegetation-bound
soil instead collects on hot surfaces and slaloms down streets to pour into the
river and its tributary creeks. The unnatural wallop of sediment and heated
water has already exterminated the Chattahoochee's native shellfish and now
endangers temperature- and sight-sensitive fish such as trout, says naturalist
Henning von Schmeling of the Chattahoochee Nature Center, a 130-acre riverfront
educational facility north of Atlanta.
Over
the next ten miles, as the river flows through Atlanta proper, it absorbs more
than 250 million gallons of treated sewage and nearly a billion gallons of
heated power-plant discharge a day. Even worse are the millions of gallons of
raw sewage that spill into the river when rainstorms swamp the city's
overburdened treatment plant.
From
1995 to 1997, the Riverkeeper spearheaded a lawsuit against the city for its
sewer system's long-standing violations of the federal Clean Water Act. As a
result, Atlanta was forced to pay $2.5 million in fines and comply with a
strict eight-year timetable for improving water quality that included spending
$360 million to upgrade its main sewage plant and committing another $25
million for watershed restoration.
A
greater problem remains in polluted runoff from roads, construction sites and
other nonpoint sources. The longstanding provisions of the federal Clean Water
Act require the state of Georgia to reduce such pollution to a level that the
river can absorb without threatening wildlife. "But the state has yet to
determine the level of pollutants going into the river, let alone what it can
safely handle," says biologist Andrew Schock, director of NWF's
Southeastern Natural Resources Center. NWF has become particularly involved in
training community activists in Atlanta's poorer neighborhoods to lobby for the
restoration of the heavily polluted waters where their children fish, swim and
play.
"Success,"
adds Schock, "means having the people who live in those neighborhoods
involved in the decisions that affect their daily lives."
South
of the city, the Chattahoochee opens up for a slow, 40-mile meander through
floodplain farmland to West Point Lake on the Georgia-Alabama border. West
Point's quiet waters--a stark contrast to Lanier's buzz of activity--have become
a settling pond for Atlanta's tainted runoff. But even as pollution levels
dampen the lake's popularity for swimming, the high load of nitrogen and
phosphorous has made West Point one of the nation's most fertile bass
hatcheries. Bald eagles, osprey, and heron share the world-class fishing with
sports anglers, though the humans know better than to eat what they catch.
After
West Point, the Chattahoochee continues south along the state border and over
the fall line, where the hard rock and red clay of Piedmont Plateau give way to
the soft sandstone of the coastal plain. Wildlife becomes even more abundant as
the river fills its last reservoir, the shallow and reedy Lake Seminole. There,
the waters of the Chattahoochee mingle with those of the Flint River before
entering the Florida Panhandle under a new name: the Apalachicola. Over its
final 100 miles, the meandering stream nourishes millions of acres of hardwood
swamp, including the world's largest stands of tupelo trees.
The
river's final act is to deliver some 16 billion gallons of fresh water a day
into Apalachicola Bay, a protected estuary where fresh and salt water mix
slowly to produce a world-class harvest of oysters, shrimp and fish valued at
more than $100 million a year. Imperative to the health of this breeding ground
is the massive influx of fresh water that keeps deep-ocean predators at bay.
Declining volume and pollution have already begun to take their tolls.
"A
lot of hip Atlantans love to eat Apalachicola oysters at the city's finest
restaurants," comments von Schmeling. "They need to realize that the
road grease from their commutes and the chemicals from their over-fertilized
yards are ending up on their plates." In many ways, Atlanta's appreciation
of fine Apalachicola oysters epitomizes the larger issues facing the
Chattahoochee. The millions of Southeasterners who benefit from this river must
now face the cost of ensuring its long-term welfare.
"The answers must come from a sense of wise stewardship," says
Lindsay Thomas, the federal commissioner appointed to oversee the ongoing
negotiations between the three states for the Chattahoochee-Flint-Apalachicola
River Basin. But solutions have not come easily. Over the last three years,
state negotiators have failed to meet four deadlines for a mutually
satisfactory water-management plan. Georgia and Alabama want enough water to
sustain another 50 years of booming development, without sacrificing irrigation
for agriculture or river levels for commercial navigation. Florida remains
desperate to stem the dwindling flow that threatens Apalachicola Bay and 90
percent of its oyster harvest.
Fighting
to be heard above the fray is the 17-member TriState Conservation Coalition,
which includes the Riverkeeper and two NWF affiliates, the Georgia Wildlife
Federation and Florida Wildlife Federation. Lobbying for negotiators to go
beyond sheer quantity, the coalition is raising complex "flow" issues
that directly impact the wildlife that make southeastern rivers among the most
biologically diverse on Earth. Many of the Chattahoochee's 170 species of fish,
for example, rely on spring floods to reach their spawning grounds in
surrounding wetlands. As withdrawals lower the river's flow, the careful timing
of dam releases becomes crucial to these natural cycles. Cyclic flooding is
even more pivotal to the Apalachicola Bay system, with its vast fishery
nurseries.
The
coalition's demands are bolstered by such federal laws as the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Coordination Act, which requires federal negotiators to consider
ecological impacts; and the Clean Water Act, which mandates that waterways be
kept clean enough to maintain wildlife.
Meanwhile,
water-quality issues remain largely in the control of local communities,
particularly metro Atlanta and its northern neighbors. Sensing the shift in
mood, some of the region's developers have begun to go beyond the letter of the
law to protect the Chattahoochee. "More developers are approaching us with
a sincere attitude of wanting what's best for the community," says Bethea.
"Other times, they're forced to work with us."
A
recent case involved construction of the massive Mall of Georgia, the
centerpiece of a sprawling retail complex that laid bare some 500 acres of red
Georgia clay south of Lake Lanier. "The developers needed a variance to
build within stream buffers and knew we could raise holy hell about it,"
explains Bethea. "As result we got a seat at the planning table."
Specifically, the mall's developers consulted closely with Riverkeeper
engineers to keep construction runoff from rolling into bordering creeks.
On
the public side, Georgia Governor Roy Barnes recently budgeted 60 new positions
in the state's Environmental Protection Division, primarily in programs
focusing on water quality, with a promise of 140 more over five years. Barnes
also vetoed a bill that would have allowed the state legislature to strike down
environmental regulations set forth by the agency. Perhaps the most exciting
opportunity on the horizon is the creation of a 180-mile greenway protecting
riverbank from Helen to Columbus. Though it would leapfrog privately held land,
the proposed Chattahoochee Riverway would become the longest river park in the
nation--a project that will require $180 million to complete.
Clearly, the momentum for saving the Chattahoochee has never been greater. "What makes this river so remarkable is the fact that there are so many people who love it and depend on it," concludes England. "But the same environmental issues are being faced by great rivers across the nation." What happens here in the next few years, environmentalists agree, will largely determine whether the Chattahoochee becomes a national paradigm or a legacy lost.
Writer Jessica Snyder Sachs is the author of Good
Germs, Bad Germs: Health & Survival in a Bacterial World
(Hill&Wang/FSG) and Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint
Time of Death (Perseus/Basic Books).
A fragile linkage exists between the nation's
water supplies, the wild places where they come from, and the life that the two
support togethercopyright Jessica Snyder Sachs, as first appeared in National Wildlife
FOR TENS OF
MILLIONS
of years, a corps of natural hydrologists ensured the continuous cleansing of our continent's water supplies. In woodlands across North America, some 200 million beavers slowed rivers and streams to a
silt-dropping crawl with their semiporous dams. Moreover their relentless logging created an elaborate network of wetland meadows that absorbed and cleansed surface runoff.
Beyond the
forests, tens of millions of bison and elk worked in tandem with wildfires to
sustain the short-grass and tallgrass prairies that soaked up the torrential
downpours of seasonal thunderstorms. Beneath these same grasslands, hundreds of thousands
of prairie dogs dug vast networks of tunnels that channeled
groundwater deeper, to feed and refresh underground rivers that, in turn,
continually recharged the continent's lakes and above-ground streams.
In these
ways, a network of keystone species helped maintain a clean supply
of the continent's most vital, life-sustaining substance. For while many forms
of life can survive without oxygen, none can do so without water. Indeed, 60 to
80 percent of every living cell consists of water, and all vital biological
processes begin or end with this simple molecule.
So far as science can
discern, life on this planet began in a watery cradle. And when astronomers
scan other planets for the potential to support life, they look first for
signs of the molecule H20.
As
seen from space, the sparkling blue ball that is Earth reveals itself to be a
paradise of wetness. Above the oceans and lakes that cover more than 70 percent
of the planet's surface drifts an ever-shifting lace of water-vapor clouds.
Water pours from our skies, courses down our mountains and flows across every
continent, back to the seas where the warming sun sends it skyward again. In
this manner, our planet continually recycles an estimated 370 quintillion
gallons (18 zeros), most of it older than the oldest fossils.
As life in
North America and elsewhere evolved around water's unique properties, elaborate
ecosystems developed to ensure continual recycling and purification. In Water: A Natural History, environmental engineer Alice Outwater
describes the consequences of disrupting these ecosystems, particularly the
large-scale decimation of North America's pre-Columbian populations of beaver,
bison, elk and prairie dogs. "By tampering with and in some cases
eliminating the ecological niches where water cleans itself," she says,
"we have simplified the pathways that water takes through the American
landscape, and we have ended up with dirty water."
Without
wetlands and prairie grasslands to absorb rainfall, water slaloms across the
landscape, picking up and dumping sediment into streams and lakes. Without
beaver dams to brake their flow, streams frequently deepen into brown-water
gulleys, continually eating away at their own banks. In an even more dramatic
manner, development that clears natural vegetation speeds sediment-laden runoff
during rainstorms, while adding a potentially toxic load of pesticides and
other chemicals. The U.S. Geological Survey's recently completed ten-year
assessment of the nation's water resources found multiple pesticides and
unnaturally elevated levels of phosphorus and nitrogen in virtually all streams
and groundwater sampled outside undeveloped wilderness. The majority of these
streams contained pesticides at levels that exceeded--and often far
exceeded--federal guidelines for the protection of aquatic life. These same
chemicals can likewise endanger humans if they enter the drinking water supply.
"Scientific
studies have repeatedly shown that our ability to protect our water sources
from pollutants--and there are many of them--relates closely to our ability to
safeguard our own health, especially that of our children, with their growing
bodies," observes Monty Fischer, National Wildlife Federation policy
director of water resources. "As conservationists, we're also keenly aware
of the crucial role an untainted and abundant water supply plays in sustaining
wildlife."
Certainly,
Fischer points out, part of the solution is increased water efficiency--from
turning off the faucet when we brush our teeth to making sure that our
municipalities repair leaky water mains and otherwise invest in efficient
water-delivery systems. But more important, he says, "is a public
understanding of the linkage between the water flowing out of your tap and the
wild places where it comes from, both in terms of the quantity and quality of
that water, and the commitment it takes to protect those water sources."
Outwater
agrees, adding: "An undeniable symbiosis exists between our country's
water, the land from which it springs and the life that the two support
together. Safeguarding that symbiosis is a responsibility all of us must
share."
New Jersey
journalist Jessica Snyder Sachs wrote about the effects of pesticides on endangered species in the December/January issue.
SIDEBAR:
H2O:
The Incredible Molecule
What
is it that makes H2O the liquid of life itself?
In
chemical structure, the water molecule could hardly be simpler: two hydrogen
atoms stuck like Mickey Mouse ears onto a single atom of oxygen. But in that
simplicity can be found water's unique properties.
In
essence, every water molecule is a tiny magnet, and its strong polar nature
gives it the ability to dissolve an unparalleled range of substances, including
a wide range of salts. In addition to the familiar sodium-chloride molecule we
know as table salt, these include scores of biologically important substances
such as potassium chloride, magnesium chloride and calcium sulfate. Indeed, all
living beings--from plants to humans--depend on water to release the
life-sustaining minerals contained in these salts.
Water's
remarkable solvent powers provide the perfect medium for virtually every
biological reaction that occurs inside a living cell--from energy-storing
photosynthesis to energy-consuming respiration. And water has the remarkable
ability to dissolve gases--most importantly, oxygen and carbon dioxide. It is
water's oxygen-carrying capacity that sustains aquatic animal life.
A
water molecule's mini-magnet configuration generates a host of other queer
qualities, as well. Given its simple structure and small size, it should fly
apart into gaseous form at extremely low temperatures. But water molecules
cluster into tight groups, with each molecule's negatively charged oxygen atom
lining up with the positively charged hydrogen on its neighbors. The
considerable amount of energy needed to break these "hydrogen bonds"
gives water the unusually high boiling point of 212 degrees F (100 degrees C).
As a result, the planet's surface water never completely evaporates under the
beating sun. Instead, oceans and lakes act as impressive energy sinks for
storing and slowly releasing solar energy to temper seasons, and smooth out
temperature differences between day and night.
As temperatures drop toward freezing, the hydrogen bonds between water molecules perform another impressive trick. They preassemble into the open-lattice structure that gives snowflakes their beautiful patterns and makes ice lighter than water. This bizarre quality of water being lighter as a solid than as a liquid has a huge consequence: It is the reason that lakes and oceans don't freeze from the bottom up, solidifying into a global ice block that even the hottest summer would never melt.--Jessica Snyder Sachs
Jump back to WEBSITE HOME
Copyright Jessica Snyder Sachs, as first
appeared in National Wildlife
THE EARLY MORNING SUN glints off the amber, "swamp tea"
waters of Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, as an eager group of Sunday
birders clamber up its wetland observation tower. For the last half mile of
boardwalk, they've heard the croak of sandhill cranes above the rustling sound
of the sawgrass blocking their view. "They'll be lifting off any day
now," says refuge ranger Maggie O'Connell of the swamp's winter population
of several thousand greater sandhill cranes. Though only mid-February, winter
is already loosening its halfhearted grip on southern Georgia's Great
Okefenokee, one of the largest intact freshwater ecosystems in the world.
Atop the 50-foot tower, O'Connell surveys her
domain. "Seventeen miles to the horizon without a stitch of solid
ground," she marvels. Indeed, the dense vegetation of this landscape grows
atop floating peat-bog islands, the largest crowned by bald cypress draped in
ghostly green Spanish moss. For good reason, the Creek Indians dubbed this
Oguafenogua, the "land of the trembling earth." Stomp hard enough and
even the trees shake.
Like the majority of the 539 units in
America's National Wildlife Refuge System, the Okefenokee was protected to
serve as sanctuary for migratory waterfowl such as the cranes, teals,
mergansers, herons and egrets seen feeding across its open, wet
"prairie." But the Georgia reserve has evolved far beyond its "duck
factory" genesis.
This refuge's expanded purpose becomes clear
as the sun rises high enough to banish the morning chill, and boaters begin
paddling and motoring up the swamp's 120 miles of canals and slow-moving
streams. Blinking back at them from the shore or half-submerged in the
shimmering blackwater are the sleek American alligators that are among the
Okefenokee's star attractions. Many of the visitors will linger after returning
to dock--lunching on the refuge's grassy picnic grounds, touring its new
million-dollar environmental education exhibit, and shopping for souvenirs in
the gift shop. Some will spend the night, either in the state park easement on
the refuge's west side or deep in the swamp, on one of seven overnight canoeing
platforms.
In addition to playing host to more than
400,000 visitors a year, the staff of this national wildlife refuge have
launched an ambitious long-term project to restore and expand the area's upland
stands of rare longleaf pine and wiregrass habitat--home to endangered
red-cockaded woodpeckers and threatened gopher tortoises, indigo snakes and
Florida black bears. To this end, nearly half the refuge staff work on the fire
crews that conduct prescribed burns to beat back the saw palmetto and slash
pine that once were kept in check by seasonal wildfires. "We figure it'll
take about 300 years of active management to restore the area," says
O'Connell.
Now, as it prepares to celebrate its
centennial year beginning in March, the National Wildlife Refuge System as a
whole is experiencing an equally radical deepening and expansion of its
purpose. Administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it is the world's
only national network of public lands set aside specifically for wildlife. And
for years, it struggled without any sense of unifying mission. Beginning with
President Theodore Roosevelt's founding of the first refuge--Florida's Pelican
Island in 1903--one unit after another has flickered into being with its own
narrowly defined mission. Before Roosevelt left office in 1909, these included
56 big game preserves and bird reservations such as Idaho's Mindoka refuge for
ducks and geese, Oklahoma's Wichita Mountains for bison and elk, and Alaska's
Fire Island for moose.
In addition to playing host to more than
400,000 visitors a year, the staff of this national wildlife refuge have
launched an ambitious long-term project to restore and expand the area's upland
stands of rare longleaf pine and wiregrass habitat--home to endangered
red-cockaded woodpeckers and threatened gopher tortoises, indigo snakes and
Florida black bears. To this end, nearly half the refuge staff work on the fire
crews that conduct prescribed burns to beat back the saw palmetto and slash
pine that once were kept in check by seasonal wildfires. "We figure it'll
take about 300 years of active management to restore the area," says
O'Connell.
Now, as it prepares to celebrate its
centennial year beginning in March, the National Wildlife Refuge System as a
whole is experiencing an equally radical deepening and expansion of its
purpose. Administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it is the world's
only national network of public lands set aside specifically for wildlife. And
for years, it struggled without any sense of unifying mission. Beginning with
President Theodore Roosevelt's founding of the first refuge--Florida's Pelican
Island in 1903--one unit after another has flickered into being with its own
narrowly defined mission. Before Roosevelt left office in 1909, these included
56 big game preserves and bird reservations such as Idaho's Mindoka refuge for
ducks and geese, Oklahoma's Wichita Mountains for bison and elk, and Alaska's
Fire Island for moose.
Since 1934, the Migratory Bird Hunting and
Conservation Stamp Act has funded the acquisition of millions of acres of
additional waterfowl habitat, concentrated up and down North America's four
major migratory flyways. Among the first, Montana's Red Rock Lakes refuge
became the last-chance sanctuary for the highly endangered trumpeter swan in
1935.
In 1966, Congress passed the National
Wildlife Refuge Administration Act, enlarging the refuge system further with
several thousand small prairie pothole wetlands designated as "Waterfowl
Production Areas." And in 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands
Conservation Act nearly tripled the refuge system's holdings with some 54
million acres of pristine arctic and subarctic habitat.
By the time the 500th refuge--West Virginia's
Canaan Valley--was established in 1994, the system encompassed more units than
the National Forest Service and more land (90 million acres) than the National
Park Service's holdings. Yet much of the refuge system continued to be managed
under a mishmash of policies and regulations that left its lands vulnerable to
such strangely incompatible uses as jet skiing, dune-buggy racing, livestock
grazing, oil drilling, even military war games and bombing runs. Refuge
managers opposing such uses stood on shaky legal ground unless they could show
that the activities directly threatened the specific purpose for which their
refuges had been established.
A case in point: In 1990, the manager of
Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast tried to remove
privately owned cattle from the preserve's wildlife-rich Matagorda Island.
Biologists had determined that overgrazing had already degraded the island's
otherwise pristine habitat, including nesting sites for endangered sea turtles
and underbrush vital to wintering songbirds. The problem was that Congress had
established the refuge in 1937 specifically as a sanctuary for the world's last
wild population of whooping cranes.
"We could show that the cattle were
definitely degrading the overall ecosystem of Matagorda Island," explains
National Wildlife Refuge System Director Dan Ashe. "But technically, in order
to deny the grazing permit, we had to show that it was incompatible with the
refuge's original purpose." In the end, federal administrators stood
behind the refuge manager's claim that cattle grazing constituted an
incompatible use. "But a lot of people, including our own attorneys,
thought we were stretching things," admits Ashe.
Such legalistic hand-tying came to an end in
1996, with an executive order by President Clinton, followed the next year by
the bipartisan passage of the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act.
These two legal directives set forth "conservation" as the refuge
system's singular and all-encompassing purpose--a purpose against which any
proposed use had to be judged. The groundbreaking Improvement Act also required
the staff at every refuge to create a 15-year comprehensive conservation
plan--guided, in large part, by public input. Indeed, by placing an emphasis on
"wildlife-compatible" uses such as observation, photography and
limited hunting, the law acknowledged that refuges are for people too.
Specifically, some 2 million hunters and 6
million anglers visit the refuge system each year. Twice that number--some 16
million visitors--come solely to watch wildlife or soak in the beauty and
serenity of the nation's wildest places. Add busloads of students and tour
groups taking advantage of environmental education programs and the tally
swells to at least 35 million visitors a year. The importance of their input in
setting the system's agenda for its second century can hardly be
underestimated, says Jamie Rappaport Clark, former director of the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service during the Clinton administration and now NWF senior vice
president for conservation programs. "The pressures on the refuge system
have grown tremendously in recent years," she explains. "We have more
threatened and endangered species, more demands for human activity on the
landscape, and more development and encroachment from the outside. As a result,
the job of safeguarding these wild places and passing them on to new
generations demands a high level of public engagement."
In fact, the most serious threats to refuge
wildlife and habitat--urban sprawl, water depletion, pollution and invasive
species--originate outside refuge borders and, therefore beyond the system's
authority. Consequently, progress depends on activism on the part of local
citizens and allied conservation organizations.
In recent years, for example, the Okefenokee
National Wildlife Refuge has depended on a large coalition of conservation groups,
including NWF and its affiliate, the Georgia Wildlife Federation, to stave off
plans by the chemical giant DuPont to excavate a 30-mile-long, 50-foot-deep
titanium strip mine a few feet from the refuge's eastern border. The proposed
mining operations would generate a 24-hour-a-day onslaught of dust, smoke,
exhaust, noise and light directly alongside the refuge's main wildlife
observation drive. Worse, scientific studies indicate the mine could
irrevocably alter the Okefenokee's delicate hydrology and ecology. With no
authority to stop operations off refuge grounds, refuge managers continue to
rely on sustained and vocal public opposition to keep DuPont's plans at bay.
Public opposition has, at least for the time
being, helped play an even larger role in confronting what many people view as
the greatest single threat to the refuge system in its 100-year history: the
proposed opening of the coastal plain section of Alaska's 19.6 million-acre
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling--a plan that the U.S. Senate
voted down last year. Scientific studies by government wildlife biologists had
confirmed that petroleum operations on the Arctic refuge would disrupt its vast
caribou calving grounds and irreparably harm the region's delicate tundra
ecosystem. More importantly, says Clark, "opening Arctic to drilling would
totally blow apart the purpose of the entire refuge system. For if there's the
will to violate a refuge as spectacular and ecologically unique as Arctic, what
would stop the same from happening at the system's 75 million other
acres?"
At the least, adds Clark, the 1997 Refuge
Improvement Act makes doing so extremely difficult. "As there's no
possible way to open up the heart of this refuge to drilling and call it
'compatible' with conservation," she says, "it would require
Congressional legislation to literally set the Refuge Improvement Act
aside."
More insidious threats to the system include
a widening budget shortfall for staffing and maintenance, says Evan Hirsche,
president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, the umbrella
organization for more than 200 local refuge volunteer "friends"
groups. "Wildlife refuges have long been the black sheep of federal land
holdings in terms of monetary support," he says. Specifically, the system
must manage more than 94 million acres--and the welfare of more than 200
threatened or endangered species--with an annual budget of $370 million, or less
than $4 an acre.
"As a result," says Hirsche,
"a great deal of conservation objectives are not being met." Primary
among these has been the refuge system's losing battle with invasive species
such as the Australian pine and Brazilian pepper trees supplanting native
habitat at Florida's Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge; the zebra mussels
and purple loosestrife crowding out native mollusks and wetland plant species
in the Upper Mississippi National Fish and Wildlife Refuge; and nutria, a
beaver-like Central American rodent, tearing up tidal marshes in Maryland's
Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Also showing the strain of underfunding is
the refuge system's aging infrastructure of access roads, buildings,
water-management facilities and other assets.
The severe underfunding for maintenance and
staff has also slowed the system's opening of new refuges, despite the annual
influx of "Duck Stamp" money for land acquisition. "Before we
acquire new areas, we have to ask ourselves whether we'll have the funds to
manage them," explains Ashe. "Too often, I hear the argument, 'You
don't have to do anything, just buy the land and protect it.' But 'protect' is
an active verb."
Indeed, though much of the refuge system
consists of wilderness where humans seldom tread, at a minimum, these places
must be posted and patrolled. "In this day and age, even our most remote areas
are no longer insulated from such illegal activities as drug trafficking,
poaching and garbage dumping," says Ashe. "If we just left these
places alone, I don't think anyone would be happy with what we'd find when we
came back five years later." Moreover, a large percentage of the refuge
system requires intensive management such as controlled burning to maintain
ecosystem balance and active farming to provide grain for migratory waterfowl.
"We need more maintenance workers, more equipment operators, more
law-enforcement officers," says Ashe.
In particular, Ashe and conservation
activists agree, the system needs more wildlife biologists. "The lack of
biological expertise undermines any effort at strategic planning and wise
management," says Clark. "Many of our refuges need extensive habitat
restoration that can't be carried out because of this lack of biological
expertise." At the very least, she explains, the system needs enough
biologists to conduct wildlife surveys, monitor wildlife threats and prioritize
spending at individual refuges.
For all these reasons, a coalition of 20
conservation groups, including the National Wildlife Federation, recently
called on President Bush and Congress to nearly double the refuge system's
budget. "Because of their strategic locations and acreage, our refuges
provide safe havens for hundreds of threatened and endangered species, provide
migratory stopover for millions of birds, while at the same time provide
terrific areas for solace and enjoyment for people who want to experience
nature," argues Clark. "But it's a system that desperately requires
increased funding if it's going to address the needs of both wildlife and
people."
The good news is that authorities in
Washington, D.C., are finally getting the message. "We've seen sustained
budget increases over recent years, including Secretary of the Interior Gale
Norton's endorsement of a nearly $57 million increase for maintenance and
operations in 2003," says Ashe, who credits conservation groups for their
persistent lobbying on behalf of the refuge system. "Constituent
organizations like the National Wildlife Federation have in the past five to
six years rallied to our defense. It's in large part thanks to them that
government leaders have been able to set aside political differences and
support us."
Admittedly, recent federal funding increases
fall far short of the refuge system's staggering maintenance backlog--currently
estimated at more than $526 million, with another $700 million needed for
high-priority projects such as restoring degraded habitats and promoting the
recovery of endangered species.
Increasingly, refuges have come to rely on
volunteers to pick up the slack. Every year some 30,000 volunteers donate more
than a million hours of their time to driving heavy equipment, conducting
habitat surveys, building boardwalks, running bookstores and nature programs,
and lobbying for increased local, state and federal support. "That translates
to about $13 million worth of services a year," notes Hirsche.
The need for volunteer support will only
increase in the refuge system's second century. "These precious places are
mere islands in the landscape, and we can't hope to ever acquire all the land we
need," he explains. "As a result, the success of the system's
conservation mission will depend on local volunteers becoming envoys to
neighboring landowners and local governments, and in this way extending each
refuge's wildlife objectives beyond its borders."
In the future that Hirsche envisions,
"refuges will become shining examples for private landowners, state land
managers and other federal land agencies of how they can all develop management
policies consistent with species conservation."
New Jersey-based journalist Jessica Snyder
Sachs visited the Okefenokee and Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuges while
reporting for this article.
