North Texas, the fastest-growing region in the fastest-growing state in the nation, has a growing demand for water. While the rest of the U.S. is tearing down decaying dams, Texas wants some dam water.
When Richard Donovan saw the Lufkin Daily News on Dec. 14, 1998, a front-page story took him completely by surprise. It showed three proposed dams slicing across his beloved Neches River, a 416-mile, sediment-rich waterway in East Texas, where he grew up catching catfish on trotlines. The newspaper depicted Fastrill Dam across the upper Neches, Rockland Dam in the middle and Town Bluff Dam — which already existed but would be raised — on the lower river.
The Steinhagen Reservoir where a damn already existed, but was slated to be raised. Credit: Wendee Holtcamp
That can’t be, Donovan thought. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had listed the upper Neches as a “priority one” conservation area in 1985, even proposing it as a possible national wildlife refuge. Each of these dams would drown bottomland hardwood forests lining the river’s edge, which grow lush with oaks, elms, pecans, hackberries and hickories. Texas had already lost more than 75 percent of its bottomland hardwood forests.
The next year, Donovan — at age 65 — paddled 235 miles of the river to raise awareness. He devoted the next decade of his life to saving the Neches, writing a book, Paddling the Wild Neches, and joining forces with other conservation-minded folk. In June 2006, their efforts paid off when FWS Director Dale Hall approved the 25,281-acre Neches River National Wildlife Refuge in the same basic footprint as the proposed Fastrill reservoir.
The refuge became official when FWS accepted a 1-acre land donation from Jim and Annie Yount. Annie’s great-grandfather bought himself out of slavery after the Civil War; the family has lived in the region since.
Then the real trouble started.
The city of Dallas and the Texas Water Development Board, with the support of Gov. Rick Perry, sued not only the federal government, but also the Younts, in order to stop the refuge so the Fastrill Dam could proceed. Ironically, they used the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969 — one of the nation’s top environmental laws — claiming FWS did not adequately consider the environmental or economic impacts of the refuge.
As he fought against the dam, Donovan was labeled a “radical environmentalist,” a sobriquet that puzzles him.
Bottomland hardwood forests, including these, would be lost if the dams become a reality. Credit: Wendee Holtcamp
Donovan is a Bible-believing, retired real estate agent who grew up in these parts, a man who got riled at the thought of government taking people’s land by eminent domain, damming the river then shipping its water to satisfy the high water consumption of big cities — something that rural East Texans would continue fighting against in a David vs. Goliath battle for the foreseeable future.
“It doesn’t offend me; it just doesn’t fit,” he wrote in his book of the tag he’d received. “Radicals, to me, do radical things, such as poison the water and air, eradicate hardwoods and destroy wildlife habitat.”
Lone Ranger While the rest of the nation is tearing down decaying dams to restore historic river flows, Texas is planning new ones. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams, of approximately 75,000 dams higher than 6 feet in the U.S., no state exceeds Texas and its 7,173. The nation’s largest state, Alaska, has 96; its most populous, California, has 1,468; and one of its rainiest, Florida, has 892. Despite having only one natural lake (Caddo), today Texas has 4,790 square miles of surface water, rivaling Minnesota — the Land of 10,000 Lakes — which has 4,800 square miles.
Dam building began in earnest in the U.S. during the Great Depression to spur economic growth. The 1930s Dust Bowl boosted public support for the pricey projects, and dam building exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. But dams have a shelf life, particularly small to medium-sized ones. According to FEMA, by 2020, 85 percent of smaller dams in the U.S. will be older than 50 years, the average life expectancy of a dam. Dams that have overstayed their welcome are being demolished, rather than risk catastrophic failure. In the U.S., that happened most recently in 1976 at the Teton Dam in Idaho, which followed the failure of China’s Banqiao Dam a year before that killed 171,000 people.
According to the nonprofit American Rivers, more than 450 dams have been removed in the U.S. since 1999 — notably the Savage Rapids and Marmot Dams in Oregon, the Lewiston Dam in Idaho, as well as several in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The group estimates a majority of the removals are for ecological restoration; the biggest removal in the nation is scheduled for mid-September on Washington’s Elwha River, which will return historic salmon runs to tribal lands.
American Rivers says on its website: “We have learned a lot in the past twenty years about the many impacts dams have on rivers, and we have learned many alternatives to damming rivers. … It is unlikely that we will reverse ourselves and decide to build more dams.” Apparently, Texas didn’t get the memo.
Eye on the Future The lawsuit to stop the Neches River National Wildlife Refuge remained in litigation for two years. In February 2010, it reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal. Fastrill Dam and Reservoir was dead in the water; the refuge could open. While Donovan and others rejoiced, the fevered battle between big-city water needs and rural nature continued. The two other proposed dam projects on the Neches — plus 23 on- and off-channel reservoirs of varying sizes on other rivers and creeks — remain in the works.
Like many other states, Texas has engaged in long-range water planning mandated by the state legislature since 1997, bringing the process squarely in the public eye. The state is divided into 16 Regional Water Planning groups (North Texas is Region C), and every five years, businesses, conservation groups, politicians and citizens from each region create a plan to determine where their water will come from for the next 10, 20 and 50 years.
Water for the future could come mostly from groundwater, existing surface water, new reservoirs, piping water from one region to another, water conservation and reuse (taking previously used “gray water” and treating it). Newly proposed reservoirs have proven the most controversial, and the North Texas region’s water waste, profligate growth and desire to dam rivers far away from the city has made them a popular target for criticism.
“Dallas-Fort Worth and the suburban areas north of there, that part of the state is driving the train of surface water development,” says Janice Bezanson, director of Texas Conservation Alliance, a National Wildlife Federation affiliate. The 2011 North Texas water plan contains four new major reservoirs, all in areas of conservation importance: Marvin Nichols and Ralph Hall on the Sulphur River, one on Lower Bois D’Arc Creek, and an as-yet-undesignated “Fastrill replacement” reservoir. Most conservation concern now falls on Marvin Nichols, on the Sulphur River. Deep in East Texas, the Sulphur is a meandering river that runs through mature forests containing at least 13 of the largest individual trees of their species in the state, according to Texas Forest Service. The reservoir, if approved, will be twice the size that Fastrill would have been.
As the fastest-growing area in the fastest-growing state in the country, North Texas predicts its population will reach 13 million by 2060, surpassing even the Houston region. They insist they need that dam water. But do they?
Robbing Peter so Paul (or Ross Perot) Can Water His Lawn Many from outside the Lone Star State imagine it as one scorched, tumbleweed-rolling desert, but rainfall increases dramatically as one heads east — and along with it, the height of the trees. In the west, the scrubby Chihuahuan Desert stretches into Mexico, while some 44-60 inches of rain falls in East Texas annually, sustaining tall pine-hardwood forests. North and center, the Dallas-Fort Worth region receives moderate rainfall, yet the twin cities have been widely criticized as being the most water-wasteful in the state (though Corpus Christi is close behind).
In western Texas, the Chihuahuan Desert may be dry, but other parts of Texas have significant annual rainfall. Credit: Leaflet/Wikipedia
According to the 2010 report “Drop by Drop,” published by the National Wildlife Foundation and the Sierra Club, Dallas had the highest per-capita water use of any major city in Texas in 2008, at 240 gallons per citizen per day. (Revised Texas Water Development Board data has Dallas at 213 — values vary because of differences in how population is calculated. More recent data is still unofficial.) During the summer months, watering lawns accounts for at least 50 percent of total water consumption, which can be substantial.
In a piece titled “Drought Schmout,” NBC-5 reporter Scott Friedman analyzed Dallas and Fort Worth utility records and found wealthy residents hog much of the water. The top 10 residential users used 60 million gallons in 2008. Ross Perot, for instance, used 4.8 million gallons at his 13-acre estate, compared to 88,000 gallons annually for a typical citizen. The top user, environmental lawyer Fred Baron, doubled Perot’s numbers
“There is enough water in existing reservoirs to meet their projected demand for at least the next 50 years,” Bezanson says. Plentiful untapped water also exists in nearby Lake Texoma and Wright Patman. What’s more, she says, the North Texas water planning region bases its projected future demand on extravagant water-use values — with an equally extravagant price tag.
The 2011 North Texas region projects it will need 3.3 million acre-feet of water per year by 2060. That means every citizen would use 197 gallons per day — more than their present use of 190 in 2009 and 182 in 2010, according to unofficial data reported from by Dallas Water Utilities. That’s also far higher than 140 gallons per day, the target for all regions set by the Legislature-appointed Water Conservation Advisory Council.
“The water use projection is drafted by their consultant,” says Bezanson, “the same engineering firm that would build the Marvin Nichols reservoir at a price of $3.3 billion — Freese & Nichols. “The former principal of that engineering firm, the late Marvin C. Nichols, served as the first chairman of the Texas Water Development Board, and within hours of his death in 1969, the Texas Legislature passed a resolution to name a reservoir in East Texas after him.
Don’t Be a Water Hog North Texas is working hard to overcome the persistent perception of them as water hogs via impressive new conservation outreach programs, (including Dallas’ brilliantly named New Throne for Your Home toilet replacement program, as well as other efforts). Nonetheless, their 2011 Region C Plan includes, at $19.1 billion, vastly more spending than any of the other regions on new projects that conservationist Bezanson calls boondoggles. That amount is double the spending of the Houston region, with an equivalent projected future population and in marked contrast to the arid El Paso region, which will spend only $842 million, including $50 million on two desalination plants (which usually get roundly criticized as being too pricey).
Arid cities such as San Antonio and El Paso have learned to make do with less water and have been hailed as national models for water conservation.
In the mid-1980s, San Antonio had a per-capita water use of 225 [gallons per citizen per day] and reduced it to 122 by 2010. “Our goal is 116 by 2016, and we are working hard to achieve that,” says Sarah Gatewood of San Antonio Water Systems. They have strict lawn-watering rules, education programs, and incentives for toilet and washing-machine replacement, among other things. “We are using the same amount of water that we did 25 years ago, even though we’ve seen a 67 percent increase in customers.”
The bottom line is that much of the water necessary to satiate Texas in the future can be achieved through conservation, wise use of existing resources, and taking a critical look at what politicians want to spend the taxpayers’ money on before jumping in full-throttle. Although Texas may lead in the exuberance with which it’s going after dams for water supply, it’s not the only state considering new reservoirs. Heated battles have begun over a handful of proposed new dams: on Colorado’s Cache la Poudre River, California’s Upper San Joaquin River and Washington’s Yakima River, for starters.
“Elected officials get caught up in the promoters’ claims that reservoirs will be good for the economy and push for new ones,” says Bezanson, executive director of TCA. “Promoters don’t mention the downsides – taking land out of production, condemning people’s homes and lands, reducing the tax base of counties and school districts, and massive destruction of wildlife habitat.”
Dams will have a devastating affect on nany species of fish, such as this paddlefish. Credit: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
In addition to completely drowning terrestrial habitat underneath a new reservoir, the downstream problems that dams cause for aquatic ecosystems and fish, mussels and other species are scientifically well-documented. Although less celebrated than salmon, anadromous paddlefish and shovelnose sturgeon have declined throughout rivers that run into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, to the point where both have disappeared from several rivers, and are now listed as threatened species in Texas and other states.
On the other hand, the East Texas Tourism Board has begun to embrace the region’s promise for ecotourism. During the peak of spring migration, thousands of waterfowl and songbirds stop here, and decades ago, red wolves and black bears roamed the woods. Although both species plummeted to extinction by the 1960s from overzealous riflemen and loss of giant cypress trees for denning, bears have started spilling back over the border from Louisiana and Arkansas — re-creating the kind of “wild Texas” that few have known or perceived. And a wild Texas is something that Donovan, for one, has gladly devoted the past decade of his life fighting for.
LIMÓN, COSTA RICA — I left Earth University last Tuesday morning and headed to the Selva Bananito Ecolodge where I would be staying next. Jürgen Stein, along with his sister, Sofia, own the ecolodge, which has received the highest sustainability rating from the Costa Rican Tourism Board, 5 leafs. Along with their parents, they own around 3,850 acres of land, 75 percent of which is rainforest. The remaining 25 percent is for cattle and an African palm oil plantation, and for land being reforested as a carbon offset project. Their off-the-grid ecolodge gives travelers the chance to stay right in the midst of the rainforest in accommodations that are incredibly beautiful without harming the environment. Solar panels generate electricity and dinner is served by candlelight. They also cater to adventurers, as they have horseback riding, naturalist-guided hikes and birdwatching. Visitors can zipline through the jungle, and then rappel off the platform or rappel down a beautiful waterfall. The cuisine is local and delicious, and in the evening, I watched the lighted eyes of caimans in the pond just down the hill from the dining lodge. In the rainforest, visitors can spot poison dart frogs, sloths, monkeys, as well as an incredible list of birds such as trogons, tityras and oropendula. Birders come here from around the world to see the beautiful pure white snowy cotinga dove and the great jacamar. Their land borders La Amistad International Peace Park — the biggest park in Costa Rica and which extends into Panama. But one of their most important contributions involves giving back: They established the Limón Watershed Foundation to protect the water in the Banano and Bananito Rivers for the community, and they give presentations to local schoolchildren — as well as visitors who stay at the lodge.
Listen to my conversation with Adventures.
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Correction: The Stein family own 1750 hectares not acres (approximately 3,850 acres).
For the past several days, I have been at Earth University, or in Spanish Universidad Earth, for the Planet, People, Peace 3rd International conference on sustainable ecotourism, hosted by CANAECO — the Costa Rican National Chamber of Ecotourism. Earth is a 4-year university focused on teaching students about sustainable agricultural, forestry and natural resource management techniques. They recruit students from extremely rural, poor regions by going to different countries and talking to families and finding young people who will return to their areas as leaders in sustainable ag techniques and as eco-agro-entrepreneurial business leaders. Fifty percent of the students have 100% of their expenses paid for.
Costa Rica is way ahead of most countries when it comes to sustainability and the protection of natural resources. The government has set a goal to become the first carbon neutral country by 2021.
I called into Adventures to share the amazing work being done in Costa Rica and I sent some pictures along too.
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Fine blue dots highlight the arrival of trans-Gulf migrant birds on the upper Texas Coast. Once the birds arrive, they begin to land, so there are fewer over land than over the Gulf. Credit: NOAA, a taxpayer-supported service of the U.S. government
After slogging through knee-deep water, past palmetto thickets and trumpet vines dangling from the treetops, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Mike Lange stops short. He signals toward a gnarled live oak, straight out of the magical charm of The Shire, its trunk the width of a car. Crumpled resurrection ferns line its branches, waiting to sprout in green abandon with the next rains. Nearby, the trunks of an elm and a water hickory wrap around each other like a sculpture of intertwined lovers.
Lange is rightly proud of these woods. Over the past 20 years, he has been largely responsible for orchestrating the conservation of what is known as the Columbia bottomlands, low-lying hardwood forests lining the southern portions of the Brazos, Colorado and San Bernard Rivers before they cross the Texas coast and spill into the Gulf of Mexico. This particular piece of the bottomlands — the Dance Bayou tract of the San Bernard Refuge — contains one of the South’s few remaining old-growth forests.
The Columbia bottomlands are also an amazing hotspot for migratory birds, with an estimated 40 million to 80 million individual birds of 240 species using the area. Many of them are spring migrants stopping to rest and eat after crossing the Gulf of Mexico before heading farther north.
But no one understood the significance of this thicketed haven for birds until a good-natured Cajun named Sidney Gauthreaux came to visit in the early 1990s. It was just after the National Weather Service installed the first Doppler radar on the Gulf Coast south of Houston, and meteorologist Bill Read — now director of the National Hurricane Center — invited Gauthreaux to check it out. What they discovered catalyzed the conservation effort Lange and the Fish and Wildlife Service have led since then.
“The displays were never more spectacular than when we saw the Columbia bottomlands near Houston,” Gauthreaux says, his passion for birds and science shining through a distinctive Cajun lilt. “We knew it had to be a very special area.”
Birds and radar have a storied history, but the relationship has not always been synergistic. During World War II, England established radar stations along its coastline, providing early warning when the fighters and bombers of the Luftwaffe were crossing the English Channel. On more than one occasion, unidentified radar signals caused widespread panic among British radar operators. When these mystery echoes appeared, which was always at night, they resembled small aircraft heading toward the coast of Britain. Sometimes masses of these echoes covered the radar screen, but they always vanished by morning, and no attack ever followed. The British military started calling the false returns “angels” — that is, the souls of dead soldiers headed home. The term made its way into the Oxford English dictionary by 1947 and soon became common lingo for any unexplained radar interference.
Eventually, radar operators came to believe that atmospheric discontinuities caused angel echoes. A few advanced the idea that the angels might be birds, but most considered the idea preposterous. A secret British government document, now declassified, says, “The extreme reluctance in accepting the view that birds are responsible for angel phenomena appears to arise from the feeling that an object so small and soft as a passerine bird could not possibly produce a detectable radar echo.”
A sample of waterbirds found in the Gulf Coast — a white ibis (on the far right), a bunch of roseate spoonbills and a few yellow-crowned night herons. Credit: Wendee Holtcamp
The English military’s top brass turned eventually to prominent British ornithologist David Lack, who began gathering year-round data on migrating birds and soon correlated bird movements with the angel echoes. But by then, the war was over, life moved on, and talk of angels passed from the popular lexicon.
The U.S. National Weather Service established an early-warning radar system in the late 1950s, and Gauthreaux, then a high-school-age birdwatcher, became intrigued by it. He swore he could occasionally detect birds on the black-and-white images of those early radar systems, known as Weather Surveillance Radars-1957, or, more casually, WSR-57. He eventually paired his interests and helped pioneer the field of radar ornithology while in graduate school.
Gauthreaux accepted a professorship at Clemson University in 1970 and proceeded to document nearly a 50 percent decline in the numbers of trans-Gulf migratory songbirds between 1967 and 1987. (No new calculations have been done since then, but anecdotal evidence suggests a continued decline.) Early black-and-white radar had severe limitations, and Gauthreaux’s research didn’t really take off until the 1990s, when the National Weather Service released a “next generation of radar,” also called NEXRAD, WSR-88D or — in the terminology most used today — Doppler-pulse radar.
“With WSR-57, you’d get single-frame shots,” he explains. “It wasn’t connected to a computer or anything.” Today, scientists — and birdwatchers — can stream radar images live on their computers, enabling them to see exactly where groups of birds are at any given time. That is, if they know what to look for.
Radar works by emitting electromagnetic waves that travel until they bounce off an object in their path. By measuring the time it takes for the wave to return to the source, scientists can determine an object’s distance and size. The bigger the object — whether an enemy plane or a rainstorm — the more of the wave gets reflected to the source. Older radar could not detect an object’s speed, but newer radar does by making use of the Doppler Effect.
The Doppler concept is illustrated by the rising pitch of an ambulance siren as it approaches a listener and the falling pitch as the ambulance recedes into the distance. The sound waves are actually shifted as the moving ambulance approaches, making them arrive more frequently at a listener’s ear and seem to be more highly pitched and vice versa for the receding vehicle. This frequency-shifting phenomenon works for any type of wave, including the electromagnetic waves emitted by a radar source.
The Doppler radar collects three types of data from the waves that come back to its receiver: reflectivity, velocity and a wind profile. From these data, scientists create the radar images seen on the news describing the intensity of a weather event, its directional movement and the wind speed. Meteorologists usually filter out echoes caused by birds, insects and even dust, occasionally talking about “ground clutter.” Gauthreaux flipped that around, filtering out the weather and looking at echoes caused by the birds. “They used radar to quantify the amount of rainfall; the stronger the storm, the more rainfall,” Gauthreaux says. “I used that same concept to quantify birds. Migratory birds are just big drops of water.”
Meteorologists use pulse-Doppler radar, which sends out an intermittent rather than continuous signal, allowing a finer-scale detection of objects. Distinguishing birds from precipitation on a radar image is not difficult. “Birds show a fine stippling pattern while weather forms huge chunky echoes,” Gauthreaux says. By studying patterns on radar images, he has learned to distinguish different types of birds — hawks, songbirds and water birds for example — as well as calculate the densities of flocks. Scientists can even study insects using Doppler, and in fact, ornithologists using radar have to remove the “noise” caused by the insects (and vice versa, for the bug scientists).
Ironically, Gauthreaux had to convince meteorologists all over again that birds caused some of the unexplained radar interference. Most of the people who had worked with WSR-57 had retired, and the new echelon of radar experts wasn’t familiar with birds. Gauthreaux had figured out that birds flying faster than wind were artificially inflating the wind speeds calculated from Doppler radar. “I took a lot of grief because a lot of meteorologists said things like, ‘If there were that many birds out there, we’d be up to our nose in bird crap,’” he says. “They had to ultimately eat crow because we now know those algorithms are very sensitive to picking up birds.”
It was not long before Gauthreaux had used the new radar to solve one of ornithology’s long-standing puzzles: Where did spring migrants from Mexico and Central America stop after crossing the Gulf of Mexico on their way north? The birds always eventually showed up at nesting habitats in northern North America. And although birds practically fall out of the sky if they experience bad weather when crossing the Gulf — a phenomenon known as “fallout” — in better weather they do not always show up in great numbers in the small coastal woodlots that have become renowned birding hotspots, including Texas’ High Island sanctuary and Sabine Woods.
No one really knew whether the birds stopped somewhere en masse or kept going.
Birds land piecemeal, but they take off en masse, usually just after dusk. Pulse-Doppler radar images from that time of day showed intense concentrations of birds along the forested rivers of coastal Texas. Gauthreaux and other local biologists visited the forests and found a Shangri-la for weary migratory birds. “Right quickly,” Gauthreaux says, “we discovered that radar picked up birds coming out of stopover habitats. That’s proved to be a very useful tool, leading to discovery of important conservation areas.”
From high in the treetops comes the crystal-clear call of a Prothonotary warbler, a brilliant yellow bird that somehow remains camouflaged in the trees. Lange points out the calls of a tufted titmouse and a white-eyed vireo.A red-shouldered hawk takes flight. But the woods of the Columbia bottomlands are not just shelter for birds of prey, songbirds and water birds. They boast a great diversity of tree species — ash, maple, pecan, hackberry, sycamore, birch, cypress, water oak and dozens of others. The multitiered canopy allows insects to thrive, providing food for most of the birds. Tree flowers, berries and fruit feed other species.
A sample of live oaks, which keep their leaves year round, unlike most oaks. Credit: Wendee Holtcamp
Historically, this coastal floodplain contained more than 700,000 acres of hardwood forest, but 75 percent has already been lost, much of it to growth in the Houston region. Named after a colony that Stephen F. Austin settled when Texas was still under Spanish control, Columbia later became the first capital of the Republic of Texas. Some still refer to the forests as Austin’s Woods.
After Gauthreaux discovered the importance of Austin’s Woods to birds, he began giving talks to the Texas conservation community. “People saw this and said, ‘Good gracious alive, we’ve got to protect those things,’” he says. “Once we publicized this, everything started to fall into place.”
In 1995, the Fish and Wildlife Service began an initiative to prevent the remaining forests from succumbing to urban sprawl and in 1997 formalized its plan just in time to receive the first land donation — the 657-acre Dance Bayou tract. Despite early resistance to what some in the generally conservative state of Texas worried was a federal land grab, the project has proceeded with almost no opposition.
A devil's walking stick or toothache tree. Credit: Wendee Holtcamp
To conserve as much biological diversity as possible in this highly fragmented landscape, the Columbia Bottomlands Conservation Plan set out to create an integrated network of satellite tracts, rather than one larger contiguous reserve. (A similar approach is used in Texas’ Big Thicket National Preserve, a couple of hours east.) Three National Wildlife Refuges preserve Columbia Bottomlands habitat — Big Boggy,Brazoria and San Bernard. New tracts in outlying areas become, for administrative purposes, part of the San Bernard refuge.
All told, the Fish and Wildlife Service has preserved 19,000 acres since 1997, with a goal of 70,000 acres. In the long run, the federal government not only intends to reforest and improve habitat on the land it has acquired; it plans to work with private landowners to do the same.
Ephemeral radar angels may have inspired the conservation of the Columbia bottomlands, but the project has brought concrete benefits to the people living around them. In addition to their recreational value, the preserved forests provide a measure of flood control by storing excess water after heavy rains. They protect against damage from hurricanes. Ancient trees store and sequester carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
Some of the benefits of this conservation effort are financial. The forests help clean the water flowing through them and into the Gulf of Mexico estuaries, supporting multimillion-dollar shrimp and fishing industries. The Texas Gulf Coast is also one of the “birdiest” places in the world, and wildlife watching is a very big business. In 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available), it brought $2.9 billion in revenue to Texas, up from $1.2 billion in 1996.
In the end, though, the people responsible for saving these forests admit the effort was born in emotion. There is, after all, something awe-inspiring about a tree that has a trunk thicker in diameter than a car is wide.
“Any two slices of these woods are as different as pecan and cherry pie,” Lange once wrote in a Trust for Public Land newsletter. There are upland forests, oak motts, cypress swamps and coastal prairie. Canebreaks or bamboo thickets once grew so high you could not see a horse galloping through; very few remain. “To the casual observer, I must admit that it probably looks pretty unspectacular,” he continued. “To me, this land is an undiscovered place filled with mystery.”
When fertilizer-laden runoff from the Mississippi River empties into the gulf, algae thrives — and marine animals die.
I’m in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico on a modified shrimp boat, the R/V Sabine Lake, and a trawl net’s worth of ocean catch has just been unceremoniously dumped on board. A pile of slimy, silvery things squirm and flip around a square tray, but the large iridescent eyes of a dozen or so little squid enthrall me. I watch as small dots on their whitish-clear bodies pulse and expand as they turn rust-red. The pulsating dots are called chromatophores, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) biologist Kirk Blood tells me as he picks through the catch, counting and measuring each organism.
Little Squid, or Brief Squid, (Lolliguncula brevis) have irridescent eyes and small dots on their whitish-clear bodies which pulse and expand as they turn rust-red. Credit: Wendee Holtcamp
We’ve arrived at the first stop of eight on an all-day research excursion. Rain or shine, wind or waves, the TPWD upper coast fisheries biologists take this trip twice monthly and year-round to sample a 300-square-mile wide region of the gulf for sea creatures and water quality. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, the crew roughs it in sloppy seas under the careful guidance of Captain Robert Martinez Jr. — who is with us today. They haven’t missed a sampling in 23 years.
“Catch data for these different species helps us judge whether these organisms need special attention through regulation changes,” Terry Stelly, TPWD ecosystem biologist, explains. “Our samples are for fishery management, but we do encounter the dead zone in our routine sampling.”
The dead zone? Is that like the Bermuda Triangle? The Dragon’s Triangle? Area 51? Being the mildly paranoid seafarer that I am, I already fear the Perfect Storm arising from nowhere, and now we are talking about a dead zone? And then out of nowhere, Captain Martinez asks if I brought a banana on board. He looks worried. “No,” I say, “I ate one this morning, though. Why?”
“Every time someone brings a banana on board, we have bad luck.”
Captain Robert Martinez, Jr. Credit: Wendee Holtcamp
Winds have picked up, turning glassy seas to 3-foot swells, and there’s a dead zone? Maybe I have banana remnants on my pants. I put on a brave face, and even though not a single cloud mars the blue sky, I swallow a Dramamine just in case.
It turns out the dead zone cannot suck our boat into the watery abyss, but as for sea creatures, they are not so lucky.
“From the Mississippi to the Sabine River, you have an area of essentially dead water on the bottom,” Blood says.
Also known as a zone of hypoxia, the dead zone is an amoeba-like blob of oxygen-deprived water that stretches down the Louisiana and Texas coastline and has blighted the Gulf of Mexico for at least the past half-century. Water containing less than 2 milligrams of oxygen per liter of water is considered hypoxic and can not support life.
Northern Gulf of Mexico hypoxic area, 2010 Credit: EPA
“Species that are not fast enough or mobile enough, perish,” Blood explains. He’s been working with TPWD for 13 years, and has seen this firsthand. Ocean organisms that can swim will leave the area if they can swim fast enough, but if the low-oxygen zone lasts too long, ocean-floor creatures have no options. They die. “If this persists, you can lose whole species that are endemic and live in just this specific area.”
We motor on to the next few sampling locations in the gulf, and in each one, the crew collects water on the ocean floor using a “water catcher” — a tube that snaps shut once it reaches the bottom. They test the water for salinity or saltiness, turbidity or cloudiness, temperature, and dissolved oxygen which reveals whether or not they have entered the dead zone — even though the main purpose of their research is to help govern TPWD regulations on fisheries — the shrimp, crab and finfish fisheries.
At each stop the guys also throw a 20-foot trawl net overboard which sinks to the ocean floor some 12 to 39 feet below. Martinez then motors the boat in a straight line for about a half-mile. Next, they haul the trawl net back on board and dump everything out. Catch after catch on our eight stops, we find shrimp galore.
“This is the Bubba Gump shrimp boat,” Martinez says with a laugh. He rattles out the names: white shrimp, brown shrimp, pink shrimp, mantis shrimp, broken-back shrimp and seabob shrimp. We also catch some cool and creepy creatures, including blue crabs, longnose spider crabs, pink purse crab, Florida lady crab, a brittle star, sand seatrout, croaker and lookdowns — thin fish whose eyes make them appear they’re looking down. But the coolest catch besides the squid? Bighead searobins — which have huge fins and fingerlike rays which they use to walk along the sea floor.
Blood recalls fondly a vivid experience that catalyzed his love of the sea when he was just 15. “My dad took me out and we were diving off a rig,” he says. “I saw a whole school of lookdowns and I was like, ‘wow’ and then they disappeared! They’re about 1 centimeter wide so the whole school looks like it disappears when they turn. Then I couldn’t find my dad or the rig.” He headed to the surface and had to swim against strong current to make it back. But his appreciation for marine life has never waned. He’s not the only one. Martinez keeps repeating how much he loves it out here at sea.
There’s so much life squirming on board after each trawl that I start to wonder if that gulf dead zone really exists. “Our critters and our data are being affected. Sometimes we’re not catching anything at all,” says Stelly. “When we take those measurements at the bottom, many times in the month of April through about September or so, we end up getting [oxygen] values right near two, sometimes less than two.” Apparently, the dead zone can last up to six months out of the year, but doesn’t typically appear during winter months. That explains why we’re catching critters in February.
The dead zone’s seasonality became a vital clue to determining its cause. Although first documented in the 1970s, scientists have systematically studied and mapped the phenomenon only since 1985. They soon discovered that fertilizers applied to America’s breadbasket — the farm belt that stretches across the Great Plains — were affecting the ocean thousands of miles away. The fertilizers get washed off the land during rainstorms, drain into the Mississippi and out into the Gulf of Mexico. Major landscape changes over the past two centuries, including deforestation, development and concretization, have increased the volume of water flowing into the Mississippi River by 20 to 30 percent, and as the largest river in North America, the Mississippi watershed drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States. The loss of coastal wetlands further exacerbates the problem, because they otherwise would allow some of the nutrients and fertilizers to settle out before reaching the ocean.
The majority of the land in the Mississippi watershed is farm land. Each spring as farmers fertilize their lands preparing for crop season, rain washes fertizer off the land and into streams and rivers.
Fertilizer-laden river flow contains nitrogen- and phosphorus-based compounds, and once this water enters the bay, it spreads out and “fertilizes” naturally occurring ocean algae. The algae explode into riotous blooms at the sea surface. These algae blooms actually produce oxygen through photosynthesis at the surface, but as algae cells die, they sink toward the ocean bottom where mass quantities of oceanic bacteria decompose them. This decomposition consumes so much oxygen that it depletes the ocean for thousands of miles, giving rise to a dead zone that follows currents down the coast.
Besides the fact that farmers apply fertilizer in spring, a couple of other factors cause the dead zone to occur during warmer months. Just as hot air rises, so also does warm water rise above colder water. In addition, fresh water is less dense than salt water so it tends to stay near the surface. The result? Warm, fresh, oxygenated water on top and cold, salty, oxygen-deprived water below.
“When you have these two layers, oxygen in the surface layer doesn’t get down to the bottom,” says Nancy Rabalais of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and one of the world’s leading dead zone experts. “Like a tequila sunrise cocktail, with layers of orange juice and grenadine, until you mix it up, the layers are going to be separate.” Anything that churns up the ocean will bring some of the oxygen down below, reducing the size and extent of the dead zone, so whenever hurricanes and tropical storms sweep through, the zone shrinks.
Click to enlarge Credit: EPA
Stelly tells me about how in 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and then Rita mixed up the gulf, decreasing the dead zone temporarily although it re-emerged after the hurricanes. But in December, when the TPWD crew normally would not catch many shrimp, they were catching boatloads. The most likely explanation, says Stelly, is that the temporary increase in oxygen caused by the hurricanes gave shrimp a small window in time needed to reproduce — so the crew caught an extraordinary amount in December.
The dead zone lasts up to six months of the year, but is that the extent of its damage? According to scientists, it affects the marine ecosystem year-round. Rabalais and her colleagues found dramatic declines in marine biodiversity and the total abundance of marine organisms in regions of the gulf affected by severe hypoxia. “A healthy community will have a diversity of fauna — snails and clams, plants, starfish, sea urchins, small shrimp that live in the sediment,” says Rabalais. Within the dead zone, “none of those are there anymore. There’s mostly small worms and bacteria.”
Dead zones occur around the world, not just in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2004, the United Nations identified 146 such zones, ranging from less than 1 square mile to 45,000 square miles in the Baltic Sea. Other dead zones around the United States include Chesapeake Bay and a new one off the Pacific Coast from California to Oregon, which scientists attribute to rising ocean temperatures due to climate change. Since warmer ocean temperatures cause more intense stratification and more algae blooms, climate change will inevitably intensify dead zone phenomena. Dead zones can reverse if steps are taken, but unfortunately sometimes the necessary actions are drastic. A massive dead zone in the Black Sea disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union made fertilizer use unaffordable.
reated by satellite, the red circles on this map show the location and size of many of our planet’s dead zones. Black dots show where dead zones have been observed, but their size is unknown. Darker blues in this image show higher concentrations of particulate organic matter, an indication of the overly fertile waters that can culminate in dead zones. Image courtesy of NASA. Click on image to enlarge.
So what, if anything, is being done to breathe life back into the gulf dead zone? An interagency Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force formed in 1997 and set a goal to reduce the dead zone to less than 1,900 square miles by 2008. But in 2007, it extended for 7,900 square miles, roughly the size of Massachusetts and scientists are predicting that 2011 will see the largest dead zone in history along the northern Gulf of Mexico.
“There’s not a concerted, well-funded effort to make a difference. That’s what the task force is supposed to be doing,” says Rabalais. “In 2001, the task force forwarded an action plan to [the president]. The five-year reassessment still isn’t done. A lot of people call it the No Action Plan.”
It’s a basic tenet of ecology that you can’t change one part of the web of life without affecting a dozen other parts. What happens in middle America affects organisms on the bottom of the sea, which have no say in the matter. We live on land, but we impact our oceans, and it is foolish to believe that our lives are unaffected by the state of our oceans. People make a living from shrimping or marine fisheries along the coast. People take their kids fishing in the bays and along the coast on weekends.
“The right solution is to try to figure out better land management. If you can get all the farmers on the same page for 3,000 river miles and all the tributaries, that’s going to require major effort between different user groups to get this accomplished,” says Stelly. “With the push for corn [for biofuel and ethanol], it’s going to make the battle even harder.”
And so, as we finish up our sampling in the eighth sampling spot and head toward shore, the beauty of the sun setting over the open ocean leaves a sinking feeling in my heart. Even though we caught some fascinating ocean creatures today, below those waves a dead zone has zapped the life from a large expanse of the gulf. At the present time, Texas does not serve on the interagency task force, and although the dead zone affects more of Louisiana’s coastal water, it stretches into Texas waters every summer. Texans need to get involved in order to ensure that the marine life that has inspired awe in so many people — and indeed has led these biologists to dedicate their lives to sampling, studying and saving it — does not continue to decline, die and disappear.
Could major metropolitan areas get by without building any more major freeways — ever?
That is the conclusion of a new study by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC). Not only that, they found that under the “No More Freeway” scenario, employment and housing opportunities were more evenly distributed throughout the urban areas, and mobility was more, not less, efficient.
In the report, “No More Freeways: Urban Land Use Transportation Dynamics Without Freeway Capacity Expansion,” researchers Le Zhang of University of Maryland and Wei Xu of Oregon State University used a computer simulation model called ABSOLUTE (Agent-Based Simulator of Land-Use Transportation Evolution) — previously developed by Zhang — that allows them to play around with different land use and growth scenarios and also to look at public versus private investment ( in other words, who ultimately pays for those additional freeways and roads).
In 1900, there were 149 miles of paved roadways, and by 2000 that had increased to 4 million miles. “Planners and decision-makers often are drawn to short-term solutions for prominent freeway bottlenecks,” Zhang and Wei write in the report, and as a result are often drawn to the immediate solution of building more freeways, typically using public dollars.
Yet this short-term approach may have far-reaching consequences. Kaid Benfield of NRDC’s Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth Program recently made that point clear in a blog post (with aerial images) for the Atlantic magazine, showing that the traditionally romantic cities of Vienna, Rome and Paris do not have freeways running through the city center, unlike Atlanta or Dallas.
In No More Freeways, the researchers analyzed both a hypothetical urban area and the real-world Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.
“The research question is, What is the land use and transportation impact of not building any additional freeway capacity at all? With the “No-More-Freeway” proposal as one of the alternative transportation investment policy scenarios, four additional policy scenarios are also developed, modeled and evaluated for comparison purposes: more public freeways, more private freeways, completely private ownership, and socially optional investment.”
For the Twin Cities, they found that in the short term (the next 8 years), the “No More Freeway” scenario outperformed all other investment options — including public funding of freeways, private funding of freeways, and a market-based investment approach. “This suggests that more investment in arterial streets is probably the more cost-effective investment strategy than more freeway capacities given the current land use and transportation systems in the Twin Cities,” the report concludes. In the longer term, they say, if demand continues to grow then freeway investment will become more cost-effective once again unless more efficient options are used, such as public transportation (buses, rail) or more efficient land use and development.
Although they acknowledge a need to improve their model and further refine the study, they would like to expand it to other urban areas.
Desert bighorn sheep are being restored to the mountains of West Texas.
Solstice Moon and Sunrise, Elephant Mountain WMA, Texas
Against a magenta sunrise, the winter solstice moon — full and white — sinks into the western horizon. Several dozen folks stand bundled up at the base of Elephant Mountain, a flat-topped 6,225-foot monolith rising more than 2,000 feet above the Chihuahuan Desert. Witness to the glorious dawn on the solstice, a day historically celebrating rebirth and a return to light, I can feel the collective anticipation of the events soon to unfold.
On all accounts both practical and symbolic, it seemed the perfect day for returning desert bighorn sheep to the Bofecillos Mountains of Big Bend Ranch State Park on the Texas-Mexico border, where they had been absent for the past half-century.
Desert bighorn sheep on top of Elephant Mountain, West Texas
“Every time we drove by, we would say, ‘There ought to be sheep in those mountains,’” says Mike Pittman, Trans-Pecos wildlife management area project leader overseeing the relocation. Bighorns disappeared from Texas around 1958, and restoration efforts began in earnest in the 1980s. Although bighorns are not yet in all of their former habitats, the return of the flagship species represents one of the state’s biggest wildlife victories. It involved an uncommon cooperation between hunters, private landowners, government agencies and conservationists.
When I visited the region just three months before, in September, Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD) biologist Froylan Hernandez showed me around the 23,147-acre Elephant Mountain Wildlife Management Area (WMA), which has become a natural breeding ground for the bighorns. Although the WMA has a self-guided driving tour, the 2,200-acre grassland plateau on top is often closed to the public except for guided hunts, research activities and field days. I witnessed something few ever will: bighorn herds up close atop the mountain.
A bighorn ram on Elephant Mountain
We clambered through the willowy grass as ethereal fog came and went, hiding the bighorns from view. “The mountain makes its own weather,” Hernandez explained. The desert’s wet season lasts from July through September, bringing occasional thunderstorms, low clouds and fog. We tried to get close to a half-dozen females and a lamb on a ridge, but when we arrived where they were literally moments before, the cloud lifted and they were halfway across the mountain, eliciting our raucous laughter. These sheep can dash like silent lightning through the pale yellow grasses.
As we continue our exploration, Hernandez shows me where the sheep nibbled “ice cream plants” — a colloquialism for their preferred vegetation: mountain mahogany, Wright’s silk tassel and the spring flowers of yuccas. Desert bighorns can survive with little fresh water, getting what they need from vegetation. These fleet-footed animals prefer habitat with mountain slopes greater than 60 percent, which helps them elude predators such as mountain lions and coyotes.
Froylan Hernandez looks through the clouds to spot bighorn sheep.
Watching the agile sheep leap across narrow ledges is like watching the Cirque de Soleil. How can they do that without falling to their deaths many feet below? The answer lies in their hooves, which have rubbery soles that grip rocky surfaces, giving them an uncanny ability to leap wildly but land safely.
As Hernandez tells about the bighorns, it’s clear how much he loves his work. He interned at Elephant Mountain in 2000, and 10 years later, he leads the bighorn restoration for TPWD.
“If you find a job you love, you won’t have to ‘work’ a day in your life,” he says happily.
As we walk and observe, he shares the bighorn’s history. One subspecies of desert bighorn once roamed the mountains of West Texas — Ovis canadensis mexicana — but was extirpated throughout the state by 1958 from unregulated hunting, domestic livestock diseases and habitat loss and fragmentation. Although humans have not destroyed the mountaintops, we have modified the valleys in between with roads, cities and fences that limit the ability of bighorns to move from range to range. As a result, when bighorns disappear from a mountain range, there’s little chance for recolonization.
And that brings us to this winter solstice, a day for new beginnings. The cold air nips at my skin, but that will change as the day goes on. Excitement over the first sheep captured pulses through the whole crew, which includes several Texas Bighorn Society volunteers, students and a professor from Sul Ross State University, TPWD biologists, veterinary scientists and a few photographers and reporters. By moving some individuals from one mountain range to another, humans go from being the bighorn’s No. 1 threat to No. 1 hero — even if the individuals being relocated may experience what some of us jokingly call the sheep version of an alien abduction.
Abducted by "aliens"
Imagine their point of view: While happily walking through their desert scrub home, bighorns suddenly find themselves ensnared in a net, legs tied, blindfolded. Then their bodies lift off the ground and fly through the air. What in their experience or evolution could have prepared them for this? The helicopter pilot flies down the mountain with up to three tethered beasts dangling below. They are gently placed on the ground, whereupon strange creatures (that would be us) take blood and fur and, yes, even perform an anal probe for the purpose of taking temperature and a fecal sample.
After the helicopter captures the sheep on Elephant Mountain they are taken to the staging area.
Elephant Mountain WMA came into existence in 1985 when rancher and Texas Bighorn Society member C.G. Johnson donated Elephant Mountain Ranch to Texas. Biologists brought 20 bighorns from Sierra Diablo to Elephant Mountain in 1987, and they have blossomed into a population of 165 today. Elephant Mountain is now home to the bighorn portion of the annual Grand Slam — a five-day guided hunt, determined by lottery, for Texas’ big four game animals: white-tailed deer, mule deer, pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep.
Truly, this is a story where the passion and conservation ethic of hunters led to the restoration of a species. Only about 16 of the oldest rams out of an estimated population of 1,500 are hunted each year. In addition, bighorn hunters put their money where their mouth is. The Texas Bighorn Society auctions sheep hunts and other items, using the money for its annual work project — usually installing automated wildlife guzzlers. In addition, proceeds from TPWD bighorn hunting licenses, Grand Slam tickets and an excise tax go toward research, management, monitoring and relocation efforts. It’s one of few completely self-sustaining wildlife restoration programs.
When the first sheep arrive at the helipad, we receive an unwelcome mouthful of dust, but then get to work. The plan is to capture 40 animals — mostly females, since they will give birth in spring, but also some rams.
A team of volunteers unhitches each sheep from the helicopter, then carries them one by one to the four stations standing ready. I work with TPWD biologists Mike Sullins, Mike Janis and Jonah Evans. After removing the hobbles binding a sheep’s feet, we lift the animal onto a special stretcher, guiding each leg through a hole to immobilize it. I gently hold the sheep’s head to one side so vets can take blood and look for parasites.
We take a hair sample and attach a radio collar before moving the sheep into a transport trailer. Everyone learns the routine quickly; once a sheep is off the helicopter, it gets handled for less than five minutes.
At the staging area hair samples are taken and a radio collar attached.
Their bodies seem small and fragile under our “alien” care. Horns on the female, or ewe, stay small and pointed, but a mature ram’s horns weigh up to 30 pounds and seem gargantuan for an animal whose body is only 200 pounds, similar to a white-tailed deer. During breeding season, rams use their bony skulls and tough horns in impressive battles that can last up to 24 hours. Only similarly sized males fight, charging at each other from distances of up to 20 feet, then head-butting. These battles can mean life or death, but the winning male mates with all the females, so their heavy horns pay off — at least for a lucky few.
Around midday, Pittman makes the call to stop and move the 29 sheep we have, and continue the effort the next day. All ewes are together in one trailer, while the rambunctious rams have their own wooden boxes. The trailers head south for almost two hours before turning off toward some of the most magnificent mountains I have seen — colorful, rugged and picturesque.
All ewes are together in one trailer for the trip to the release site.
The release site at Panther Canyon lies just feet from the Mexico border, and in December, TPWD, the National Park Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the international cement company Cemex — which owns the land across the border — signed a memorandum of agreement for joint wildlife restoration and management. Cemex is already engaged in bighorn restoration in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua, with former TPWD employees Billy Pat and Bonnie McKinney heading the program.
Panther Canyon
Those who came here for the release stand on either side of the trailer, anxiously waiting. The gate is opened, and a dozen ewes come charging out, running straight up the mountainside. Others hesitate, but with a little encouragement, they all head up the slopes. The rams come next, and with a little help, the regal bighorns have all gone to their new home. Cheers erupt from those standing by. It’s a fitting end to a perfect winter solstice, the day for looking forward to a brighter tomorrow.
“I don’t think the capture could have gone better,” says Louis Harveson, director of the Borderlands Research Institute at Sul Ross State University, who will monitor bighorn movements in the park. “Will they all just go to Mexico?” he wonders, glancing at the nearby Rio Grande. Some may head back to Elephant Mountain, 55 miles north as the crow flies. Everyone involved hopes the bighorns will stay, breed and establish a new population.
A ewe makes a leap towards her new home.
Despite clear success, the effort remains far from complete. “We are only halfway to the goal,” Hernandez says. “Bighorns historically lived in 15 or 16 mountain ranges. Right now we have 1,500 animals in seven mountain ranges — the Beach, Baylor, Sierra Diablo, Van Horn, Eagle, Black Gap–Del Carmen ranges and Elephant Mountain.”
We can now add the Bofecillos to that list, and with it the opportunity to witness wild bighorns prancing around the rock ledges of Big Bend Ranch State Park, one of the state park system’s crown jewels — not unlike the bighorn itself.
Although the planet as a whole has been warming — the past decade was the warmest since instrumental records began in the 19th century — natural climate variability still steals the show from time to time, causing some regions to buck the global trends. The Bering Sea — where temperatures have been on a roller coaster ride in recent years — offers an example of what regional variability looks like up close.
The Bering Sea, west of Alaska, is one of those regions of the globe that has experienced some of its coldest temperatures on record during the past four years — a downturn after experiencing the area’s warmest six years on record between 2000 and 2005. As depicted on Discovery Channel’s popular show “The Deadliest Catch,” the stormy region’s fisheries feed a large portion of North America, with lucrative crab, pollock, halibut, salmon, and cod industries.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, affects sea surface temperatures and wind flow in the North Pacific. This graphic from NASA shows sea surface temperature departures from average, as well as wind anomalies (arrows), for different phases of the PDO. Credit: NASA JPL.
As part of a $52 million project funded by the National Science Foundation, more than one hundred scientists have been studying how climate change affects this important ecosystem. The story of why the Bering Sea has recently become colder helps illustrate an aspect of climate science that frequently results in misunderstandings between scientists and the public: not every part of the world will warm due to increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or warm at the same rate.
Until about four years ago, the Bering Sea was warming up like most of the world’s oceans. “It was extremely warm there not that long ago, and now we’ve got a few years that are really cold in the context of a climate still really warm globally,” says Nathan Mantua, a climate scientist at the University of Washington.
“The reason you can have these shifts regionally is because atmospheric circulation changes, and sometimes you get dramatic regional changes that go against global trends.”
Research has shown that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — a long-term atmospheric circulation pattern — is largely responsible for the Bering Sea’s recent temperature flip-flop, though other factors also play a role. Most people are familiar with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which includes El Niño and La Niña, but the PDO differs in two ways. First, it typically operates on longer time scales, shifting every 20 to 30 years, rather than six to 18 months with El Niño. The PDO has its primary effects on the North Pacific region with secondary effects in the tropics, while El Niño is the opposite.
The PDO was first described by fisheries scientist Steven Hare in 1996, when he, Mantua, and three other University of Washington scientists linked its oscillations to variability in Coho and Chinook salmon production in the Pacific Northwest. With a one to three year lag, during warm phases of the PDO, salmon in the Pacific Northwest tend to fare poorly, and the trend reverses when the PDO shifts to its cool phase. Interestingly, the PDO appears to have the reverse effects on Alaskan salmon production — so when the Pacific Northwest salmon boomed recently, previously thriving Alaskan runs declined across the state.
While the third-highest Chinook salmon returns were recorded in Oregon and Washington in 2010, the Commerce Department issued a “fishery failure” determination for the Yukon River Chinook salmon in Alaska. The declaration paved the way for federal assistance to Alaskan communities that suffered economic damages from the lackluster commercial fishing season. This year, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is predicting the fifth-largest Columbia River fall Chinook salmon return since at least 1948.
The PDO shifted into a warm phase in 1977, widely documented in the scientific literature as a “regime shift” that affected everything from weather patterns to fish in the sea. Around 1998, the PDO shifted back to a cool phase, which begs the question, if the PDO shifted into a cool phase, why did the Bering Sea warm right around that same time? This is where the story gets a little messy.
Time series of shifts in the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), from 1925 to 2010. Red bars indicate positive (warm) years; blue bars indicate negative (cool) years. Credit: NOAA PMEL.
Firstly, scientists say the PDO does not have uniform effects across the Pacific. The warm phase is associated with warm temperatures along the western coast of North America, but cool ocean temperatures in the center of the North Pacific, and vice versa for a cool phase. Secondly, within the predominant longer-scale oscillations, the PDO has shorter one to five-year oscillations. And lastly, just as large-scale, long-duration climatic patterns like the PDO affect weather patterns, ocean and air temperatures, shorter-term, lesser-known influences also affect year-to-year patterns in the Bering Sea.
In this case, research has shown that winter weather plays a dominant role — specifically wind direction.
“It’s almost as simple as which way the wind blows,” says Mantua. Every summer, the Bering is ice-free, but as colder weather arrives, ice forms at the border between the sub-Arctic and the Arctic. How far south it extends into the Bering Sea each year depends in large part on how far the winter winds push it. Scientists call this “sea ice advection.”
“More wind out of the north brings especially cold air that drives the [winter sea] ice to lower latitudes,” says Mantua. “If the winds are mostly out of south, they’re bringing mild air from lower latitudes to higher latitude parts of the Arctic.” A study led by Jinlun Zhang of the University of Washington recently confirmed that the PDO, combined with winter sea ice advection, might explain much of the variation in the Bering’s water temperatures.
Winter sea ice extent, in turn, affects the entire ecosystem. More winter sea ice means a large “cold pool” exists during spring and summer — a frigid footprint left behind by the melted sea ice. In warm winters with little sea ice, as in 2000 through 2005, the cold pool can be virtually nonexistent. This affects everything from the tiniest zooplankton to marine mammals, fish, and seabirds.
“The next question is, what is it about climate that causes changes in wind?” asks Mantua. “The surface wind variability is strongly influenced by the pressure difference between the high pressure area in Eastern Russia and the Aleutian Low. The PDO is well correlated with the Aleutian Low, but not the Russian High. So the PDO is a significant part of the story, but not the only part of the story.”
Scientists do not yet have any reliable way of predicting how the PDO will change in the future, as they do with the better-studied El Niño. In the meantime, year-round ice cover in the Arctic continues to decline every year, and global average land and sea surface temperatures continue to rise.
And even as some folks get lost amidst these erratic global climate and weather patterns, the reality is that the interaction between manmade climate change and natural cycles like the PDO is complex. “I think a lot of people are confused by it. They think, ‘how can you have these fierce winters in the Eastern U.S. or Western Europe if we’re facing global warming?’” poses Mantua. “The simple answer is that there’s a lot of regional variation that may be completely independent of global warming.”
In other words, the simple answer is there are no simple answers.
Below, view a slideshow of researchers studying the Bering Sea from on board the RV Thompson last summer.
Wendee Holtcamp, a Houston-based science writer, spent a month on board the RV Thompson in the Bering Sea last summer, blogging and reporting for Nature. She also wrote about the Bering Sea Project for BioScience. Homepage photo from flickr/naturemandala
A conservation-minded Texas mom assesses her contribution to climate change, one meal at a time.
Three years ago, I stood atop the Franklin Mountains at dusk, gazing over El Paso, Texas and gritty Ciudad Juárez, its third-world neighbor south of the border. I had just taken a gondola ride up the mountain, but as the lights in the houses of some 2.5 million people flickered on, I started to feel uneasy.
There I was: Comfortable, warm and happily digesting a hamburger, when right across the Rio Grande people lived in desperate conditions with rampant crime. Something about this juxtaposition of indulgence and poverty made me edgy.
Already, our planet’s 6.8 billion people include 1 billion hungry and 1.6 billion overweight, and scientists’ best predictions have the population rising to 9 billion by 2050 before leveling off. How will we feed so many people without utterly ravaging the Earth?
Here’s the dilemma: As people improve their lot, first they start consuming more food, primarily grains and tubers, and then diets shift to energy-rich vegetable oils, sugars, and meat. Raising these foods on large scales - particularly meat – requires more land, water and energy, and it creates more pollution than grain crops or veggies alone.
“We are in essence eating the world’s tropical rainforests and savannas,” University of Minnesota ecology professor David Tilman told me. But it doesn’t have to be this way. “There is no reason for even one more acre of rainforest to be cut. If we farmed them properly, the lands that have already been cleared could fully meet global food demand for at least the next 50 years,” he said.
Tilman and colleagues modeled how our diet will affect the world by 2050, warning that agriculturally-driven environmental change will rival that from a warming climate. If trends continue, people will be exposed to more pesticides, and we will run out of fresh water for irrigation. Increased fertilizer use will salinize soils and raise the number of aquatic low-oxygen “dead zones.” The loss of natural ecosystems to agriculture will exceed the land area of the United States, leading to biodiversity loss and species extinctions. They conclude that food demand could be lowered “if the trend toward diets rich in meat were reversed.”
Perhaps I was feeling guilty over my hamburger. It’s easy to bemoan runaway population growth, but as an American I contribute disproportionately to global consumption, and hence environmental degradation. In a New York Times essay, University of California-Los Angeles professor Jared Diamond calculated that Americans consume 32 times the resources than those in developing countries. Food plays a huge role in this.
For more than 25 years now, I have lived in Texas, land of the longhorn, home of famous BBQ beef. My ex-husband gently swayed me from teenage vegetarianism back into carnivory. We raised two kids, now teens themselves, who prefer a helping of cow, pig or chicken with every meal, thank you very much.
Ah meat, it’s a national obsession: Meat Lover’s Pizza, lunch meat, hot dogs, hamburgers, grilled ribeye, fried chicken. Americans eat twice the recommended daily allowance of protein. The result? We “eat like an SUV,” say University of Chicago scientists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin. The average American diet adds an extra ton and a half of CO2-equivalent emissions per capita annually compared to a vegan diet. That’s significant when the annual total for an average American is 4 tons.
Livestock contributes 18 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide, according to the oft-cited United Nations report, Livestock’s Long Shadow. Much of that value comes from rainforest deforestation, and most of the rest comes from cow burps and liquefied manure. Some have criticized the report, but report co-author Dr. Pierre Gerber says, “We fully maintain the 18 percent.”
The U.S. EPA estimates that 6 percent of our greenhouse gases come from all agriculture, but we also have a disproportionate number of vehicles and smokestacks. Nicolette Niman, vegetarian rancher and author of Righteous Porkchop, argues that it’s misguided to blame American beef for rainforest destruction.
Tilman disagrees. “What we eat in the U.S. has global impacts, whether or not we directly consume beef from Brazil,” he says. “We use about half of our farmland to grow grains for animal feed. Were we to eat less meat or eat more environmentally efficient meat, we would export more grains, and this would decrease the demand for crops that are an underlying driver of tropical deforestation.”
A 2009 study commissioned by Compassion in World Farming and conducted by European academics determined that we can feed 9 billion people without any further habitat loss using organic, humane methods, with no factory farms. This challenging task would require reduction of meat consumption, particularly in developed nations.
This brings to mind a childhood memory. One harvest day, I watched Dad place an Araucana rooster on a stump, and with one fell smack, off came its head. True to story, the headless chicken flopped around, blood sputtering It enthralled and revolted me in equal measure. I decided not to eat our chickens. Dad was not thrilled. “It’s so much healthier than store-bought chicken,” he pleaded, to no avail. I still wanted meat, but only from a package.
I retained that mental disconnect between animals and meat for most of my life. Then last year, reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, I connected my diet to problems with animal welfare, pollution, worker injustices and the power of Big Ag. I made a vow to avoid factory-farmed meat. Given the high price of sustainably raised and humanely harvested meat, this single mom now eats mostly vegetarian.
“It makes sense from all perspectives – health, environmental, animals – for Westerners to reduce their meat and dairy consumption,” says Niman. “Farmers and ranchers who are raising higher quality meat can command a premium and be rewarded for their good work.”
I may not be able to personally change agricultural policy, slow global population growth, or invent technological innovations to curb global climate change, but I can modify my diet. With three meals a day, every day, it adds up.
Wendee loves to share her knowledge and her passion for magazine writing in her online writing class.
Jan. 19, 2011 — Coral reefs around the world have suffered from coral bleaching, pollution, physical damage, overfishing, and ocean acidification, to name a few. And although people have started to restore some reefs, few scientists have systematically studied the best way to go about returning life and color to the corals.
Elkhorn Coral/Image courtesy of NOAA
Graham Forrester, a professor of natural resources at the University of Rhode Island, changed all that. He monitored volunteer efforts to restore a once-thriving coral reef in the British Virgin Islands, while documenting the growth and survival rates of the threatened species of elkhorn coral being restored.
“We picked the elkhorn coral because it has declined severely, and is now listed under the Endangered Species Act,” explains Forrester. “This approach has been tried with other coral species. It is most often done with fast-growing branching corals because pieces break off the branches naturally during storms, so there is a naturally available supply of small coral pieces that can be transplanted.” The goal was to figure out whether volunteers could ultimately help restore corals simply and inexpensively using these coral fragments. “We focused on the general question, when storm-generated coral fragments appear, is it beneficial to use them for restoration?’”
It turns out that the volunteer efforts paid off. Restoring elkhorn coral is as simple as moving broken fragments of coral and reattaching them to barren reefs. Forrester’s study, recently published in the journal Restoration Ecology, showed that the transplanted coral had higher growth and survival rates compared with reefs that didn’t get assistance.
University of Rhode Island undergraduate student Lindsay Harmon transplanting elkhorn coral/Credit Dr. G. Forrester
“Our findings were that securing the fragments to the reef dramatically improves their growth and survival, moving them to a new site has no effect, there weren’t big differences between the methods used to attach corals to the reef, and that clearing away seaweed improves the growth of transplanted fragments,” says Forrester. “So the bottom line, with a little practice and training, volunteers should be able to make coral ‘gardens’ and this should accelerate the recovery of damaged reefs.”
Freelance writer Wendee Holtcamp covers science, conservation and adventure travel, which takes her to the far reaches of the globe — from the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, to the Peruvian Amazon, to the Galapagos Islands. Holtcamp earned a M.S. in Wildlife Ecology from Texas A&M University in 1995, and has been publishing since then in magazines such as National Wildlife, Scientific American, Nature, Audubon, Smithsonian, Sierra, and as well as Discovery Channel, Travel Channel, and Animal Planet Online. Based in Houston, she also writes regularly for Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, and teaches an online magazine writing class. Wendee loves to share her knowledge and her passion for magazine writing in the online writing class she teaches.
According to the nonprofit American Rivers, more than 450 dams have been removed in the U.S. since 1999 — notably the Savage Rapids and Marmot Dams in Oregon, the Lewiston Dam in Idaho, as well as several in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The group estimates a majority of the removals are for ecological restoration; the biggest removal in the nation is scheduled for mid-September on Washington’s Elwha River, which will return historic salmon runs to tribal lands.
In the mid-1980s, San Antonio had a per-capita water use of 225 [gallons per citizen per day] and reduced it to 122 by 2010. “Our goal is 116 by 2016, and we are working hard to achieve that,” says Sarah Gatewood of San Antonio Water Systems. They have strict lawn-watering rules, education programs, and incentives for toilet and washing-machine replacement, among other things. “We are using the same amount of water that we did 25 years ago, even though we’ve seen a 67 percent increase in customers.”
Could major metropolitan areas get by without building any more major freeways — ever?
Three years ago, I stood atop the Franklin Mountains at dusk, gazing over El Paso, Texas and gritty Ciudad Juárez, its third-world neighbor south of the border. I had just taken a gondola ride up the mountain, but as the lights in the houses of some 2.5 million people flickered on, I started to feel uneasy.
For more than 25 years now, I have lived in Texas, land of the longhorn, home of famous BBQ beef. My ex-husband gently swayed me from teenage vegetarianism back into carnivory. We raised two kids, now teens themselves, who prefer a helping of cow, pig or chicken with every meal, thank you very much.
A 2009 study commissioned by Compassion in World Farming and conducted by European academics determined that we can feed 9 billion people without any further habitat loss using organic, humane methods, with no factory farms. This challenging task would require reduction of meat consumption, particularly in developed nations.
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