Thoughts on World Population Day

People gather to get water from a well in the Indian state of Gujarat. Population growth is putting pressure on the world’s resources.  Image credit: Reuters

This year, World Population Day, July 11, fell on the same day as Major League Baseball's All-Star Game and it's not hard to figure out which one was "trending" on the Internet. Raising awareness about the All-Star Game, as far as I can tell, has no long-term consequences, while a dialogue about securing reproductive health and family planning options for the world's women affects the entire future well-being of people both in developed and in developing countries.

Last fall, Forbes columnist Erica Gies wrote a column on not having kids, arguing that the 7 billion and counting people in the world are consuming resources at a rate that can't be sustained. She's also sure that her kids' quality of life will be worse than her own so she can't bring them into the world in good conscience. It's easy to see that we live on a finite planet and that our resources are also finite. But we continue to think that population growth and economic growth can be sustained indefinitely. It just doesn't add up.

The projections are for the global population to reach 9 billion by mid-century -- that's 2 billion more people than today. If you think our natural resources are stressed and stretched now, then wait until 2050. Maybe it's better then to move population growth issues to the front burner and not reach 9 billion in the first place. Kudos to the Gates foundation for making family planning part of their strategy. According to their pamphlet, over 200 million women worldwide who want to use contraceptives don't have access to them (see the annual number of abortions below).

At the end of her essay, Gies links to "Worldometers", which gives a running population ticker as well as many other related social, energy and environment tickers. I encourage you to see the tickers spin for yourself but some numbers (rounded, as they change rapidly) are below:

Births this year: 70,000,000
Deaths this year: 30,000,000
Net population growth: 40,000,000
Abortions this year: 22,000,000
Deaths of children under five this year: 4,000,000
People with no safe drinking water source: 900,000,000

Forest loss this year (hectares): 2,800,000 (about the area of Massachusetts)
Desertification this year (hectares): 6,400,000 (about the area of West Virginia)
CO2 emissions this year (tons): 18,000,000,000

Other numbers: more bikes are being produced than cars, there are 50% more overweight people than undernourished people, cellular phones sold today outsold tv sets worldwide 6 to 1, and far too many women (182,000) died in childbirth this year. 

We can reuse and reduce as much as we want, and we should, but if we keep allowing our own numbers to increase then we're going to overwhelm the natural resources and be in a much more difficult place than we are now. And all the All-Star Games in the world won't save us.

So what can you do? Find a way to celebrate World Population Day (it doesn't matter that it was yesterday). Help put population growth and women's reproductive health on the radar of the blogosphere, the mass media, pop culture and ultimately, government and international policy. Here's a positive news item from the good people at the Huffington Post, and some suggestions from the good people at the Feministing community. Dave Gardner, who produced the documentary Growthbusters, has also put together a great resource of videos. Check them out!

Living in an age of extinction III: The Lost Bird Project Film Review

Quick, how many extinct birds of North America can you name?

Most of us could probably name the Passenger Pigeon, famous for flocking across the sky so thickly that they would eclipse the sun, and the Great Auk, a flightless bird in the puffin family that once thrived in the North Atlantic. Beyond those two, few of us would know about the Heath Hen, the Labrador Duck or the Carolina Parakeet, three other birds that have gone extinct in modern times. “Forgetting is another kind of extinction,” says Todd McGrain, the artist whose work is profiled in The Lost Bird Project, a fascinating documentary film and project that aims to rescue the birds from cultural extinction.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

since the year 1500, human activity is known to have forced 869 species to extinction. In his excellent book, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos frames it for us for the future: “within the span of my life up to one-fifth of species will be gone,” an extinction rate that is more than 1000 times the normal rate.

            Inspired by Cokinos’ book, The Lost Bird Project (also discussed in this post), directed by Deborah Dickson, is a light-hearted film about a serious subject: how can we memorialize extinct species? McGrain’s answer, and an answer that is long, long overdue, has been to create larger-than-life bronze sculptures of these five birds and install them in places significant to where the birds last thrived. “We can’t allow these extinctions to be thought of as a natural process,” McGrain says. “Memorializing them helps keep their memory alive.”

Todd McGrain with his sculpture of the Passenger Pigeon
Photo: The Lost Bird Project

            In the film, McGrain, and his brother-in-law Andy Stern, go on a wild goose chase around the Eastern US and Canada to properly situate the memorials. The film opens with a large crate being brought by helicopter to barren and rocky Fogo Island, Newfoundland. Inside the crate, we find out in the next scene as McGrain puts his hands into buckets of clay and begins forming shapes, is the story of the five extinct birds, a mix of the known and unknown, lost to biology and now on the verge of being lost to history.  

It is the compelling nature of these birds’ stories as much as the effort to situate the memorials that drives the film. The Heath Hen is portrayed as a dancer, a singer, and a fighter. Footage of the closely related prairie chicken’s elaborate courtship display shows males booming and thrusting out their chests to win the attentions of the females. Though they once thrived on the coast from Maine to Virginia, by 1870, overexploitation had wiped out the coastal population leaving only a few hundred survivors on Martha’s Vineyard. The state of Massachusetts did enact measures to save the population, but numbers continued to dwindle. By 1929, there was just one left, famously known as Booming Ben and he was once seen calling out repeatedly from the top of a tree. No answer came.

McGrain quotes a Samuel Beckett line that most writers and artists know, “Fail better,” and this becomes the subtext for the film and the entire Lost Bird Project. McGrain’s first pitch for a memorial to the Heath Hen in a state park on Martha’s Vineyard is turned down. Stunned by the denial, he resolves to “fail better” in order to appropriately honor the bird. Evidently, this involves much behind the scenes courting of bureaucrats and this story is teased out over the course of the film. The sculpture is not some random memorial, instead it is “something that digs deeply and will add meaning to the place.” Having already seen the care that goes into making the sculptures, and been shown the Heath Hen’s remarkable story, we’re already onboard and rooting for McGrain to succeed. 

Labrador Duck
Photo: The Lost Bird Project

On the road, McGrain and Stern track down bird enthusiasts and conservation biologists who might know anything about these lost birds. One of the tragedies exposed in the film is that we only see the Carolina Parakeet, a striking bird with brilliant green plumage and North America’s only parrot, in a drawer instead of chattering among the trees in one of its homes near Kissimmee, Florida. The demise of the Passenger Pigeon, described as a biological storm, is linked to the new rail transport, which could transport millions of hunted birds across states in a day or two, where they could be sold at market. The Labrador Duck -- presented in McGrain’s memorial as a form that elegantly folds back in on itself -- gets little screen time, because little is known about it, a victim of industrialization and habitat loss. Indeed, we barely know how much we’ve lost and the film evokes a sense of a former glory of sound and color in the thickets, among tree tops and along the coasts.

With an upbeat, eclectic score provided by Grammy-award-winning composer Christopher Tin, and Stern's comic relief to McGrain's dedicated mission, the tone of the film tightropes between quirky road trip and a deeper elegy.  As the two men successfully negotiate the installation of the memorials, the stories all gather strength so that by the time we visit Fogo Island, Newfoundland, to hear the tale of the Great Auk, with its “Chaplin-like appeal,” the film takes on real gravity. The indigenous people of Newfoundland buried their dead with Great Auk beaks and these spectacular sea birds allowed the survival of the first settlers – just as Fogo Island itself was a refuge for the birds to come ashore and lay their eggs. Ungainly on land, they were easy to kill and were hunted for their down. But before we start thinking this is all history of a century ago and that we know better now, a Newfoundland woman reminds us of how the same market forces that decimated the Great Auk also decimated the cod and drove it to the brink of oblivion.

            At the unveiling of the Great Auk, locals clamber over barren rocks for the christening ceremony. Like the other memorials, the Great Auk sculpture is big enough to make a statement, with smooth curves that long to be touched, for touch, McGrain says, “is literally how we come in contact with the world.” After ceremonial flares are lit, a few people line up to kiss its beak. One gets the sense that at last, the Great Auk has come home. 

           The importance of the film, now making the rounds at film festivals but deserving of a much wider audience, is not just to honor these lost birds but to help us to understand these birds better, to grieve for their loss by “opening a portal into learning their stories”. Forgetting is a kind of extinction. Ultimately, the Lost Bird Project is a hopeful film. The memorials are triumphs of personal perseverance and totems for our cultural memory. Now there are five places in North America where people who knew nothing about these lost birds can delve into their stories. By learning their stories perhaps we can indeed fail better and turn these past failures into future successes. 

Stay tuned for an interview with Todd McGrain, coming soon.
More information about The Lost Bird Project, including a film-trailer, can be found at their website.

Getting to Know your Endangered Species

I recently wrote about the Endangered Species Act's success stories. The main finding was that out of 110 species sampled, 91% were recovering at the rate projected by their federal recovery plans. Good news. Now the US Fish and Wildlife Service has produced an interactive map so that you can check up on endangered species in your state. This is a great way to tour the biodiversity present in the fifty states as well as the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

In Massachusetts, you can hear about what's being done to protect the adorable little shore bird, the Atlantic piping plover, pictured below.

You can also read about what's being done for the New England cottontail.

In Texas, you can read and hear about one of the most endangered bird in North America, the whooping crane, whose recovery efforts have now gone on for decades. 

In Puerto Rico, check out what's being done for the Puerto Rican parrot, one of the world's most endangered parrots: 

Awareness and education is the first step to saving endangered species. Just click on the map and find out about endangered species in your state, next door, or across the country. 

Stunning footage of the endangered Cross River Gorilla

Chest-Thumping Cross River gorilla, caught by hidden camera trap. 

Now that cameras have gone digital, one of the greatest boons has been for wildlife camera traps. Like a hidden camera, these "traps" can unobtrusively photograph or video whichever the creatures happen to walk by. Last year, Jeremy Hance reported for the Guardian about the impact these cameras were having on conservation efforts.

In May, the video camera trap scored one of its greatest victories. Placed in Cameroon's Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary, the trap picked up eight Cross River gorillas making their way along a forest path. The sanctuary was established in 2008 for the sole purpose of protecting these gorillas, among our closest living relatives, rarely seen by humans and never videotaped, until now. There are only about 250 Cross River gorillas left due to habitat loss and hunting for bushmeat. The footage was captured by the Wildlife Conservation Society and gives us a rare glimpse of a hidden world. Kudos to them for this spectacular footage.





You can read more about conservation efforts for the Cross River Gorilla here.

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Living in an age of extinction II: Creating a Life Cairn

Why do no church bells ring when animals go extinct?

This was one of the questions that came up when Andreas Kornevall met with Reverend Peter Owen-Jones over a cup of tea and a plate of Indian curry. Kornevall had recently been to a workshop where a Guatemalan man related how he had lost his land and his culture and in relating his story the man became overcome with sorrow. Kornevall realized the men in the room were not accustomed to this public display of sorrow from another man and came to see how important it was, that grief was a way into thinking about the environment and change.

I caught up with Kornevall over Skype to ask him about the Life Cairn (previously mentioned here), which was begun over a year ago on Mount Caburn in East Sussex, England.

Daniel Hudon: Here in North America, we mostly see cairns as ways to guide hikers on mountain paths, but in England I understand they have an additional meaning.

Andreas Kornevall: That’s right, we also use them as markers, but for thousands of years, people here have been using them also as burial chambers. Around here (in East Sussex, England), there are many tumuli, which are mounds of graves, and they might have begun as cairns. Reverend Peter Owen-Jones has hosted a show in the BBC called 80 Faiths Around the World, and during our discussion we hit upon the idea of a cairn, a Life Cairn, as a way to mark the passings and address the passings of species that were going extinct. It began as a way to express our grief.

DH: How did you pitch the idea of the Life Cairn to the community?

AK: We held a meeting and about fifty people came – really a good amount of interest from a wide variety of people. People liked the idea. We’re just one stone; we hoped others would come and build on it.

DH: The Life Cairn was founded on May 22, 2011. What was the mood like that day?

AK: It’s hard to say what goes on in the minds of people. The first to lay stones were the youngest and the oldest who were present. According to tradition, water was put in the cairn. People came from all around to place their stones -- it’s on the eastern shoulder of Mt. Caburn, with a great view of the landscape and the sea. Though the whole project came from a place of grief and sorrow, there were songs and poems. It became festive. We were all wind-blown. Maybe it was something in our DNA, something from our burial customs – that go back thousands of years – when we were gathered around like that it felt like it needed to be done, this showing respect. It has been missing; at earlier times and in other cultures we showed more respect for animals – it’s been practiced before but it’s been forgotten now. Some say animal tracks are how we first learned to read – a debt we have forgotten. But yes, it became a happy event. People felt it was important to have paid tribute.

DH: What has happened since the Life Cairn was founded?

AK: People continue to come and lay stones. There are now about 3000 stones at the Life Cairn. There are no signs, no markings. It’s all word of mouth.

Since the opening, there have been spontaneous gatherings and poetry events, we’ve brought school groups up there for educational events about extinct species.

DH: Are you planning other Life Cairns?

AK: We just put one in the middle of Stockholm. We started one in Ecuador [which has more endangered species than any other country]. We have one planned with Catholic and Protestant priests in Northern Ireland. That’s on September 15. It’s like a water hole, a shared sense of responsibility. You’re there as a human being. It will be an open ceremony. Anyone can come.

Beyond that, I’d love to get one in every country. I’d love to set one up in front of the White House! (laughter)

DH: Setting one up in front of the White House would be something. How do you see the Life Cairn now? How are people treating it?

AK: Practically, as I said, as a place where we can gather to express our grief. It’s not an activist project. If it was an activist project, we would have put it in the center of  London. It’s a place for quiet reflection, for sanctuary. We lost two subspecies of rhino last year. When the Yangtze dolphin – the “Goddess of the River” – went extinct in 2006, there was no news. Same with the Pyrenean Ibex. We’re in the silent phase of the Sixth Extinction. But just as there’s an external climate change, we hope this will help create an inner climate change on how we relate to our environment, to overcome our feeling of being detached and blasé.

DH: An “inner climate change” is quite provocative.

AK: Well you know it’s true. The language of environmentalism is leaving us inert. Extinction is abstract. CO₂ is abstract. But biodiversity is not abstract. We grew up playing in trees, running around in the woods, chasing rabbits. This is not abstract. Look at things like “parts per million” and the statistics, these are facts that freeze us to death. Language is not communicating the depth of the problem. And certainly after Rio we see that language is not communicating enough – nations are not taking responsibility.

The vitality of the problem is missing and that’s how getting in touch with grief can help. There are no historical parallels here. As Aldo Leopold said, “For one species to mourn for another is a new thing under the sun.”

DH: Reverend Owen-Jones has a nice quote to summarize the project. Can you share that with us?

AK: It goes like this: “All life to carry one life, one life to carry all life.”

DH: Thanks for your Life Cairn. It’s a new way for us to consider the biodiversity crisis and to respond to it in a meaningful way.

AK: Thanks for giving me the chance to talk about it. 

Readers can visit the Life Cairn's Facebook page for more information, photos and videos. And if you're heading to East Sussex, bring a white stone for the Life Cairn. 

Find out about Andreas Kornevall's other projects, like the Earth Restoration Service, involved in proactive ecosystem restoration worldwide and Restore the Earth, which asks, "Will you leave a positive handprint on the Earth?"

Learn about biodiversity -- and practice your Spanish

Ready to learn some Spanish? You get two for one here, a chance to learn Spanish and about biodiversity.

I take this verbatim from Emmett Duffy over at the SeaMonster, mostly because he uses the word flummoxed and it's such a good word to indicate, well, a state of flummoxedness:

 "Have you ever been flummoxed trying to understand — or explain — the concept and importance of biodiversity? Your prayers have been answered. This short video is an absolute gem of intuitive, attractive, concision (en español, with subtitles):"


If you want some other goodies, go to Duffy's Facebook page and check out his Wall photos -- great collection!

Endangered Species Act Success Stories

The Atlantic Piping Plover: one of the many species
recovering thanks to the Endangered Species Act.

Last year, The Endangered Species Act (ESA) took a high profile criticism from Doc Hastings, chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources of the US House of Representatives. Hastings asserted that the act is a failure because relatively few species have been removed from the endangered list:

“The purpose of the ESA is to recover endangered species — yet this is where the current law is failing — and failing badly. Of the species listed under the ESA in the past 38 years, only 20 have been declared recovered. That’s a 1 percent recovery rate.” [The 1% figure can still be found on the Congressman’s website.]

Is that so? What should the recovery rate be?

In response to criticisms like this, this past May, the Center for Biological Diversity produced a 16-page report, On Time, On Target: How the Endangered Species Act is Saving America’s Wildlife. Authors Kieran Suckling, Noah Greenwald and Tierra Curry compared the actual recovery rate of 110 species on the list with the projected rate specified in their federal recovery plans. They found that the ESA has a strong success rate: 91% of species are recovering at the rate specified by their federal plans. Further, recovery takes time. The majority of species have not been listed long enough to warrant an expectation of recovery. Eighty percent of species have not yet reached their expected recovery year. On average, these species have been listed for just 32 years, while their recovery plans required 46 years of listing. For example, the Florida panther has been listed for 38 years but its expected recovery time is 113 years, so it’s not project for delisting until 2085.

Another important success is that 21 species have recorded population boosts of more than 1000 percent in time periods ranging from seven to forty-four years. These include El Segundo blue butterfly (population increase of 22,000% in 27 years), Kemp’s ridley sea turtle (19,800% increase in 32 years), California least tern (2819% increase in 40 years), American crocodile (1290% increase in 32 years) and the Whooping crane (1009% increase in 44 years). Sounds pretty good to me.

 

Many other species have increased to populations near the recovery goals established in their recovery plans, such as the Atlantic piping plover (though strangely, the Canadian population is not seeing the same increase in nesting pairs). Piping plover populations plummeted due to over-hunting and the millinery trade in the 19^th century. When these were eliminated, their numbers began to rise early in the 20^th century, only to take another hit due to development and increased beach use by humans. Even if piping plovers are delisted in the next couple of years, they will still need our vigilance and protection on coastal beaches and nesting sites to make sure the population remains healthy.

An additional success is that 12 species are in the process of being downlisted (e.g. from critically endangered to threatened) or delisted altogether in the next five years. These include the Steller sea lion, Grizzly bear, Virgin Islands tree boa, Wood stork and California least tern.

So, the criticism is completely without scientific basis. Find out more about the many Endangered Species Act successes here. The site also contains other goodies where you can browse regions and find out more about endangered species around the country. You can also search by species groups (taxa) or from an alphabetical list. Look at the data. Get to know these species.