For a whole month, one writer practiced a kind of abstinence so she could better understand her own complicity in our throwaway culture. It wasn’t easy.
A few days into a vow of shopping celibacy, I visit a Hallmark store with my kids. The 75-percent-off rack draws me in. I’ve forgotten that I’m supposed to be living according to the Compact, an agreement to avoid all new purchases in favor of used goods in an attempt to reduce my impact on the environment.
“Look at these cute penguins,” I say, showing them to my kids.
My 10-year-old son, Sam, picks one up. “Cool. They poop candy.”
I pay and leave the store before realizing what I’ve done. I stop short. “I am not supposed to buy anything new!” I yelp. My kids glare at me. “Well,” I say, taking a deep breath, “I will just have to start again tomorrow.”
The original Compacters, who formed their group in early 2006, did not intend to start a movement. It was just 10 San Francisco friends trying to reduce their consumption by not buying new stuff for a year. The group’s manifesto was simple: to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture. Named after the Pilgrims’ revolutionary Mayflower Compact, the small idea led to a Yahoo Web site that has attracted more than 8,000 adherents and spawned some 50 groups in spots as far-flung as Hong Kong and Iceland.
What they don’t say on the Compact Web site: Kicking consumerism may require its own 12-step program. So after my Hallmark relapse, I started again from square one. According to the guidelines, I must buy used, or borrow. No new stuff, with the exception of food, necessary medicines and health care items, and — no joke — underwear.
“This all started over a dinner conversation about the limitations of recycling,” says Rachel Kesel, a professional dog walker and one of the original friends who established the Compact. What else could people do to tread more lightly on the earth? “One of the solutions is not to buy so much crap.”
The average American generates about 4.5 pounds of trash a day — a figure that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, includes paper, food, yard trimmings, furniture and everything else you toss out at home and on the job. That makes the United States the trashiest country in the industrialized world, followed by Canada at 3.75 pounds a day and the Netherlands at 3 pounds a day. In part, we can thank the corporations that spend billions to convince us that the newest, shiniest widgets will make us happy and attract friends and lovers. What’s more, each new widget is designed to wear out or otherwise fade into obsolescence so we’ll have almost no choice but to buy more and more. (Read Lori’s blog, It’s not easy being green when your refrigerator dies.) In the words of Dr. Seuss’s Once-ler in The Lorax, “A Thneed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!!” The old Thneed — often in working condition — goes out with the trash. And in the process of making thneeds, the Swomee-Swans get smog in their throats and the Super-Axe-Hacker whacks all the Truffala-Trees, and the gills of the Humming-Fish get gummed up with Gluppity-Glup.
I was already an eco-savvy consumer when I began my moratorium on new stuff. I bought organic produce, “green” beauty products, compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and the like. “A month won’t be too bad,” I told my preteen daughter. Without thinking I added, “I’ll just buy everything I need beforehand.” She laughed. As if I were joking.
The Compact has, for the most part, attracted people who were already living frugally or eco-consciously and whose dismay over society’s overzealous buying habits may have been brewing for some time. Such feelings are not universally shared. On a Seattle radio show that aired just after the group formed, the host ripped into John Perry, one of the original Compacting friends, saying, “You people are bad for America and you’re bad for the American economy.”
A Web forum mocking the Compact sprang up, one of the first posts proclaiming, “Today I’m starting a Compact wherein no one can buy anything yellow. Except bananas. And lemons. … Oh, wait. I need legal pads.” The Compact founders were called pretentious, since they live upper-middle-class lives, and hypocritical, since one of them works in marketing — the art and science of selling goods.
After this criticism, the Compacters consulted several economists about the soundness of their premise. Alex Tabarrok, a professor of economics at George Mason University, theorizes that if throngs of citizens shopped secondhand, it would drive the market to produce higher-quality, more durable goods. Some sectors of the economy would expand, he says, as people spent more money on services or used goods, which are often sold by smaller, independent business owners. But if enough of us started buying less stuff, wouldn’t corporate profits fall, leading to layoffs and a drop in the gross domestic product — that classic index of the economy?
I ran this by Bob Costanza, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Vermont who has given some thought to the question. “If ‘growing GDP’ is considered to be the goal, then yes, buying secondhand will hurt ‘the economy’ because less stuff will be produced per unit time,” he says. “But this just shows how wrong this narrow conception of the economy is.” So maybe we need to rethink the way we define a strong economy to encompass not only the health of our financial markets, but also the health of our natural resources.
Still, not everyone immediately grasps why buying used products has less impact on the environment than buying new ones. When you buy a new widget — a cell phone, for example — the store orders a replacement, instigating a chain of events that eventually leads to more raw material being mined from the earth. In contrast, when you buy used, the seller — at a garage sale, a thrift store, or on eBay — does not put in a replacement order. The chain stops there. I nearly lost a friend once when I bought a used teak table after I had exhorted her never to buy anything that wasn’t made from sustainably harvested wood. My purchase did not cause a living tree to be cut down, I told her. She didn’t get it.
Giving up new stuff forced me to shop creatively. A visit to Goodwill yielded a travel mug for my Starbucks visits, clothes for my daughter, and a bongo drum to substitute for the practice pad my son needed for his drum lessons. Buying a basketball net proved more challenging. I found one through Freecycle, a Web site where users trade belongings, but it had so much rust it wouldn’t have passed muster with my suburban homeowners’ association. After much looking, I bought a like-new one for $30 on my local Craigslist Web site. Then it took two weeks and 55 e-mail, text and voice messages before I got my basketball net.
When my laptop went on the fritz, I panicked. I needed a working computer, so I went shopping for a new one. This time, the widget-maker’s plan to lure me into buying the newest, shiniest model backfired. Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system won’t work with the perfectly good computer accessories I already own, so if I were to fork over a grand for a new laptop, I’d also have to buy new software, new drivers and new Microsoft Office programs. Exasperated, I took a deep breath and went home. Sticking to my Compact vow, I hauled an old dinosaur of a computer out of the closet while I waited, impatiently, for laptop repairs.
I wondered: Am I really making a difference? Do I need to eliminate everything I would ordinarily buy new? The answer surprised me. In The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, Michael Brower and Warren Leon of the Union of Concerned Scientists calculated the impact of various consumer purchases on four environmental problem areas: air pollution, water pollution, global warming and habitat alteration. They analyzed the environmental footprints of everything from cheese to carpet to feminine products and then aggregated them into 50 categories of goods and services. In the end, they found that just 7 of the 50 categories were responsible for the lion’s share of environmental degradation: cars and trucks; meat and poultry farming; crop production; home heating, hot water, and air conditioning; household appliances; home construction; and household water use and sewage treatment.
Interestingly, the personal items I worked so hard to forgo are not among the worst offenders. Clothing, books, magazines, and toys account for a relatively small fraction of the total environmental destruction wrought by our modern lifestyle. Brower and Leon suggest that we focus on choices that matter most: alternative energy utility providers, energy-saving appliances, organic food, and fuel-efficient or hybrid cars. Over time, buying smart may be more important than buying used.
I grew up in a log cabin with a hippie dad who chose simplicity. We had an outhouse, wood stoves, chickens and a vegetable garden. Compacting should be second nature to me. Still, I found myself rebelling. I’m a self-employed single mom! Call me an impatient American consumer, but the truth is, I both care passionately about the environment and live in a world where I often have zero extra time. And shopping for used stuff takes lots of time. I made a commitment some time ago to use my purchasing power to help the environment, and spending a month Compacting forced me to reexamine my priorities. It also helped me reconsider my needs versus my wants. We could have forgone the candy-pooping penguins, and I can find many perfectly good things used — and at less cost. But eventually, I will need a brand new laptop.
“I don’t think everyone has to stop shopping to change American consumption habits,” Rachel Kesel tells me. “But a lot of people need to be put on detox for a while.”
AND what about you?
Home energy use is responsible for 35 percent of the average American household’s total greenhouse gas emissions, about as much as car use and other transportation combined (32 percent). Food ranks third at 12 percent, due in part to the 1,300 miles the average meal travels from farm to plate. Visit www.localharvest.org for tips on buying local foods, www.energyhog.org to cut home energy use, and www.fueleconomy.gov to find the most fuel-efficient car.
A toxic molecule found in pond scum may trigger neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS and Parkinson’s. Could a group of scientists, led by a botanist, hold the key to a cure?
Rudyard Kipling called it “Hell’s Half Acre,” a geothermal wonderland where people could fall through the Earth’s thin crust or be poached by steamy hot springs and geysers. Most visitors to Yellowstone National Park’s Midway Geyser Basin stroll the wooden boardwalks, but a few hike a short, steep side trail that reveals a bird’s-eye view of the entire valley, including Grand Prismatic Spring, which can be fully appreciated only from above. Mustard-yellow and vibrant-orange mats spread like tentacles from the turquoise pool. “Not even the most talented artist could imagine something as beautiful as that,” muses Sandra Banack, a biologist who studies cyanobacteria, the microbes that create the colorful mats — and that hold a toxic secret.
Banack works as senior scientist at the Institute for EthnoMedicine in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, alongside the institute’s founder, Paul Cox, a botanist and conservationist. Cox’s long list of achievements includes working to preserve Samoan rain forests, for which he was awarded the 1997 Goldman Environmental Prize, and discovering one of the few compounds active against HIV, prostratin, from the Samoan mamala tree. In the early 2000s — when he directed the National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii and Florida and Banack was a biology professor at California State University, Fullerton — the two made a series of discoveries that led to the founding of the institute.
What started as a study of the island of Guam’s fruit bats and cycads, ancient seed-bearing plants that resemble palms, led to a startling hypothesis: Could cyanobacteria cause neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s?
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“We never wanted to announce a problem without some thoughtful solutions,” says Cox. He, Banack, and I met at their small institute, a building tucked on a side street near Jackson Hole’s town square two hours from Yellowstone. The institute’s two-room laboratory is stuffed with equipment and Erlenmeyer flasks filled with emerald goo — cyanobacteria from around the world.
Cyanobacteria, which sometimes form symbiotic relationships with other organisms, live in marine and freshwater habitats and even in dried desert crusts, where they spring to life with the first droplets of rain. The microbes may cover shallow lakes and ocean floors or grow over the top of coral reefs. And under certain conditions, massive blooms erupt, covering the water’s surface in a pea-green scum.
Although frequently called blue-green algae, cyanos are actually bacteria that photosynthesize, or create food from light, which is why early scientists classified them as algae. Modern genetics shows they share no evolutionary lineage with algae; the classification is as scientifically accurate as calling a dog a plant.
Cyanobacteria produce a host of nasty compounds, including neurotoxins that derail nervous systems, hepatotoxins that damage liver function and tumor promoters. Their blooms have poisoned wildlife and caused massive fish kills. In humans they can cause rashes, numbness, vomiting and sometimes long-term liver or nerve damage. While “death by pond scum” has never appeared in an obituary, that could change: not only are blooms increasing worldwide, but scientists predict they will worsen as the climate warms and nutrient levels rise, when, for example, fertilizers from America’s breadbasket run into the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico. Recently, burgeoning cyano blooms in the Great Lakes have garnered attention.
Although cyanobacterial toxins are well known, until Cox started studying them, no one had documented that they can cause health problems years after exposure.
I first met Cox in 2004, when he gave a seminar at Rice University in Houston, where I was a graduate student. He told a riveting tale about following a serendipitous trail of clues that led him to discover that a tiny toxic molecule, beta-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA), believed to be from cycads on Guam, was in fact produced by cyanobacteria, and not just on Guam, but around the world. More astonishing, he and Banack discovered that BMAA had accumulated in the brains of humans who’d died from ALS, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s — but not in the brains of people who’d died from other causes. Was BMAA accumulation a cause or an effect of these diseases? And how had BMAA gotten into these individuals’ brains in the first place?
Cox and Banack theorized that long-term, chronic exposure to BMAA — from eating food, drinking or swimming in water contaminated with cyanobacteria — could trigger these neurodegenerative diseases. He suspected that BMAA accumulated in the brain, creating a neurotoxic reservoir that eventually began to attack the nervous system. He also suspected a gene-environment interaction, since many people are likely exposed, but not everyone falls ill.
A 2005 New Yorker article detailed Cox’s hypothesis, and his critics complaints that his initial studies showing BMAA in human brains had been based on small sample sizes, and that there was no plausible scientific mechanism for how it could accumulate in brain tissues. BMAA is a nonprotein amino acid — in other words, it’s not one of the 20 amino acid building blocks that make up proteins in all living organisms. “My grail now is to raise this story to the level of scientific respectability,” the article quoted Cox. And he set out, guns blazing, to do just that.
After the Institute for EthnoMedicine was founded in 2004, Banack, who had studied bats, donned a lab coat while Cox built a loose consortium of scientists — neurologists, medical scientists, analytical chemists, bacteriologists, ecologists — who could help piece together the puzzle. Although their research will provide new insights into all neurodegenerative diseases, the institute focuses on ALS both because it’s more accurately diagnosed in living patients than is Alzheimer’s and because ALS has no known cause or cure.
Called Lou Gehrig’s disease after the baseball player who died from it in 1941, ALS is a brutal disease that strikes healthy people seemingly at random. Victims are slowly paralyzed, and within two to five years most have died, usually after reaching the point where they can no longer breathe or swallow. The only therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers at best two to three extra months of life. Around 5,600 Americans are diagnosed with ALS every year, and 90 percent of cases remain unexplained.
“If we’re right, we can stop these diseases — and that’s huge,” Banack says. “We can get BMAA out of people’s bodies, and out of their diets. There’s a lot of potential for good.”
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During Cox’s seminar he described the famous medical mystery of Guam. The indigenous Chamorro people suffer from what they call lytico-bodig; its symptoms include ALS-like paralysis, Parkinson’s-like shaking, and occasionally Alzheimer’s-like dementia. At the height of the epidemic, in the 1950s, Chamorros were succumbing to lytico-bodig at an astonishing rate — 50 to 100 times the normal rate of ALS worldwide.
In 1967, researcher Arthur Bell suspected lytico-bodig might be traced to the island’s cycads, and he was the first to isolate BMAA from the plants. More than 30 years later, Cox discovered that it was cyanobacteria within the cycad roots that produced BMAA, rather than the cycads themselves. On Guam, Cox also learned that the Chamorros craved stewed Mariana flying fox, consuming them whole — brains, bones, skin, and all. Perhaps, he surmised, BMAA biomagnified (or increased in concentration) as it moved up the food chain — from cyanobacteria to cycad to bat to human — much as the fat-soluble insecticide DDT once had.
Cox set out to find more collaborators. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks added his name to the first scientific paper outlining the hypothesis, in 2002. But others took more convincing. Banack recalls that after Cox presented his ideas before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 2003 “the room was totally silent. We looked at each other. Finally Lars-Olof Ronnevi, at the Karolinska Medical Institute said, ‘Your account of flying foxes has been a source of great amusement at our cocktail parties. Now that I’ve heard your research, I think you are on to something.’”
One of the major discoveries made by Cox and his colleagues, published in 2004, was that 50 to 100 times as much BMAA is bound within proteins than exists as free amino acids, which are not bound together into chains but float in the cellular or intercellular fluid. Cells build proteins by stringing together amino acids using a process called translation.
“At the time Cox first published his hypothesis,” says Walter Bradley, a neurologist and ALS expert at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, “the scientific world thought translation was so accurate that no amino acid other than the 20 that normally make up our proteins could be incorporated into them.” Since amino acids dissolve in water, most scientists also didn’t think BMAA could biomagnify.
Cox”s ability to see solutions where others see obstacles has earned rave reviews from some of his peers. Bradley, who collaborates with Cox, calls him a polymath, a Renaissance man. A former graduate student, Renee Richer — who helped connect higher rates of ALS in Gulf War veterans with inhalation of desert crusts containing cyanobacteria — describes him as “one of those rare minds that comes along only once in a while.”
But along with the kudos are still some criticisms. A handful of scientists were skeptical of the BMAA hypothesis, before and after Cox came along. These included Douglas Galasko, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of California, San Diego; Tom Montine, a professor at the University of Washington; and Daniel Perl of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. The three published two separate studies, in 2005 and 2009, that failed to find BMAA in human brains. In the first study they had looked only for free, unbound BMAA, not BMAA in protein chains in tissues. “If BMAA is incorporated into proteins, leading to protein dysfunction or an immune reaction, this would be a remarkable and novel mechanism of toxicity,” Montine and his colleagues wrote in the journal Neurology in 2005.
As well as questioning biomagnification and sample size, they asked if Cox could have been detecting an isomer, a compound with the same molecular formula as BMAA but a different structural formula.
In response, Cox and Banack published two papers, in 2010 and 2011, detailing a method for differentiating BMAA from its isomers and suggesting that other scientists standardize their research techniques so that results could be more accurately compared. In 2009, Deborah Mash, a professor of neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, replicated Cox’s brain study, finding BMAA in the brains of ALS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s victims but not in the brains of people who’d died from Huntington’s, a neurodegenerative disease that’s linked to a specific gene. She also verified that BMAA crosses the blood-brain barrier in laboratory rats.
Yankees first basemen, Lou Gehrig, who died of ALS in 1941 at the age of 37. Credit: Library of Congress
A 2006 paper coauthored by Susan L. Ackerman of the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, published in Nature, revealed that insertion of the wrong amino acid into a protein chain, known as misincorporation, can cause neurodegenerative disease. And research by Ken Rodgers and Rachael Dunlop in Sydney, Australia, which at press time was scheduled to be unveiled at the International Symposium on ALS/MND (motor neuron disease) in December, found that BMAA can be incorporated into protein chains within human neurons, causing proteins to “misfiled” and form aggregates within the cells.
Many proteins have a highly specific three-dimensional structure in which the water-loving (hydrophilic) parts stay on the outside, and the water-repelling (hydrophobic) parts stay on the inside. “If proteins are damaged or contain a nonprotein amino acid such as BMAA, the structure of the protein can be altered so that the hydrophobic parts become exposed, and the damaged proteins can then stick together and form aggregates,” Rodgers says. What’s more, he found that the higher the concentration of BMAA, the more likely that it would be incorporated into a protein chain. When proteins misfold and stick together within nerve cells, it is thought to lead to neurofibrillary tangles, a telltale sign of neurodegenerative disease.
Much work remains to be done, but the scientists working on Cox and Banack’s hypothesis believe that normal metabolic processes should allow most people to metabolize and excrete small amounts of BMAA. But some individuals don’t metabolize or excrete BMAA, which could allow it to accumulate in their nerve cells. And that, if Cox and his team are right, could lead to ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Based on recent discoveries, Phase II clinical trials are underway to see if a zinc-based drug could remove BMAA from the body and slow the progression of ALS, bringing hope to victims of a disease that has given them little reason for optimism.
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While Banack shows me how researchers at the institute test for BMAA using a machine called a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer, my mind wanders to how I might be exposed to the toxin — in drinking water, seafood, milk from cows eating pastures irrigated with pond-scum-laden water, spirulina in my protein shakes. I ask about blue-green algae supplements. “Our official policy is that we do not test them,” she says, choosing her words carefully. She refers me to a 2008 paper by Dan Dietrich from the International Symposium on Cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms; he found large quantities of BMAA in commercially sold supplements, including ones containing spirulina and Aphanizomenon flos–aquae.
Cox and Banack have tested, but not yet published, data on several food items. “We are very interested in shellfish as a possible route of exposure, because an oyster can filter 4 to 8 liters of water a minute. They’re amazing indicators of waterborne toxins. They’re like canaries in the mine shaft,” says Cox. “The danger, if there is one, is in consuming shellfish from cyanobacterially contaminated habitats. But if you’re eating from a pristine habitat, you are OK.” I point out that people usually don’t know what kind of water their seafood comes from. Cox suggests that warnings could help. The government already warns people to avoid eating fish caught in mine-tailing areas and to avoid shellfish at certain times of year because of toxins; similar warnings could work for areas with cyanobacterial blooms or high BMAA levels.
In 2009, Larry Brand, a marine biologist at the University of Miami, published a study showing extreme BMAA levels in bottom-feeding species off Florida’s coast, where a massive cyanobacterial bloom exists. Pink shrimp, blue crabs, and species that feed on the ocean floor had the highest levels; people eat some of those species. Brand and Deborah Mash have since found BMAA in the brains of dolphins as well as in fins of several shark species, organisms at the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, European researchers have documented biomagnification of BMAA in Baltic Sea aquatic life.
“As the dose goes up, our data suggests that incidence [of ALS] also goes up,” says Cox. “If people are consuming a BMAA-rich diet, there’s more chance they are going to fall ill. People need to be very careful about the water they’re drinking.” Neurologist Elijah Stommel of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center has linked clusters of ALS cases in the same zip code, or even the same street or building, to exposure to cyanobacteria-contaminated lakes in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. Stommel is building a geographic database of ALS cases in the northeastern U.S.; it already includes more than 800 cases.
Do standard water-treatment methods remove BMAA? Only one study has been conducted so far. A graduate student who works with microbiologist Tim Downing at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Summerstrand campus in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, found that standard water-treatment methods, including sand filtration, powdered activated carbon (a bit like what’s found in a Brita filter), and chlorination, were particularly successful at removing BMAA. Flocculation, sometimes called coagulation, in which particles are allowed to settle and then made to cluster so that they can be separated from drinking water, was not as effective.
I knew that Texas’s Lake Houston, which supplies drinking water to residents of this country’s fourth largest city, including me, regularly has cyanobacterial blooms, so I collected water and sediment from the lake and mailed it to the institute. It returned positive for BMAA. Houston’s Northeast Water Treatment Plant uses coagulation, sedimentation, and sand-filtration processes, so I can only hope they remove the BMAA.
There are potentially bigger problems further north. According to Stommel’s research in New England, the rate of ALS doubles around lakes where cyanobacterial blooms have been reported. For people living around Lake Mascoma in New Hampshire, the prevalence of ALS was 10 to 25 times the normal rate. At present, no water facilities are known to test for BMAA, though in a 2005 article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cox and his colleagues suggested it would be prudent to monitor BMAA concentrations in drinking water contaminated by cyanobacterial blooms. Researchers at the institute have created an antibody that binds with BMAA and could be used in a simple dipstick-type water test. They’ve also developed the technology for a filter that would remove the compound. Cox hopes some company will commercialize these technologies. “We’re not a commercial lab,” he says. “We need to focus on finding a cure.”
In a world where poisons assault us from every angle — air, water, food, cosmetics — people tend to either overreact or ignore the problem. “You can cause panic pretty easily,” says Banack. “We want to urge measured caution.”
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Banack and Cox say they believe the paradigm is shifting in the science of neurodegenerative diseases. For the past decade or so, most funds have gone toward seeking genes that cause neurodegenerative diseases. “If there’s a gene that can cause ALS, then maybe there’s some way to block it. Everybody’s been looking at genetics,” says Banack. “There’s some good research out there, but as Cox says, scientists have been kicking the same ball for 15 years.” Given that 90 percent of cases haven’t yet been explained by genetics, more scientists have begun assessing environmental triggers.
One thing going for the institute’s research is the variety of fields represented in Cox’s consortium of scientists. Too often scientists work in disciplinary silos, “and the silos are not communicating,” says Cox. “A lot of neurologists never heard of cyanobacteria, and a lot of cyanobacterial people were not that familiar with ALS. But there have been a lot of really smart people working really hard for a long time, and there has just not been any progress in terms of discovering new therapies. It’s going to require an interdisciplinary group to approach the problem from a number of different angles.”
“The paradigm here that is emerging is that there are ties between environmental health and human health,” Cox goes on. “There is a tie between cyanobacteria and human health. I think that’s pretty well accepted. And at this point we suspect there may be a tie between cyanobacterial toxins and your risk of progressive neurodegenerative disease — but it’s still a hypothesis.”
“If we can disprove it, we can go move on to something else,” adds Banack. “But so far we’ve been unable to disprove it. The data support the hypothesis.”
“We probably have some details wrong,” Cox admits. “But at this point, it’s hard to think that we, including all 20 universities focusing on it, are totally on a wild-goose chase.”
Coastal marshes, home to a stunning array of wildlife, have been drained, dredged and carved up, but now an unlikely team is working to reverse the decline.
The moon is full, the night is warm, and I’m sitting in the high seat of an airboat, like a queen on a wetland wildlife safari. I feel like a firsthand witness to the springtime creation of new life. The deep glunk-glunk of a bronze frog, like a banjo, creates the song of the night, and baby marsh birds are everywhere. Two black-necked stilts guide their chicks, beige fuzzballs on stick legs, across a mudflat. A 6-foot gator slithers perilously near as a downy moorhen chick submerges itself, and I gaze in awe at the glowing orange eyes of what seems like a hundred of the reptilian beasts down the watery slough.
It is so beautiful and wild that this could be Africa’s Okavanga Delta, only we’re a mere hundred miles east of Houston.
I’ve joined Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologists at the 24,250-acre J.D. Murphree Wildlife Management Area to find and catch alligators and mottled ducks in the marshes on the upper Texas coast. Duck hunters converge on these marshes every fall and winter, but populations of mottled ducks have taken a nosedive in Texas over the past 45 years. Some blame the increase in alligator populations, but it’s more likely that mottled duck declines may merely be symptomatic of landscape modification writ large on this low-lying coastal plain formed from the Sabine and Neches rivers.
Since European settlers first arrived, this marshy landscape has been carved, dredged, polluted and sucked dry. Many different types of wetlands exist in Texas and around the world — from coastal marsh to prairie potholes to bottomland hardwood forests along creeks and rivers — and this is by no means the only place that wetlands have been disregarded in the pursuit of human enterprise before recognition of their intrinsic worth. For decades after European colonization, wetlands were maligned, feared and cursed, and according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the lower 48′s original 221 million acres of wetlands have, in fact, disappeared. The U.S. Swamp Lands Act of 1849 gave away 65 million acres of federal wetlands with the caveat that the new owners would drain them.
Over time, attitudes changed. Science revealed the myriad ways wetlands help us — they provide critical habitat for the fish we harvest and the birds we delightedly watch, not to mention amphibians, reptiles, insects and other invertebrates. Coastal wetlands offer a measure of flood control by absorbing excess rainfall and protecting inland homes from greater destruction during hurricanes.
In the natural state of affairs, coastal wetlands exist in a gradient of saltiness. Farthest inland are freshwater wetlands, followed by intermediate, then brackish and, finally, salt marsh nearest to the ocean. Each type has its own unique plants and animals. Roseate spoonbills, pelicans, sandpipers, terns and other shorebirds feed on the abundant fish and shellfish in the estuaries, which include brackish, intermediate and salt marsh.
“[Almost] all the fish in the Gulf have their nursery habitat in the estuary,” says Tom Tremblay with the Bureau of Economic Geology, who has documented the loss of Texas coastal wetlands over the past 50 years. “If you lose the estuary, you lose the fish. That’s the bottom of the food chain for a lot of things.”
Freshwater marshes have the highest plant species biodiversity, and many shorebirds and waterfowl nest here.
“Freshwater coastal marsh is extremely important due to the diversity and production dynamics of fish, wildlife and plants found there,” explains Jim Sutherlin, TPWD’s upper Texas coast wetland ecosystem project leader, based at Murphree. “Here is where a tremendous amount of insect production occurs — dragonflies, mayflies and a host of others. This really cranks the food web.”
As the airboat picks up speed, bugs whiz by my face with surprising rapidity: whack-whack-whack. Above the water’s surface, cordgrass intermingles with blackrush and bulrush, sedges and common reed, creating a soft, windswept look. The bright spotlight illuminates wigeongrass beds growing under the water’s surface. Mottled and other “dabbling ducks” tip their bottoms in the air while feeding on wigeongrass and other underwater plants, along with the occasional crayfish and invertebrate.
From the water, the marsh looks vigorously healthy and abounding with new life. In the cover of night, hens take their brood out to feed and explore, and seeing these wild animals in their natural element is breathtaking. Yet, from a bird’s-eye view, it becomes apparent how much the intricate labyrinth of marshy land has been carved up and dredged.
Starting in the late 1800s, engineers began building the 1,050-mile Gulf Intracoastal Waterway parallel to the coastline, and it now stretches from Brownsville to Florida. The intracoastal waterway, the Sabine-Neches Waterway (which cuts a path from north to south) and other smaller inlets, canals and ports have permanently altered the natural hydrology, or water flow, across the coastal plain. Coastal freshwater and intermediate marshes are particularly vulnerable because once channels are cut, that allows tidal water to move much farther inland than it ever had before.
“Too much salt water will kill freshwater plants that hold the fragile organic soils together,” says TPWD biologist Mike Rezsutek. “Once the plants are dead, the soil is easily eroded, turning marsh into open water. More-salt-tolerant plants can’t colonize before the soil is lost.”
Most baby marsh birds do not like salty water, either. Ducklings of mottled ducks, for example, will die in water with salinity over 8 parts per thousand.
Much of Texas’ coastal wetlands have disappeared or been negatively affected since human settlement, and nowhere is that loss more pronounced than on the upper Texas coast. This region nearest Louisiana loses more than 40 feet of land per year — the highest rate of coastal erosion in Texas and some of the highest in the nation — compared to a statewide average of two feet per year. Sea level is rising around the world, but the “relative sea level rise” varies on different coastlines. On the upper Texas coast, not only is the ocean level rising, but the ground is also sinking because of the extraction of groundwater and oil. All this contributes to the decline of coastal marsh.
We glide through the watery labyrinth as the full moon ascends, a giant orb over the landscape owned by the gators and ducks, frogs and fish. As we approach a family of mottled ducks, Rezsutek lies on his stomach at the airboat’s bow, ready to catch each and every one as they scurry for cover.
He hands them to another biologist, who counts each one out loud before placing it into a sack. After the entire brood is captured, each duckling gets a leg band and is released. The data collected helps provide information on movements, survival, harvest rates and population estimates. Another team is out catching alligators to document their abundance and diet.
The shimmering lights of the Beaumont–Port Arthur petrochemical complex, one of the nation’s largest, illuminate the horizon. In these modern times, wild nature overlaps human enterprise. On the Texas coast, they are intertwined, interspersed and, to some extent, interdependent. And after decades of conflicting interests and demands on the landscape, in a few shining examples, they have begun to work together not just to make up for damage done, but as partners in the creation of new life.
Six years later, I’m on an airboat in the same coastal marsh but in broad daylight, when ducklings, baby birds and most gators are hiding. Sutherlin takes me out to a cracked, drying moonscape of brown mud in the middle of the Murphree’s Salt Bayou Unit. The vastness of the mud field is astounding. It stretches on as far as the eye can see.
Did all those hurricanes wash the marsh away? Did it die from salty water? Did it erode or sink from rising seas? What happened here? The mud, it turns out, is part of a project to reverse the decline of the marsh.
With so much coastal marsh eroding and degrading for various reasons, biologist Jamie Schubert in TPWD’s Coastal Fisheries Division submitted a post-Ike recovery grant application to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and was awarded $1 million to restore 37.5 acres of marsh.
“We were able to bring Golden Pass Liquid Natural Gas on board and use their dredged material to leverage the funds and increase the project size to about 1,500 acres,” says Rezsutek. In the Sabine-Neches Waterway, Golden Pass ships unload in a terminal that is equivalent to a driveway off a street. Mud constantly fills in and settles on the bottom of the terminal, requiring constant dredging. Instead of dumping it at a Corps of Engineers dredge placement site, Golden Pass opted to work with TPWD to create a beneficial use for the dredge spoil.
The airboat pilot kills the engine, and we carefully step out and onto a giant expanse of cracked mud. “It’s like the surface of the moon,” says Sutherlin. It’s barren, all right. I have to walk carefully on the solid surfaces, which are separated like pillars with masses of goopy muck in between and underneath — after all, they deposited 3.2 million cubic yards of mud here.
Building up the elevation of the marsh buffers it against erosion and sea level rise, which has contributed to marsh decline here for decades.
“Settlement will occur across the entire area,” explains Rezsutek, “so the end product will have similar contours — ponds, channels, high marsh — as the degrading marsh, just at a slightly higher elevation.”
All the mud gets tested to make sure it does not have any chemicals that could be toxic to wildlife or plants. When it’s ready, the mud is transported from the terminal to the marsh through a giant pipe, and then workers allow the mud to settle before planting three different marsh grass species. Sutherlin points out the rows of newly planted salt grass, marsh hay and seashore paspalum.
“We have to re-establish vegetation on the landscape to get the habitat to function,” he says.
Within a few months, this entire area will be covered in verdant marsh grasses — along with feeding shorebirds.
“Historically, this was fresh to intermediate marsh. Changes to the hydrology cut off freshwater flows, and the Sabine-Neches Waterway allowed salt to come in a big way,” says Sutherlin.
Right now the restored mud marsh is brackish, but as a mosaic of emergent plants gets re-established over time, it should become less salty. TPWD has plans to reduce the volume of salt water that reaches the marsh here, and then over time, the region’s notoriously heavy rainfalls will help keep fresh water in the marsh.
“Our intent is to restore the hydrology to a point where we simulate the historic functions of that landscape,” Sutherlin says.
The project exemplifies how TPWD can work with industry to create win-win situations. Besides Golden Pass’ terminal, there are billions of cubic yards of dredge spoil that comes out of these channels every year, some of which is now used in various “beneficial use” projects around Texas bays and estuaries.
“We can complain about the navigation folks all we want to, but when we start to solve this is when we start working with them to use every ounce, every cubic foot of this material that comes out of the ship channel,” says Sutherlin.
“I think that we are growing as professionals as a result of things like Hurricane Ike that just devastate the whole system,” Sutherlin adds. “It allows us to really begin to build our vision for how the Texas coast might be maintained.”
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
Doppler radar helped save the Texas forests where millions of migrating birds rest each spring.
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.
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.
A few days into a vow of shopping celibacy, I visit a Hallmark store with my kids. The 75-percent-off rack draws me in. I’ve forgotten that I’m supposed to be living according to the Compact, an agreement to avoid all new purchases in favor of used goods in an attempt to reduce my impact on the environment.
Could major metropolitan areas get by without building any more major freeways — ever?
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