Cat Story

Incredible and rare: a sighting of Arizona’s only known wild ocelot. For all the stories of gloom and deprivation that rocked the natural world over the past year, there was the occasional ray of hope. This was one.

Jason Miller/YouTube

Just as P-22, a young mountain lion dubbed the “Hollywood cat” who surprised biologists by establishing a decade-long residency in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles sparked a conservation movement that has resulted in the construction of a wildlife bridge over California’s 10-lane Highway 101, other animals left their mark in 2023.

Lone animals and groups alike used their innate skills and courage to recover lost territory, expand their range, or simply survive against the odds.

Some were helped by human action like stream restoration, while others, following in the tracks of P-22, deepened scientific knowledge and helped inspire those who work to save them.

An ocelot, a much smaller — and more rare — cat than a mountain lion confounded observations in Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains in early July by, well, showing up. This ocelot, dubbed Lil’ Jefe — a nod to El Jefe, the now-famous jaguar found in the same region — overcame ranchlands, roads, mining activities, poison traps set by the US Dept. of Agriculture, and an increasingly fortified border wall, to find a way to survive.

His presence has since galvanized local conservation efforts in the area, if only by highlighting the threat to wildlife from a border wall that keeps growing, despite the ongoing controversy.

The ever-growing border wall promises to be a divisive issue in the upcoming US presidential elections, where it hasn’t proven to be so already.

Fewer than 100 ocelots remain in the continental United States, mostly in Texas. The US population is the northern reach of a range that extends south through the Americas to Argentina. As reported by the conservation website The Revelator, biologists believe Lil’ Jefe, who was spotted just five miles north of the border, has appeared on trap cameras some 150 times since 2012. He’s the only known ocelot in Arizona and one of just five spotted in the state since 2009. He likely came from northern Mexico, a home he can’t return to — and that others can’t migrate from — because of the border wall.

Camera traps in the region have captured ringtail raccoons, mountain lions and the occasional black bear, an indication of the region’s remarkable biodiversity and the need —some would say responsibility — to protect and preserve it for future generations, for biodiversity’s sake and for the sake of the wild world at large.

Lil’ Jefe’s efforts have not entirely been in vain. A video uploaded to YouTube five months ago by wildlife videographer and self-styled “conservation CATalyst” Jason Miller has captured 20K views. The circle of life goes on.

Jason Miller/YouTube

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Glimmer of Hope 2.0

2023 was by all accounts — except perhaps those of diehard climate deniers and the more two-faced participants at last month’s CoP28 climate conference — a hell of a year.

Not only did governments fail to reverse the tide of global warming, the rate of heating actually accelerated.

That’s why an obscure, little-reported court ruling in an obscure, out-of-the-way mountain state in the US last August — a month of record-breaking temperatures across the entire northern hemisphere — has the potential to create such a huge ripple effect in the campaign to stem and possibly reverse global heating caused by fossil fuels.

On Aug. 15, a state court in Montana ruled in favour of 16 young people who had sued their local government, arguing that policies that favour fossil fuels violate their constitutional rights to a clean and healthy environment.

In short, youth climate campaigners — inspired in part by Greta Thunberg — were able to prove, using the testimony of climate scientists and constitutional experts, that the climate crisis jeopardizes their generation’s future well-being as guaranteed under the United Nations Charter of Human Rights.

Montana district court judge Kathy Seeley made no bones in her 103-page written ruling.

“Plaintiffs have proven that as children and youth, they are disproportionately harmed by fossil fuel production and climate impacts,” she wrote.

True, the state of Montana is appealing the ruling — an upper court decision is pending — and no one is under any illusion that the Republican/Trumpist-dominated US Supreme Court will toss the ruling the first chance it gets, but a legal precedent has been set.

Recent court rulings across Latin America and South America have shown that court challenges by youth climate campaigners, once ridiculed as the namby-pamby imaginings of a pampered generation of idle kids who don’t have to work for a living yet, may carry more legal weight than many doubters first assumed.

The Montana court judgment has already marked an important turn in the road for climate campaigners who are using the legal system to address the climate crisis.

If nothing else, the ruling is the first trial win for the public interest lawyers who represent the climate advocacy group Our Children’s Trust.

Their voices are growing louder.

By the end of 2022, there were more than 2,100 climate-change-related court cases filed globally, more than double the total from 2017, according to a report from the United Nations Environment Programme. Court cases have been filed in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, France, and New Zealand, among other countries.

This past month, lawyers representing youth-driven campaigns across the continental United States filed suit against the US Environmental Protection Agency, accusing the agency of failing to meet its obligation to protect the environment for future generations.

The lawsuits are part of a larger movement to use the courts to hold polluters —  and the governments that enable them — to account for reckless endangerment and depraved indifference in the name of profit-making.

The impact is global.

In September, a half dozen youthful climate campaigners in Portugal filed suit at the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that governments in Europe aren’t doing enough to protect younger generations from the effects of the climate crisis. That’s instructive because governments across Europe are already far more progressive in combating global heating than in the US and China, the world’s two largest emitters of carbon. We’re talking about Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, France and Germany, not Trumpist America. If continental Europe is shown to be neglecting its moral and fiduciary duty to future generations, what chance have America and Canada?

The kids are all right.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/14/montana-climate-trial-young-activists-judge-order

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/20/what-happened-montana-climate-trial-decision

Our Children’s Trust

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Glimmer of Hope

Roundups of the year’s most important environmental stories can’t help but focus on the bad. Here’s a good news story, though.

The most important environmental stories of any year are always those most likely to have ripple effects well into the future.

Hot winter, hot spring, hot summer and hot fall, capped by a bogus climate conference in an Arabian Gulf petrostate to close the year, marked 2023 as a year to forget, though, of course, we can’t — and shouldn’t.

The past year was the world’s hottest since record-keeping began, meteorologists and climatologists agree. Don’t argue. The science is in. Time to stop playing games.

On every continent and across every season, surface temperatures broke long-standing records and, in the process, made it clear that the age of climate change isn’t some distant what-if. It is here, now.

There were glimmers of hope, though, if a glimmer is, in truth, all they are. Offhand, I can think of two.

I’ll get to the second, involving youth climate protesters and the courts, in my next post. First, though, here’s a story that barely caused a ripple in the mainstream press, but which has the potential to change the way governments think and act in the future.

Ecuador, August. This country of 17 million people (according to the official 2022 census) and covering some 282,000 km² (109,000 square miles) is one of 17 countries officially designated by the NGO Conservation International as megadiverse, those countries that are home to the majority of the Earth’s wild species, including a wide range of endemic plant and animal species found nowhere else. Ecuador’s territorial responsibility includes the Galápagos Islands — and it is also home to potentially vast reserves of oil.

Even as some countries say one thing and do another with regards to oil exploration and development — hello, Norway — on Aug. 20th Ecauadorans voted in a historic referendum to put the brakes on the development of all new oil wells in Parque Nacional Yasuní in the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

Unesco designated Yasuní as a World Biosphere Reserve in 1989. It covers more than 1m hectares (2.5m acres) and is home to 610 species of birds, 139 species of amphibians and 121 species of reptiles. On one hectare alone there are 665 tree and bush species, more species than in the whole of Europe or the USA and Canada combined.

On one hectare alone there are 665 tree and bush species, more species than in the whole of Europe or the USA and Canada combined.

The referendum was included as part of the first round of presidential elections. In the end, voters chose to safeguard the biosphere by a margin of nearly 20%, with more than 58% in favour and 41% against.

The move means an estimated 725m barrels of oil will stay underground in an area of the Amazon that is also home to the Tagaeri and Taromenane indigenous tribes, two of the world’s last remaining “uncontacted” Indigenous communities.

Ecuador’s voters took the unprecedented step of knowingly forgoing the profits to be made from oil extraction. They decided the damage was not worth the risk, no doubt aware of the oil industry’s reckless practices and appalling record when it comes to extracting oil in the Amazon region, not to mention attendant factors such as water pollution, environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

At a time when the climate crisis is intensifying and the Amazon rainforest is fast approaching an irreversible tipping point, Ecuador has become one of the few countries in the world to set limits on resource extraction through a democratic vote.

In a second referendum, Ecuadoran voters voted to block gold mining in the Chocó Andino, a sensitive highland biosphere near the capital of Quito, by an even larger margin: 68% to 31%. Pedro Bermeo, founding member of Yasunidos, an activist group that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures petitioning the referendum, told the Guardian newspaper that the vote shows that the “greatest national consensus at this time is in the defence of nature, the defence of Indigenous peoples and nationalities, the defence of life.”

Well, yes. It doesn’t end there, though.

“The fight isn’t over,” Bermneo added. “Even if politicians separate us, nature unites us, and we will work together to ensure the government complies with the will of Ecuadorian people.”

And, with luck, the will of people the world over.

The referendum is binding — and permanent. It cannot and will not be undone by a future government; it’s enshrined in law.

Baby steps, but steps just the same.

Hablemos de Culturas

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Climate change?

Massively exaggerated!

Creative Commons

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Deal! Or No Deal?

An 11th-hour deal has been struck at the CoP28 climate talks — but what kind of deal? The devil’s in the details, as always.

It’s being labelled “the UAE consensus,” but those are not the kind of words to stir hope and joy in the climate science community.

On the face of it, the 11th hour — literally, midnight Pacific Time — agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels sounds like, if not the end result exactly, a step in the right direction.

What the EU has labelled “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” is also being singled out by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) as an “improvement,” but with a “litany of loopholes.”

Climate justice campaigners are, by and large, disappointed with the wording, which they say can — and probably will — stand in the way of implementation.

Was it ever thus.

The reaction from small island countries like Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Kiribati is telling because they are the nation states most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis in the immediate term, as opposed to “somewhere in the future,” say, 2050, when — in theory — the world will have cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global heating to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That was already a tall order as the science tells us that the world is already at 1.7°C ahead of pre-industrial levels. Rapid ice melt in the polar regions and glaciers in more temperate climes might not seem evident right now in London, New York and Washington D.C., but it is an existential issue in Tonga, Micronesia and the Maldives, among 33 other member states.

The deal encourages the world’s nations to embark on a de facto phasing out of fossil fuels, but developing countries still need billions of dollars to help them transition away from coal, oil and gas. The G7 nations, fast-growing economies like those in China and India, and the wealthy oil sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf are not compelled, let alone required, to move as quickly as the climate science urges. The US has pledged just $20 million in new finance to help emerging nations, and even that amount — paltry considering the US is also the world’s most active producer of oil and gas — and even that is likely to be rolled back when political conservatives regain power in the US White House and Congress, as they are likely to do next November, with Canada to follow in 2025.

China has already vowed to expand coal production, and India will face no penalty for following suit. Russia, which worked hard behind the scenes to forestall any kind of deal, including this one, will face little opposition next year, when the UN’s climate conference will be held in Azerbaijan, an oil producer and more or less a client state of the oil and gas-producing Putinocracy.

There is a silver lining to all this, if silver is the right word exactly. Timing, as always, is a factor. Perhaps shamed by the optics of handing the world’s biggest, most important climate conference to Azerbaijan in 2024, the following year’s conference will be held in Brazil. And not just Brazil, but in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the symbol of nature’s last stand against global heating.

Let’s hope it’s still there.

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