How Vincent van Goat Saved the Presidential Library

November 02, 2019

“It was darn smart of us to do that.”

— John Heubusch, executive director, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute

Bring on the goats. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is the repository of presidential records from the administration of Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States, and the burial place of the President and First Lady, Nancy Reagan. And this past week, it was saved from the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles Basin by — wait for it — a herd of goats.

The library is in Simi Valley, Calif., about 64 km (40 miles) northwest of downtown Los Angeles and 24 km (15 miles) west of Chatsworth. The somewhat oddly named Easy Fire broke out early Wednesday morning in the parched hills surrounding Simi Valley and burned through some 1,300 acres by daylight, according to the Ventura County Fire Dept. The Easy Fire, one of several California wildfires burning in dry and windy conditions for the past two weeks, threatened some 6,500 homes and forced numerous school closures before burning toward the Reagan Library, propelled by strong winds.

Interestingly — and by design — a herd of 500 ravenous goats was introduced to the area surrounding the library this past May, with the idea of creating a fire break by munching away at brush that otherwise might have served as kindling to any potential fire. Fire breaks slow the flames in any potential fire and buy firefighters extra time to respond.

Southern California, SOCAL to the locals, has been the site of terrible wildfires for the past three years running, owing to the seasonal Santa Ana winds that sweep down from the parched mountains every October. Due to climate change, some say, the winds have been more capricious, intense and unpredictable in recent years. This season has proved particularly bad — winds topped 160 kph (100 mph) miles an hour in some areas, triple the norm, or whatever passes for normal these days.

That there are fires should come as no surprise: The Los Angeles Basin is essentially a huge bowl of

sand, and the regional population — in an area that has little to no natural water sources — now tops 10 million.

The goats, naturally enough, have become stars. The “caprine contractors,” as BBC dubbed them in a news story Thursday, include Selena Goatmez, Goatzart and the unofficial ringleader, poster boy and public face of SOCAL goat herds everywhere, Vincent van Goat.

The goats work (relatively) cheap. A local company, established last November, supplies the goats and charges around USD 1,000 per acre for grazing brush. The Reagan Presidential Library grounds required around 13 acres of land to be cleared — a bargain, considering the Easy Fire burned through 1,300 acres before firefighters had a chance to tackle the fire head on.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles was also threatened by fire this past week; in that case, valuable scrub-clearing work was carried out by museum staff. The company that supplies the goats is already talking about having to double their herd, just to meet demand.

The bigger picture tells a valuable tale. Using goats to clear unwanted brush is a natural way to fight nature’s fires, though the California experience shows that most of these fires were started by human encroachment, mainly downed power lines in high winds that flame out and spark the underbrush, as opposed to dry lightning, which is responsible for most of the wildfires north of California, on the BC West Coast, for example, and in the coastal mountains that separate the Pacific region from the Rocky Mountains further inland.

The goats proved invaluable, as it turned out. The Ronald Reagan Library grounds cover some 700 acres. At its height, the Easy Fire came within 27 metres (30 yards) of the complex. If not for the goats, there’s no telling what might have happened.

Fridays 4 Future in China

October 31, 2019

“The seasons have changed. In the middle of the 8th lunar month it used to be already quite cold here. Now it’s warm until the 9th and even 10th month.”

— Tang Xiaodi, farmer in Guilin, China

If it’s true, as Lao Tzu said, that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, it may also be true that the Fridays for Future movement in China, population 1.43 billion, might begin with a single16-year-old girl.

Mind you, in a nation state noted for its wanton destruction of the environment, the authoritarian nature of its omnipresent, all-controlling government, and the ruthlessness directed toward any form of dissent, no one is holding their breath that Howey Ou, age 16, can change the minds of more than a billion people. Then again, much the same could have been said of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was unknown little more than a year ago. Howey Ou has vowed to plant osmanthus plants around her home city of Guilin.

As reported just days ago by the German state-owned news agency Deutsche Welle, Howey Ou has started her very own school climate strike, choosing to plant seedlings of a plant noted for its ability to absorb carbon dioxide rather than attend school. She has not been to school for four months, according to Deutsche Welle.

And if you think China’s government — not to mention her parents — are fine with that, you’d be wrong.

As she told the news agency, plainly, “Protesting needs a lot of courage in China. But planting trees is something we can do.”

China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which is saying something given the voracious appetite for consumption and the casual disregard of environmental protections in the US today.

Howey Ou learned about climate change and the effect of man-made pollution on the world’s

delicate ecosystems after coming across a copy of National Geographic at a local library in her home town on Guilin. The issue in question featured an article about plastic waste in the sea.

This past spring, students in more than 100 countries marched against man-made global heating and the growing climate crisis. China was not one of them.

She protested outside her local city government’s office with a hand-written cardboard sign this past May. She stood there for seven days. And after seven days, the police took her away.

She was lectured about the legality of protests — basically, they’re not legal, period — and police contacted her parents and told them in no uncertain terms to tell her to stop protesting, or else.

So she is planting trees instead.

“I am not that courageous,” she explained, though some might beg to differ.

Guilin, pop. 4.748 million (2010), is in a region of southern China noted for its dramatic backdrop of limestone karst hills. There is little if any land around Guilin that has not been cultivated; it is all spoken for. A sympathetic farmer, Tang Xiaodi, granted her permission to plant osmanthus fragran seedlings in front of his house, along a nearby canal.

“Fridays for Future are being ridiculed and cursed a lot on the Chinese internet,” Howey Ou told Deutsche Welle. “But I do get some positive comments. People say: ‘Look, the Chinese students are planting trees, while the foreigners just speak empty words.”

A forest, after all, begins with the planting of a single seed.

‘You Are Stealing Our Future’

October 29, 2019

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

— Margaret Mead

Close to half of the global population, 41%, are under the age of 24. And they’re angry. From Hong Kong to Stockholm, from St. Petersburg to New York City, young people are rising up to fight inequality and draw attention to the climate emergency.

Their elders should be grateful, Simon Tisdall, veteran foreign affairs op-ed columnist and former US editor of The Guardian wrote in a Sunday Observer essay this past weekend, because the issues at stake affect us all.

It’s too soon — and possibly a mistake — to draw a straight line between today’s street demonstrations and the generation-defining May, 1968 student riots in Paris, but the parallels are clear. The Fridays 4 Future climate movement and the School Strike For Climate protests inspired by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — she turns 17 in January — have galvanized today’s young people to a scale rarely seen in our lifetimes.

At first glance, the street protests around the world seem to revolve around local and regional issues — riots over the rising price of vegetables in India, skyrocketing fuel costs in Chile, the burgeoning independence movement in Catalonia, sudden regime change in Sudan and the lingering pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, to cite just a few — but there’s a common thread.

More and more, young people, loosely defined as women and men between the ages of 18 and 24, are at the forefront of demonstrations that are increasingly violent and, in some case, have turned deadly.

Younger people are predisposed to upsetting the established order of things in any era, Tisdall says, often driven by economic, social and political imbalances, but the climate protests are different. “It is as if the unprecedented environmental traumas experienced by the natural world are . . . (reflected in) similarly exceptional stresses in human society.”

Consider the demographics. There are more young people today than ever before. The global population, at last estimate, tipped over 7.5 billion. Four-in-10 of those 7 billion — 41%, to be precise — are aged 24 or less. In Africa, the youth trend is even more marked: 41% are under the age of 15. In Asia and Latin America, home to 65% of the world’s total population, 25% are 15 or younger.

These young people, especially those at the younger end of the age scale, will reach adulthood in a world scarred by memories of the 2008 financial crash and worried about signs of a new, bigger financial crash to come, a world buffeted by

the increasingly capricious winds of climate change, the result of global overheating that is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientific projections of just 10 years ago.

Social media is linking and connecting young people in ways social scientists have yet to come to grips with. The industrial revolution had a profound effect on human development, but what is happening with digital technology is happening much faster. Lebanon’s protests have been dubbed the “WhatsApp revolution,” and with good reason.

The climate protests in particular are part of a new global movement to save the planet and correct the abuses of the recent past, everything from the spike in carbon emissions — caused mainly but not solely by our outdated over-reliance on coal and other dirt-spewing fossil fuels — to species extinction caused by the erosion and, in some cases, wanton destruction of natural habitat.

Coupled with young people’s natural distrust of politicians and policy makers of all political stripes and designs, it’s a toxic brew.

Small wonder, then, that many of the young climate protestors’ inspirations include David Attenborough, a 93-year-old naturalist and natural historian who has never lost his childlike wonder for the natural world. In just the past six months, Attenborough praised Thunberg’s actions and other youth protesters like her, from 14-year-old New Yorker Alexandria Villasenõr, co-founder of the US Youth Climate Strike and founder of Earth Uprising, to 21-year-old Muscovite Katerina Birdy, who cites care for the environment and climate activism as her primary passions, on her social-media home page (“We live in a time when it’s impossible to be silent. Speak up for the environment. We are living in a climate emergency.”)

“In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined,” Attenborough said in the recent BBC documentary Climate Change: The Facts, in which he appeared with Thunberg. “It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world, and the collapse of our societies.

“There’s a message for all of us in the voices of these young people,” he added. “It is after all their generation who will inherit this dangerous legacy.”

What helps protect us, Tisdall says, “is the noisy, life-affirming dissent of the young.”

‘We Don’t Need Them, They Need Us.’ Is He Right?

October 27, 2019

“Conservationists argue that humans need to save species in order to save ourselves. The truth is we could survive without wild species — but they canʼt survive without us, and the moral argument for protecting them and the beauty they bring to the world is overwhelming.”

— Carl Safina

Carl Safina — naturalist, ecologist and author of books about humankind’s relationship with the natural world — set the cat among the pigeons, proverbially speaking, in an essay last week for Yale Environment 360 magazine, aka Yale E360, in which he argued that we can survive without endangered species, but they can’t survive without us.

The case for saving tigers, elephants and blue whales matters, not because we can’t survive without them as many conservationists insist, but because it’s our moral, social and ethical duty to keep them around. The Kirtland’s warbler, named after Ohio doctor and amateur naturalist Jared P. Kirtland in 1851, was down to just 200 pairs when the Endangered Species Act took effect in 2008. The songbird’s population has since grown more than tenfold, “not because we needed Kirtland’s warbler, but because we understood Kirtland’s warbler needed us,” Safina wrote in E360. “We understood our moral responsibility and commitment to keep a tiny bird in the world with us.”

The world — “us” “we” — has done fine without the dodo, last seen in 1681, give or take a decade; the passenger pigeon, last seen in September, 1914; and the Tasmanian tiger, officially declared extinct on Sept. 7, 1936.

The world hasn’t lost a step since — or so goes the argument.

I would argue that there is one species that humankind can most assuredly not do without, and that’s just off the top of my head. I’ll save that one for the end.

First, though, back to Kirtland’s warbler. In just the past fortnight, the Kirtland’s warbler, also known as the jack pine warbler, has come off the endangered species list — in part, Safina argues, because the Endangered Species Act decides that when species need us, we go to their aid, not the other way round.

The argument over whether the Endangered Species Act is itself endangered, with the present US administration in power, is a debate for another day.

Safina argues instead that we live in a sacred miracle, and for that reason alone we should act accordingly. It’s not about practicality. It’s about morality.

“For decades, some conservationists have been trying to sell a clumsy, fumbling appeal to self-interest: the idea that human beings need wild nature, need wild animals, need the species (that appear) on endangered lists. ‘If they go extinct, we’ll go extinct,’ is a common refrain. The only problem: It’s false.

“We have endangered species not because what is bad for them is bad for us, but because the opposite is true: What is bad for them has fuelled the explosive growth and maintenance of human population and technology.”

Put in simpler terms, there are too many of us, and we leave too heavy a footprint. Bigger, faster, more. The world is running out of space to sustain it all, and natural species — the most vulnerable first, the others later — can’t cope. Human beings have thrived by destroying nature. “Annihilation comes easy to Homo sapiens,” Safina wrote. “What’s of little interest for us is coexistence.”

The Endangered Species Act, when it’s applied in good faith — the key phrase — works. “It works because of something many environmentalists have forgotten, most average people never think about, and most politicians are incapable of learning: It works because it doesnʼt ask a species to prove its usefulness, what theyʼre good for, or how much money theyʼre worth.”

Which is all true.

“There is no species whose disappearance has posed much of an inconvenience for civilization, not a single wild species that people couldnʼt do without, fewer whose erasure would be noticed by any but a handful of die-hard conservationists or scientists,” Safina continued.

Well, I can think of one.

Everything is connected. The things that are bad for land, water and air eventually are bad for people, too. A breakdown of the world’s living systems will eventually led to a breakdown of the human economy and, ultimately, society itself.

“Claiming that people depend on wild nature is nice,” Safina noted, “but dependence on wild nature ended generations ago. What keeps most people going is farming, felling, pumping, and mining.”

Which is true, to a point. For most people.

What keeps all people going, though, is having enough to eat. And more and more, we’re learning that what we eat depends on pollination. And pollination depends on — bees.

If bees should go extinct, and the population has crashed of late, the whole “We don’t need them” argument will be put sorely to the test.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-real-case-for-saving-species-we-dont-need-them-but-they-need-us?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+YaleEnvironment360+%28Yale+Environment+360%29&fbclid=IwAR0jf4iKwpEb_-Nw7idCHalI8mj9mooqb45qZkhA6YjMRfQHNoIEnmymyNo

On Assignment: A Conversation with Dereck and Beverly Joubert

October 20, 2019

“Anybody who comes out into nature, whether it’s toward polar bears or elephants or the great apes or anything, and wishes to destroy it, is acting selfishly. They may say they want to do it for reasons they think can justify, like conservation, but really and truly it’s a selfish act. You go out to Africa to shoot an elephant, but not because you love elephants or otherwise you wouldn’t shoot them. You go out so that you can acquire it, so you can have it on the wall — your wall — rather than leave it there for other people, hundreds of other people, to see.”

— Dereck Joubert

Dereck Joubert, talking on the phone from New York’s Lincoln Center alongside his filmmaker wife Beverly Joubert, says the traffic in New York is brutal. HIs word.

”It’s the reason we’re late,” he says simply, and it’s not hard to imagine the traffic being a shock to the system after years living in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, filming, photographing and studying the vast ecosystem’s natural rhythms.

The Jouberts are talking to me for my day job: Their three-part, four-years-in-the-making nature film Okavango: River of Dreams is about to make its North American television debut, Wednesday on PBS’s Nature showcase, and while they don’t need the publicity exactly, it can’t hurt. (An account our conversation specific to the film can be found at TVWorthWatching.com, linked here: http://www.tvworthwatching.com/post/Life-and-Death-in-the-Long-Grass-PBS-Nature-Takes-Viewers-Into-the-Heart-of-the-African-Wilderness-in-Epic-Three-Part-Miniseries.aspx

They’re running late, owing to the kind of traffic that’s impossible to imagine from a wilderness area some 15,000 kms² (5,800 sq miles), but once they start talking about their life’s passion, it’s hard to let go. They have a meeting to get to, with executives of PBS’s New York affiliate WNET — part of the international consortium that financed River of Dreams — but more than 30 minutes later, Dereck and Beverly Joubert are still talking. The meeting will just have to wait.

The Okavango, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, faces many of the same issues — climate change, habitat loss, human encroachment — the rest of the natural world faces.

Lately, though, the Okavango has had to deal with a whole new challenge.

The government of Botswana has lifted a five-year ban on elephant hunting, owing to growing conflict between humans and the animals, which sometimes destroy crops, and the Jouberts are agitated and annoyed.

Dereck Joubert has actively campaigned against hunting at international symposiums chaired by big players CITES, IUCN, SADC and the UN, while Beverly Joubert has made numerous documentary programs about the subject. The pair are Explorers-in-Residence at National Geographic, and have devoted most of their working lives to studying and getting to know elephants in their natural habitat. Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants — the world’s largest population — of an animal increasingly under threat around the world.

Dereck Joubert doesn’t pull any punches in his disdain for anyone who’d want to shoot an elephant for the trophy wall, and he’s unafraid to say so out loud. He’s long past the point of social niceties and diplomacy on the subject, even though, around the world, environmental activists are increasingly harassed, threatened and even murdered for speaking out, whether it’s against misuse of power or just old-fashioned greed.

Trophy hunting is just not on, as far as the Jouberts are concerned, regardless of any arguments against.

Joubert has heard the economic argument so often that it’s now like a red flag to a bull, as far as he’s concerned.

“The economics of it all don’t make any sense. People say, ‘Well, the money that I spend, that I give to go and act selfishly, protects the elephants from a broader, relatively intangible threat.’

That is not the motivation. The motivation is that you’re going out there to kill it for yourself. Nobody’s going out there to kill it because they hate killing and they want to do something for conservation. The core of this is a selfish act. And in my opinion, that’s morally bankrupt.”

Beverly Joubert — still recovering from serious injuries she sustained while filming buffalos in the middle of the night, ironically enough — is equally blunt in her own assessment.

“I really do believe we should all be living in harmony with nature,” she says simply. “Too often I think people forget that we’re just another species on the planet. I suspect that those who go out to kill are trying to be that superior ape. Well, we can be the superior ape. We have the intelligence. But we can live side-by-side with them, and respect them, without having to kill them. That’s what intelligence is.”

Beverly Joubert is worried what will happen now that the hunting ban has been lifted. The new rules come into effect in the new year.

“When the ban was originally enacted we had areas where life came back in a glorious way. We felt that this was what a paradise on earth should be like. And now it’s going to go through another change, and that’s concerning. The change will be man-made, and that’s something we need to be watching. The Okavango is, in almost every way, a wonderful base-line study area for nature. We’re going to be able to see if there is extreme damage.”

The larger picture — climate change — is creating its own problems, because everything is tied to habitat loss.

“We had a screening of the film last night, and

those questions came up from the audience as well.

“They were all wondering how the climate crisis is going to affect Africa. Well, it’s happening. It’s definitely there. We’ve seen it in the violent storms around the globe, and it’s very evident in Botswana. Temperatures are rising every year. Every year, we get the next record high. And now we’re in a drought again, in many parts of Africa.

“There are a lot or profound changes going on, and obviously the environment is one of them. Okavango is really one of the last pristine places left on the planet. We have seen it in a state of flux, through man, over the last 30 years. Areas of the Okavango that used to be hunted lost a huge population of wildlife, and that was very evident and really concerning. That’s why the former president stopped all hunting.”

The Jouberts’ stay in New York has coincided with a series of climate conferences and protests, from the UN to Wall Street. In Botswana, the Jouberts established the Great Plains Foundation which, as part of its remit, works with young people locally to help further the message of conservation. They have never met Greta Thunberg, but it’s only a matter of time before her name comes up in conversation.

“We’re big fans of Greta,” Dereck Joubert says. “What is interesting about that question is that, through Great Plains, we spend quite a bit of time and money and effort working with children around Greta’s age, funnily enough, in Botswana, looking for and nurturing that voice of, not innocence, but that voice of outrage in a child’s way to say that, no, this is not okay. The children have rights, too. They have a right to the future. More and more, we’re starting to hear that in the villages in Botswana.”