In Search of Quiet Places

  • Gordon Hempton uses a mic stand shaped like a human head to accurately capture the sounds we hear. (Photo by D Harrington)

There are very few truly quiet places left in this country. There’s noise pollution even in the wildest, most remote national parks.

Gordon Hempton has been traveling to some of those last quiet places and he wants to protect them. He’s an Emmy-winning professional sound collector. He’s traveled the world to record everything from city streets to howler monkeys. He’s the author of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet. He’s joining me from Olympia National Park in Washington State.

You’ve said that you’ve found just 12 places so far in all of the U.S. where there’s an interval of at least 15 minutes without human noise. What do you think we’re missing out on if we lose those places?

AUDIO EXTRA: Hear more from Gordon Hempton

The Sound Tracker

Hempton on WBUR’s On Point

Hempton in Newsweek

Transcript

HEMPTON: In a quiet place in nature not only are we listening to many, many square miles, but we are connecting, we are re-connecting, with where we come from, who we are and how our bodies have evolved to take it all in.

RW: A documentary has been made about you – called Soundtracker – and in it, the thing that struck me the most was when you talked about having to trust your gut feeling. You were in Sri Lanka, it was dark and you were recording…


(sound of Hempton’s Sri Lanka recording comes up under)


HEMPTON: Right, I learned a very important lesson that morning in the Sri Lanka rainforest of Sinharaja. And I was there to record morning bird song and that means getting up early, so I was walking into the forest, in the dark, and started to roll. And then my good feeling changed to panic. I could honor my panic and simply leave my equipment running, and so I walked away. Months later, I’m sitting in my Seattle studio reviewing the tape… I hear my footsteps disappear and moments later, there’s the guttural growl of the leopard.


(leopard growling)


RW: I have to tell you I found that sound to be terrifying!


HEMPTON: (laughs) Yeah, yeah, I know. I hate to think what would’ve happened if I’d remained there.


RW: So you’ve recorded all over the world for 30 years. How do you find these true quiet places?


HEMPTON: You know, I’ve been looking at Michigan. The very first thing I do, I look at the nighttime view of the United States, and I looked in this case at the nighttime view of Michigan. The upper half of Michigan was surprisingly dark. Then I went to the FAA chart to see all the airways that are charted and I could see that most of Michigan was covered. But there were two areas that were not. So I went to Google Earth and zoomed in on those places and I could see there were quite a few roads. But there were two locations: Manitou Island, particularly a site on that island that is Perch Lake. And also Lily Lake on Isle Royale National Park.


RW: So what can we do to protect these places?


HEMPTON: There’s one action we can all participate in to save the vanishing quiet places of this country. And that is to pass a single piece of legislation that will create for the very first time these areas off limits to all aircraft over our most pristine national parks.


RW: Gordon Hempton is a professional sound collector and the author of: One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet. Thank you so much.


HEMPTON: Well, all right, thank you Rebecca.


RW: You can hear some of Gordon Hempton’s work and his favorites on our website: environment report dot org. I’m Rebecca Williams.

Whooping Cranes Not Hatching

  • One of the goals of the Partnership is to get more cranes to raise young in the wild, but so far, only one crane chick has been successfully hatched and gone on to migrating. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Wildlife experts are trying to bring back a flock of migrating whooping
cranes in the eastern United States. But there’s a problem. Scientists are
having trouble getting the whoopers to hatch chicks in the wild. Chuck
Quirmbach reports – researchers are taking a closer look at the ten-year-old
rehabilitation effort:

Transcript

Wildlife experts are trying to bring back a flock of migrating whooping
cranes in the eastern United States. But there’s a problem. Scientists are
having trouble getting the whoopers to hatch chicks in the wild. Chuck
Quirmbach reports – researchers are taking a closer look at the ten-year-old
rehabilitation effort:

It’s not easy to get whooping cranes to reproduce, but here in Baraboo,
Wisconsin, researchers have had success at getting captive cranes to produce
chicks.

For the last ten years, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership has created a
flock of more than 100 whoopers. Researchers hatched the birds
– and trained them to migrate by flying behind ultralight aircraft ….or to
follow adult cranes. The birds now fly between the upper Midwest and
southeastern U.S.

But one of the goals of the Partnership is to get more cranes to raise young
in the wild. So far, only one crane chick has been successfully hatched and
gone on to migrating.

Jeb Barzen is with the International Crane Foundation. He says they can’t
keep supplying the flock with chicks hatched in captivity:

“It’s expensive. it’s expensive in time, expensive in money…expensive in overall conservation effort, because what you put into whooping crane reintroduction you can’t put into other conservation projects at that time. so to be fully successful …you want that population to be
able to survive on it’s own.”

So far, about 16 million dollars has gone into re-introducing whoopers to
the eastern u.s. More than half of that money came from private donors.

The birds’ main summer home is here at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge
in Wisconsin.

It’s not that the cranes don’t get close to each other. If you watch the cranes here, you can spot single cranes and the occasional couple.

Jeb Barzen pauses to watch two tall white cranes having a territorial dispute:

“Ooh! these birds are threatening each other. that’s a preen behind the wing
threat…that the second bird is doing…so these are not birds of the same
pair.”

Researchers don’t know why the birds are not raising more wild chicks. But
they do have some theories. Even when cranes do make nice and produce an
egg – the relatively young cranes may be too inexperienced to be patient
parents. Black flies may drive the birds off their nest. Or the parents
may be low on body fat and take off to find food.

The crane researchers are gathering data to find out what cranes need for a
successful nesting site. They’re using tracking radios to follow some of the
birds.

Anne Lacy is with the International Crane Foundation. Today she’s driving
around southern Wisconsin listening for the whoopers.

“it’s important to look at what choices they make as a young bird
before they breed…to know how they choose those areas….they need for
water for roosting at night…they need that eventually for nesting.”

This kind of research is being ramped up this spring. That’s because an
independent report raised some concerns about the crane recovery effort.
The report was done by consultants hired by the Whooping Crane Eastern
Partnership. It mentions problems with financial oversight, scientific
coordination, and whether the birds’ main summer home – at the Necedah
wildlife refuge – is the best place for them.

Louise Clemency is with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. And
she is a co-chair of the eastern partnership. She says the crane recovery
effort won’t make any big changes overnight.

“We’re trying to the time to draw the right conclusions so we can
take the right next step.”

Clemency says decisions on the whooping crane experiment could come next
year. In the meantime..she hopes that some crane eggs laid this spring at
the Necedah refuge will hatch.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

Killer Whale Shows Reconsidered

  • Animal rights activist Will Anderson says there is nothing healthy about the relationship between captive marine mammals and their keepers. (Photo Courtesy of Milan Boers CC-2.0)

People who want to watch marine mammals like dolphins often head to
theme parks such as SeaWorld. But after a killer whale at one SeaWorld
killed its trainer last month, critics are calling for a reevaluation
of keeping these huge animals captive. Ann Dornfeld has the story:

Transcript

People who want to watch marine mammals like dolphins often head to
theme parks such as SeaWorld. But after a killer whale at one SeaWorld
killed its trainer last month, critics are calling for a reevaluation
of keeping these huge animals captive. Ann Dornfeld has the story.

In the wild, a killer whale’s world sounds something like this:

[Killer whale calls in British Columbia]

But most people see killer whales in an environment like this:

[Electric guitar at SeaWorld show, chanting of “Shamu! Shamu!
Shamu!”, audience claps in time]

SeaWorld calls all of its performing whales “Shamu.” Millions of
people have visited SeaWorld over the decades to get splashed by
Shamu’s tail and watch trainers leap off the killer whales’ noses. The
trainers hug and kiss the animals between high-flying stunts.

But animal rights activist Will Anderson says there is nothing healthy
about the relationship between captive marine mammals and their
keepers. The waters around Seattle, where he lives, are home to wild
killer whales. Anderson has worked to free captive killer whales for
40 years.

“The relationships they have with their trainers are
nothing less than ‘Well, what else is there to do?’ If you’re starved
for what you innately need – social bonding – you’re gonna settle for
whatever morsel you can get.”

Killer whales are actually huge dolphins, not whales. Anderson says
tanks are no place for animals which roam up to 100 miles each day in
their native waters.

“Their bodies and their minds, and their behaviors,
their needs and their huge size, they are all adapted for the wild.
They are not adapted for tanks.”

At SeaWorld, Julie Scardina is the Animal Ambassador. She handles
public relations for the theme park. She says just because killer
whales can roam 100 miles a day in the wild doesn’t mean they often
do.

“The 100 mile statistic there is actually just a
capability. They have the capability of roaming that far, just like
humans have the capability of walking 20 miles or more per day. We
provide opportunities for exercise, for play, and of course during our
shows they get plenty of exercise.”

Scardina used to train killer whales. She says the tricks show the
public what the animals are capable of. And she says keeping killer
whales in a more naturalistic, aquarium-like environment wouldn’t
serve the animals well.

“I’ve worked with animals for over 30 years. There’s
no way you can convince me that it would be better to let an animal
kind of hang. That’s kind of like saying it’s okay to let a person sit
on the couch if they’d like. You need to provide stimulation, you want
to get them up and moving.”

Scardina says the goal of SeaWorld’s Shamu shows is to encourage
marine conservation.

“Well, certainly our mission is to educate people
about the oceans, to inspire them. And that’s what obviously our hope
is, is by seeing these animals and how incredible they are – I know
that’s how I became inspired when I was a child.”

But in a promotional video for SeaWorld’s main killer whale show,
called “Believe,” SeaWorld employees suggest a different theme… more
conquest than conservation.

“How do we get in the water with the top predator in the ocean, y’know. that kills and eats anything it wants at any time.
I thought for a moment right there, y’know what, this is really crazy
what we do. But we are doing it!”

The video, and the “Believe” show itself, focus on the power of the
human spirit – not the marine environment.

Activists like Will Anderson are calling for theme parks like SeaWorld
to return killer whales to their native waters, protected by huge
enclosures. There is general agreement that captive killer whales
wouldn’t survive if released into the open ocean.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Climate Change and Caribou

  • Some want the government to put caribou on the endangered species list. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Santa’s reindeer are not doing
so well. Rebecca Williams reports
one group wants to get them on
the endangered species list:

Transcript

Santa’s reindeer are not doing
so well. Rebecca Williams reports
one group wants to get them on
the endangered species list:

Caribou, also known as reindeer, are declining all over the globe. The group International Fund for Animal Welfare says two subspecies of caribou are in especially bad shape.

Nathan Herschler is with the group. He says these caribou live in the Arctic. And climate change is making their lives miserable.

“Instead of soft snow that’s falling on the ground, we’re getting freezing rain. That’s encasing the land in ice and the caribou are literally starving to death.”

Herschler’s group wants the US government to put the caribou on the endangered species list. Even though the caribou live in Canada, he says the listing would help by banning the import of caribou or caribou meat into the US.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Recording Elephant Conversations

  • Elephants talk amongst themselves below levels we can hear. (Photo courtesy of the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park)

Biologists are always trying to
get a good count of the animals
they’re studying. You wouldn’t
think it’d be that hard to find
an elephant for a count, but even
some of the largest animals are
difficult to count in the wild.
So researchers are now trying new
methods. Emma Jacobs reports on
a Cornell University project which
is using audio recordings to learn
more about elephants:

Transcript

Biologists are always trying to
get a good count of the animals
they’re studying. You wouldn’t
think it’d be that hard to find
an elephant for a count, but even
some of the largest animals are
difficult to count in the wild.
So researchers are now trying new
methods. Emma Jacobs reports on
a Cornell University project which
is using audio recordings to learn
more about elephants:

Mya Thompsons sits down in her lab and pulls up a set of recordings on her computer. She helped tape these sounds for the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park in the Central African Republic. She plays a recording made in the forest, late at night.

(sounds of the forest at night)

“You heard some insects, you heard some sort of the din of a nighttime forest.”

But you probably don’t hear elephants.

Next, Thompson takes the same sound and speeds it up on her computer. Suddenly, you can hear something else.
“This is 4-times normal speed.”

(sound of forest at night, but with rumbles)

Elephants make those low rumbles. When she speeds up the playback, they rise in pitch. It’s kinda of like the voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

It turns out elephants talk among themselves below levels we can hear. Biologist Kaity Paine discovered these sounds in the 1980s. She realized that because elephant rumbles are so low, they travel long distances. This should make them useful to track elephants over wide forests, but Thompson remembers that in the field, it was hard to see how.


“We’re collecting all this information and we wanted to know what the calls were like, but because we can’t hear them, we were almost totally in the dark about what was going on.”

When she got back to New York, Thompson and the rest of the research team started combing through all the audio and video collected in Central Africa for elephant calls. It took thousands of hours.

But with time, they could nail down a pattern. The key was a relationship between the audio recordings and the video of elephants they had made in one clearing popular with elephants.

“This is a communication system. There are a lot of other variables other than, ‘Hi I’m here,’ but, overall, the more calling, the more elephants and that was good news for us.”

Now Thompson can monitor elephants over huge areas of this dense forest using these audio recordings.

In the field, the team hoists their recorders into trees attached to truck batteries. They can stay up there a long time, which has real advantages.

“Usually, when you take a survey, you go, you count, and you leave. For acoustics, we’re able to have this recorder up continuously without all this human effort and make repeated estimates over longer periods of time.”

With enough information, Thompson can estimate at the numbers of elephants in a forest with twice the precision she could have before.

Marcella Kelly teaches wildlife field techniques at Virginia Tech. She says, when you can track animal numbers closely, you can see how they respond to changes in their environment. This is a must for conservation.

“We really need effective ways to estimate population size, especially because decisions are made on management based on what those numbers tell us, over time.”

The Elephant Listening Project recently started monitoring elephants in the African nation of Gabon.


“The authorities had allowed gas exploration to see if there’s any petroleum reserves there, and so our project was asked to monitor the forest for elephant calls before, during, and after this exploration.”

Thompson can already say that things have changed. Elephants have started coming out more at night than during the day to avoid people. In the end, hopefully she’ll be able to see just how disruptive changes have been and to pinpoint the human activities causing problems.

She also wants to protect other animals making noise in the forest, and outside it.

“We’re really hoping that these methods that we’ve developed, will be developed for not only forest elephants but for other species that are hard to survey that we really need to know more about before we can protect them.”

For right now though, Thompson is still in her lab, listening for elephants.

For The Environment Report, I’m Emma Jacob

Related Links

Pet Pythons on the Loose in Florida

  • JD Willson holding a juvenile python. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Foreign animals that get released
in the wild usually don’t spark that
much interest. But when that species
is a giant snake, well, most people
sit up and take notice. That’s the
problem facing the state of Florida,
where Burmese pythons have moved in
to Everglades National Park. Now,
scientists are trying to figure out
if the snakes could spread to the
rest of the country. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Foreign animals that get released
in the wild usually don’t spark that
much interest. But when that species
is a giant snake, well, most people
sit up and take notice. That’s the
problem facing the state of Florida,
where Burmese pythons have moved in
to Everglades National Park. Now,
scientists are trying to figure out
if the snakes could spread to the
rest of the country. Samara Freemark reports:

Meet South Florida’s newest invasive species – the 20 ft long, 200 lb,
Burmese python.

“They’re impressive animals. They’re really impressive animals. And
they’re breeding
like crazy out there.”

That’s python researcher JD Willson. He says the pythons probably started
off as pets –
until their owners got bored of them and dumped them in the Everglades. Now
those pets
have procreated their way into a huge wild population.

“Certainly thousands. Certainly tens of thousands. Some people have gone
as far as to
say hundreds of thousands.”

Willson says most pythons won’t attack humans. But they do pose a big
threat to local
ecosystems.

“These are snakes that are top predators. They eat alligators, they got a
bobcat record, a
couple of white tail deer. These are a predator that native wildlife are
just not prepared to
deal with. They’re not used to having a giant snake around.”

Florida lawmakers are considering putting a bounty on the pythons – paying
hunters to
kill them. And people in neighboring states just have their fingers crossed
that the
pythons won’t spread north.

But no one really knows enough about the snakes to come up with a good
control plan.

Willson and some other researchers are trying to change that.

“This is the python enclosure.”

They’ve built a little artificial habitat in South Carolina, surrounded
it with a really tall
wall, and filled it with 10 pythons. The researchers want to learn more
about how the
snakes behave in the wild, and see if they can make it through a winter
with freezing
temperatures.

(sound of door opening)

The snakes are tagged with radio transmitters, so the scientists can track
them and record
data on how they’re doing.

Freemark: “It’s safe to be in here?”

Bower: “Oh yeah, they’re not aggressive.”

Inside a student volunteer, Rick Bower, is tracking the snakes with a radio
receiver.

“As you sweep it across, you can see how the signal strength changes and
you get an idea
of where the strongest signal is coming from.”

The receiver tells us we’re basically standing right on top of one of the
pythons.

“Yeah, he’s right at our feet. Yeah, he’s down there.”

But we don’t see anything, even when Willson starts jabbing a stick at
the source of the
beeping.

“Somewhere within an 8 foot radius of where we are, there’s an 11 foot
snake. And he’s
hiding in this aquatic vegetation. And not only can we not see him, but
poking in the
vegetation doesn’t seem to be eliciting too much of a reaction.”

He’s a really sneaky snake.

Whit Gibbons is also working with the crew. He says that if the scientists
have so much
trouble tracking down their pythons, in an enclosed cage, using radio
transmitters –
there’s no way bounty hunters could make even a dent in the Everglades
python
population.

“So they find a hundred, so what. There’s a hundred thousand left. No
one’s going to find
100,000. I mean, we’ve got ‘em in a small enclosure, 10 big snakes,
over 75 feet of snake
if you add them up. And you can’t find them.”

Instead, Gibbons says people could opt for a harm reduction strategy- focus
on limiting
the spread of the snakes, try to protect species they threaten.

“One position is, ‘okay, they’re here, here’s what they can do to
us, or to our pets, or to
the wildlife. Let’s learn to live with them.’”

The South Carolina python study ends next summer. JD Willson says he’s
not sure what
they’ll do with the snakes afterwards. But he does know one thing –
they’re not going to
release them back into the wild.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Should Zoos Keep Elephants?

  • Some zoos have stopped keeping elephants, because they feel they can’t provide the best care for them any more. (Photo by Lauren Humphries, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)

News of a zoo being investigated and fined has reignited the debate over keeping elephants in captivity. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

News of a zoo being investigated and fined has reignited the debate over keeping elephants in captivity. Rebecca Williams reports:

It’s just been revealed that the Los Angeles Zoo was fined for the death of an elephant back in 2006. The zoo does not admit any wrongdoing.

But some people believe keeping elephants in zoos is wrong.

Suzanne Roy is with the group In Defense of Animals. She says elephants in captivity often have foot problems from standing on hard surfaces.

“It’s just incredible the level of suffering these elephants are put through before they eventually literally can’t stand on their own feet or legs anymore.”

But the Association of Zoos and Aquariums says its zoos have to meet high standards of care for elephants.

Paul Boyle is the group’s senior vice president for conservation.

“There are no people more committed to keeping elephants in good health and humor than those professionals at zoos across the country.”

Some zoos have stopped keeping elephants. Some, because they feel they can’t provide the best care for elephants any more.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Captive Otters Adopt Orphaned Pups

  • Now that surrogate moms raise the otters, the goal is for the pups to never see or hear a human. To get up close to the pup, Ann had to put on a Darth Vader costume of sorts. (Photo by Angela Hains)

For animals in most zoos and
aquariums, the door from freedom
to captivity only swings one way.
But at the Monterey Bay Aquarium,
sea otters from its exhibits teach
wild sea otter orphans how to
survive in the ocean. Ann Dornfeld
has the story:

Transcript

For animals in most zoos and aquariums, the door from
freedom to captivity only swings one way. But at the
Monterey Bay Aquarium, sea otters from its exhibits teach
wild sea otter orphans how to survive in the ocean. Ann
Dornfeld has the story:

Rosa has her baby in a headlock. That’s actually how
southern sea otters hold their young.

“The pup is essentially unconscious – it’s very much
asleep, and Rosa is holding it as a female would in the
wild: she’s got it sort of teed off to her side with a paw
around its neck.”

Andy Johnson is the director of the Monterey Bay
Aquarium’s Sea Otter Research and Conservation
program.

By the end of the19th century, sea otters had been hunted
to extinction in some parts of the Pacific.

Lilian Carswell is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She says these days, pollution and disease are sea otters’
biggest threats. And she says a lot of other species
depend on otters’ survival.

“Sea otters are important for a number of reasons. One is
that they’re a top predator in the nearshore marine
ecosystem and they play an important role in structuring
what that ecosystem looks like.”

Hungry sea otters keep sea urchin populations in check.
When urchins overpopulate an area, they can mow down
entire kelp forests that provide food and shelter for
hundreds of species.

So to help conserve the otter population, Andy Johnson
and his team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium pair orphaned
pups from the wild with the female exhibit otters. The goal
is for the surrogate mother to not only care for the pup, but
also to teach it all the skills it will need to be released back
into the wild at about six months old.

A volunteer has just tossed some food into the pool where
Rosa and the orphaned pup are swimming. Rosa grabs
the live crab as the pup watches.

“Rosa’s quite skilled with those, so she’ll pretty much take
that apart in a few minutes. We’ll have to watch the pup
and see if the pup approaches the crab without getting
pinched. I have to admit it’s quite amusing to see these
young animals confronting these crabs ’cause these crabs
are pretty formidable on their own.”

Rosa ends up breaking off a leg for her adopted pup, who
decides the shell is too much work. Before long, though,
the pup will learn some of the same impressive skills that
adult sea otters have – like how to use tools to open clams
and sea urchins.

Before the surrogate program began, workers and
volunteers used to hand-rear these pups. They’d even
take the pups swimming in Monterey Bay to acclimate
them to their future home.

But that made the released otters expect food from
boaters and other people they encountered in the bay.

Now that surrogate moms raise the otters, the goal is for
the pups to never see or hear a human. We’ve been
watching the sea otters interact from a TV monitor near
the pool. To get up close to the pup, I have to put on a
Darth Vader costume of sorts – starting with a huge black
nylon poncho.

(sound of the poncho)

Ann: “This is a welding mask?”

Andy Johnson: “A very cheap welding mask.”

Rosa isn’t fooled. As I approach the pool, she shoots over
to see whether I have food.

(sound of the otter sniffing around)

Rosa was a rescued pup. She was hand-reared before the
surrogate program began. After she was released into
Monterey Bay, she had to be recaptured because she was
jumping on kayaks and divers.

“We found that with the sea otters, putting them with an
adult female in a fairly shallow pool for six months far
outweighs whatever we were doing trying to raise these
pups.”

Sea otter populations are recovering at a slow pace in
California. But this program is contributing to the
population.

Johnson says the apparent survival rate of the re-released
pups is now about as good as that of newly-weaned pups
in the wild. Some have even successfully raised their own
pups, using skills they picked up from an exhibit otter at
the aquarium.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Predicting Wildfires in a Warmer World

  • This wildfire ignited along Idaho Highway 55 and was started by people. Scientists say as the climate warms, fires like this one will become common place in many parts of the world. (Photo by Sadie Babits)

Climate change has already brought
warmer temperatures, rising sea
levels and melting glaciers. Now,
researchers believe global warming
will cause major shifts in wildfire
patterns around the world. As Sadie
Babits reports, scientists hope to
predict where future wildfires will
light up:

Transcript

Climate change has already brought
warmer temperatures, rising sea
levels and melting glaciers. Now,
researchers believe global warming
will cause major shifts in wildfire
patterns around the world. As Sadie
Babits reports, scientists hope to
predict where future wildfires will
light up:

Trying to predict where wildfires are likely to start decades from now, is
kind of like getting a full body scan.

(sound of medical scanner)

Except instead of a medical scanner, scientists scanned the earth using
satellite data, climate models and the history of present day wildfires to
map out global wildfire patterns.

“The impacts of climate change on wildfires are expected to be widespread
around the world.”

Katherine Hayhoe is a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. She’s part
of a group of scientists that has for the first time, tried to project where fire
hotspots will crop up around the world. She says they found that climate
change will affect wildfire patterns.

Hotter temperatures and rain and snow coming at different times in the
year or perhaps not at all, will mean forests and grasslands will dry out
quicker – becoming tinder boxes for fire.

In the next 30 years, scientists believe that the Western U.S. will continue
to see catastrophic fires like the recent blaze in Santa Barbara, which
destroyed 80 homes.

In the next 60 years, they predict wildfires will increase in the Corn Belt and
spread into the East Coast.

Hayhoe says having an idea of how wildfire patterns will shift will help
communities better prepare.

“We can never eliminate the risk of climate change entirely but by making
wise choices and planning strategically we can minimize those risks.”

Some communities are already taking steps to prevent wildfire. The city of
Bend, Oregon was one of the first in the country to launch a public
education campaign to get homeowners to fire proof their homes. The
program, called FireFree, started more than a decade ago, after a massive
wildfire burned nineteen homes and scorched thousands of acres.

“It was something that scarred our community.”

Gary Marshall is the deputy chief of Bend’s Fire Department.

“We have this history of people wanting to live outside the urban area and
live out in rural areas, where they can see the deer and be out in the trees
and live that lifestyle that most Americans who move out to the West want
to be a part of that.”

Bend lies in what’s known as wildfire alley. Every year there are dozens of
fires that crop up either from lightning strikes or from people. The flames
are fed by dried out grasses and forests so dense you can’t see through
them. Add homes to the mix and you have a recipe for disaster not just
here but throughout the West.

But Marshall says the Fire Free program is working.

(sound of a truck driving on a dirt road)

County forester Joe Stutler and Gary Marshall drive me through
neighborhoods outside Bend. We stop first at an upscale suburb called
Coldera Springs. Everyone here has volunteered to fire proof their new
homes.

But just down the road, there’s a much older suburb and a lot of trees that
have been thinned out.

Sadie: “You can’t see through the trees it’s so dense.”

Joe: “You can’t walk through.”

Gary: “And a firefighter won’t go in there. You’d write that off. So if you
don’t take care of it, the fire will.”

That’s a picture that climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe hopes to avoid.
She says having a long term view of where wildfires might pop up could
help communities to start now and follow Bend’s lead.

It took Bend years to get most of the homeowners here to take
responsibility, and give their homes a fighting change to survive a
devastating blaze.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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Coral Conservation in the Caribbean

  • The island of Bonaire is somewhat of an anomaly in the Caribbean due to its remarkably preserved coral reefs (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

Scientists say nearly half of the coral reefs in the US are in bad shape.
Many are dead. The situation is similar in much of the world. But not
everywhere, as Ann Dornfeld found on the Caribbean island of Bonaire:

Transcript

Scientists say nearly half of the coral reefs in the US are in bad shape.
Many are dead. The situation is similar in much of the world. But not
everywhere, as Ann Dornfeld found on the Caribbean island of Bonaire:

(sound of waves on shore)

Jerry Ligon was working as the on-board naturalist on a small Caribbean
cruise ship when he first saw Bonaire.

“And I saw how clear the water was. And I’d been able to compare, during
my stint on the cruise ship, other islands in the Caribbean, and I realized
how special Bonaire was. So that was at the end of my contract, so I
decided to stay here. And I’ve been here for 15 years!”

It’s wasn’t just the clarity of Bonaire’s water that made Ligon stick around. It
was the remarkably healthy coral reefs that lay beneath the waves.

“I can even talk to divers who come to Bonaire and they say, ‘What
fantastic diving!’ and they remember, ‘This is how the way it was in Cayman
Islands 25 years ago!'”

Ligon says the Cayman Islands might have even had more impressive
reefs than Bonaire’s back in the day. But coral throughout the US and
Caribbean has been in sharp decline for decades.

So how do Bonaire’s reefs remain intact?

Ramón de León is the manager of the Bonaire National Marine Park. He
says the island has an advantage in that it has no industries to pollute the
water.

The island is mostly undeveloped, which means relatively little farm and
lawn fertilizer run-off that can create marine algae blooms. And cool
upwellings in the region help balance the rising ocean temperatures. Warm
oceans can cause coral bleaching, which often kills the coral animal.

But de León says Bonaire really owes its healthy reefs to its history of
conservation laws. They date back to an era when such policies were rare.

“Bonaire start to protect sea turtles and turtle nests in 1961, back when
everybody was promoting sea turtle soups and nailing shells in the walls.”

By the end of the 1970s, Bonaire had banned spear fishing and made it
illegal to damage coral. For years, divers have been required to pay a
sizeable fee and take an orientation course before they’re allowed to dive
on the island. That helps them avoid touching the coral, which can kill it.

De León says the island still allows too much fishing. So several years ago,
he told the island’s fishermen they needed to choose a no-take zone to let
the reefs recover.

“I refuse to decide myself. I give the fishermen some prerequisites that they
have to have to close, and they chose which area. Is not my number-one
option, but is their number-one option. So I have to respect that.”

De León says because the fishermen chose the no-take zone, something
important happened. Compliance is high.

For all of Bonaire’s success in coral conservation, there are still some
problems. De León says its reefs suffer from leaky septic tanks and boat
pollution. And there are few of the large predator fish that used to maintain
population balance on the reefs.

But the island is a haven for researchers like Mark Patterson. He designs
underwater robots at Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.

Last year he led a NOAA expedition to use robots to map Bonaire’s reefs.
He says the island’s reefs are valuable as a baseline by which other reefs
can be judged.

“If you’re an up-and-coming marine scientist and you go to a lot of the coral
reefs on the planet now, you might think that all coral reefs have always
look like this. And they haven’t! So the fact that we’ve got some pristine
reefs left is very important, and we’ve got to work very hard to protect them
because it shows us how the ecosystem should look and used to look
around the planet before things started to go downhill.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

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