On September 8, the New Yorker published an article by Jonathan Franzen titled, “What if we stopped pretending?” By September 11, various instant criticisms and rebuttals had been published including a Scientific American piece by Columbia University climate scientist Dr. Kate Marvel, titled, “Shut up, Franzen.”

Basically, Franzen believes there is almost no chance that enough will be done to avert massive climate changes and consequent disruptions in coming decades. The critics find this defeatist, and they object.

Thing is, I thought Franzen’s piece was the best thing I’ve ever read about climate change. In conversations this week it has struck me that people objecting to his article missed key points and nuance, or are simply so emotionally and professionally invested in the fight to stop climate change that they just can’t entertain the possibility of failure. To reevaluate the disparity between Franzen, his critics, and me, I went back through and raked out some of Franzen’s main points and ideas, to see if I still thought Franzen’s article solid and constructively thought-provoking. I do. In fact it seems even milder on second reading.

Franzen opens with, “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.” That premise is no different than the premise undergirding all the calls for flood gates, geoengineering, coastal retreating, raised homes, and varied schemes large and small under the heading “climate adaptation.” All those proposals rely solely on the proposition that climate change is coming and will not be prevented. A very safe bet, since it’s here and getting worse….

Read the rest of my reaction piece on Medium.com.

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On May 6, 2019, the U.N. released its latest report on Earth’s extinction crisis. As I write in my CNN article, their conclusion is dire and outlook bleak for all life–including humans. But we should not focus solely on people: Our actions are ushering in the extinction of at least one million other species on Earth.

“Caring only about people is why we have these problems affecting nature and people. Not caring about nature is degrading the entire planet and its life-supporting systems, causing suffering and misery to life in every corner of the world. Endangering just 100 species constitutes an emergency. Eradicating a million is a catastrophe. And it’s well under way,” I write.

You can find my full piece for CNN online here.

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Read my opinion piece for CNN, here.

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East Island has just about disappeared. Hurricane Walaka has washed it away. This happened just a few days ago. You might be relieved to hear that it is so remote a part of Hawaii’s Northwest Islands that no one lived there and no one will be affected. That’s not quite true.

Ninety percent of all Hawaii’s green turtles migrate hundreds of miles to a remote atoll called French Frigate Shoals to breed. And almost all of them nest on a tiny island in the atoll, called East Island. Or at least, they did.

I had visited there a few years ago while I was writing my book Eye of the Albatross. It was an incredible experience. The wildlife had no fear of people, and the numbers and densities of seabirds and sea turtles blew the Galapagos Islands away—figuratively speaking.

One nesting turtle tagged there returned a couple of years later and then again a few years after that. Fitted with a transmitter, the turtle voyaged mostly out of sight of land, over waters miles deep, and against prevailing winds and currents. During this trek, she averaged one mile an hour. Slow and steady. Eventually she arrived in Kahului Bay on the Maui coast, 700 miles from French Frigate Shoals and East Island. When again her time came to nest, she would reverse her track and swim the slow trek back there again.

The convergence of turtles at French Frigate Shoals from so far and wide makes it an extremely important breeding spot.

That’s why it’s a big deal that it is getting washed away.

Tern Island, another island in the atoll, was heavily damaged by a storm a few years ago. And now East Island, the turtles’ lode-star dot of land, is history. The turtles will return in spring, after swimming hundreds of miles while averaging perhaps a mile an hour, and find—where they had always nested— no island.

Female sea turtles almost always lay their eggs on the same shore they were born decades earlier. This fidelity to place of birth was a way of increasing survival chances for their own young, gifting the eggs and nestlings the advantage of starting life on a proven beach.

But in the age of humans, such faithfulness has made turtles in many parts of the world vulnerable to egg gatherers and meat hunters. When human hunters completely destroy a nesting population, re-establishment may take a thousand years; no one really knows how long because it’s never happened. Hundreds of years is apparently not enough turtle-time; no turtles have ever re-colonized rookeries wiped out in the last 200 years, including Bermuda in the Atlantic and the Caribbean’s enormous Cayman Islands population. The Cayman green turtle rookery was probably the largest that ever existed. Parts of the Caribbean at that time were so full of turtles we cannot really picture it today. Columbus’ second voyage, in 1492, brought this impression of turtle numbers: “…in those twenty leagues…the sea was thick with them…so numerous that it seemed that the ships would run aground on them and were as if bathing in them.” During Christopher Columbus’ fourth voyage Ferdinand Columbus described the Cayman Islands as “two very small and low islands, full of turtles, as was all the sea about, so that they looked like little rocks.” Of a part of the Caribbean during the 1600s, one Edward Long wrote, “It is affirmed, that vessels, which have lost their latitude in hazy weather, have steered entirely by the noise which these creatures make in swimming.” Recent calculations have estimated the original Cayman Green Turtle population at several million animals. Yet even the Cayman nation was exterminated, never to regroup.

Each existing breeding beach, each remaining population, therefore, is a distinct world treasure. The entire Hawaiian turtle population is geographically isolated and rather small; each year about 500 female Greens go to nest in French Frigate Shoals, out of a population of about 2,000 adult females living throughout all the islands. The good news is that the number of nesters has slowly risen, more than doubling since the 1970s. Hawaiian restaurants served Green Turtle as recently as the ‘70s, and their current upward trend reflects the hunting ban. The Hawaii turtle population enjoys the rare privilege of being effectively protected from most human predation and not subjected to drowning in shrimp nets; both things kill many turtles elsewhere. French Frigate Shoals enjoys the rare distinction of welcoming turtles nesting in increasing numbers, going from moribund to more abundant.

In other words the good news is that nowadays Hawaii’s turtles are safe on the land they nest on.

The bad news: the land they nest on is no longer safe. Their most important spot in Hawaii—is now gone.

This post was originally published on the National Geographic Blog on October 29, 2018.

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Last month, a team of six Japanese and one German scientist released a paper in the free online prepress server bioRxiv suggesting that a small reef fish called a cleaner wrasse had self-awareness because it passed what’s called a “mirror test.” The mirror test involves marking an animal’s face before introducing it to a mirror. According to scientists, any attempts by the animal to touch or remove the mark on its body are seen as a sign that they recognize their own self–a trait largely seen as exclusive to humans and a select group of nonhumans, including some primates, dolphins, elephants and pigeons.

But there’s a problem with the mirror test and the idea of self-awareness, as I discuss in my eighth book, Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel….

“The mirror test doesn’t actually show whether the creature has self-awareness. Actually, the mirror test is often interpreted exactly backwards, as I’ll explain.

First, there’s a defininition problem. Psychology professor Gordon Gallup — who invented the mirror mark test in the 1970s — has said, ‘Self-awareness provides the ability to contemplate the past, to project into the future, and to speculate on what others are thinking.’ That’s quite a definition. Try finding that in a mirror. The other end of the confusion spectrum is the ‘introspection’ school, typified by Wikipedia’s entry: ‘Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment.’ Introspection doesn’t reflect light. And recognizing yourself in a mirror doesn’t show whether you understand that you are separate from the environment. So in just two definitions, the innocent phrase ‘self-recognition’ supposedly refers to: the ability to know time, to guess what someone is thinking, to examine one’s own mind, and to understand you are distinct from the rest of the world. None of which can be seen in a mirror.

For our purposes, ‘self-awareness’ will mean what it sounds like: understanding that you are an individual, distinguishable from others and the rest of the world. Self-recognition means simply that you recognize your self from everything else. That was easy. Let’s proceed…

…Apes do figure out that the image in the mirror is themselves. Zookeepers had been watching apes recognizing themselves in mirrors for over a century, doing things like examining the inside of their mouth, which they love to do. But not until 1970 did four chimpanzees undergo the first formalized test. Researchers surreptitiously placed a dye mark on the chimpanzees’ foreheads. Later, encountering their reflection in a familiar mirror, the chimpanzees touched the marked spot on their own skin. The researcher concluded this was the, ‘first experimental demonstration of a self-concept in a subhuman.’ It was nothing of the sort. But the assertion has been dogma ever since. We put a mirror in a cage to see if the creature goes, ‘That’s me!’ If they do, we say they have a ‘self concept.’ Otherwise, they ‘fail,’ as most researchers put it; no self-awareness.

Um, no. When a bird, say, attacks the mirror, it does so precisely because it believes the reflection is another individual — not itself. That proves it understands it is distinct from others. It demonstrates self-concept. It doesn’t “fail” the mirror test. An animal that attacks its reflection clearly knows the difference between self and not-self. It is attempting to attack what it thinks is not-self. If the subject shows fear of the reflection or solicits play — as monkeys and some birds do — it has likewise proved it has a self-concept. It just doesn’t understand reflection.

All that the mirror test shows is whether an animal understands reflection of itself and cares about its reflection. Mirrors are extremely primitive tools for understanding the complexities of minds. It’s preposterous to say that animals who don’t understand their reflection don’t have self-awareness. Everything that runs from danger or searches for food proves that it distinguishes ‘self’ from ‘not self.’ Self-recognition is why a wolf eating an elk’s leg doesn’t bite into its own leg. A concept of ‘self’ is absolutely basic.”

When studying nonhuman sentience and emotions, we must think outside the box, or at look away from the mirror.

Originally published on Medium.com on September 11, 2018.

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Celebrated sea captain James Cook implanted a British flag down into the rocky, icy ground on the shore of South Georgia in 1775. When he did so, he claimed ownership of the icy, mountainous Antarctic island not only for his country’s humans, but, inadvertently, also for its rodents. From the arrival of Cook onward, ships carrying explorers, scientists, whalers, fishers and seal hunters continued to fuel the island’s exploding population of rats and mice. The rodents quickly adapted to the cold and icy conditions of their unforgiving new home—subsisting off local animals, particularly seabird chicks, which—like most remote island animals—never evolved defenses against such ruthless predation.

After more than 200 years after they first colonized South Georgia, by the early 2000s, rats and mice had munched many native species to the very edge of existence, including the South Georgia pipit, a tiny songbird, and South Georgia pintail, a duck—two birds found nowhere else in the world. But after seven years of eradication work, launched in 2011, conservation group South Georgia Heritage Trust has just announced it has completely rid the island of rodents. This, the Trust says, will provide a safer future for South Georgia’s native wildlife—especially its vulnerable native birds. South Georgia is home to the largest and second-largest king penguin colonies in the world, as well as countless other bird species, including albatross, shearwaters, petrels, cormorants, skuas and more.

“Thanks to the outstanding work of the passionate and committed members of Team Rat and the Board of Trustees, the birds of South Georgia are free from the threat of rodents,” said Mike Richardson, chairman of the South Georgia Heritage Trust said in his announcement. “The Trust can now turn its attention and efforts to working with the Government of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands on conservation of a different kind: the conservation and reinterpretation of the island’s historic cultural heritage to educate and enlighten future generations about our environment.”

South Georgia Heritage Trust rolled out its rodent eradication work over four phases, from 2011 to present. For three field seasons, “Team Rat”—a group of pilots, engineers, chefs, doctors and field staff—was deployed to South Georgia. The field team prepared hundreds of tons of poisoned bait that was dropped from several helicopters cruising over the island. The hope was that the rodents would take the bait and then retreat to their underground burrows to die, out of reach of scavenging animals, like gulls, that could potentially be poisoned by eating dead rats and mice.

In 2017, two years after it dropped its final round of poison, South Georgia Heritage Trust rolled out the final phase of its project: checking the island for signs of rodents. Field staff placed thousands of wooden stakes into the ground, and tied to them wax tags and plastic cards dipped in vegetable oil or peanut butter—attractive snacks for gnawing rats—to check for signs of rodents. Two canine handlers lead three rodent-detection dogs across South Georgia. By the end of 2017, the devices and dogs exposed no signs of rats.

The presence of invasive rodents on remote islands is extremely dangerous to native species. I have seen the incredible devastation rats can cause to seabird colonies on islands in the Atlantic, on Midway Atoll, in New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic, and in South Georgia.

But I have also witnessed the benefits of eradication, the more-incredible resurgence of birds and vegetation when rats are vanquished from the same oceanic islands, including the outer islands of South Georgia; those smaller islands had already been made rat-free by the last time I visited a little over a year ago. Rats have probably driven more island-bird extinctions than any other human-introduced species. South Georgia’s pipit has now been saved from likely extinction and there will probably be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, more seabirds nesting there in coming years.

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Carl Safina is one of six conservation heroes in the running for the quarter million-dollar Indianapolis Prize

INDIANAPOLIS – Officials from the Indianapolis Prize today named the Safina Center’s Carl Safina as one of six Finalists for the world’s leading award for animal conservation. Carl Safina joins conservation heroes Dr. Joel Berger, Dr. P. Dee Boersma, Dr. Sylvia Earle, Dr. Rodney Jackson and Dr. Russell Mittermeier in the running for the prestigious title of Indianapolis Prize Winner and an unrestricted $250,000 prize.

The Indianapolis Prize was created in 2006 to recognize best-in-class conservation solutions, bring innovative ideas to scale and reward the conservation heroes who have achieved major victories in saving species from extinction. Carl has been honored as a 2018 Indianapolis Prize Finalist for his work to inspire conservation of the natural world through science, art and literature; his establishment of a sustainable seafood program; and his work banning high-seas drift nets and reforming federal fisheries laws. Carl has been named finalist for the Indianapolis Prize in 2010, 2014 and 2016.

“The Indianapolis Prize Finalists are consistent winners in the ongoing battles to save threatened species,” said Michael I. Crowther, chief executive officer of the Indianapolis Zoological Society, Inc., which administers the Indianapolis Prize as one of its signature global conservation initiatives. “By telling the stories of their heroism and their victories, the Indianapolis Prize aims to inspire more people to work for a planet that future generations will be happy to inherit, rather than be forced to endure.”

Carl is honored to again be named a finalist for this prestigious conservation prize.

The 2018 Indianapolis Prize Finalists include:

Joel Berger, Ph.D. (Colorado State University; Wildlife Conservation Society) — Distinguished scientist leading projects examining the effects of climate change on musk ox in the Alaskan Arctic, the impacts of energy development on wildlife in Greater Yellowstone, the threat of large carnivores on the conservation of endangered species such as Andean deer (huemul), the development of pronghorn antelope migration corridors, and saiga antelope conservation in Mongolia. Finalist for the 2014 and 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

P. Dee Boersma, Ph.D. (University of Washington; Center for Ecosystem Sentinels) — Conservationist dedicated to the study of global warming’s impact on penguins; successful in stopping both harvesting and the development of oil tanker lanes through penguin colonies.

Sylvia Earle, Ph.D. (Deep Ocean Exploration and Research; Mission Blue; SEAlliance) —Oceanographer, author and founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, Inc., Blue and SEAlliance. Focused on researching ocean ecosystems, developing new exploration technologies and creating a global network of marine protected areas. Led more than 100 expeditions and logged more than 7,000 hours underwater.

Rodney Jackson, Ph.D. (Snow Leopard Conservancy) — Conducted in-depth radio-tracking studies of snow leopards since the 1980s; helped lead an international team in the first-ever range-wide genetic assessment of snow leopards, and as their classification has improved from endangered to vulnerable, he continues to create solutions to sustain their populations. Finalist for the 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

Russell Mittermeier, Ph.D. (Global Wildlife Conservation) — Visionary leader able to motivate every level of conservation to support the greater good of many species, including saki and muriqui monkeys and other neotropical primates; one of the first academic primatologists to become concerned with the welfare and conservation of primates. Finalist for the 2012 and 2014 Indianapolis Prize.

Carl Safina, Ph.D. (The Safina Center) — Brought ocean conservation into the environmental mainstream by using science, art and literature to inspire a “sea ethic.” Established a sustainable seafood program, connecting science-based criteria with consumers; led efforts to ban high-seas drift nets and reform federal fisheries laws. Finalist for the 2010, 2014 and 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

At a time in which animals are going extinct at a rate not seen since the era of dinosaurs, a 2018 Atomik Research survey* finds that 9 in 10 Americans believe the government (federal and state) should do more to promote policies that protect endangered animals, and when give the definition of an animal conservationist, 83 percent of Americans say animal conservationists qualify as heroes.

“[The Indianapolis Prize] brings the most incredible people together to talk about their work and give us a message about where to go from here,” said Sigourney Weaver, actor and 2016 Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador, a title administered by the Indianapolis Prize to honor public figures who have been effective voices for wildlife conservation.

The 2018 Indianapolis Prize Jury, comprised of distinguished scientists and conservation leaders, will determine the Winner of the 2018 Indianapolis Prize, its $250,000 cash award and the Lilly Medal, an original work of art that signifies the Winner’s contributions to saving some of the world’s most threatened animals. Each of the five Finalists will receive $10,000.

The 2018 Indianapolis Prize Winner will be announced in late spring and formally honored at the Indianapolis Prize Gala presented by Cummins Inc. on Sept. 29, 2018 in Indianapolis.

“Winning the Indianapolis Prize gave my organizations a much bigger platform from which we could reach people with our conservation message,” said 2016 Prize Winner Dr. Carl Jones, chief scientist of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and scientific director the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation. “The field of animal conservation is fortunate to have an award that recognizes and celebrates individuals who have dedicated their life’s work to understanding biodiversity and protecting the species on which entire ecosystems depend.”

The Indianapolis Prize was first awarded in 2006 to Dr. George Archibald, the co-founder of the International Crane Foundation. The 2008 Winner was George Schaller, Ph.D., known as one of the founding fathers of wildlife conservation, and both a senior conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society and vice president for Panthera. In 2010, Iain Douglas Hamilton, Ph.D., founder of Save the Elephants, received the Prize for his pioneering research in elephant social behavior and for leading the way in the fight against the poaching of African elephants. Steven Amstrup, Ph.D., chief scientist for Polar Bears International, received the 2012 Prize for his work promoting the cause of the world’s largest land carnivore. In 2014, Dr. Patricia C. Wright, founder of Centre ValBio, became the first woman awarded the Indianapolis Prize for her dedication to saving Madagascar’s famed lemurs from extinction. Last year, Dr. Carl Jones received the 2016 Indianapolis Prize for his species recovery success on the island of Mauritius, including the echo parakeet, pink pigeon and Mauritius kestrel.

ABOUT THE INDIANAPOLIS PRIZE

The Indianapolis Prize recognizes and rewards conservationists who have achieved major victories in advancing the sustainability of an animal species or group of species. Winners receive the Lilly Medal and an unrestricted $250,000 award. Remaining Finalists each receive $10,000. The Indianapolis Prize has received support from the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation since its inception.

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