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National Observer
21 hours ago
- Science
- National Observer
The weird way that penguin poop might be cooling Antarctica
This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration In December 2022, Matthew Boyer hopped on an Argentine military plane to one of the more remote habitations on Earth: Marambio Station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where the icy continent stretches toward South America. Months before that, Boyer had to ship expensive, delicate instruments that might get busted by the time he landed. 'When you arrive, you have boxes that have been sometimes sitting outside in Antarctica for a month or two in a cold warehouse,' said Boyer, a Ph.D. student in atmospheric science at the University of Helsinki. 'And we're talking about sensitive instrumentation.' But the effort paid off, because Boyer and his colleagues found something peculiar about penguin guano. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, they describe how ammonia wafting off the droppings of 60,000 birds contributed to the formation of clouds that might be insulating Antarctica, helping cool down an otherwise rapidly warming continent. Some penguin populations, however, are under serious threat because of climate change. Losing them and their guano could mean fewer clouds and more heating in an already fragile ecosystem, one so full of ice that it will significantly raise sea levels worldwide as it melts. A better understanding of this dynamic could help scientists hone their models of how Antarctica will transform as the world warms. They can now investigate, for instance, if some penguin species produce more ammonia and, therefore, more of a cooling effect. 'That's the impact of this paper,' said Tamara Russell, a marine ornithologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who studies penguins but wasn't involved in the research. 'That will inform the models better, because we know that some species are decreasing, some are increasing, and that's going to change a lot down there in many different ways.' With their expensive instruments, Boyer and his research team measured atmospheric ammonia between January and March 2023, summertime in the southern hemisphere. They found that when the wind was blowing from an Adelie penguin colony 5 miles away from the detectors, concentrations of the gas shot up to 1,000 times higher than the baseline. Even when the penguins had moved out of the colony after breeding, ammonia concentrations remained elevated for at least a month, as the guano continued emitting the gas. That atmospheric ammonia could have been helping cool the area. The researchers further demonstrated that the ammonia kicks off an atmospheric chain reaction. Out at sea, tiny plantlike organisms known as phytoplankton release the gas dimethyl sulfide, which transforms into sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. Because ammonia is a base, it reacts readily with this acid. Ammonia wafting off the droppings of 60,000 birds contributed to the formation of clouds that might be insulating Antarctica, helping cool down an otherwise rapidly warming continent. This coupling results in the rapid formation of aerosol particles. Clouds form when water vapor gloms onto any number of different aerosols, like soot and pollen, floating around in the atmosphere. In populated places, these particles are more abundant, because industries and vehicles emit so many of them as pollutants. Trees and other vegetation spew aerosols, too. But because Antarctica lacks trees and doesn't have much vegetation at all, the aerosols from penguin guano and phytoplankton can make quite an impact. In February 2023, Boyer and the other researchers measured a particularly strong burst of particles associated with guano, sampled a resulting fog a few hours later, and found particles created by the interaction of ammonia from the guano and sulphuric acid from the plankton. 'There is a deep connection between these ecosystem processes, between penguins and phytoplankton at the ocean surface,' Boyer said. 'Their gas is all interacting to form these particles and clouds.' But here's where the climate impacts get a bit trickier. Scientists know that in general, clouds cool Earth's climate by reflecting some of the sun's energy back into space. Although Boyer and his team hypothesize that clouds enhanced with penguin ammonia are probably helping cool this part of Antarctica, they note that they didn't quantify that climate effect, which would require further research. That's a critical bit of information because of the potential for the warming climate to create a feedback loop. As oceans heat up, penguins are losing access to some of their prey, and colonies are shrinking or disappearing as a result. Fewer penguins producing guano means less ammonia and fewer clouds, which means more warming and more disruptions to the animals, and on and on in a self-reinforcing cycle. 'If this paper is correct — and it really seems to be a nice piece of work to me — [there's going to be] a feedback effect, where it's going to accelerate the changes that are already pushing change in the penguins,' said Peter Roopnarine, curator of geology at the California Academy of Sciences. Scientists might now look elsewhere, Roopnarine adds, to find other bird colonies that could also be providing cloud cover. Protecting those species from pollution and hunting would be a natural way to engineer Earth systems to offset some planetary warming. 'We think it's for the sake of the birds,' Roopnarine said. 'Well, obviously it goes well beyond that.'
National Observer
26-05-2025
- Politics
- National Observer
What Pope Leo means for global climate action and colonialism
This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration On a sweltering January day in 2018, Pope Francis addressed 100,000 of the faithful in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, not far from where gold mining had ravaged an expanse of Amazon rainforest about the size of Colorado. 'The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,' he told the crowd. He simultaneously condemned extractive industries and conservation efforts that 'under the guise of preserving the forest, hoard great expanses of woodland and negotiate with them, leading to situations of oppression for the Native peoples.' Francis denounced the insatiable consumerism that drives the destruction of the Amazon, supported those who say Indigenous peoples' guardianship of their own territories should be respected, and urged everyone to defend isolated tribes. 'Their cosmic vision and their wisdom have much to teach those of us who are not part of their culture,' he said. To Julio Cusurichi Palacios, an Indigenous leader who was in the stadium that day, the words from the head of the Catholic Church — which claims 1.4 billion members and has a long, sordid history of violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide — were welcome and momentous. 'Few world leaders have spoken about our issues, and the pope said publicly the rights of Indigenous peoples were historically violated,' he said after Pope Francis died last month. 'Let us hope that the new pope is a person who can continue implementing the position the pope who passed away has been talking about.' During his 12 years as pontiff, Francis radically reshaped how the world's most powerful religious institution approached the moral and ethical call to protect the planet. Beyond his invocations for Indigenous rights, Francis acknowledged the church's role in colonization, and considered climate change a moral issue born of rampant consumption and materialism. As the Trump administration dismantles climate action and cuts funding to Indigenous peoples around the world — and far-right politics continues to rise globally — experts see the conclave's selection of Robert Francis Prevost, or Pope Leo XIV, as he is now known, as a clear beacon that the faith-based climate justice movement his predecessor led isn't going anywhere. In 2015, Pope Francis released his historic papal letter, or encyclical, titled Laudato si '. In the roughly 180-page document, he unequivocally identified planet-heating pollution as a pressing global issue disproportionately impacting the world's poor, and condemned the outsize role wealthy countries like the US have in contributing to the climate crisis. With it, Francis did what no pope had done before: He spoke with great clarity and urgency about human degradation of the environment being not just an environmental issue, but a social and moral one. Laudato si' established the definitive connection between faith, climate change, and social justice, and made it a tenet of Catholic doctrine. The lasting influence of Francis' encyclical would be buoyed by his other writings, homilies, and his direct appeals to world leaders. He was, for example, credited with helping rally nearly 200 countries to sign the 2015 Paris Agreement, regularly urged cooperation at international climate summits, and released a follow-up to his pioneering encyclical in 2023 that sounded the alarm in the face of the climate crisis. 'Pope Francis routinely said that we have a throwaway society. We throw away people, we throw away nature … and that we really need a culture that's much more based in care,' said Christopher Cox, executive director of the Seventh Generation Interfaith Coalition for Responsible Investment and a former priest. 'That means care for people, especially the most poor, the most vulnerable, the most marginalized. And we also need much greater care for creation. We've been given a beautiful earth and we're consuming it at a rate that goes far beyond what will be able to sustain life for the long term.' The first Latin American pope, Francis was unique in implicitly embracing some elements of liberation theology, a Catholic social justice movement that calls for the liberation of marginalized peoples from oppression. Although Francis was occasionally critical of the doctrine's Marxist elements and never fully supportive of it, many observers see his statements regarding poor and Indigenous peoples as reflective of the doctrine's central values. 'Right from the beginning of his papacy, that outreach, that recognition of Indigenous ways of being Catholic and Indigenous language in Catholicism, heralded — up to that point — the most expansive official recognition of Indigenous contributions to Catholicism thus far,' said Eben Levey, an assistant professor of history at Alfred University who has studied the relationship between the Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. In the centuries since conquistadors arrived in the Americas and forced Indigenous peoples to accept their religion, many Indigenous communities have made Catholicism their own, and a growing number of church leaders have embraced the idea that there are multiple ways of being Catholic and that Catholicism and Indigenous cultures can coexist. A year after becoming pope, Francis approved the use of two Mayan languages, Tzotzil and Tzeltal, in mass and sacraments like baptism and confession. In 2015 he expanded that list to include the Aztec language Nahuatl, and in 2016, during a visit to Mexico, he celebrated mass in Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Chol. In 2022, Francis officially apologized to Canada for the residential schools that ripped Indigenous children from their families, leading to the deaths of many who were later buried in unmarked graves. The following year, he rejected the Doctrine of Discovery, a religious concept that colonizers used to justify the illegal seizure of land from Indigenous peoples and became part of an 1823 US Supreme Court ruling that described Native Americans as 'savages.' 'The Doctrine of Discovery is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,' Pope Francis said, adding that he strongly supports the global implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He also drew a clear connection between those rights and climate action: In 2023, he made clear that Indigenous peoples are critical to fighting climate change when he said, 'Ignoring the original communities in the safeguarding of the Earth is a serious mistake, not to say a great injustice.' But Pope Francis' progressivism had its limits. In 2019, he called for a meeting of church leaders, known as the Synod of Bishops, for the pan-Amazon region to address issues affecting the Amazon Basin. Indigenous Catholics who attended brought up illegal logging and violence against land defenders and proposed reforms. 'The ancestral wisdom of the aboriginal peoples affirms that mother earth has a feminine face,' reads the document that emerged from the gathering and urged the church to give women more leadership roles and allow married deacons to be ordained as priests. In his response, Francis condemned corporations that destroy the Amazon as committing 'injustice and crime,' yet refused to embrace the proposals to make church leadership more inclusive of women and married men. Francis' climate activism was also riddled in constraint. He transformed how religious institutions viewed the climate crisis, framing a failure to act on it as a brutal injustice toward the most vulnerable, but could have implemented 'more direct institutional action,' said Nadia Ahmad, a Barry University School of Law associate professor who has studied faith-based environmental action. Though the former pontiff publicly supported renewable energy adoption, called for fossil fuel disinvestment, and prompted churches across the world to go solar, he did not mandate what he deemed a 'radical energy transition' across dioceses, schools, and hospitals. The work he accomplished 'could have been amplified a bit more and had more accountability,' said Ahmad. But that limitation, she noted, likely stemmed from contradictory politics playing out within the church — many traditional, conservative Catholics, particularly in the United States, resisted Francis' progressive teachings. A 2021 study found that over a period of five years, most US bishops were 'nearly silent and sometimes even misleading,' in their official messaging to parishioners about climate change and the pope's famed encyclical. Though Pope Leo XIV has been lauded for his advocacy in defense of immigrants and worker rights — his namesake, Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 until 1903, is known as a historical Catholic champion of social justice and equality — the new pope's track record on engaging directly with climate change is sparse. Still, Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, sees comments the new pope made last year on the need to move ' from words to action ' as a promising sign that he will continue Francis' commitment to communicating the urgency of a warming world. The timing of the conclave's unprecedented decision to select the first pontiff from the United States, coming amid the Trump administration's sweeping dismissal of climate action, elimination of environmental protections, and attacks on Indigenous rights, isn't lost on her. 'It may be a signal to say, 'America, come back into the world community, come back into a planetary future where we collectively have been working to create a future worthy of our children and our children's children,'' she said. Leo grew up in Chicago and is a citizen of both the US and Peru, where he spent decades serving as a missionary and bishop before Francis made him a cardinal in 2023. He speaks five languages fluently and some Quechua, an Indigenous Incan language. While he was working in Peru in the 1990s, Leo was critical of the government's human rights abuses — though he refrained from explicitly taking sides in the political fight between Maoist rebels and the government of then-dictator Alberto Fujimori, according to Matthew Casey, a historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State University based in Lima. Still, his reaction to the country's authoritarianism could provide a glimpse of what stances he might take as pope, Casey said. 'It doesn't matter who was abusing human rights, he was on the side of the people,' he said. In 2016, the would-be pontiff spoke at a conference in Brazil where attendees talked about threats to the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous peoples who lived there. He praised Francis' encyclical, describing the document as 'very important' and representing 'something new in terms of this explicit expression of the church's concern for all of creation.' To Casey, that suggests Pope Leo XIV, like his predecessor, has an awareness of the issues affecting Indigenous peoples, such as the rampant degradation of the environment. 'Both Francis and Prevost are attuned to Indigeneity in ways that they couldn't have been if they worked in Europe or the United States, because the politics of Indigeneity in Latin America are just so different,' Casey said. More than a week after the conclave that named him pope, communities across Peru are still celebrating the selection of Pope Leo XIV. Francis and Leo's shared experiences working with marginalized communities harmed by colonialism and climate change, and their commitment to the social justice aspects of the church's mission, are particularly meaningful in this political moment, said Levey, the Alfred University historian. 'We are seeing a resurgence of ultra right-wing politics globally, and the Catholic Church, next to the United Nations, is one of the few multilateral organizations perhaps capable of responding in some form or fashion to the questions of our modern age or contemporary moment,' he said.
National Observer
23-05-2025
- Climate
- National Observer
Sinkholes and the people who love them
This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. Lauren Bacchus is one of many people in Asheville who are strangely enamored with the city's sinkholes. She's a member of the Asheville Sinkhole Group, an online watering hole of more than 3,400 people in and around this North Carolina city who eagerly discuss the chasms that mysteriously emerge from time to time. She even owns a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase 'For the love of all things holey.' Bacchus concedes sinkholes are an odd thing to be passionate about, but they speak to the impermanence of things made by human hands. 'I don't want to discredit that sinkholes can cause a lot of damage and hurt people, but they do evoke this feeling of excitement and curiosity and mystery,' she said. 'It's a void that opens up where you thought something was solid. That's the reality of the ground we walk on all the time.' The Facebook group recently enjoyed renewed interest when a small pit appeared at an intersection near a storm-damaged area on the outskirts of town late last month. 'Oh, we're so back,' one user wrote. Given the flooding and busted pipes that followed Hurricane Helene, sinkholes have become a pressing problem for a vast swath of the region. Roads already battered by record flooding are pocked by the blemishes, which can be anywhere from a few inches to several feet in diameter — though particularly monstrous ones can reach hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet deep. A marked increase in their numbers has been keeping road crews busy In Asheville, according to spokesperson Kim Miller. 'The uptick has impacted staff workload,' she said. Such dints can appear quickly, or over long periods of time. They also can occur naturally, or as the result of humans altering the landscape. Whatever their speed and cause, they are almost always the result of something or someone altering the natural flow of water underground — a problem exacerbated by the extreme rain often brought on by climate change. Over time, these anomalies grow and grow, unseen, until reaching the surface and causing an abrupt cave-in. The country's biggest open sinkhole, Golly Hole, opened 52 years ago in Alabama, creating a rift 350 feet wide and 100 feet deep. But even small ones can be horrendously expensive; all told, sinkholes may have cost the country over $300 million annually during the past 15 years. No one maintains a master list of them, and the US Geological Survey says most are probably never reported. Still, there's enough data to know the majority occur in states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, and Pennsylvania, where soft, porous bedrock is liable to dissolve. The 'sinkhole capital' award might go to Florida, which has seen these craters proliferate after large storms like Tropical Storm Debby in August and Hurricane Milton in October, devouring backyards and chunks of road. Some experts on the matter say that ' sinkhole season ' takes over as hurricane season winds down. Sinkholes are also complicated to resolve: Many states don't require homeowners' insurance to cover them, leaving many people to deal with a big problem on their own. Florida and Tennessee are among the few states that require disclosing past occurrences to anyone buying a house, though those laws are antiquated and lawmakers have been pushing for updates. Regardless of the annoyance, sinkholes have seen a lot of love in Asheville. Bacchus joined the sinkhole group just after its founding in 2019, when a particularly monstrous example swallowed a parking lot in a cavity 36 feet wide and 30 feet deep. That story made national headlines. The owners of the land tried, without success, to fill it with concrete before the city declared that the building on the site was too dangerous to occupy. It remained vacant for years while the corroded piping that caused the sinkhole was repaired. Late last year, a Waffle House in the nearby Mars Hill suffered a similar fate. The day before Helene brought record flooding, a sinkhole took out much of the diner's parking lot, ultimately leading the owners to shut down. Much of Appalachia sits on porous limestone, made of the compressed shells of sea creatures that, millions of years ago, swam and scuttled in shallow seas. This topography, called karst, is full of tunnels and caves. USGS maps paint much of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia in a bright-red, high-risk sinkhole zone. The nuisances have threatened, among other things, a Corvette museum in Kentucky, a police station in West Virginia, and a shopping mall in East Tennessee. For years, a sinkhole at the bottom of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Boone Dam drained it like a bathtub. These geologic formations are an expensive nuisance, and occasionally tragic. A Pennsylvania grandmother died late last year after falling into one while looking for her missing cat. In Western North Carolina, and other areas with notably no limestone, sinkholes are mainly the result of human intervention – construction fill, bad plumbing, and choices made by developers and builders that result in water going places it shouldn't. However they arise, sinkholes have an insatiable quality to them, often expanding in ways that make them difficult and sometimes impossible to repair. But they also create a sense of wonder and fascination — the feeling of peering into another time. By opening a window into a subterranean world of water, fossils, and caves, they offer a glimpse of what came before. And, experts say, we might see more of them as a warming world makes big storms more common. Ernst Kastning, a retired geology professor who taught at Radford University in Virginia, said sinkholes are often a natural reaction to a sudden change, like torrential rain. They can form as all that precipitation flows downhill, such as via an underground cave system. 'The water has to come out somewhere,' Kastning said. After an intense downpour or sudden inundation, the land attempts to restore equilibrium, which often means water and soil move into inconvenient places. Geologists colloquially call this the earth's 'plumbing system' — the complex network of underground drainage pathways that are a part of the water cycle. Human-caused sinkholes can force a similar reaction through artificially creating what scientists call 'void space' in the ground. This affects how much water the soil can hold and can cause it to collapse. 'If you come in there and dig something or put in something or build something or modify the water flow … you're likely to have nature react to that,' Kastning said. In particular, pumping water out of aquifers and pouring concrete or asphalt, for foundations or roads, for example, causes depressions and allows sinkholes to form. While these depressions can be caused by a variety of factors, the main culprit is rain. Warm temperatures can also make the ground and the rock within it softer. Sinkholes after a storm like Helene, Kastning said, are part of nature's way of righting itself. But if big storms happen more often, so will sinkholes. 'The frequency of these things is increasing,' he said. But so too are the unique opportunities they present. On a sunny April afternoon, three scientists walked across an ancient sinkhole, long since filled in and covered in grass, on the Gray Fossil Site in Gray, Tennessee. Active archaeological digs are currently covered with black plastic and protected by fences. The 4.5-acre, 144-foot deep pit and surrounding forest once provided water to prehistoric animals and, when they died, served as their grave. As museum collections manager Matthew Inabinett put it, 'When a place is a good place to live, it's also a good place to die!' Gray Fossil allows scientists to peer 4.5 million years into the past. Of course, they've only (literally) scraped the surface. 'We've estimated a few tens of thousands of years at current rates to excavate to the bottom,' said fossil site Americorps member Shay Maden. 'So we've got job security on that front for sure.' They've found fossils of exciting species like giant flying squirrels and mastodons, but also have seen more familiar faces, including rhinos (one of which the team named Papaw, since he died at an advanced age) and tropical reptiles. The site, Inabinett said, has become a scrying glass to understand climate conditions of the past. It can also suggest what things might look like in a world a few degrees warmer than today. Many of the fossils found so far are from the Pliocene epoch, which ended about 2.6 million years ago and was about 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than now. That's also about how much warmer Earth is projected to grow by 2100. Oceans were about 25 feet higher back then, and alligators lived in Appalachia. The region's biodiversity, once among the greatest in the world, survived multiple periods of extreme heat and cold. Later, the humid climate of the Pliocene quickly succumbed to the Ice Age. Because silt flows toward the ocean, the Appalachian region has few easily accessible fossils, making Gray Fossil a primary window into the ancient past. 'The Southern Appalachians are one of the most biodiverse regions in North America,' Inabinett said. 'To study this time period, the early Pliocene, is really useful for understanding how that diversity originated.' While not every sinkhole opens a prehistoric portal, even the most mundane of them taps into something primal. For Bacchus, who goes on regular walks to check new and growing sinkholes, they represent the concept of 'the void,' and bring an opportunity for people to reflect on concepts bigger than themselves. 'I am attracted to sinkholes because of the humbling feeling they evoke,' she said. 'I am reminded I am a small animal on this planet, and there's more going on below the surface than we may realize.'
National Observer
21-05-2025
- Science
- National Observer
Feather forensics offers a way to root out poachers
This story was originally published by bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration Every year, the illegal wildlife trade ensnares millions of wild birds in a vast global industry worth up to US $23 billion. Poaching for the black market affects a huge diversity of life, including nearly half of all bird species. Songbirds and parrots are particularly popular targets, with thousands illegally caught and traded every year. Proving that a bird sold as a pet was born in captivity, rather than poached from the wild, is difficult. Tracking a bird's origins, says Katherine Hill, an invasive species biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, relies on paperwork, 'which can obviously be forged relatively simply.' Over the past few decades, however, scientists have been developing a technique that can hint at whether an animal hails from the wild or captivity. Known as stable isotope analysis, the approach involves analyzing the abundance of different forms of certain chemical elements in an animal's tissues. Stable isotope analysis works on birds because their feathers lock in identifiable chemical signatures as they grow, creating a snapshot of a period of the bird's life, Hill says. Captive birds, for example, tend to eat corn and sorghum. Wild birds eat more fruits, nuts, and wild plant seeds. This altered diet skews the chemical analysis, giving scientists an accurate way to gauge what kinds of foods a bird has been eating. Scientists have used stable isotope analysis to study bird diets for s everal years. But earlier projects aiming to tease out birds' origins largely focused on a few endangered parrot species with limited diets, small populations, or small ranges. Hill wanted to see if she could apply the technique to parrot species with relatively large geographic ranges that eat a wider variety of foods. In particular, she focused on four common Australian parrots that are popular as pets—galahs (Eolophus roseicapilla), sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita), little corellas (Cacatua sanguinea), and long-billed corellas (Cacatua tenuirostris). Beginning in December 2020, Hill set out around Adelaide, where she scanned the streets for the vibrant white, yellow, or pink shocks of wild parrot feathers. COVID-19-related lockdowns meant it was difficult for Hill and her colleagues to visit zoos or aviaries to collect the feathers of captive parrots. Instead, they created a community-science initiative to collect feathers from the public. Spreading the word through social media, local news organizations, and other places likely to catch the eyes of animal lovers, the scientists harnessed dozens of volunteers from across South Australia who collectively sent in thousands of feathers they found in the wild or gathered from the bottom of their pets' cages. The project became a way for people to connect with nature, Hill says. Pooling the feathers by species, and splitting them by whether they came from wild or captive birds, Hill and her colleagues found that stable isotope analysis can accurately distinguish between wild and captive galahs nearly 90 percent of the time, and the other parrot species 74 percent of the time. The isotope research from those four parrot species will provide data that other scientists can use in future studies as well. The technique offers a potent way to identify poached birds. But it is possible, says Hill, to cheat the test. If a captive bird is fed a diet similar to what a wild one would eat—or if wild birds have particularly diverse diets or access to something similar to pet food—it could muddy the results. But, says Hill, when used with other tools, isotope analysis could tip off law enforcement that a bird might have been poached, giving the authorities reason to investigate further. The value of stable isotope analysis is also constrained by time, Hill says. Because birds regularly grow and molt their feathers, each piece of plumage only reflects the time between molts. For many parrots, that's about a year. This means the technique would be best at identifying birds that were captured from the wild within that time frame. Astrid Andersson, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, says the effectiveness of stable isotope analysis to distinguish between captive and wild parrots aligns with previous research, including her own work on a Chinese population of yellow-crested cockatoos. 'It's really important to expand the number of species that have this stable isotope data,' says Andersson. Different species need their own stable isotope datasets, she says. 'We need to build up the database that authorities could potentially refer to.' Wildlife authorities don't often use stable isotope analysis in their investigations and, to date, the technique isn't being regularly used in bird-poaching investigations. But analyzing feathers could be a powerful new tool in the anti-poaching toolbox, says Kate Brandis, a wildlife forensics expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia. 'This is still a developing area,' she says. But research like Hill's is 'demonstrating that this does have a place in fighting the illegal wildlife trade.'
National Observer
15-05-2025
- Business
- National Observer
States are banning forever chemicals. Industry is fighting back
This story was originally published by Wired and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration In 2021, James Kenney and his husband were at a big box store buying a piece of furniture when the sales associate asked if they'd like to add fabric protectant. Kenney, the cabinet secretary of New Mexico's Environment Department, asked to see the product data sheet. Both he and his husband were shocked to see forever chemicals listed as ingredients in the protectant. 'I think about your normal, everyday New Mexican who is trying to get by, make their furniture last a little longer, and they think, 'Oh, it's safe, great!' It's not safe,' he says. 'It just so happens that they tried to sell it to the environment secretary.' Last week, the New Mexico legislature passed a pair of bills that Kenney hopes will help protect consumers in his state. If signed by the governor, the legislation would eventually ban consumer products that have added PFAS—per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, known colloquially as 'forever chemicals' because of their persistence in the environment—from being sold in New Mexico. As health and environmental concerns about forever chemicals mount nationally, New Mexico joins a small but growing number of states that are moving to limit—and, in some cases, ban—PFAS in consumer products. New Mexico is now the third state to pass a PFAS ban through the legislature. Ten other states have bans or limits on added PFAS in certain consumer products, including cookware, carpet, apparel, and cosmetics. This year, at least 29 states—a record number—have PFAS-related bills before state legislatures, according to an analysis of bills by Safer States, a network of state-based advocacy organizations working on issues around potentially unsafe chemicals. The chemical and consumer products industries have taken notice of this new wave of regulations and are mounting a counterattack, lobbying state legislatures to advocate for the safety of their products—and, in one case, suing to prevent the laws from taking effect. Some of the key exemptions made in New Mexico highlight some of the big fights that industries are hoping they'll win in statehouses across the country: fights they are already taking to a newly industry-friendly US Environmental Protection Agency. PFAS is not just one chemical but a class of thousands. The first PFAS were developed in the 1930s; thanks to their nonstick properties and unique durability, their popularity grew in industrial and consumer uses in the postwar era. The chemicals were soon omnipresent in American lives, coating cookware, preventing furniture and carpets from staining, and acting as a surfactant in firefighting foam. In 1999, a man in West Virginia filed a lawsuit against US chemical giant DuPont alleging that pollution from its factory was killing his cattle. The lawsuit revealed that DuPont had concealed evidence of PFAS's negative health effects on workers from the government for decades. In the years since, the chemical industry has paid out billions in settlement fees around PFAS lawsuits: in 2024, the American multinational 3M agreed to pay between $10 billion and $12.5 billion to US public water systems that had detected PFAS in their water supplies to pay for remediation and future testing, though the company did not admit liability. (DuPont and its separate chemical company Chemours continue to deny any wrongdoing in lawsuits involving them, including the original West Virginia suit.) As the moniker 'forever chemicals' suggests, mounting research has shown that PFAS accumulate in the environment and in our bodies and can be responsible for a number of health problems, from high cholesterol to reproductive issues and cancer. EPA figures released earlier this year show that almost half of the US population is currently exposed to PFAS in their drinking water. Nearly all Americans, meanwhile, have at least one type of PFAS in their blood. For a class of chemicals with such terrifying properties, there's been surprisingly little regulation of PFAS at the federal level. One of the most-studied PFAS chemicals, PFOA, began to be phased out in the US in the early 2000s, with major companies eliminating the chemical and related compounds under EPA guidance by 2015. The chemical industry and manufacturers say that the replacements they have found for the most dangerous chemicals are safe. But the federal government, as a whole, has lagged behind the science when it comes to regulations: The EPA only set official drinking water limits for six types of PFAS in 2024. In lieu of federal guidance, states have started taking action. In 2021, Maine, which identified an epidemic of PFAS pollution on its farms in 2016, passed the first-ever law banning the sale of consumer products with PFAS. Minnesota followed suit in 2023. 'The cookware industry has historically not really engaged in advocacy, whether it's advocacy or regulatory,' says Steve Burns, a lobbyist who represents the industry. But laws against PFAS in consumer products—particularly a bill in California, which required cookware manufacturers to disclose to consumers if they use any PFAS chemicals in their products—were a 'wakeup call' for the industry. Burns is president of the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, a 501c6 formed in 2024 by two major companies in the cookware industry. He and his colleagues have had a busy year, testifying in 10 statehouses across the country against PFAS restrictions or bans (and, in some cases, in favor of new laws that would exempt their products from existing bans). In February, the CSA was one of more than 40 industry groups and manufacturers to sign a letter to New Mexico lawmakers opposing its PFAS ban when it was first introduced. The CSA also filed a suit against the state of Minnesota in January, alleging that its PFAS ban is unconstitutional. Its work has paid off. Unlike the Maine or Minnesota laws, the New Mexico bill specifically exempts fluoropolymers, a key ingredient in nonstick cookware and a type of PFAS chemical, from the coming bans. The industry has also seen success overseas: France excluded kitchenware from its recent PFAS ban following a lobbying push by Cookware Sustainability Alliance member Groupe SEB. (The CSA operates only in the US and was not involved in that effort.) 'As an industry, we do believe that if we're able to make our case, we're able to have a conversation, present the science and all the independent studies we have, most times people will say well, you make a good point,' Burns says. 'This is a different chemistry.' It's not just the cookware industry making this argument. Erich Shea, the director of product communications at the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED in an email that the group supports New Mexico's fluoropolymer exclusion and that it will 'allow New Mexico to avoid the headaches experienced by decisionmakers in other states.' The FDA has authorized nonstick cookware for human use since the 1960s. Some research—including one peer-reviewed study conducted by the American Chemistry Council's Performance Fluoropolymer Partnership, whose members include 3M and Chemours, has found that fluoropolymers are safe to consume and less harmful than other types of PFAS. Separate research has called their safety into question. However, the production of fluoropolymers for use in nonstick cookware and other products has historically released harmful PFAS into the environment. And while major US manufacturers have phased out PFOA in their production chain, other factories overseas still use the chemical in making fluoropolymers. The debate over fluoropolymers' inclusion in state bans is part of a larger argument made by industry and business groups: that states are defining PFAS chemicals too broadly, opening the door to overregulation of safe products. A position paper from the Cookware Sustainability Alliance provided to WIRED lambasts the 'indiscriminate definition of PFAS' in many states with recent bans or restrictions. 'Our argument is that fluoropolymers are very different from PFAS chemicals of concern,' Burns says. Some advocates disagree. The exemption of fluoropolymers from New Mexico's ban, along with a host of other industry-specific exemptions in the bill, means that the legislation 'is not going to meet the stated intentions of what the bill's sponsors want it to do,' says Gretchen Salter, the policy director at Safer States. Advocates like Salter have concerns around the use of forever chemicals in the production of fluoropolymers as well as their durability throughout their life cycles. 'Fluoropolymers are PFAS. PFAS plastics are PFAS. They are dangerous at every stage of their life, from production to use to disposal,' she claims. Kenney acknowledges that the fluoropolymer exemption has garnered a 'little bit of criticism.' But he says that this bill is meant to be a starting point. 'We're not trying to demonize PFAS—it's in a lot of things that we rightfully still use—but we are trying to gauge the risk,' he says. 'We don't expect this to be a one and done. We expect science to grow and the exemptions to change.' With a newly industry-friendly set of regulators in DC, industry groups are looking for wins at the federal level too. In February, an organization of chemical manufacturers and business groups, including the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, sent a letter to the EPA outlining suggested 'principles and policy recommendations' around PFAS. The group emphasized the need to 'recognize that PFAS are a broad class of chemistries with very diverse and necessary properties' and recommended the agency adopt a government-wide definition of PFAS based on West Virginia and Delaware's definitions. Both of those states have a much more conservative definition of what defines PFAS than dozens of other states, including Maine, New Mexico, and Minnesota. A federal definition like this could 'have a chilling effect on state legislation going forward,' said Melanie Benesh, the vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental activist organization. 'There would be this federal position that the chemical industry could point to, which might be convincing to some state legislators to say, well, this is what the federal government has said is a definition of PFAS. As you start excluding PFAS from the class, you really limit what PFAS are covered by consumer product bans.' Shea, of the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED that the group believes 'that the federal regulatory approach is preferable to a patchwork of different and potentially conflicting state approaches.' States with bans face a monumental task in truly getting PFAS out of consumers' lives. Vendors in Minnesota have been left with expensive inventory that they can no longer sell; Maine's law, one of the most aggressive, makes exemptions for 'currently unavoidable use' of PFAS, including in semiconductors, lab equipment, and medical devices. PFAS are used in so many of the products in our lives that it's almost unfathomable to think of phasing them out altogether, as soon as possible. For advocates like Salter, it's a change worth making. 'There might be essential uses for PFAS right now,' she says. 'But we want to spur the search for safer alternatives, because we don't want to give a pass to chemicals that are harming human health. By exempting them altogether, you are completely removing that incentive.'
