To combat the biodiversity crisis, the Sierra Club supports establishing a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. land, and 30 percent of U.S. ocean areas by 2030. Known as the 30×30 Agenda, this campaign has the potential to not only benefit wildlife, but improve outdoor equity and expand representation of historically marginalized groups on public lands. This three-part series explores the potential implications of such measures from locations across the country.

Standing on the exposed dust of Great Salt Lake’s growing shoreline, biologist Bonnie Baxter recently shared an obituary she wrote mourning Great Salt Lake. “The Great Salt Lake experienced her final, glimmering sunset today,” she said in a video recording the performance. It’s just one way Baxter is trying to educate people—and garner support to save the lake before it’s too late.

Its water levels hit an alarming record low in 2022. Utah’s state legislature took steps to develop emergency mitigation plans, calling for additional conservation, but these were shelved after the winter delivered a record snowpack. Nevertheless, experts warn that the need for political action is still critical. Without taking drastic and immediate measures, Great Salt Lake’s unique ecosystem is in grave danger. 

For Maria Archibald, the lands and water programs coordinator with the Utah chapter of Sierra Club, this is a crucial moment for the region. The global climate crisis is driving unprecedented cycles of extreme precipitation, drought, and wildfires in the western United States, she says, but the ability to save Great Salt Lake is still in human hands.

Understanding localized impacts of climate change is complicated, but Archibald says the lake’s desiccation “is an issue that’s within our control.” She points to a recent report by the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, which is made up of researchers from the University of Utah and Utah State University. It estimates human water usage is responsible for more than two-thirds of the lake’s decline. 

The report found the minimum water level for the lake to be healthy is an elevation of 4,198 feet above sea level. In 2022, Great Salt Lake dropped to a record low about ten feet below that. That may not sound like a huge difference, but to get the lake back to a sustainable level will require saving a million acre feet per year—enough water to cover roughly a million football fields a foot deep.

Great Salt Lake is a terminal body of water, meaning there are no outflowing rivers or streams. With four rivers flowing into the lake, Archibald says it’s no mystery where the water to save the lake needs to come from. But the solution isn’t as simple as turning off the tap. There’s tense competition for water resources from real estate development, agriculture, mineral extraction, and other industrial uses—with many livelihoods at stake. “How are we economically supporting water users through this transition that needs to happen?” Archibald asks. 

Still, Archibald says getting politicians to set and adhere to tangible water conservation goals could have immediate effect. “I think Utah’s sort of in the hot seat right now, because there’s other states in the West that have made really big commitments to water conservation,” she says, “and Utah refuses to do so.”

But practical legislative changes have been slow to materialize—even a non-binding resolution affirming support for a target lake level at sustainable levels recently failed to even be seriously discussed. There has been some progress to change outdated “use it or lose it” agricultural water policies that force farmers to utilize their full water rights each year or risk losing them in the future, but Archibald says the effort is undercut by a lack of monitoring. “A farmer could want to do water conservation,” she says, “but have no idea whether the decisions and the sacrifices they’re making upstream are actually benefiting the lake and the communities that depend on it.” 

This disconnect makes it even more essential for the general public to understand what steps it will take to save Great Salt Lake. For Bonnie Baxter, who has helped build school curricula, guided research, and engaged with everyone from children to community elders, education is a pivotal part of her work. “With Great Salt Lake in crisis,” she says, “scientists really have a responsibility to speak with the public.”

Baxter’s current research centers on the lake’s food chains, focusing on two crucial species—the brine fly and brine shrimp—that live and reproduce in its saline waters. Both species are suffering as the lake’s level drops and its salinity rises. The brine fly, for instance, thrives in water between nine and twelve percent salinity; with record low water levels in 2022, the water in the lake’s south arm was at 19 percent salinity. “Last year, we noticed the population was missing,” Baxter says. “They just crashed.” 

As part of the brine fly’s life cycle, larvae swim down to feed on and cocoon in microbial mats on the lakebed. Baxter says the larvae were either unable to swim down because the saltier water made them too buoyant, or the microbial mats themselves were dying because of the increased salinity or exposure. 

The story for the brine shrimp is similar: Saltier water prompted brine shrimp to reproduce abnormally early, with embryos that would normally overwinter instead hatching in the fall. “We don’t know what it will look like this year,” Baxter says, “if we’ll see ramifications from that—if we’ll see less adults in the lake or not.” But that kind of uncertainty gives Baxter pause. More than 10 million birds come to Great Salt Lake each year, and many of them rely on either the brine fly or brine shrimp as crucial food sources. Some birds eat both, Baxter says, “but some birds are wholly dependent on shrimp and some birds are wholly dependent on flies.”

Baxter recognizes it may not be the fate of billions of brine flies or millions of birds that helps return water to the lake, but hopes to help people recognize their own connections and reliance  on it. “The brine shrimp industry, the mineral extraction industry, the ski tourism industry—and it is the air quality issue, which affects everybody—that’s what the legislature is responding to.”

For some advocates of Great Salt Lake, the small measure of political progress feels insufficient. While Utah legislators declared last year “the year of water,”  no significant modifications have been made to upstream water diversions. Meanwhile, the state continues to pursue development that will worsen the problem, including the Bear River Development project,  which would siphon over 200,000 acre feet a year from the lake’s primary water source.

These decisions have real public health consequences. As the lake’s level dropped to record lows, it exposed over 800 square miles of dusty shoreline. This dust contains metals like lithium, arsenic, copper in concentrations above Environmental Protection Agency limits. While researchers say more data is needed to understand the long- term potential health impacts on regional communities, increased air pollution poses significant risks to vulnerable populations, and is linked to respiratory and heart disease. The 

After the state announced $40 million in January to develop plans to support the lake, Darren Parry—a former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation—shared his ongoing disappointment that Native people, who have lived in the area for millennia, have not been included or consulted in the state response to the crisis. Parry expressed his support for the scientific efforts to save the lake in an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, but said, “all the science in the world will not make up for our selfish behaviors. To assume scientific knowledge is superior to Indigenous wisdom, that kind of thought process can be harmful.”

Finding a way to incorporate the concerns of the many communities who surround the lake will be important for any long-term conservation. If done well, Baxter believes the Great Salt Lake ecosystem can be a web that ties the region together. “This lake is in the fabric of people who live in Utah,” she says, “and now that it’s threatened, they are stepping up.”

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Scientists say we need to safeguard 30 percent of America’s land by 2030 to avoid mass extinction and climate catastrophe. The U.S. ranks as one of the top countries in the world when it comes to wilderness-quality land. Right now, roughly 12 percent of that is protected land—and the Sierra Club has played a role in saving nearly all of it. That means we have to protect more lands in the next decade than we did in the last century. With an ambitious agenda and strong local advocacy, we can still conserve much of these natural areas. Every acre counts.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Saving Great Salt Lake on Nov 9, 2023.

Serena Fitka sat in the cabin of a flat-bottomed aluminum boat as it sped down the Yukon River in western Alaska, recalling how the river once ran thick with salmon. Each summer, in the Yup’ik village of St. Mary’s where Fitka grew up, she and her family fished for days on end. They’d catch enough salmon to last through winter, enough to share with cousins, aunts, uncles, and elders who couldn’t fish for themselves. 

“We’d get what we need, and be done,” Fitka said, raising her voice above the whir of the outboard motor and the waves beating against the hull. “But now there’s nothing.” 

The boat skirted the river bank as Fitka glanced out the window, her face shielded from the mid-July sun. Gray water, thick with glacial silt, lapped against the land’s muddy edge below a summer palette of green: dark spruce needles, light birch leaves, and willows a shade in between. A bald eagle soared 10 feet above the river, scanning the water.

“I thought this wouldn’t happen in my lifetime,” Fitka said. “I thought there would always be fish in the river.”

There have been salmon in the Yukon, the fourth-longest river in North America, for as long as there have been people on its banks. The river’s abundance helped Alaska earn its reputation as one of the last refuges for wild salmon, a place where they once came every year by the millions to spawn in pristine rivers and lakes after migrating thousands of miles. But as temperatures in western Alaska and the Bering Sea creep higher, the Yukon’s salmon populations have plunged.

State and federal fishery managers have resorted to drastic measures to save them. In 2021, for the first time in Fitka’s life, regulators prohibited all fishing for the river’s two main salmon species — king and chum — even for subsistence. For the better part of three fishing seasons, thousands of Yup’ik and Athabascan fishers have been banned from catching the fish that once kept their families fed. 

“We grew up with fishing, cutting fish, smoking fish all our lives,” Fitka said. “And to have it taken away just like that — without warning, without mentally preparing yourself — is traumatizing.”

All five species of Pacific salmon swim in the Yukon, but Fitka’s family and the thousands of other Indigenous people who live on the river rely mainly on kings and chum. The kings usually arrive at the mouth of the Yukon in early June. With a range that extends from California to Russia’s Far East, they’re the biggest, fattiest, and priciest species, selling for more than $40 a pound at high-end grocery stores in the lower 48 states. Around the same time come the chum, a less fatty, more abundant cousin of the king. 

Staggering numbers of both species have disappeared in recent years. Two decades ago, for instance, more than 200,000 kings would make it back to the Yukon to spawn each year. This summer, scientists counted just 58,500, which was slightly better than the previous summer’s meager tally, the worst on record. 

The Yukon’s chum swim up the river in two distinct runs, a summer run that starts in early June and a “fall” one that starts in late July. Although the summer run showed signs of a rebound (the nearly 850,000 chum allowed for a brief window of fishing), the fall run comprised only 290,000 chum, less than one-third its historical average.

Salmon are vital to the river’s Yup’ik and Athabascan communities as a source of nutrients and a symbol of cultural identity. Dense with protein and fat, Yukon kings are highly nutritious. To swim as many as 2,000 miles upriver, against the current — the world’s longest salmon migration — the fish put on huge stores of fat, some bulking up to 90 pounds. (Their journey is equal to running an ultramarathon every day for a month without stopping for a snack.)

“There’s nothing richer than a Yukon king,” said David Walker, a longtime fisherman and the water plant manager in the Deg Xit’an Athabascan village of Holy Cross.

Such a nutritious food source is especially important to the people living in one of the most remote regions in the United States: Many villages along the Yukon and its tributaries have no more than a few hundred residents and are accessible only by river boat or small plane. That isolation makes the cost of goods exorbitant and fresh produce scarce. A gallon of gas in the small Holikachuk and Deg Xit’an village of Grayling costs $8. Twenty miles downstream, in the smaller village of Anvik, a tin of spam sells at the only store in town for $7.95.

“Our food and fuel — everything has to be brought in by barge or by airplane — so that really increases the cost of living,” Fitka said. “That’s why we’re so reliant on our fish and our animals that we harvest.” According to a 2017 survey by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, every household in rural western Alaska makes use of fish, and people in the region eat an average of 379 pounds of wild food each year. 

Salmon also embody a custom that has brought relatives and neighbors together for generations. Across more than 1,000 miles, from Yup’ik villages at the mouth of the river to Han and Gwich’in fish camps near the Canadian border, Alaska Native families spend much of their summers at the river’s edge, hauling in fish, carving them into filets or strips, hanging them to dry, smoking, eating, and sharing them. 

Fitka’s job is to help protect this tradition. She’s the executive director of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association, a nonprofit that advocates for salmon conservation and subsistence fishing rights along the river. On the boat in July, she was leading an educational exchange with a handful of visitors from the upper Yukon in Canada, where the lack of fish has been devastating for several First Nations. 

In Old Crow, a village of 200 people in the Yukon Territory, the town’s sonar station on the Porcupine River, a tributary of the Yukon, counted just 349 king salmon last year, according to Katherine Peter, fisheries and harvest support coordinator for the Vuntut Gwich’in First Nation. So this summer, the Vuntut Gwich’in government shut down all fishing for any species for the first time, in an attempt to help as many salmon get up river to spawning grounds as possible. 

As the boat cut through chop on its way to Russian Mission, a Yup’ik village about 100 miles upstream from St. Mary’s, we passed a handful of fish camps tucked away from the bank. The river would usually be abuzz with fishing activity in mid-summer: outboards humming, nets drifting, and smoke billowing from smokehouses dotting the shore. But that July day, we were the only people on the water. 

Anglers along the Pacific coast of North America have been staring down steadily diminishing salmon runs since the start of the millennium. In Washington state, overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss have shrunk Puget Sound’s population of king salmon to one-tenth its historic size. California’s rivers, like the Klamath and Sacramento, used to support millions of king and coho salmon. Those stocks have thinned to just a few hundred thousand. The shortages prompted the federal government to shut down California’s king salmon season this year for the third time in 15 years. 

On the Yukon, the first real dip in numbers occurred in 1998, when roughly 100,000 fish returned to spawn, about half the size of a normal run. Two years later, the run fell by half again. 

The collapse put pressure on governments to conserve stocks. In 2001, the state of Alaska narrowed windows for subsistence fishing from 7 days to 48 hours and took unprecedented steps to restrict commercial fishing, which families on the Yukon depend on for income. The Canadian government restricted the commercial king salmon catch, which all but disappeared. 

The closures came at a high cost for the region’s economy. Average earnings for people who fish for a living on the lower river dropped from more than $10,000 in the 1990s to about $2,000 after 2000. In Dawson City, a small outpost on the upper river that was the Yukon Territory’s commercial fishing hub, the salmon industry “washed away,” said Spruce Gerberding, who grew up fishing as part of his family’s business near Dawson. 

Since then, the situation has grown more dire. The number of kings crossing into Canada routinely fails to meet the goal of 42,500 agreed upon by U.S. and Canadian officials under the Yukon River Salmon Agreement. (That treaty, finalized in 2002, aimed to make sure enough salmon would reach their spawning grounds in the Yukon Territory and British Columbia each year.)  

The collapse of the Yukon’s chum was more sudden. Runs regularly numbered in the millions until 2020. That year, anglers and scientists alike were astonished when the usual droves of chum failed to appear. A year later, both the summer and fall runs had dropped to their lowest levels on record — each below 500,000. 

The disappearance of so many chums and kings has been the subject of growing scientific inquiry. For years, the vanishing kings posed an ecological mystery because the Yukon flows mostly unimpeded — untouched by the sort of industrialization that has destroyed salmon habitat in California, Oregon, and Washington. The river’s salmon don’t have to contend with large-scale dams that block passage to spawning grounds, clear-cuts that destroy streams, or mega-farms that siphon off water.

But salmon are notoriously difficult to study. They spawn in fresh water, then spend most of their lives far out in the Pacific, an area dubbed the “black box” because it’s so vast and poorly understood. Most salmon research — in Alaska and along the entire Pacific Coast — is focused on streams and lakes, where it’s easier to study their habitat, sample the water, and count stocks. 

Scientists have recently made progress in unraveling the mystery in the Yukon, and their main suspect is climate change. As humans pump greenhouse gases into the air and cause global temperatures to rise, salmon are getting hit on two fronts: Both their saltwater feeding habitat and their freshwater spawning grounds are rapidly heating up. Marine heat waves in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska are becoming more frequent, and the Yukon itself, like other northern rivers, is warming twice as fast as streams farther south. 

“Salmon are cold-water species, so when temperatures go up, their metabolism increases, so they need more energy to just be, just live,” said Ed Farley, an ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “That means they’re going to have to feed more.” 

At the same time, hot spells in the ocean and melting sea ice have set off a cascade of changes, forcing salmon to find new food. When the Bering Sea heats up, juvenile chum don’t nab as much of their usual, nutrient-dense prey, like krill, tunicates, and small fish. Instead, they settle for jellyfish, which proliferate in warm seas and carry less fat. Salmon wind up burning more energy while consuming fewer calories, and struggling to pack on the fat necessary to survive in the open ocean and, later, complete their long journey up the Yukon. 

During recent marine heat waves, scientists found chum with empty stomachs and smaller fat reserves — “by far the lowest we have ever seen in the 20 years of monitoring salmon in the northern Bering Sea,” said Katie Howard, who leads Yukon River salmon research at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. 

“The chum, pretty much as soon as they hatch, they migrate out of the river,” Howard said. “They’re tiny, tiny, tiny fish. They’re probably less prepared to deal with this big change, with higher temperatures and different food available.” 

It’s more complicated for kings. Juveniles spend more time maturing in fresh water than chum. That extra year lets them fatten up before they head out to sea, giving them more energy and a better chance at survival in the warming ocean, Howard said. 

Still, even though kings aren’t dying at sea in the same way that chum are, they are returning to the river younger, smaller, and increasingly malnourished. That makes them susceptible to rising river temperatures, which force the fish to burn through fat reserves more quickly. 

They are also dealing with a new disease that appears linked to rising temperatures. A parasitic protozoa called Ichthyophonus, which is harmless to humans but eats away at fish tissue, has been showing up in more and more salmon, their hearts speckled with white bumps. Scientists aren’t sure exactly what’s causing the spike in infections. What they do know, according to Howard, is that the onset and severity of the disease seems to increase in warm waters.

Compared to other king salmon populations struggling with climate change, lack of nutrients, and disease, those in the Yukon are doing especially poorly. Howard has an idea about why: They’re the farthest north, and they migrate the farthest in fresh water. 

In rivers to the south, Howard said, some fish populations have shifted their migrations earlier in the season when the water is cooler. That’s not an option for Yukon kings because they’re so far north that the summer season isn’t long enough to accommodate such a move. They can’t swim under the ice that covers the river into May, Howard said. 

“They’re going to be the first ones to struggle,” Howard said, “because they are already at the extreme of what salmon can do.” 

When salmon from the Yukon River feed in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, they need to navigate more than unusually warm waters. Some end up in the nets of commercial fishing boats, hundreds of miles from villages on the river. Massive trawlers in the Bering Sea accidentally scoop up salmon while targeting pollock and other species. Smaller vessels farther south, in a commercial zone off the Alaska Peninsula called Area M, catch and sell salmon, including chum and some kings from the Yukon. Much of the chum intentionally caught at sea gets frozen, sent to processors in China and elsewhere in Asia, then packaged and sold in chunks at grocery stores in the U.S. and Europe. 

Many people on the Yukon feel angered by this double standard. Why do federal and state regulators prevent them from fishing, both commercially and for food, but allow big businesses to catch salmon in the ocean — sometimes incidentally, sometimes for profit? 

“I don’t know why they shut us down. We’re not the problem,” said Ronald Demientieff, an elder in Holy Cross. “You have to regulate us because they killed them in the ocean? We’ve been regulating our fish way before Fish and Game came to this place.”

The trawlers, which make up the biggest fishery by volume in the U.S., deploy gigantic, billowing nets that sometimes scrape across the bottom of the ocean as they wrangle pollock — the meat used in McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. Their nets can span the length of four football fields, large enough to capture hundreds of thousands of salmon as bycatch over the course of a season, including Yukon kings and chum. 

Scientists are quick to say that these fisheries can’t be blamed for the Yukon’s salmon declines. The math just doesn’t check out. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, trawlers in the Bering Sea catch about 20,000 king salmon each year, and roughly half of those come from western Alaska. In 2021, about 50,000 chum from western Alaska and the Yukon wound up in the pollock nets, a number that’s well short of the 1.5 million that disappeared that year.

“If you look at how many fish they’re catching [that are heading] to western Alaska, it cannot explain anywhere near the decline in the chum salmon that just occurred,” Farley said. “It’s a small number of fish from western Alaska being caught in the bycatch.”

Even though bycatch doesn’t appear to be a major driver of the salmon shortage, Yukon salmon are still swimming into large nets at sea at the same time that communities  along the river are being told to keep their nets out of the water. In 2021, when Alaska Native families on the Yukon weren’t allowed to fish for chum or kings, Bering Sea trawlers incidentally scooped up more than 18,000 western Alaska kings and 51,500 chums. Not all of those were from the Yukon, but some were, and others were from stocks on rivers like the Kuskokwim, where there have also been severe shortages and fishing bans in recent years.

“Whether it’s 1 percent or 0.25 percent — or whatever percent [of bycatch] they’re trying to say that reaches the Yukon — that is a percentage that we need,” Fitka said. “We need it in the river if we want to rebuild our stocks.”

In Area M, fishing businesses had a banner season in June 2021, hauling in more than 1.1 million chums. State biologists aren’t sure exactly how many of those were headed back to the Yukon, though it was likely a small fraction. Researchers estimated a year later that the Area M fleet caught about 5 percent of the chums bound for western Alaska, while people along the river weren’t allowed to catch a single fish to eat.

Unlike Indigenous nations in other places such as Washington state, Alaska Native communities on the Yukon don’t have treaty rights to fish. Under state and federal law, subsistence fishing in Alaska is given priority over other uses like commercial fishing, but Alaska Natives aren’t given priority over other groups. The lack of specific rights — and the lack of control over management decisions — has left tribal leaders with little recourse except to push state and federal officials to adopt stricter conservation measures on fishing companies at sea. That requires navigating a maze of agencies and regulators: The Alaska Board of Fisheries and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game regulate salmon fishing in Area M; those two along with the Federal Subsistence Board and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have jurisdiction over the Yukon River; and the federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council and NOAA Fisheries oversee pollock fishing in the Bering Sea.  

Two Indigenous organizations — Tanana Chiefs Conference and the Association of Village Council Presidents — are suing the federal government over its management of the Bering Sea pollock industry, including the amount of bycatch that’s allowed. A federal rule already exists that limits the pollock fleet’s incidental catch of king salmon, but there’s no cap on chum. In October, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council met and agreed to weigh options to reduce chum bycatch, including a limit on fish specifically from western Alaska.

John Linderman, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game official and co-chair of the Yukon River Panel, the joint U.S.-Canada board that governs the Yukon River Salmon Agreement, told Grist that the ideal scenario would be getting bycatch down to zero. Trying to reduce it is an “obligation,” he said. “There are no ifs, ands, or buts.” 

Linderman defended the North Pacific Fishery Management Council for taking measures in past years to keep kings out of pollock nets and for looking at new steps to save chums. But no option now being weighed by the council would eliminate bycatch, as some people on the Yukon want. 

At the October council meeting, Jon Kurland, NOAA Fisheries’ regional administrator in Alaska and a council member, said an action that would end bycatch “of course would be best for chum salmon, but to me would not be practicable.” Proponents of the pollock industry say a hard cap on chum bycatch could force the lucrative fishery to close. And if that happens, big businesses like American Seafoods wouldn’t be the only to suffer. Kurland noted that many coastal Alaska villages, including several on the lower Yukon, rely on sales generated by the trawlers. (That fact has caused some tension in western Alaska between subsistence fishing advocates and regional nonprofits that bring in revenue from the pollock catch.)

In February, Fitka and dozens of Indigenous leaders from the Yukon and western Alaska traveled to Anchorage for a meeting of the Alaska Board of Fisheries, a group of seven people appointed by the governor to regulate the state’s fisheries, including Area M. They wanted the board to adopt tighter rules on those salmon businesses, asking them to restrict fishing time in June by around 70 percent, a reduction of more than 250 hours.

The issue was contentious because commercial fishing advocates and representatives from Alaska Native villages on the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, where local economies are linked to the Area M fisheries, largely opposed major restrictions. They said significant cuts would risk sinking Area M fisheries and jeopardize local tax revenue that funds schools and other essential services. After three days of public testimony and several more days of deliberation, the Board of Fisheries narrowly rejected the proposal backed by Yukon tribes and adopted a watered-down version instead, winnowing harvest times by only 42 hours. 

After the final vote, Fitka and dozens of other people in her delegation silently walked out of the meeting in protest. 

With fish racks and freezers empty along the Yukon river, people are turning to other sources for food. The Yukon’s only commercial fish processor, which has been shut down for three years, started building greenhouses and selling vegetables in 2021. More than a dozen tribal members and elders told Grist that they’re eating more moose, whitefish, pike, and goods bought at village stores, like “chicken, hot dogs, and spam,” according to Walker. And they all seemed to agree on one thing: There’s just no substitute for Yukon salmon.

“Nothing can replace the fish,” said Tessiana Paul, an administrator at the tribal government in Holy Cross. “Gosh, it just feels like we took it for granted now.”

To make up for the shortage in Holy Cross and several villages upriver, the region’s tribal consortium – Tanana Chiefs Conference – sent residents frozen sockeye salmon, a leaner species. The fish came from Bristol Bay, the world’s largest sockeye run, a few hundred miles south of the mouth of the Yukon. In one of the many paradoxes of climate change, Bristol Bay’s sockeye runs have boomed in recent years, as the northern lakes where the fish spawn have warmed to an optimal temperature. 

For people who grew up eating fatty Yukon kings and chum, the smaller Bristol Bay salmon, which make a shorter migration and carry less fat, are a disappointing substitute. The first batch of sockeye that came to Holy Cross last fall was decent, according to Walker, though a second bunch that came in late spring was “all freezer-burned.”

“Nobody could eat them. They were as yellow as your paper,” he added, referring to a reporter’s lemon-colored legal pad.

Walker was preparing a stew of moose meat and vegetables, which sat quietly simmering on his stove as he described the need to harvest two moose each year instead of just one, which used to be enough to keep a family fed for months. Without fresh salmon, people are feeling more pressure to hunt.

“A lot of families here — they run out of moose pretty fast,” Walker said. “In fact, somebody was asking us for moose just the other day. I’ve got to give them some.”

For some, the question of what to eat has morphed into a question of whether to leave. In Anvik, a village of some 75 people upstream from Holy Cross, more than a dozen people have moved out in the past few years, according to Robert Walker, the Anvik Tribal Council’s first chief (and David’s cousin). “Right after the fisheries closed down people moved to Anchorage to get jobs,” he said. “The impact was so great they had to find another way of life.”

Paul said she and her husband, Eugene, have contemplated leaving Holy Cross, where they both grew up, and are now raising their children. She has the Kenai River in mind, about 300 miles east of Holy Cross and a few hours by car from Anchorage, where visitors and locals alike flock with fly rods or dip nets to scoop salmon out of the water every summer.

“People from Anchorage can easily go down to Kenai and get 40 fish and take them home and put it in their makeshift cache,” Paul said from her office in Holy Cross. So many people line the Kenai’s banks each summer to pluck fish from the river that it’s notorious for so-called “combat fishing,” referring to the anglers jostling for space. “They’re getting more fish than we are on the Kenai, and it’s combat fishing.” 

The lack of salmon has been felt around the Kenai, too. Locals once made a living setting nets for kings along the peninsula’s gravel beaches, until their population started falling. This year the state adopted its strictest regulations yet to protect Kenai kings, a move that forced small family businesses to shut down.

Still, to Paul, the thought of having some salmon on the Kenai Peninsula is better than having none in her home village. “It’s probably easier than being here and not being able to fish at all.” 

In Russian Mission, the last stop on Fitka’s trip, we finally saw signs of fresh salmon. Slender red fish bellies dripping with oil were slung across wooden drying racks. Boats were nosed up to the beach, sporting fishing nets in their bows. The smell of “summertime perfume” hung in the air: smoldering birch, cottonwood, or alder logs smoking salmon. 

Chum numbers had edged back up this summer, and for the first time in three years, the state opened some subsistence fishing for chum on the lower Yukon. The window applied only to the first chum run, and people weren’t allowed to use their preferred gillnets, forced instead to haul in fewer fish using more selective gear like dip nets. Even so, it was welcome news to Basil Larson, who had repaired his camp just in time, after it had been destroyed by a spring flood. By the time we met him, Larson, who is on the board of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association, had already caught two dozen summer chum. He and his mother had carved the fish into long orange strips, and dozens of them hung like streamers in his small smokehouse, about 100 yards from the river. A broad-shouldered man with a long, black goatee, Larson described his internal conflict about catching salmon when there are so few to be found.

“My mind is saying we’ve got to get these fish passing [to spawn],” he said, “but my heart is saying we need a little taste for winter.” 

The evening before Larson showed me his fish camp, he and more than 50 other people, including Fitka and the visitors from Canada, got a taste of salmon at a potluck in Russian Mission. In a fluorescently-lit room in the middle of the village, elders shared memories of a time when there were no restrictions on fishing for food. “Everywhere you went, it was always fish oil and fish smoke,” said Charlene Duny, a resident of Russian Mission. “And now when we finally smell it, oh, my mouth waters and my heart aches.” 

On a buffet table in the middle of the windowless room lay two small dishes of local salmon, dwarfed by platters of hot dogs and hamburgers. One held a pile of chum strips, each dried into a crimson jerky; the other contained a few dozen half-dried chum bellies, each cut into a pink piece a few inches long. As residents and visitors shuffled through the food line, both dishes slowly emptied. The salmon was gone long before the burgers.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Salmon are vanishing from the Yukon River — and so is a way of life on Nov 9, 2023.

The negotiations produced no particularly big wins. There is still no agreement on a common, global method to measure and identify mercury-contaminated waste from industrial sources, like chemical manufacturers or oil and gas operators. Mercury can still also be purchased online and traded internationally, and states could not agree on when to pull it from tooth fillings. 

But there were some successes: Nations have agreed to ban the use of mercury as a preservative in cosmetics by 2025 as well as to increase support for Indigenous peoples in future negotiations.

Mercury — the silvery, highly toxic heavy metal — still poses a serious environmental and health threat around the world, and last week, world leaders met in Geneva for five days of negotiations in a bid to control mercury pollution, trade, and use. Mercury is used in a range of products including skin-lightening cosmetics, batteries, fluorescent lighting, pesticides, and dental amalgams to fill cavities. It’s also a byproduct of coal-fired power plants and waste incineration. 

A decade ago, the United Nations adopted the Minamata Convention on Mercury to eliminate the effects of the chemical on people and the environment. Named after Minamata Bay in Japan, where mercury-tainted wastewater poisoned more than 2,000 people in the 1950s and ’60s, the debilitating illness was dubbed Minamata disease with symptoms including hearing and speech impairment, loss of coordination, muscle weakness, and vision impairment. Exposure to mercury produces significant, adverse neurological and health effects, especially in fetuses and infants. Human exposure to the chemical typically comes from eating contaminated fish where the chemical bioaccumulates, dental amalgams, and occupational exposure at jobs where mercury is present, like in mines, waste facilities, and dentists’ offices.

The goal of the Minamata Convention, which was adopted in 2013 and became legally binding in 2017, is to eventually eliminate the use of mercury. The convention has led to the phaseout of a wide range of products that contained the chemical, like batteries, compact fluorescent lights, pesticides, thermometers, and other measurement devices, while industrial processes that relied heavily on mercury, like the production of chlorine, are now almost nonexistent. Today, the world trade in mercury has dropped significantly.

But there is still demand for the chemical. The biggest driver of the mercury market by far is artisanal and small-scale gold-mining operations, where one of the fastest, most cost-effective ways to extract gold from ore is to mix it with mercury, separating gold powder and flecks from low-quality deposits. Artisanal and small-scale gold-mining operations account for nearly 20 percent of the world’s gold supply, which means the rise and fall of the mercury trade is driven by demand for gold. 

These operations are particularly prevalent in the Amazon, Indonesia, and western Africa, and release 35 percent of all mercury pollution to the environment, creating newly toxic sites at rates that vastly outpace cleanup efforts and impacting both Indigenous peoples as well as local communities. Representatives from Latin American, the Caribbean, Australia, and Canada noted that both Indigenous peoples, as well as local communities, are particularly vulnerable to mercury exposure and are among the first to face serious health and environmental impacts from mercury pollution owing to their close relationships with the environment.

Grassy Narrows First Nation in Ontario, Canada, for instance, has seen three generations of mercury exposure. In the 1960s and ’70s, a paper mill dumped nearly 10 tons of mercury into the river the First Nation relies on for fish. A recent study linked high rates of attempted suicide among Indigenous youth to intergenerational mercury exposure. In California, historic mines leftover from the gold rush in the mid-1800s pose public health, land management, and environmental challenges to tribal, state, and federal agencies. 

Where countries have banded together to tackle the issue of mercury, reaching international consensus is, unsurprisingly, difficult. No consensus could be made on the question of mercury-waste thresholds: how much mercury can be in waste that countries export. 

The agreement made this last week is 15 milligrams per kilo, and while experts say the number is tolerable for the time being and could likely come down in the future, the greatest concern among advocates is around the adoption of an “opt-out clause” around waste.

“What that’s done is open the floodgates for any country, if they don’t want to use 15 milligrams a kilo, to use any threshold they like, any measurement technique they like, any classification system they like,” said Lee Bell, policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network. “It’s now, effectively, a free-for-all where any country can declare, or not declare, certain types of waste to be mercury waste.”

According to Bell, this has massive impacts on the movement of waste across international borders.

Say a country in the Global North has set a mercury threshold limit of 25 milligrams per kilo. That number is deemed safe because the country in question has effective waste-management measures in place that protect the environment and human health. Because of these standards, if this country exports waste that tests at, say, 20 milligrams per kilo, they don’t have to declare it as mercury waste. It’s safe, by national standards.

That makes it possible to ship to a country in the Global South where the threshold may be significantly lower, like 15 milligrams per kilo. But because the country of origin doesn’t have to label its exported waste as mercury waste due to its own national standards, the country receiving the waste doesn’t know what’s in it.

“It pushes the onus onto the importing country to spend the money to do the testing once the material has already arrived,” said Bell. “If 15 milligrams a kilo was applied in the country of export and the country of import, they would both know what material they were dealing with, it’s apples and apples.”

The opt-out effectively derails any legally binding language in the treaty and undermines the agreed-upon 15 milligram threshold, but is helpful in illustrating the divide at meetings like this: Countries in the Global North tend to have interests rooted in economic interests and industries, while those in the Global South are typically more concerned about protecting their citizens from those Northern interests. 

Then there’s the matter of dentistry. Mercury is still used in tooth fillings, and in the United States, some of the most common recipients of dental amalgams are low-income children of color, prisoners, members of the military, and Indian Health Service patients. While the science behind the safety of these fillings has been inconsistent, to date, nearly 40 countries have generally banned the use of dental amalgams or set hard dates of complete phaseouts, while another 40 have phased down the use of mercury fillings in children under 15 years old, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women. Stopping the use of dental amalgams would also have impacts on the supply chain.

While most countries, including the U.S., are working to phase down dental amalgam use, this COP5 did not produce hard dates for a complete phaseout, although one positive outcome is that states must now develop plans on how they will phase down mercury fillings and report back to the convention. 

But more broadly, one reason many countries have failed to make progress on this concerns the possibility of litigation. 

“It comes down to this issue of admitting that it was harmful all along,” said Bell. “There’s a strong defense of the current position, so what you’re seeing is more of an incremental position where they want to phase it down and slowly bring supplies down over time.”

In the long run, that means there is no firm date on when that might take place and won’t be discussed until the next round of negotiations in two years.

There was one bright spot this week though: World leaders agreed to broaden the participation of Indigenous peoples at future meetings, acknowledging that the impacts of mercury, particularly due to mining, have disproportionate impacts on Indigenous peoples. It’s a vague reference to the potential for a funding mechanism to get more Indigenous peoples to future negotiations, but a significant one for future representatives.

“We’re encouraged that there is increased support from states, as well as recognition of our unique political status,” said Rochelle Diver, U.N. environmental treaties coordinator for the International Indian Treaty Council. “Indigenous peoples are disproportionately impacted by legal and illegal gold-mining, making future generations intensely vulnerable to mercury’s toxic legacy.”

The next meeting will take place in 2025. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mercury is still an environmental threat on Nov 9, 2023.

The world’s biggest producers of fossil fuels aren’t letting go of dirty energy just yet. In fact, most of them plan to keep producing coal, oil, and natural gas for decades to come, despite signs that demand for dirty energy will peak this decade.

That’s the conclusion of a major United Nations report that analyzes the production plans of 20 major fossil fuel-producing countries ahead of the COP28 climate conference in Abu Dhabi. The report finds that these countries plan to extract more than twice the amount of coal, oil, and gas by 2030 than what is needed to limit warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius, and around 70 percent more than would limit warming to 2 degrees C. These are the two key warming targets laid out in the Paris Agreement, beyond which climate impacts will hit catastrophic levels.

António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, described the report’s findings as, “a startling indictment of runaway climate carelessness.”

The report, which shows almost no movement away from oil and gas, is likely to strengthen calls for an agreement to “phase out” fossil fuels at COP28. Major fossil fuel-producing countries have rejected such language before, but negotiators from the European Union have said they plan to make another push for stronger language this year at Abu Dhabi.

“Despite governments around the world signing up to ambitious net zero targets, global coal, oil, and gas production are all still increasing while planned reductions are nowhere near enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” Angela Picciariello, a researcher at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a leading climate research organization, said in a statement. “This widening gulf between governments’ rhetoric and their actions is not only undermining their authority but increasing the risk to us all.”

Almost all the countries profiled in the report have announced plans to slash or even zero out carbon emissions by the middle of the century, and several have spent billions of dollars to encourage a domestic energy transition to renewables, but almost all of them are still planning to maintain or even increase extraction activities on their own turf over the same period. If they follow through on those plans the world will cross the 1.5 degrees C warming threshold laid out in the Paris Agreement. The authors of the report refer to this discrepancy as the “production gap.”

There are two main trends behind the gap. First, the report projects that the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Russia will all continue to produce around the same amount of oil in 2050 as they do today, and developing countries such as Guyana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will likely start producing more oil at the same time, leading to a rise in the production of both fuels over the next few decades. These projections are based on estimates of future production from each country’s national government.

The second trend is that a smaller number of countries are still planning to produce massive amounts of coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and one that has been on the wane in the United States and Europe. Large emitters like China, India, and Indonesia, all of which are using coal to meet rapidly rising energy demand, have said they intend to give up the fuel slowly rather than all at once. This is in stark contrast to the “near total phase-out of global coal production and use by 2040” that the report says is necessary.

Both these trends have dire implications for the climate. In order to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels, the world has to adhere to what experts call a “carbon budget,” limiting the amount of coal, oil, and gas that we burn over the coming decades. If the 20 countries profiled in the report end up producing all the fossil fuels they say they will, the world will blow through that budget.  

The gap may be even bigger than it seems at first. Most models for how the world can limit warming to 1.5 degrees C rely on big assumptions about carbon capture and sequestration technology to help ease the transition away from fossil fuels. In theory, direct-air capture machines and carbon sinks such as forests and peatlands can suck greenhouse gasses out of the air, which allows for a little wiggle room as countries try to give up gas-fired power plants and gasoline vehicles. But many of these carbon capture technologies are untested, and the report cautions against relying on them.

The potential failure of these measures to become sufficiently viable at scale, the non-climatic near-term harms of fossil fuels, and other lines of evidence, call for an even more rapid global phase-out of all fossil fuels,” the authors write.

The most concerning part of the report is that it’s not even clear who would buy all these fossil fuels. According to the International Energy Agency, global demand for oil and gas is likely to plateau or decline before the end of the decade, and solar energy is already cheaper than coal and even natural gas in many places. Yet big producers’ plans for fossil fuel extraction have not changed to accommodate the growing speed of the energy transition.

“Despite these encouraging signs, the overall size of the production gap…has not discernibly changed,” the authors write.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world is doubling down on fossil fuels even as global demand peaks on Nov 8, 2023.

Quick Key Facts

1. A drought happens when little-to-no precipitation occurs in a given area for a considerable time period. A drought can also characterize an area receiving precipitation far below its particular average.
2. Droughts are ranked on a scale from D0 – D4, with D0 being more of an alert of potential drought and D4 indicating the harshest types of drought.
3. Droughts can alter an ecosystem’s carbon, nutrient and water cycles, as well as impede plant growth, kill wildlife and open the door for outbreaks of vegetation-harming insects and fungi.
4. As climate change continues, higher temperatures and heavier rains are expected to increase in frequency and duration, meaning flash floods and droughts could become more common.
5. Droughts have a negative effect on both chronic and acute human health problems and can exacerbate heat-related concerns. 
6. Droughts drive wild animals into greater competition for limited food and water, in some cases forcing them to enter human spaces to get the resources they need to survive.
7. Hydropower production is diminished when water levels decrease, but it isn’t the only energy source that needs stable water availability.
8. Xeriscaping, or landscaping with plants that don’t need much supplemental watering in your area, is one way to reduce water demand and help mitigate the impact of droughts.
9. Rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse also help reduce the harm caused by droughts by recycling and repurposing as much water as possible.
10. Local and state governments can implement water efficiency standards and maximum water use limits to help reduce the impact of active or potential droughts.

What Is a Drought?

A meteorological drought is when there is a severe lack of precipitation in a given area for a notable amount of time. But as the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska explains, whether or not an area is experiencing a drought is “in relation to the average conditions for a region.”

“Meteorological drought is region-specific since precipitation is highly variable from region to region,” the center notes. “For example, a location in Florida may receive more rainfall during a drought than a location in New Mexico receives during an entire year.”

The center notes that there are several other subtypes of droughts, including socioeconomic droughts, which occur when economic activities, like hydroelectric dams, are disrupted because of a lack of water. In parts of the world that rely on wintertime snow to provide water through the following seasons, like in the Upper Missouri River basin of the U.S., snowdroughts can result from lower snowpack totals that subsequently lead to lower water levels.

A drought can last as little as a few weeks or as long as a few years. According to the National Weather Service, “there have been at least three major U.S. droughts in the last 100 years,” two of which lasted between five to seven years. The severity of a drought is denoted with a D0 – D4 scale, with D4 being the most intense types of droughts and D0 serving as an alert of potential drought because of abnormally dry conditions.

After lengthy, severe periods of drought, an area can experience desertification, meaning the existing ecosystem transitions to a desert devoid of the plant life it once hosted.

A report issued by the United Nations last year found that the frequency and duration of droughts had increased 29% from 2000  and that up to 75% of the global population could face water shortages at least one month per year by 2050.

How Does Drought Affect an Ecosystem?

Naturally, less precipitation means drier conditions throughout an environment. And since water is required for plants to grow and wildlife to survive, droughts have a profound impact on the viability of an ecosystem. The National Integrated Drought Information System says that droughts can interrupt the delicate balance of our carbon, nutrient and water cycles, in addition to stymying plant growth and causing wildlife death or even extirpation, which is the local extinction of a given species.

Those same conditions also lead to dry, infertile soils and vegetation, which when paired with windy days can fuel wildfires, destroying forests and homes.

“Drought and persistent heat set the stage for extraordinary wildfire seasons from 2020 to 2022 across many western states, with all three years far surpassing the average of 1.2 million acres burned since 2016,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Scientists have also found links between lengthier periods of hot, dry conditions and fungi and insect outbreaks, which in turn further stress or decimate vegetation.

How Are Drought and Climate Change Connected?

As climate change continues, higher temperatures are expected to become more common year-round.

“Climate change increases the odds of worsening drought in many parts of the United States and the world,” explains the Center For Climate And Energy Solutions on its website. “Regions such as the U.S. Southwest, where droughts are expected to get more frequent, intense, and longer lasting, are at particular risk.”

Why Aren’t Heavy Rains Welcome After a Drought?

Scientists also see evidence that climate change will continue to bring more intense rain storms. That might initially sound like a good thing, since rain helps restore ecosystems experiencing drought.

But during a drought, soil becomes dry, which after a while means it has a tough time absorbing rainwater. That means that when rains do come after a drought, they can lead to flash floods since the ground is incapable of accepting it. That was the case last summer in the U.S. Southwest, when heavy rainstorms from Arizona to Texas after a period of extreme heat and drought led to flooding.

How Does Drought Harm Public Health?

Hot temperatures threaten human health without hydration and cooling measures in place, like shade or air conditioning. In the short term, heat can cause heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heatstroke and hyperthermia and worsen chronic conditions like cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, according to the World Health Organization.

During a drought, the impact of heat on the human body can be amplified by the lack of water for drinking, sanitation and crop production. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also says that air quality can decline during a drought because of an increase in dust and particulate matter that exacerbate chronic and acute respiratory problems.

Around 55 million people suffer from drought conditions every year across the planet, while “as many as 700 million people are at-risk of being displaced as a result of drought by 2030,” the World Health Organization estimates. Certain groups, ranging from athletes and outdoor workers to the poor, pregnant and elderly, are more vulnerable to heat.

How Does Drought Impact Wildlife?

Similar to humans, wildlife see their health and comfort levels decline during a drought. Less water means less to drink, but also less food that needs water to grow. That increases competition among different types of animals and animals of the same species that prefer the same food, like insects or plants, but it also means that those creatures may need to travel closer to human communities and infrastructure — like highways — to find enough food to eat.

“With fewer berries and acorns available, bears will eat garbage, grease from barbecues, bird seed and sugar water from hummingbird feeders,” explains the National Environmental Education Foundation. “Raccoons may seek out garden vegetables and pet food.”

And since droughts wipe out vegetation, that reduces the amount of habitat and hiding places for young prey creatures, like deer, elk and birds, the foundation says.

Drought has forced countries like the African nation of Zimbabwe, where dozens of elephants died because of drought within two months back in 2019, to relocate thousands of wild animals to a nature preserve in a different part of the country. In southwest Australia, mass camel culling was authorized in 2020 because drought conditions drove the creatures to drink too much water and enter towns seeking more.

Back in the U.S., an overpopulation of wild horses in the West has exacerbated resource availability problems, leading to an increase in the number that officials have rounded up and sterilized.

How Does Drought Affect Energy Production?

Hydroelectric turbines aren’t as effective during droughts because lower water levels cause lower water pressure, making it harder for the turbines to operate, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System.

But while hydropower facilities may be the most obvious energy production method that would rely on water levels, other sources of electricity also suffer during droughts. Any power plant that uses steam to rotate a turbine will be less efficient during a drought, while hydraulic fracturing and biofuel production both rely on water supplies for their operations.

How Can I Help Mitigate the Impact of Droughts?

Droughts reduce the amount of available water that could be earmarked for communities’ critical needs, like sanitation. Before a drought occurs where you live, there are large and small measures you can take to reduce your water demand. 

Doing anything to generally reduce water demand will help your community before or during a declared drought, but don’t feel discouraged if you can’t immediately make significant changes to your lifestyle. Your overall water consumption is likely nowhere near the excessive amounts that celebrities have been known to use even during droughts.

And local and state governments have the ability to set policies that can impact water availability at a broader scale, like instituting maximum water use levels and water efficiency standards.

Xeriscaping

Xeriscaping is the practice of landscaping an area in a way that requires little or no irrigation, or watering. It’s often deployed in areas with little water because of the water-intensive nature of planting vegetation that requires more water than the local ecosystem can naturally provide. But even though the concept may conjure up images of succulents and desert plants, you can xeriscape even if you don’t live in a community vulnerable to drought and water shortages. The premise is more about water reduction than water elimination. Reach out to your state’s cooperative extension program for information about what local vegetation you can plant on your property to reduce your landscaping water needs. 

Rainwater Harvesting

Depending on how much water your family uses and the size of your property, rainwater harvesting could help you bridge the gap between rain storms. Rainwater harvesting — also known as rainwater or stormwater retention — is a category of equipment that captures and stores rainwater for future use before it pours into the local stormwater or sewage drains. It can range from intentional plantings, like green roofs or rain gardens, to storage systems like cisterns or rain barrels. 

Greywater Reuse

Similar to rainwater harvesting, reusing greywater involves capturing water that would otherwise head to your town’s storm drains. But while rainwater essentially goes from the clouds to a storage container, greywater is water that has been used in the home for showers, bathtubs, sinks and washing machines, immediately sent into the sewage system after light use. But while you might not want to reuse your children’s bathwater for your shower, that water is suitable for other uses around the home, like watering ornamental plants, car washing or toilet flushing.

Help Collect Data

Knowing when and where droughts occur — as well as how they impact an area — helps experts craft strategies. To that end, the National Drought Mitigation Center suggests joining the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network or other drought impact data collection efforts to help track current trends and different problems that surface as a result of dry conditions.

Follow Water Conservation Alerts and Mandatory Measures

Regardless of whether your area is technically experiencing a drought or not, the American Red Cross recommends you follow any water conservation measures — whether voluntary or mandatory — that your local government puts in place to help the wider community stretch the amount of available, potable water. They also provide a series of their own recommendations as to how you can conserve more water, like using gray water for your plants, plugging up any leaks or drips in your pipes or faucets and covering pools to reduce evaporation.

The post Drought 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.

Voters in Maine overwhelmingly rejected scuttling the state’s for-profit utilities in favor of a public power company that would have been governed by a board of elected and appointed officials.

The referendum was the nation’s first effort to replace all privately owned utilities with a statewide nonprofit option. The proposed new company, Pine Tree Power, would have bought out the assets of Maine’s two investor-owned utilities, CMP and Versant, using revenue bonds, taking over the distribution of 97 percent of the state’s electricity.

“I came here excited to be working every day on this campaign because I am terrified for my future and I need a utility that is going to be working for me,” Lucy Hochschartner, deputy campaign manager and spokesperson for Our Power, the group behind the ballot initiative, told the Portland Press Herald. “That would have been Pine Tree Power. It is not and never has been and never will be CMP and Versant.”

The measure, called Question 3, prompted heated debate in the months leading up to the election. Central Maine Power and Versant Power, the state’s dominant utilities, poured more than $40 million into a campaign opposing the referendum, outspending Pine Tree Power advocates 34 to 1. Political groups funded by the utilities and their parent companies mailed flyers and aired ads on TV, radio, and social media, urging Mainers to reject the measure, which would have effectively put the two companies out of business. 

Opponents argued that ditching the established players would introduce unwelcome political influence into the state’s energy system. They also said the cost of buying the utilities’ infrastructure — estimated at $8.25 billion to $13.5 billion — would lead to higher rates for customers and a decade or more of legal battles and bureaucratic delays. Our Power, the advocacy group formed to rally around the referendum, called such claims overblown, noting that they would have negotiated the lowest possible price and any challenges could have been resolved within three to four years.

The ballot measure was the culmination of years of Mainers’ frustration with CMP and Versant. Both have been accused of exorbitant rates, prolonged outages, and poor customer service. Over the years, state regulators have repeatedly fined CMP for improperly sending disconnection notices and misbilling hundreds of thousands of customers. 

Supporters of Pine Tree Power also accuse the utilities of lobbying to delay climate action. In recent years, clean energy advocates have railed against CMP for causing delays in connecting new solar projects to the grid. Our Power said a nonprofit, publicly owned utility would have better served Maine by representing residents’ interests while providing lower rates, improved reliability, and greater investment in expanding the grid to accommodate more renewables.

Question 3 supporters in Maine joined a growing movement of activists who argue that only a publicly owned and managed power grid can ensure a rapid transition to renewables while prioritizing the needs and interest of consumers. Public power advocates from San Diego to Rochester, New York, heralded the referendum as the biggest battle so far in the fight for public power and an inspiration for similar efforts in their own communities.

Hochschartner told Grist in October that even with a loss, the fight for public power in Maine is far from over. While the campaign doesn’t have any clear next steps mapped out, “What we do know is that our utilities have real problems, and we will continue to fight for the best path forward for the people of Maine,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Maine voters reject effort to create the first statewide public power company on Nov 8, 2023.