…and Pangolins

An article this week in The Los Angeles Times details the culling of the Pangolin, an armored anteater rather like a tropical aardvark. The thousand-or-so scales that protect the animal from its natural predators – big cats: lions, tigers, and leopards — are no match for poachers.

“…Because their meat is considered a delicacy and some believe that pangolin scales have medicinal qualities, 100,000 are estimated to be trafficked a year to China and Vietnam, amounting to over one million over the past decade. This makes it the most-trafficked animal in the world.”

Speaking of tigers, I’ve been fascinated by them since I was a boy, when I watched feeding time at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. One tiger felt a smaller cat had a juicier steak than he, and made a snarl so huge and powerful that — despite the stainless-steel bars, a ten-foot buffer, and a high wrought-iron fence — I leapt back in reflexive fear. They say tigers don’t roar but, whatever this was, it electrified me down to my toes.

Despite pangolin-like poaching, global tiger populations have been rising a bit the past few years, for the first time in more than a century. That’s good news but there is a long way to go. I now live in Asia where tigers are not just found in zoos, but actually roam around loose. Or used to.

In Vietnam, where I live, a 2016 World Wildlife Fund survey counted five in the wild — functionally extinct. Laos and Cambodia? Extinct. Burma has a few and some reside in Thailand.

Why this decimation?

“In China, tigers are considered symbols of courage, bravery, and strength,” according to (appropriately) the Daily Beast. “Traditional Chinese doctors prescribe tiger bones, eyeballs, and other parts to treat a variety of ailments ranging from poor eyesight to impotence. ‘Tiger Feasts’ are allegedly quite popular amongst corrupt government officials and elite businessmen who believe consuming the big cats improves performance across a wide range of activities from the boardroom to the bedroom.”

In addition some — notably in Tibet —also use tiger parts as part of their costume, according to a Save the Tiger report.

I had my nose rubbed in all this when I learned that a relative in the family I married into here in Vietnam once bought and ate a tiger. Status. Magical properties. Oy!

Tigers once inhabited a range from Turkey to the Sea of Japan, and south to Indonesia. Just 7% of that range remains and global population is down from 100,000 a century ago to less than 4,000 wild tigers now.

My family, of course, contributed directly to this.

Now, tigers have had their innings, too. It’s estimated that around a million people have been killed by tigers since 1500. They make scary neighbors, and it’s easy to see why one might be killed by frightened villagers. But a whole world without wild tigers, because we eat them or use them for trophies?

We may be headed there. The vision has moved beyond the wild and into herding tigers as others do cattle. There are, writes Terrence McCoy in The Washington Post, more than 200 tiger farms across Southeast Asia. With typical Asian pragmatism, they know using this method they can get the same value from the animals with far less danger and work.

“Nowhere else,” says McCoy, “is the animal’s commodification more complete than in tiger farming, where it is raised, butchered for parts and sold for tens of thousands of dollars.”

So what can we do?How do we ensure there are scaly pangolins and magnificent felines in our world for years to come?

The Save the Tiger Fund points to two solutions. The first, guarded preserves, is not working: tigers are being killed even in protected reserves. (Deforestation for palm oil or croplands ain’t helping either.)

The second is more nuanced: creating tiger corridors called Tiger Conservation Landscapes (TCL)[1] where tigers can remain close to humans but have the means to expand their range as young tigers mature, without having any one area become overpopulated.

There are several TCLs in operation, notably in India and the Himalayan regions “in the midst of some of the densest human populations in South Asia,” where tigers have traditionally lived cheek-by-jowl with humans.

This method links fragmented tiger ranges together through conserved corridors, so breeding pairs’ offspring can move to open ranges through preserved forest channels.

“The corridors are built to promote migration and/or dispersion of certain tiger populations giving them the ability to unite with other tigers,” and increase a depleted gene pool to support, “more diversity, higher birth rates, and higher cub survival.” This method increased the population in Northern India from around 1,400 in 2006 to 2,226 in the census of 2015, an excellent result.

However, success assumes a paradigm in which such corridors also “support and enhance local economies and livelihoods and so are in their self-interest.” (Emphasis is mine)

To those whose families and flocks are eaten by tigers, or who need pangolin meat for food, it’s difficult not to empathize, I get it. But as long as there is a rich pan-Asian class to want tigers for the wrong reasons, and a poor pan-Asian class to poach or farm them, this stuff will continue.

It’s clear that, until we educate people like my relative, lure them out of the cultural matrix in which disappearing species are either driven to extinction or exist only in menageries and tiger-meat farms, we will continue to lose ground.

Indians have a long tradition of vegetarianism and of holding certain animals sacred, and the TCL model seems to be going well there. It remains to be seen whether TCL will work in the rest of Asia. We’re going to have to find a way to make self-interest in preserving wildlife stronger than the urge to kill it.

Having heard one roar up close, I have no desire to confront a tiger in the wild. Nor — in Vietnam at least — am I likely to. But somehow I need to know they’re out there, in their huge ranges, vanishing in the tall forest undergrowth in spite of their flashy coats, feasting once again on an abundance of pangolin, terrifying villagers, and keeping the world from a loss deeper and more lasting than we’ve known.

References
[1]
(1) A TCL has evidence of one or more tigers over the last 10 years
(2) A TCL can consist of several adjacent blocks of habitat among which tigers can disperse, up to a distance of 4 km
(3) A TCL need not be restricted to nor contain protected areas, but instead includes the entire landscape over which tigers may disperse and become established
(4) A TCL must meet a minimum core area requirement for its largest block of habitat that is specific to the habitat-type in which it is found
(5) TCL boundaries are defined either where habitat ends with no suitable habitat within 4 km for the tiger to disperse to, or at country or ecoregion boundaries. [Source: DataBasin.org]

One pleasant afternoon there was a knock on our door. Several little neighborhood children looked up at me hopefully and asked, “can we play in your grass?” Just then the cat pushed past me and dove off the front porch, disappearing in the tall stalks with only a rustle and a quiver of stems to mark his passing.

I nodded and the kids also dove off and disappeared, though squeals of delight betrayed their whereabouts.

Later that afternoon the knocker sounded again, but it was a different delegation this time. These were not supplicants wanting to play, but a deputation of those same kids’ parents come to demand we do something about our lawn.  

The backstory is simple. My family had rented a house on a half-acre of hilly grass, dogwood trees, and bushes in a suburban town 40 miles north of New York City. Bucolic, a little stagnant and — with the exception of my parents — quite conservative. The rental included the use of a small riding mower and it was my twelve-year-old task to unplug from Crosby, Stills and Nash or King Crimson and tromp outside to mow the lawn every week.

One day something went ‘sproiing!!!’ under the chassis and I had to push the damn thing down a high berm and into the garage to await repairs. I reported in but my folks were commuting to the city and working late so they never quite got around to fixing the thing.

At some point my dad said, “Ah, the Hell with it, let’s just let it grow,” and in a few weeks we had a summer field three or four feet high, making our property an excellent candidate for a crop circle.

Bees, grasshoppers and many more small-fry made full use of it, and I found it pleasant to walk through the semi-wild landscape on my way to the driveway or my best friend’s house across the street. Field of Dreams it wasn’t, but it would do until Shoeless Joe or James Earl Jones came along.

But community pressure goosed us into getting the mower working, and I spent the next few days choking the blades trying to cut a channel through the brush, but no joy: The darned stuff was too tough, and our mower couldn’t manage. So my dad and I got in the car and trundled down to the local hardware store to buy four scythes, a type of instrument I had never beheld until that day.

It is interesting that the scythe has not changed one iota since the bronze age. Neolithic man could step out of his stone hut, take one look at a modern implement, heft it, and stomp off to cut wild grain. But it took us a while to get the hang of it, used as we were to things that went on-and-off with a switch.

Over that weekend we looked like a family newly tossed from Eden. There the four of us were – two highly educated and sedentary middle-class adults and two would-be hippy teenagers — ranged in a line, bent slightly at the waist, sweeping our arms back and forth, back and forth, until the lawn was mower-friendly once again and we were racked with aches in muscles we didn’t know we had. We were far more tired than suburbanites usually got.

Eventually the grass was down in pungent, unruly piles. The cat was thoroughly confused, and the neighborhood kids disappointed but order — and property values, apparently — had been restored.

We bagged the stuff up in 75-gallon black-plastic bags which, incredibly, are still on the market. There were stuffed sacks everywhere, looking like the giant sandworms of Dune, until Yours Truly hauled them to the curb to be swept away by our regular garbage truck. The neighbors would not have approved had we left it in fragrant heaps to compost itself.

Now, it never occurred to any of us that the clippings might be better left so. That natural lawn was perhaps better than manicured. That the habitat it provided was exactly what was needed for fauna already being pushed to the edge. We were worried about tigers and whales, and never dreamt we were on the brink of losing a million species: that Monarchs and honey bees and birds and the less-glamorous creatures that made up most of the world’s fauna were also in trouble — in part due to lawns like ours.

In fact, aside from an address reading ‘Windmill Drive’, we weren’t thinking green then at all: we were just lazy. And yet for all that, we were way ahead of our time.

We’d allowed our lawn return to its natural state and we’d turned to an old-world, non-mechanical, Pharaonic-era tool to cut it when modern machinery broke down. And maybe that’s the right course all around. Perhaps wild lawns — not even needing the scythe other than to swath from door to driveway, house to garden and porch to mailbox — are a step towards restoring our lands and soils.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries set a limit for arable land the planet can afford to put aside for agriculture at no more than 15% — though this number is contested by some.

“According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, 12.6% of the Earth’s land surface has been converted to cropland. A further 0.6% is covered with artificial surfaces such as cities,” etc., which puts us under the limit currently. Yet, as we’re seeing in the Amazon, Borneo, Vietnam, China and most of sub-Saharan Africa, forests are being denuded — cut or burned — for croplands and orchards at a terrifying rate. We’re certainly on pace to blow through that limit soon.

As for lawns — which are technically considered croplands — they occupy some 30-40 million acres of land in the U.S. alone, according to the Earth Institute at Columbia. That’s about 62,500 square miles, just a tad smaller than the entire state of Wisconsin.

Now, grass plants themselves take up carbon, but lawnmowers account for some 5 percent of the nation’s air pollution, making lawns a significant carbon source. It’s actually worse than this because, as National Geographic reported last year, “More than 75 percent of Earth’s land areas are substantially degraded… according to the world’s first comprehensive, evidence-based assessment.” This means less carbon storage, less water, fewer nutrients and on and on.

Why not let them go to seed or, as many in the American Southwest do, allow only native plants in their wild state?

Second, why not revert to hand-held, non-mechanical tools that can cut where necessary with no fuel spills and an excellent workout in the bargain? Even a push-mower needs no fuel and — as I recall all too well from other homes — offers tremendous exercise.

And third, leave the cut stuff lying there. Let it manage itself and return nutrients to the soil.

Two interesting concepts fall into my little protocol nicely. One is a movement towards farming front lawns rather than seeding them with pretty, but non-native and essentially valueless, grasses.

The second is carbon farming, a trend towards buying carbon-offset credits by paying ranchers in the Western U.S. to sequester carbon in their soil by plant husbandry rather than using it for grazing, allowing some company a bit more flexibility with their environmental footprint. In this way we can restore enormous tracts of tamed pastureland to a wild and carbon-storing state. These aren’t lawns, per se, but the local effect would be the same.

Organizations like the Western Sustainability Exchange are giving ranchers a chance to make money by sequestering the very carbon that is making standard ranching highly problematic. Here’s a link to an article from Montana Public Radio (MPR) on the topic.

I now live in a country where there are virtually no front lawns, and jungle flora riots from every chink and crevice. And yet the scythe is well-known here, in many smallholders’ rice fields. It’s a country of slender, hard-working, industrious and happy people. Frugal by necessity, many of them would love to have a tractor, but a scythe is within their means while a tractor is not.

Perhaps it’s not too late to learn a thing or two from them, and to realize that continuing with lawns as we’ve known them in my home country, is not living within our means.  

Thanks for reading. Your comments are very welcome.

Canada celebrated its bicentennial 52 years ago and threw a big party called Expo ’67 in Montreal. As an 8-year-old American, seeing Queen Elizabeth’s face on the money during an independence celebration was disconcerting, but the whirl of colors, the crush of onlookers, the fascination of the pavilions, and the joy of La Ronde — the theme park island in the St. Lawrence — swept all that aside. The whole place was magical.

In the American Pavilion — an enormous, Bucky Fuller-designed geodesic dome — we viewed the awesome Destination Moon, exhibit including a number of real Apollo capsules.

I also vividly recall the Telephone Pavilion, wherein “fair-goers were permitted to make videophone calls to volunteer recipients in other cities.” I was one of those so permitted and as I spoke with a fellow youngster across the Great Lakes in Chicago I thought, “This is going to be cool! Soon I’ll be able to talk face-to-face with anyone!”

In fact, it took 30 more years for cell phones to pop, but it did indeed come to pass. Yet there was another unique feature there that evoked the same expectation and anticipation: The monorails whispering past above our heads. There were three separate lines around the Exposition and for my part I could not wait to ride them to-and-from the various exhibits.

This, we were told, was the future of urban transport. Light, graceful, and smooth, with a short price and no need for tunnels, earthen berms, or heavy scaffolding. This would change everything. Walt Disney, for one, had exactly that vision.

After a trip to Germany where he viewed the Schwebebahn, the electric elevated railway topping a ravine in Wuppertal and “the oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars in the world,” Disney brought the concept to his theme parks. An unusually prescient man, he believed he had found, “a critical step toward building the community of tomorrow.” Both of us were wrong.

The revolutionary idea was that small, light trains could actually move above the populace without bisecting neighborhoods, shutting out the sun, or generating the characteristic shriek-and-roar of heavy rail.

They could even move between — and into — buildings, dropping folks at their homes and offices rather than on or below the street. Watching trains packed with tourists actually enter the American pavilion was one of the highlights of the trip.

As I rode the Expo’s monorail, my family had just recently moved north from Chicago — with its famous ‘L’ trains cruising around ‘The Loop’ on massive overhead structures — to Toronto, a city with both raucous underground subways and charming electrified trams vying with automobiles at street level. My dad took me to the end-of-the-line and back our first week in town, and it was a great way to meet a new city.

Five years later all aboard! again when we moved to New York City, a town always prepared to rumble both under and above the ground. Another fifteen years and I was on to my last U.S. destination, Boston, where the schizophrenic Green Lines can’t decide whether to tram along the streets, roar overhead, or rattle underground, and so do all three.

In each new place I wondered if light transport — such as the Expo’s monorails — might be the right people-moving option but, after a lifetime has passed, the concept still has not caught on. In the U.S. in particular, monorail has been relegated to novelty status, carrying tourists around amusement parks and ferrying travelers to the baggage claim (though at least one new and apparently successful monorail system was installed along the Las Vegas strip a few years ago).

Ryan Kennedy wrote in a treatise on the topic a few years ago that , “the real test for the acceptance and suitability of monorail rapid transit in North America will be Seattle’s 14-mile Green Line, where many of the best and most appropriate aspects of monorail technology such as visually pleasing aerials and full automation have been incorporated.”

If that’s true, then monorail has failed the test: after a bitter, years-long public battle, and a loss of $125 million, the Seattle project was scrapped. Now, Seattle already has a working monorail, built in 1962 for – you guessed it – a World’s Fair. It is still functioning along Fifth Avenue between Lower Queen Ann and Westlake Center downtown. But it doesn’t look like the rest will be built, and other cities have chosen standard light rail or subway extensions and buses to move people around. More buses in New York? Boston? Ho Chi Minh City? No thanks!

But while the North American public has never truly embraced these trains, Europe and Asia seem to think they are terrific. There are currently at least ten lines operating in Japan, including one in Tokyo carrying more than 100 million people annually. This train can take you from Haneda airport to downtown in 19 minutes.

There is also a heavily used monorail in Chongqing, China. And once again my own city — my current home, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, cries out for this type of solution. Somehow HCMC did not make the official list of most-congested cities, but when Waterloo, Ontario and Eindhoven, Netherlands, rank ahead of this place, said rankings are highly suspect. Love you too, Tacoma, but…really? Have you been to Vietnam?

Cars, rare up to now, are surging as a true middle class has formed. Five years ago, “Ho Chi Minh City had 6.4 million private vehicles, of which nearly six million were motorbikes.” We’re now up to 800K cars with total vehicles expected to reach 10 million next year.

Nine-million motorbikes darting in every direction are no joke, so a monorail system rising above the autos and the Vespa tailpipes would be an elegant solution to the burgeoning traffic in one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. 

After all, if monorail works at amusement parks and crowded terminals, and in Japanese and Chinese cities, too, it should work here. The idea is for transport to be out of the way, low profle, nimbly integrated into a cityscape, bypassing obstacles and being part of the view rather than in the way. Perfect! Let’s build one in ol’ Saigon!

But why hasn’t this concept flourished? Why did Disney’s famous prescience fail him this time? There is no single answer.

Magic Ears Dudebro — no, I didn’t make it up — writing in The Medium, claims there are three main negatives for the monorail: The cost of new infrastructure vs the cost of extending old infrastructure; Inability of interaction between systems — meaning regular trains can’t be integrated due to disparate rail types — and finally, the cost of a ticket, for trains of all types, has risen due to declining ridership in the U.S — though not in other places.

Seattle meanwhile, had imposed an auto tax that would have amounted to about $130 a year for most vehicles, which made the project tough for some to stomach. A cool idea, to have drivers pay for public transport even while encouraging them not to drive, but the plan foundered on public outcry.

Right now I’m pinning my hopes on my neighbor, Cambodia, where a feasibility study is currently underway for a monorail in perhaps the best-named capitol on the planet: Phnom Penh. Apparently, the Japanese have been invited there to look at building a monorail as a traffic solution for, as noted above, nowhere has monorail been embraced more warmly than in Japan.

Let’s hope it works in Cambodia. Maybe that will convince the Vietnamese to build one here. Anything that could potentially carry millions of Vietnamese downtown, quietly and without internal combustion, seems like a good idea. Personally, I’d be delighted to jump in a nice, smooth monorail at the end of my block on Trường Chinh Street and, 20 minutes later, find myself debarking inside the Bitexco tower in District 1. That’s quick, but there’s still plenty of time to chow down a Bánh Mì on the way!

Thanks for reading. Your comments are very welcome.

By Dan Kempner, Managing Editor, Valutus Sustainability R.O.I.
[Originally published Aug. 2019, VBlog]

Growing up, I loved my family’s edition of the Life Nature Science set, big hardcover volumes that were shilled by door-to-door salesmen. One was called The Birds I remember, another titled The Primates, then The Forests, Reptiles, and so on.

I cannot calculate all my hours after school in a brocade armchair soaking up facts about galaxies and tsunamis, baobabs and chimps, nor how eagerly I awaited each new volume.

In The Sea I read of those deadly cousins, the stonefish of Australia and the Lionfish, with its poisoned spines. This was useful later when I encountered the latter in a lagoon off the Sinai coast. Thanks to Time-Life I knew to look, but not touch!

I also learned of the exotic-sounding Sargasso Sea — the only one defined by currents, rather than by land. The name alone was spellbinding and the Time-Life photographers did not disappoint. A marvelous place teeming with curiosities, rare specimens and history. The Bermuda Triangle’s home is here, after all, and Columbus traversed the Horse Latitudes, reporting vast matts of vegetation riding the currents.

Known collectively as the North Atlantic Gyre, these currents host their namesake, sargassum seaweed, a tangled brown algal mass that floats atop the Sargasso’s relatively calm waters and houses an incredible array of marine life.

Artist and naturalist James Prosek wrote in National Geographic last month of cataloging, “900 tiny fish larvae, 30 amphipods, 50 snails, four anemones, two flatworms, six crabs, 20 shrimps, seven nudibranchs, more than a thousand calcifying worms, and abundant bryozoans, diminutive copepods, and other planktonic animals almost too numerous to count,” from a single, football-sized clump.

That is, as Prosek’s partner exclaimed, “3,000 creatures visible to the naked eye…” (Check out Prosek’s article, with stunning photos, here.) Yet something else now inhabits the floating, air-filled sargassum pods, something my books never mentioned, something new: plastic. Lots of it.

The gyre is essentially a whirlpool, sucking in anything not nailed down. In recent years this has created what has become known as the North Atlantic Garbage Patch.

Readers of this blog, and of Sustainability R.O.I., already know that Daniel caucused with heavy hitters from industry, NGOs, and others in said ‘patch,’ during the Ocean Plastic Leadership Summit (OPLS) aboard the RCS Resolute off Bermuda last Spring.

Our report of that trip is here, and there’s more at our Plastic Standard site, but one interesting note was the sargassum which they floated on, snorkeled in, and from which they collected a great deal of trash.

Normally sargassum is well-behaved but, in the Atlantic at least, it is acting out. Since 2011 the algae has been spreading until the Caribbean’s beaches are piled high with rotting, brackish, and noxious weeds.

This year the bloom has sprawled in an arc some 5,500 miles (8,850 km) long, spanning the Atlantic from the Gulf to Africa. The total mass is estimated at some 20 million tons.

Scientists have dubbed it The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, the largest algae bloom in the world. There was nothing like this in my old books! The idea of seaweed visible from space is totally nuts, I must admit, but on infra-red this stuff apparently shines like a hot bulb.

Resorts in the Caribbean are piled to a depth of eight or ten feet with sargassum, and it’s hurting business. (Here’s a link to an amazing photo of an algae-covered beach, and a great map of the bloom’s extent.) As to why? The science guys frame it this way:[1]

“…Recent increases and interannual variability after 2011 appear to be driven by upwelling off West Africa during boreal winter and by Amazon River discharge during spring and summer, indicating a possible regime shift and raising the possibility that recurrent blooms in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean Sea may become the new norm.”

The gist seems to be that warming is leading to higher sea levels and higher ocean temps, exacerbated by minerals from fertilizer and deforestation changing the chemical balance of the ocean. Perfect conditions for Sargassum to thrive.

If these guys are right, the resorts in the southern Atlantic are in serious long-term trouble. Removal is costly, although the bloom has given birth to a new industry. Sargassum-removal companies are competing heavily to sweep all those beaches clean.

It’s unclear how problematic the sargassum will be at sea. It may be valuable as food and shelter for a host of species. Or, it may choke other plants and animals as it dies, sinks and cuts off sunlight to the depths.

Those books I leafed through as a lad made no mention of preternatural algal blooms or floating islands of trash, so they may need some additional volumes to round out the series. Ocean Plastic? The Climate? Renewables, perhaps? In any case, we need to dust off and update those old tomes to include these recent turns of events.

Happily, there are ocean summits, and armies of brilliant, passionate people dedicated to restoring and protecting as much as possible of the extraordinary natural world as portrayed in those magnificent, if outdated, volumes. Even so I’d give a lot to be curled back up in that armchair with Eurasia or The Desert on my knees, when the only garbage patches were the ones I had to put on the curb before bedtime — or else.

Thanks for reading. Your comments are very welcome. You can comment here or email me at dkempner@valutus.

References:
[1] Excerpted from the abstract of The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, Science 05 Jul 2019:
Vol. 365, Issue 6448, pp. 83-87 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw7912