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The return of the American bison is an environmental boon — and a logistical mess

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Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Five miles doesn’t seem far on the vast, windblown plains of the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. There’s a high point on the dirt road leading to Danny Barcus’ ranch on the east side of the reservation, tucked within the Two Medicine River valley. When Barcus drives up there, as he did one morning in May, he can see about that far in any direction, the peaks of Glacier National Park rising in the distance. That’s how Barcus, a member of the Blackfeet tribe himself, spotted the buffalo — nearly 200 by his estimate — where they weren’t supposed to be that spring day, their chocolate-brown humps peppering one of his grass-green wheat fields. He called his dogs, hopped in his off-road vehicle, and sped over. The buffalo had crashed through his barbed wire fence and were nibbling on the winter wheat he was growing for his cattle. Over the last year, a punishing drought had settled over the plains, and Barcus had begun to feel helpless, worrying over bills he wasn’t sure he could pay. “My savings account is the grass I saved last year,” he said. “I can’t afford to feed it to the neighbor’s buffalo.”  Tribal buffalo grave in Danny Barcus’s pasture in April. Courtesy of Danny Barcus In this case, Barcus’ neighbor is the Blackfeet tribe, which keeps buffalo on the pasture it owns next to his property for part of the year. The Blackfeet herd is one of many across the continent, part of a growing movement to return buffalo, once nearly extinct, to tribal lands. For many Plains tribes like the Blackfeet, buffalo used to be the foundation of diet, commerce, and spiritual life. Bringing them back represents an effort to reconnect with that heritage and, in doing so, restore endangered grasslands. But managing the wild, ever-roaming animals is complicated by the fact that the land is now criss-crossed with contemporary borders between states, national parks, and reservations. Barcus and the dogs, Pepper and Tucker, guided the runaway buffalo back onto the tribe’s land. Then he began repairing the downed fence: a broken post here, a snarled wire there. Poor management was the root of the problem, Barcus thought. The tribe had let the herd grow too big, so the animals had eaten their way through the pasture, and when there was no food left, they ambled onto Barcus’ ranch where there was plenty more.  It wasn’t that he had a problem with buffalo. “We understand the spirituality behind the buffalo,” said Barcus, speaking of himself and his wife. Two years ago, the couple allowed the Horn Society, a spiritual organization, to host a Sun Dance on their land; buffalo are a central symbol in the Blackfeet’s most important religious ceremony. But it was a different matter when they started eating into Barcus’ business. “We also have families, employees, and our own animals to take care of,” he said.  Danny and Cindy Barcus, left pose for a photo near green grassy fields. Right, their dogs, Pepper and Tucker, rest after a long day. Courtesy Danny Barcus A six-hour drive south of the reservation, another herd of bison rambled through Yellowstone National Park, eating, on the move, unaware of where they should or shouldn’t be. The scientific name for the species is Bison bison, but many Native Americans use “buffalo,” a remnant of the 17th-century French fur traders who likened the creatures to the buffalo found in Africa and Asia. Yellowstone bison are central to the tribal restoration effort: Animals from the park help populate herds like the Blackfeet’s. After bison were driven to near-extinction in the late 1800s, a handful of the remaining several hundred were taken to Yellowstone for protection. Their lineage represents the last true North American bison, since ranchers interbred many bison with cattle in the following years. As a result, the animals from Yellowstone are prized above all.  “Those animals were descendants of the animals that provided for our people,” said Troy Heinert, a member of the Rosebud Sioux and executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a federally chartered organization that coordinates the return of buffalo to Indian Country. “There’s a connection there between Indigenous people and those animals that can’t be replicated in other places.”  As summers grow hotter and drier and rainfall more erratic, restoring buffalo to tribal lands could provide people with a healthy source of food and boost the resilience of plains ecosystems. “When you talk about buffalo restoration, it’s also land restoration, water resource restoration, and cultural revitalization,” said Heinert, who is also a Democratic state senator in South Dakota. “This is so much bigger than just the animal itself.”  The effort will be shaped by what happens next at Yellowstone National Park, which is working on an update to a 22-year-old bison management plan — a process that will determine how many animals can live in the park and how many can be transferred to tribes. But that plan must balance growth with a slew of complications: a nasty bacterial disease, cattle ranchers and politicians in Montana, and the bison’s very own nature to wander. For hundreds of thousands of years, bison thundered across the continent in the tens of millions, from the dry plains of northern Mexico to the snow-covered grasslands of south-central Canada. The animals shaped the land and lives around them: By grazing, they cleared the way for a diverse mix of plants to grow and altered the path of wildfires; their droppings propelled nutrient cycles that fed a host of smaller critters; their cast-off winter coats provided insulation for the nests of burrowing owls and mountain plovers. And, for generations, Indigenous peoples hunted them across the prairies, relying on buffalo as a source of food, clothing, tools, and ceremonial objects. When Europeans arrived in North America, bison could be found across the width of the continent. Colonization set the bison’s swift decline in motion. Livestock belonging to European immigrants overgrazed and eroded the grasslands where bison fed. European-introduced horses made bison-hunting more efficient for Plains tribes, which had previously hunted on foot and been forced from their traditional hunting territory, while booming fur and hide markets overseas encouraged indiscriminate hunting in the 19th century. The demand meant hide hunters killed millions of bison each year. Cycles of drought added even more pressure as the bison’s territory shrank. A historical map shows the ranges affected by the extermination of the American bison over time. Library of Congress By the late 1860s, the U.S. Army was encouraging this mass slaughter. Killing bison would undo the economies of entire Indigenous nations, part of the Army’s strategy to push Native Americans onto reservations and clear the way for railroads and westward settlement. In 1868, Major General Phillip Sheridan, tasked with forcibly relocating Great Plains tribes, wrote to a fellow general that the best strategy was to “make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.”  What had begun as a trend toward overhunting escalated into state-sponsored eradication. The bison population collapsed over the next decade. By 1884, just a few hundred remained in the wild.  An illustration from 1871 shows people shooting buffalo from a train on the Kansas-Pacific Railroad. Library of Congress Today, there are roughly 400,000 bison across North America, with the vast majority being raised as livestock. Since their history is intertwined with the prairies, ecologists view their re-introduction as key to restoring the country’s grasslands, an estimated half of which has already been lost to cattle, crops, and development. More bison roaming the land would mean the return of wallows, bowls in the dirt that can stretch more than 10 feet across. They’re created when the 2,000-pound animals roll and toss themselves on the ground.  Wallowing is a useful form of pest control: It keeps the number of flies and ticks down on individual animals. But it also sets off a cascade of events that benefit local wildlife. Sticky seeds often hitch a ride on bison coats, and when the animals roll around, the seeds fall and sprout into a carpet of deep-rooted grasses that lock carbon in the earth. In the spring, the dusty wallows collect water, providing a breeding ground for frogs and salamanders in a landscape where ponds are otherwise scarce.  The ecological benefits of wallows can persist for decades. Jason Baldes, a member of the Eastern Shoshone who now manages the tribal buffalo program for the National Wildlife Federation, remembers riding with his father through the Wind River Mountain Range as a child and spotting relic wallows from buffalo long gone. They were overgrown with brush and wildflowers, but the dips in the land were still easy to spot. Later, as a graduate student at Montana State University, Baldes studied old wallows and their relationship with culturally significant plants. He found that several species — yarrow, tall bluebells, and arnica — tended to thrive in them.  Baldes, who is also the secretary for the InterTribal Buffalo Council, thinks a shift in the way the United States governs land is necessary for the widespread return of buffalo. Conventional farming, the cattle industry, oil and gas companies — “these imposed systems have not been beneficial for tribal communities,” he said. “It’s probably time to try something different that incorporates more of our values and beliefs. That would be to more holistically manage our lands. We do that by restoring the keystone species.”  Since bison once lived across such a wide range of conditions, ecologists think they may be well suited for some of the challenges brought on by climate change. That’s in stark contrast to cattle, which were brought to North America by the Spanish in the 1500s. Cattle have since replaced bison’s dominance on the landscape, with an estimated 30 million living in the U.S. today. Cattle seek shade and water at much lower temperatures than bison. They tend to find a good spot to eat and stay put, mowing the grass down to a nub. Bison, which evolved on the treeless plains, are much more comfortable at high temperatures. When they cool off, they prefer to catch a hilltop breeze. They’re not inclined to overgraze because they’re always moving. As a result, they do much less damage to plants and delicate streams and rivers.  A group of buffalo graze in a pasture on Danny Barcus’s land. Courtesy of Danny Barcus That’s not to say bison are immune to heat. Over the last 40,000 years of gradual warming, their average body size has shrunk by around 36 percent, said Jeff Martin, the research director at South Dakota State University’s Center of Excellence for Bison Studies, who has studied fossils to understand how the animals have changed over time. By contrast, cattle have swelled about that much over the last 30 years — a product of hormones, diet, and selective breeding for size. A larger animal is increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, which became sorely evident this summer after a grueling heatwave killed thousands of cattle in Kansas.  “A smaller body is thrifty in drought and heat conditions,” Martin said. “Bison, as they become smaller and smaller, become thriftier and may be able to survive some of these harsh environments.” Given all these advantages, researchers believe bison could support ecosystems and communities well into the future — even one defined by a volatile climate. “Bison have seen warming and cooling,” Martin said. “They’ve seen drought, they’ve seen wet years. Their genetic fingerprints have the potential to reconcile those environmental differences, if we allow them to do so.” That, of course, is the hard part. As bison numbers climb, the wild animals are returning to a continent, now riddled with fences, highways, and state borders, that has gotten used to operating without them.  For most of the last century, the Yellowstone bison, recovering from near-extinction, rarely wandered beyond the park. But as the herds grew, they began to adopt their ancient migratory behavior. Every winter, they trekked from the high plateaus of the park down to the foothills and river valleys of West Yellowstone and Gardiner, Montana. At these lower elevations, less snow on the ground means food is easier to find.  By the 1990s, however, the population had climbed above 4,000 — up from 23 animals in the park nearly a century before. Ranchers and state officials in Montana saw roaming bison as an existential threat to cattle, the state’s top agricultural commodity, because bison carry brucellosis, a bacterial disease that can cause hoofed animals, including cattle, to miscarry. Montana’s brucellosis-free status was at risk: Losing it would force the government to spend millions on testing the cattle sent to other states.  Bison create a traffic jam in Montana. National Park Service / Neal Herbert Montana sued the National Park Service in 1995, and it took a court-mediated settlement to create the Interagency Bison Management Plan five years later. The plan set up a partnership between state, federal, and tribal agencies, which would, according to the agreement, “maintain a wild, free-ranging population of bison and address the risk of brucellosis transmission to protect the economic interest and viability of the livestock industry in Montana.”  The arrangement set a target population of 3,000 and requires that the partners agree on how many animals will be culled each year (it ranges from 300 to 900). Yellowstone has a few ways to manage the herd. Mostly, it ships surplus animals to slaughter. A handful of tribes have treaty rights to hunt buffalo once the animals have stepped beyond the park borders. Yellowstone also uses a transfer program — after 30 years of lobbying from the InterTribal Buffalo Council — in which bison are sent to herds on designated lands. Before they are moved, the animals must quarantine for up to three years to make sure they’re brucellosis-free.  In January, the National Park Service announced it would begin the process of updating Yellowstone’s 22-year-old bison management program. According to the federal agency, the science behind the agreement is outdated. For one thing, there’s never been a case of bison-to-cattle brucellosis, even though thousands of bison have crossed into Montana over the years. When the disease has spilled from wildlife to livestock, researchers say elk, which freely roam the area around Yellowstone, are the more likely culprit.  The Park Service now believes Yellowstone can safely sustain even bigger herds. Increasing the number of bison in the park would enhance the animal’s ability to fill its ecological roles while continuing to support tribal transfer and hunting programs.  “We are working to ultimately reduce reliance on shipment to slaughter,” Yellowstone’s superintendent, Cam Sholly, told the Associated Press. The park says its new program will guide how the animals are managed only within the park. If the herds are allowed to grow, however, that likely means more bison will venture outside its borders. Yellowstone sends bison to quarantine at Fort Peck before they wind up on tribal lands Grist Over the years, the interagency partners have allowed Yellowstone’s bison numbers to exceed their original target. At 6,000 animals this summer, the population is higher than it’s ever been. “If you look at it cumulatively over time, we’ve made some really good strides, and we’ve achieved our objectives as a group,” Sholly said during an interagency meeting in April. “I think it is important that we do everything in our powers to continue that progress and continue to make this group relevant.” (The park declined requests for an interview with Sholly.) The Park Service laid out a number of options for the next era of management. One sticks to the status quo: a range of 3,500 to 5,000 animals. The most ambitious would cease slaughter entirely, aiming for a population of 8,000, create more opportunities for hunting, and send more bison to tribes. The InterTribal Buffalo Council, made up of 76 member nations across 20 states, is lobbying for more transfers — to keep fostering herds like the Blackfeet’s, next to Danny Barcus’ ranch. “Our ultimate goal, and our goal always has been, is to get as many live buffalo out of Yellowstone and to tribal lands as we can,” said Troy Heinert, the InterTribal Buffalo Council’s executive director. Robbie Magnan (left), director of the Fort Peck Fish and Wildlife Department, and Chris Geremia (right), Yellowstone bison biologist, prepare bison for transfer. National Park Service / Jacob W. Frank Even if the park adopts a more ambitious target, major obstacles remain to expanding the transfer program. An estimated 60 percent of Yellowstone bison have been exposed to brucellosis, which first came from cattle that were brought to the area and was transmitted to local wildlife in the early 1900s. Baldes, from the National Wildlife Federation, says that means tribes need to maximize the remaining 40 percent. But Yellowstone’s quarantine facility can only handle around 80 animals, while an average of 800 bison are slaughtered each winter. “Right now, there’s animals going to slaughter indiscriminate of whether they have brucellosis,” he said. “That’s an atrocity.”  Yellowstone recently obtained funds to expand its capacity to 200. Tribes also have the ability to quarantine around 600 animals at a state-of-the-art facility on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast Montana. At the moment, however, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, which oversees the country’s brucellosis eradication program, only allows it to be used for the last year of quarantine — so-called “assurance testing” that comes after two years of repeated tests. The Council has advocated for Fort Peck to host the earlier phases, which would help alleviate the bottleneck posed by Yellowstone’s smaller center.  Trucks carrying bison leave Yellowstone’s quarantine facility for Fort Peck. National Park Service / Jacob W. Frank In February, Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, rejected all of the Park Service’s proposals and told the agency to go back to the drawing board, Yellowstone Public Radio reported. The population increases, Gianforte wrote, “are absurd and unsupported by both science and lay observation.” Even the status quo option, he continued, has “proven too much for [Yellowstone] to handle.” Sholly, Yellowstone’s superintendent, offered to work with the state to develop another alternative. Yellowstone has been frank about the messiness of bison politics. “Many people don’t like the fact that animals from a national park are sent to slaughter. We don’t like it either,” its website says. “But we cannot force adjacent states to tolerate more migrating bison.” Some 600 miles northeast of Yellowstone, sprawled over wide, blooming prairies, the Fort Peck quarantine facility and its roughly 400-head herd are points of pride for Suzanne Turnbull, a Dakota member of the buffalo advocacy group Pté, named after the Dakota-Lakota word for female buffalo. Pté’s latest project is a four-mile trail that would wind through the 15,000-acre pasture, dotted with benches and storytelling stations where visitors could learn about the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribes’ relationship with buffalo. (The benches won’t be secured so that the animals, which like to scratch their heads on rocks and trees, can rub against the wood without breaking them.)  Turnbull says she feels a strong spiritual connection to the animals. She had been at the pasture on a cold and blustery day in November 2014, when a group of Yellowstone buffalo arrived in semitrucks to join the growing Fort Peck herd. A kindergarten teacher at the time, Turnbull said she’d felt called to take the day off to greet the new arrivals. The field buzzed as reporters readied their cameras and tribal members sang. “You’re back,” she thought, as she watched their approach. “We’ll take care of you so we can all get well together.” The trucks backed into the pasture, and the animals bolted out, their hooves clanging on the metal ramp before they sprinted away.  A Yellowstone bison runs out of a transfer vehicle after being released at Fort Peck. National Park Service / Jacob W. Frank As part of her work with Pté, Turnbull often takes students and visitors, as well as her nieces and nephews, to the pasture so they can experience being with the wild, hulking animals like she has. “I see them as medicine,” she said, thinking of her own troubles, which she’d only found peace with through her spiritual practice. “I see them serving a purpose to bring back the foundation for storytelling, of our culture and language, our values, our kinship.”  On the other side of Montana, at the Blackfeet Reservation, Joe Kipp, chairperson of the Blackfeet Nation Stock Growers Association, also has a longstanding connection to the reintroduction effort. In the 1980s, he’d been involved with bringing the first wild buffalo — surplus animals from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota — to the Blackfeet Reservation. These days, he and his wife make the drive south to Yellowstone every winter to hunt the animals; Kipp’s wife is diabetic, and the only meat she eats is bison. (Compared to beef, bison has more protein and minerals, and much less fat and cholesterol.)  Still, Kipp is unhappy with how the tribe has managed its herd in an austere landscape where many make their living raising cattle. Ranchers deal with ferocious wind storms, bitter winters, crippling droughts: Business margins are tight. He’s heard from plenty of disgruntled ranchers like Danny Barcus, who rent grazing lands for their livestock — the current rate for a cow-calf pair is around $40 a month — only to have the tribe’s buffalo break in and eat the grass intended for their cattle. “It gets to be a sore point pretty fast,” Kipp said. Buffalo graze in a Fort Peck pasture. Courtesy of Suzanne Turnbull Kipp worries what will happen now that bison are being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, a move he fears would undermine his treaty hunting rights. He’s also content with Yellowstone’s current management and doesn’t see the need to expand the park’s herd. “People envision, ‘Oh, we want bison that are running across the landscape like before,’” he said. “But we didn’t have 50,000-pound trucks and trains running and cars and all these things. It’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t think it’s based upon reality.”  This spring, Kipp, Barcus, and other Blackfeet cattle ranchers met with their tribal council and asked them to make changes to the herd’s management. After years of frustration, they felt the council had been receptive to their concerns, and this summer, the tribe began a new culling program to manage its herd.  Follow bison’s historic range east, into the heart of America’s dairyland, and you’ll find a small farm tucked in Wisconsin’s Northwoods where some Yellowstone bison have found a home. After quarantining at Fort Peck, they arrived at the Forest County Potawatomi farm through an InterTribal Buffalo Council transfer in 2020. The Forest County Potawatomi is one of the Council’s easternmost members, and it has embraced bison as a way to provide its people with a healthy source of protein. On a bright July day, the farm’s manager, Dave Cronauer, followed a worn path between two pastures surrounded by a wall of pine. Bugs buzzed in the tall grass and wildflowers waved in the breeze. Half the fields were for cattle, the other half for bison. Once the animals had chewed the turf down to a few inches, they would be guided to the next paddock in order to give the plants a chance to regrow and deepen their roots, a practice known as rotational grazing.  Although the COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in the food system, it also “proved how valuable we were,” Cronauer said. The tribe opened its farm store in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, when shelves at neighboring grocery stores were bare from people stocking up on goods. But the farm store still had meat to sell. The ability of local, small-scale operations like theirs to withstand wider shocks, Cronauer said, could prove to be vital for a future in which warming temperatures and extreme weather will strain conventional agriculture and cattle farming. Cronauer went searching for the cattle. Bison and cattle were fundamentally different animals, he explained. Tap a bison on the head and it charges you; tap a cow on the head and it retreats. Bison are still wild, and he admired them for it. He spotted the cattle. They were difficult to see from the path, but on that summer day, they had congregated at the water, taking sanctuary in the shade under a thicket of trees. Across the way, the small herd of bison bathed in the heat of the afternoon sun, wagging their tails. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The return of the American bison is an environmental boon — and a logistical mess on Nov 9, 2022.

American bison are back on the rise. The problem is, they don't respect fences.

Five miles doesn’t seem far on the vast, windblown plains of the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. There’s a high point on the dirt road leading to Danny Barcus’ ranch on the east side of the reservation, tucked within the Two Medicine River valley. When Barcus drives up there, as he did one morning in May, he can see about that far in any direction, the peaks of Glacier National Park rising in the distance.

That’s how Barcus, a member of the Blackfeet tribe himself, spotted the buffalo — nearly 200 by his estimate — where they weren’t supposed to be that spring day, their chocolate-brown humps peppering one of his grass-green wheat fields. He called his dogs, hopped in his off-road vehicle, and sped over. The buffalo had crashed through his barbed wire fence and were nibbling on the winter wheat he was growing for his cattle. Over the last year, a punishing drought had settled over the plains, and Barcus had begun to feel helpless, worrying over bills he wasn’t sure he could pay. “My savings account is the grass I saved last year,” he said. “I can’t afford to feed it to the neighbor’s buffalo.” 

a herd of buffalo stand on a wide golden field
Tribal buffalo grave in Danny Barcus’s pasture in April. Courtesy of Danny Barcus

In this case, Barcus’ neighbor is the Blackfeet tribe, which keeps buffalo on the pasture it owns next to his property for part of the year. The Blackfeet herd is one of many across the continent, part of a growing movement to return buffalo, once nearly extinct, to tribal lands. For many Plains tribes like the Blackfeet, buffalo used to be the foundation of diet, commerce, and spiritual life. Bringing them back represents an effort to reconnect with that heritage and, in doing so, restore endangered grasslands. But managing the wild, ever-roaming animals is complicated by the fact that the land is now criss-crossed with contemporary borders between states, national parks, and reservations.

Barcus and the dogs, Pepper and Tucker, guided the runaway buffalo back onto the tribe’s land. Then he began repairing the downed fence: a broken post here, a snarled wire there. Poor management was the root of the problem, Barcus thought. The tribe had let the herd grow too big, so the animals had eaten their way through the pasture, and when there was no food left, they ambled onto Barcus’ ranch where there was plenty more. 

It wasn’t that he had a problem with buffalo. “We understand the spirituality behind the buffalo,” said Barcus, speaking of himself and his wife. Two years ago, the couple allowed the Horn Society, a spiritual organization, to host a Sun Dance on their land; buffalo are a central symbol in the Blackfeet’s most important religious ceremony. But it was a different matter when they started eating into Barcus’ business. “We also have families, employees, and our own animals to take care of,” he said. 

A six-hour drive south of the reservation, another herd of bison rambled through Yellowstone National Park, eating, on the move, unaware of where they should or shouldn’t be. The scientific name for the species is Bison bison, but many Native Americans use “buffalo,” a remnant of the 17th-century French fur traders who likened the creatures to the buffalo found in Africa and Asia. Yellowstone bison are central to the tribal restoration effort: Animals from the park help populate herds like the Blackfeet’s. After bison were driven to near-extinction in the late 1800s, a handful of the remaining several hundred were taken to Yellowstone for protection. Their lineage represents the last true North American bison, since ranchers interbred many bison with cattle in the following years. As a result, the animals from Yellowstone are prized above all. 

“Those animals were descendants of the animals that provided for our people,” said Troy Heinert, a member of the Rosebud Sioux and executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a federally chartered organization that coordinates the return of buffalo to Indian Country. “There’s a connection there between Indigenous people and those animals that can’t be replicated in other places.” 

As summers grow hotter and drier and rainfall more erratic, restoring buffalo to tribal lands could provide people with a healthy source of food and boost the resilience of plains ecosystems. “When you talk about buffalo restoration, it’s also land restoration, water resource restoration, and cultural revitalization,” said Heinert, who is also a Democratic state senator in South Dakota. “This is so much bigger than just the animal itself.” 

The effort will be shaped by what happens next at Yellowstone National Park, which is working on an update to a 22-year-old bison management plan — a process that will determine how many animals can live in the park and how many can be transferred to tribes. But that plan must balance growth with a slew of complications: a nasty bacterial disease, cattle ranchers and politicians in Montana, and the bison’s very own nature to wander.

For hundreds of thousands of years, bison thundered across the continent in the tens of millions, from the dry plains of northern Mexico to the snow-covered grasslands of south-central Canada. The animals shaped the land and lives around them: By grazing, they cleared the way for a diverse mix of plants to grow and altered the path of wildfires; their droppings propelled nutrient cycles that fed a host of smaller critters; their cast-off winter coats provided insulation for the nests of burrowing owls and mountain plovers. And, for generations, Indigenous peoples hunted them across the prairies, relying on buffalo as a source of food, clothing, tools, and ceremonial objects. When Europeans arrived in North America, bison could be found across the width of the continent.

Colonization set the bison’s swift decline in motion. Livestock belonging to European immigrants overgrazed and eroded the grasslands where bison fed. European-introduced horses made bison-hunting more efficient for Plains tribes, which had previously hunted on foot and been forced from their traditional hunting territory, while booming fur and hide markets overseas encouraged indiscriminate hunting in the 19th century. The demand meant hide hunters killed millions of bison each year. Cycles of drought added even more pressure as the bison’s territory shrank.

map shows range of bison marked in red and blue
A historical map shows the ranges affected by the extermination of the American bison over time. Library of Congress

By the late 1860s, the U.S. Army was encouraging this mass slaughter. Killing bison would undo the economies of entire Indigenous nations, part of the Army’s strategy to push Native Americans onto reservations and clear the way for railroads and westward settlement. In 1868, Major General Phillip Sheridan, tasked with forcibly relocating Great Plains tribes, wrote to a fellow general that the best strategy was to “make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.” 

What had begun as a trend toward overhunting escalated into state-sponsored eradication. The bison population collapsed over the next decade. By 1884, just a few hundred remained in the wild. 

illustration of buffalo running away from a train
An illustration from 1871 shows people shooting buffalo from a train on the Kansas-Pacific Railroad. Library of Congress

Today, there are roughly 400,000 bison across North America, with the vast majority being raised as livestock. Since their history is intertwined with the prairies, ecologists view their re-introduction as key to restoring the country’s grasslands, an estimated half of which has already been lost to cattle, crops, and development. More bison roaming the land would mean the return of wallows, bowls in the dirt that can stretch more than 10 feet across. They’re created when the 2,000-pound animals roll and toss themselves on the ground. 

Wallowing is a useful form of pest control: It keeps the number of flies and ticks down on individual animals. But it also sets off a cascade of events that benefit local wildlife. Sticky seeds often hitch a ride on bison coats, and when the animals roll around, the seeds fall and sprout into a carpet of deep-rooted grasses that lock carbon in the earth. In the spring, the dusty wallows collect water, providing a breeding ground for frogs and salamanders in a landscape where ponds are otherwise scarce. 

The ecological benefits of wallows can persist for decades. Jason Baldes, a member of the Eastern Shoshone who now manages the tribal buffalo program for the National Wildlife Federation, remembers riding with his father through the Wind River Mountain Range as a child and spotting relic wallows from buffalo long gone. They were overgrown with brush and wildflowers, but the dips in the land were still easy to spot. Later, as a graduate student at Montana State University, Baldes studied old wallows and their relationship with culturally significant plants. He found that several species — yarrow, tall bluebells, and arnica — tended to thrive in them. 

Baldes, who is also the secretary for the InterTribal Buffalo Council, thinks a shift in the way the United States governs land is necessary for the widespread return of buffalo. Conventional farming, the cattle industry, oil and gas companies — “these imposed systems have not been beneficial for tribal communities,” he said. “It’s probably time to try something different that incorporates more of our values and beliefs. That would be to more holistically manage our lands. We do that by restoring the keystone species.” 

Since bison once lived across such a wide range of conditions, ecologists think they may be well suited for some of the challenges brought on by climate change. That’s in stark contrast to cattle, which were brought to North America by the Spanish in the 1500s. Cattle have since replaced bison’s dominance on the landscape, with an estimated 30 million living in the U.S. today. Cattle seek shade and water at much lower temperatures than bison. They tend to find a good spot to eat and stay put, mowing the grass down to a nub. Bison, which evolved on the treeless plains, are much more comfortable at high temperatures. When they cool off, they prefer to catch a hilltop breeze. They’re not inclined to overgraze because they’re always moving. As a result, they do much less damage to plants and delicate streams and rivers. 

a line of buffalo far away
A group of buffalo graze in a pasture on Danny Barcus’s land. Courtesy of Danny Barcus

That’s not to say bison are immune to heat. Over the last 40,000 years of gradual warming, their average body size has shrunk by around 36 percent, said Jeff Martin, the research director at South Dakota State University’s Center of Excellence for Bison Studies, who has studied fossils to understand how the animals have changed over time. By contrast, cattle have swelled about that much over the last 30 years — a product of hormones, diet, and selective breeding for size. A larger animal is increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, which became sorely evident this summer after a grueling heatwave killed thousands of cattle in Kansas

“A smaller body is thrifty in drought and heat conditions,” Martin said. “Bison, as they become smaller and smaller, become thriftier and may be able to survive some of these harsh environments.”

Given all these advantages, researchers believe bison could support ecosystems and communities well into the future — even one defined by a volatile climate. “Bison have seen warming and cooling,” Martin said. “They’ve seen drought, they’ve seen wet years. Their genetic fingerprints have the potential to reconcile those environmental differences, if we allow them to do so.” That, of course, is the hard part. As bison numbers climb, the wild animals are returning to a continent, now riddled with fences, highways, and state borders, that has gotten used to operating without them. 

For most of the last century, the Yellowstone bison, recovering from near-extinction, rarely wandered beyond the park. But as the herds grew, they began to adopt their ancient migratory behavior. Every winter, they trekked from the high plateaus of the park down to the foothills and river valleys of West Yellowstone and Gardiner, Montana. At these lower elevations, less snow on the ground means food is easier to find. 

By the 1990s, however, the population had climbed above 4,000 — up from 23 animals in the park nearly a century before. Ranchers and state officials in Montana saw roaming bison as an existential threat to cattle, the state’s top agricultural commodity, because bison carry brucellosis, a bacterial disease that can cause hoofed animals, including cattle, to miscarry. Montana’s brucellosis-free status was at risk: Losing it would force the government to spend millions on testing the cattle sent to other states. 

bison walk near a car as seen in a rear view mirror
Bison create a traffic jam in Montana. National Park Service / Neal Herbert

Montana sued the National Park Service in 1995, and it took a court-mediated settlement to create the Interagency Bison Management Plan five years later. The plan set up a partnership between state, federal, and tribal agencies, which would, according to the agreement, “maintain a wild, free-ranging population of bison and address the risk of brucellosis transmission to protect the economic interest and viability of the livestock industry in Montana.” 

The arrangement set a target population of 3,000 and requires that the partners agree on how many animals will be culled each year (it ranges from 300 to 900). Yellowstone has a few ways to manage the herd. Mostly, it ships surplus animals to slaughter. A handful of tribes have treaty rights to hunt buffalo once the animals have stepped beyond the park borders. Yellowstone also uses a transfer program — after 30 years of lobbying from the InterTribal Buffalo Council — in which bison are sent to herds on designated lands. Before they are moved, the animals must quarantine for up to three years to make sure they’re brucellosis-free. 

In January, the National Park Service announced it would begin the process of updating Yellowstone’s 22-year-old bison management program. According to the federal agency, the science behind the agreement is outdated. For one thing, there’s never been a case of bison-to-cattle brucellosis, even though thousands of bison have crossed into Montana over the years. When the disease has spilled from wildlife to livestock, researchers say elk, which freely roam the area around Yellowstone, are the more likely culprit. 

The Park Service now believes Yellowstone can safely sustain even bigger herds. Increasing the number of bison in the park would enhance the animal’s ability to fill its ecological roles while continuing to support tribal transfer and hunting programs. 

“We are working to ultimately reduce reliance on shipment to slaughter,” Yellowstone’s superintendent, Cam Sholly, told the Associated Press. The park says its new program will guide how the animals are managed only within the park. If the herds are allowed to grow, however, that likely means more bison will venture outside its borders.

Map showing migration route of bison
Yellowstone sends bison to quarantine at Fort Peck before they wind up on tribal lands Grist

Over the years, the interagency partners have allowed Yellowstone’s bison numbers to exceed their original target. At 6,000 animals this summer, the population is higher than it’s ever been. “If you look at it cumulatively over time, we’ve made some really good strides, and we’ve achieved our objectives as a group,” Sholly said during an interagency meeting in April. “I think it is important that we do everything in our powers to continue that progress and continue to make this group relevant.” (The park declined requests for an interview with Sholly.)

The Park Service laid out a number of options for the next era of management. One sticks to the status quo: a range of 3,500 to 5,000 animals. The most ambitious would cease slaughter entirely, aiming for a population of 8,000, create more opportunities for hunting, and send more bison to tribes. The InterTribal Buffalo Council, made up of 76 member nations across 20 states, is lobbying for more transfers — to keep fostering herds like the Blackfeet’s, next to Danny Barcus’ ranch.

“Our ultimate goal, and our goal always has been, is to get as many live buffalo out of Yellowstone and to tribal lands as we can,” said Troy Heinert, the InterTribal Buffalo Council’s executive director.

two men stand near a big truck with holes in it
Robbie Magnan (left), director of the Fort Peck Fish and Wildlife Department, and Chris Geremia (right), Yellowstone bison biologist, prepare bison for transfer. National Park Service / Jacob W. Frank

Even if the park adopts a more ambitious target, major obstacles remain to expanding the transfer program. An estimated 60 percent of Yellowstone bison have been exposed to brucellosis, which first came from cattle that were brought to the area and was transmitted to local wildlife in the early 1900s. Baldes, from the National Wildlife Federation, says that means tribes need to maximize the remaining 40 percent. But Yellowstone’s quarantine facility can only handle around 80 animals, while an average of 800 bison are slaughtered each winter. “Right now, there’s animals going to slaughter indiscriminate of whether they have brucellosis,” he said. “That’s an atrocity.” 

Yellowstone recently obtained funds to expand its capacity to 200. Tribes also have the ability to quarantine around 600 animals at a state-of-the-art facility on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast Montana. At the moment, however, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, which oversees the country’s brucellosis eradication program, only allows it to be used for the last year of quarantine — so-called “assurance testing” that comes after two years of repeated tests. The Council has advocated for Fort Peck to host the earlier phases, which would help alleviate the bottleneck posed by Yellowstone’s smaller center. 

a line of trucks cross snowy lands
Trucks carrying bison leave Yellowstone’s quarantine facility for Fort Peck. National Park Service / Jacob W. Frank

In February, Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, rejected all of the Park Service’s proposals and told the agency to go back to the drawing board, Yellowstone Public Radio reported. The population increases, Gianforte wrote, “are absurd and unsupported by both science and lay observation.” Even the status quo option, he continued, has “proven too much for [Yellowstone] to handle.” Sholly, Yellowstone’s superintendent, offered to work with the state to develop another alternative.

Yellowstone has been frank about the messiness of bison politics. “Many people don’t like the fact that animals from a national park are sent to slaughter. We don’t like it either,” its website says. “But we cannot force adjacent states to tolerate more migrating bison.”

Some 600 miles northeast of Yellowstone, sprawled over wide, blooming prairies, the Fort Peck quarantine facility and its roughly 400-head herd are points of pride for Suzanne Turnbull, a Dakota member of the buffalo advocacy group Pté, named after the Dakota-Lakota word for female buffalo. Pté’s latest project is a four-mile trail that would wind through the 15,000-acre pasture, dotted with benches and storytelling stations where visitors could learn about the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribes’ relationship with buffalo. (The benches won’t be secured so that the animals, which like to scratch their heads on rocks and trees, can rub against the wood without breaking them.) 

Turnbull says she feels a strong spiritual connection to the animals. She had been at the pasture on a cold and blustery day in November 2014, when a group of Yellowstone buffalo arrived in semitrucks to join the growing Fort Peck herd. A kindergarten teacher at the time, Turnbull said she’d felt called to take the day off to greet the new arrivals. The field buzzed as reporters readied their cameras and tribal members sang. “You’re back,” she thought, as she watched their approach. “We’ll take care of you so we can all get well together.” The trucks backed into the pasture, and the animals bolted out, their hooves clanging on the metal ramp before they sprinted away. 

a bison runs away from a truck after release
A Yellowstone bison runs out of a transfer vehicle after being released at Fort Peck. National Park Service / Jacob W. Frank

As part of her work with Pté, Turnbull often takes students and visitors, as well as her nieces and nephews, to the pasture so they can experience being with the wild, hulking animals like she has. “I see them as medicine,” she said, thinking of her own troubles, which she’d only found peace with through her spiritual practice. “I see them serving a purpose to bring back the foundation for storytelling, of our culture and language, our values, our kinship.” 

On the other side of Montana, at the Blackfeet Reservation, Joe Kipp, chairperson of the Blackfeet Nation Stock Growers Association, also has a longstanding connection to the reintroduction effort. In the 1980s, he’d been involved with bringing the first wild buffalo — surplus animals from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota — to the Blackfeet Reservation. These days, he and his wife make the drive south to Yellowstone every winter to hunt the animals; Kipp’s wife is diabetic, and the only meat she eats is bison. (Compared to beef, bison has more protein and minerals, and much less fat and cholesterol.) 

Still, Kipp is unhappy with how the tribe has managed its herd in an austere landscape where many make their living raising cattle. Ranchers deal with ferocious wind storms, bitter winters, crippling droughts: Business margins are tight. He’s heard from plenty of disgruntled ranchers like Danny Barcus, who rent grazing lands for their livestock — the current rate for a cow-calf pair is around $40 a month — only to have the tribe’s buffalo break in and eat the grass intended for their cattle. “It gets to be a sore point pretty fast,” Kipp said.

a lot of buffalo on a green field
Buffalo graze in a Fort Peck pasture. Courtesy of Suzanne Turnbull

Kipp worries what will happen now that bison are being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, a move he fears would undermine his treaty hunting rights. He’s also content with Yellowstone’s current management and doesn’t see the need to expand the park’s herd. “People envision, ‘Oh, we want bison that are running across the landscape like before,’” he said. “But we didn’t have 50,000-pound trucks and trains running and cars and all these things. It’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t think it’s based upon reality.” 

This spring, Kipp, Barcus, and other Blackfeet cattle ranchers met with their tribal council and asked them to make changes to the herd’s management. After years of frustration, they felt the council had been receptive to their concerns, and this summer, the tribe began a new culling program to manage its herd. 

Follow bison’s historic range east, into the heart of America’s dairyland, and you’ll find a small farm tucked in Wisconsin’s Northwoods where some Yellowstone bison have found a home. After quarantining at Fort Peck, they arrived at the Forest County Potawatomi farm through an InterTribal Buffalo Council transfer in 2020. The Forest County Potawatomi is one of the Council’s easternmost members, and it has embraced bison as a way to provide its people with a healthy source of protein.

On a bright July day, the farm’s manager, Dave Cronauer, followed a worn path between two pastures surrounded by a wall of pine. Bugs buzzed in the tall grass and wildflowers waved in the breeze. Half the fields were for cattle, the other half for bison. Once the animals had chewed the turf down to a few inches, they would be guided to the next paddock in order to give the plants a chance to regrow and deepen their roots, a practice known as rotational grazing. 

Although the COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in the food system, it also “proved how valuable we were,” Cronauer said. The tribe opened its farm store in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, when shelves at neighboring grocery stores were bare from people stocking up on goods. But the farm store still had meat to sell. The ability of local, small-scale operations like theirs to withstand wider shocks, Cronauer said, could prove to be vital for a future in which warming temperatures and extreme weather will strain conventional agriculture and cattle farming.

Cronauer went searching for the cattle. Bison and cattle were fundamentally different animals, he explained. Tap a bison on the head and it charges you; tap a cow on the head and it retreats. Bison are still wild, and he admired them for it. He spotted the cattle. They were difficult to see from the path, but on that summer day, they had congregated at the water, taking sanctuary in the shade under a thicket of trees. Across the way, the small herd of bison bathed in the heat of the afternoon sun, wagging their tails.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The return of the American bison is an environmental boon — and a logistical mess on Nov 9, 2022.

Read the full story here.
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How Rapa Nui Lost a Tree, Only to Have It Sprout Up Elsewhere

Before the toromiro disappeared from the island, at least two men grabbed seeds from the last remaining plant and brought them home

The tree that goes by toromiro has been a fragile expat for more than a half-century. Little Sophora toromiro, is far from home, no longer present on Rapa Nui, the Pacific island where it evolved. Also known as Easter Island, or Isla de Pascua in Spanish, Rapa Nui is a speck of land in the Pacific, 2,200 miles from the west coast of Chile. The tiny island encompasses just 63 square miles, and it is quite flat, with a maximum elevation of less than 1,700 feet. The last date of the toromiro’s tenure on Rapa Nui is uncertain. Some accounts say it went extinct in the wild in 1960. Others say that it was gone by 1962, when Karl Schanz, a German meteorologist, clambered down to see the tree in the crater where it had last been spotted, and it was gone. Was it removed? Did it die, tip over and return to the earth? We will never know. Although the toromiro is gone from Rapa Nui, it survives elsewhere through luck—and pluck. Over the past century, the intermittent collecting of the toromiro’s seeds and their replanting in mainland locations have given the species purchase elsewhere. Each tree is a member of a small diaspora, with only a handful surviving in about a dozen different public and private botanical gardens around the world. This is a story of survival, persistence and, perhaps in some ways, dumb luck—a tree in decline that was rescued and whose seeds were sent to other places. Mention Easter Island to almost anyone, and if they’ve heard of it, they’ve likely heard of its statues. Imprinted in the popular imagination are its enigmatic, massive stone sculptures, or moai. Curious investigators have speculated for more than two centuries about how more than 900 of these mysterious statues—the largest being more than 30 feet tall and weighing over 80 tons—might have been moved to locations around the island, traveling miles from the site where they were quarried. The toromiro, though, is an invisible tree on the island, its story known to very few, and its existence marked more by its absence than its presence. The tree does have many close relatives. The Sophora genus is speciose, as biologists say—a crowded taxon consisting of some 60 different species, including a dozen closely related oceanic ones scattered across the Pacific. The toromiro is more of a shrub than a tree, and none of its close relatives is large—at least from descriptions recorded over the past century. The northernmost outpost for the Sophora genus is in Hawaiʻi, where Sophora chrysophylla is the primary food source for the palila, a critically endangered honeycreeper. Without S. chrysophylla, known as mamane in Hawaiian, the palila would not have survived the last century as its range dwindled. The subterranean pollen record reveals that the toromiro was abundant across much of Rapa Nui, where many other now-extinct plants also thrived. Paleobotanical evidence shows that the tree’s presence on the island dates back at least 35,000 years. Its seeds are both buoyant and salt-resistant, and they probably first arrived by water, floating onto the island, probably from another Pacific island, and then it did what species do: continued its evolutionary journey in a new place to become the tree we know today. But even before the toromiro disappeared from the island, it had been without a lot of endemic companions. Fewer than 30 indigenous seed-bearing plant species have survived on Rapa Nui to the present day, and weeds, along with naturalized, cultivated shrubs, are now the main plants growing there. The toromiro did not disappear precipitously but experienced a protracted decline. Humans arrived in Rapa Nui around the 12th century, probably not long after Polynesians reached the Hawaiian archipelago. Some hundreds of years after humans’ arrival, the island experienced a painful drop in biodiversity, and its carrying capacity plummeted as the native palm forests disappeared, replaced by grasslands. Food grew scarce, and occupants fled, thinning down to around 100 Rapa Nui at one point in the 19th century. In his deterministic 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond claimed the occupants were lousy land managers. His analysis of why Rapa Nui became denuded of its plant life is now out of date, as later studies have revealed the island’s complexities. To sketch the story of the weakening grip of native plant life on Rapa Nui as a predictable story of human arrogance intersecting with a small, remote and evolutionarily vulnerable spit of land is tempting, but the tale is more nuanced than that. Natives there recorded centuries-old histories of careful but intermittent conservation strategies. Some scholars have asserted that the Little Ice Age stressed resources on the island between the 16th and 19th centuries, leading to the disappearance of palms and other important contributors to the islanders’ activities and well-being. Others have pointed to prolonged droughts, while still others have continued to argue that humans were highly complicit in the island’s declining biodiversity. Were groves of palm trees decimated to create systems for rolling the giant stone carvings from quarry to coastline, where most of them have sat for many hundreds of years? Perhaps. However the palms disappeared, their loss seems to have been a factor in the tumbling downturn of the island’s other trees, including the toromiro. The palms had made up the great majority of Rapa Nui’s tree cover, some 16 million trees that blanketed about 70 percent of the island. Some controversy remains about what particular species of palm flourished, but many believe it was Paschalococos disperta, the Rapa Nui palm. Jaime Espejo, a Chilean botanist who’s written extensively about the toromiro, noted that it probably lived in the undergrowth of the palm, lodged in an ancient ecosystem that no longer exists. Paleobotanists and archaeologists studying the island spotted the widespread loss of the palms in their investigations. At the same time, they found that the number of fish bones found in waste middens around the island dropped as fishing boats could no longer be constructed in large numbers from trees. The loss of access to fish must have been a devastating turn, because the human residents’ main proteins came from the sea. Soil erosion, likely exacerbated by deforestation and agriculture, led to further losses of the tree. Hooved animals, arriving with European explorers in the 18th century, were also certain culprits in the toromiro’s decline and disappearance. In Hawaiʻi, sheep consume that archipelago’s species of Sophora. Another creature implicated in the destruction of much of both Rapa Nui’s and Hawaiʻi’s plant life was the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), as well as the bigger ship rat (Rattus rattus) and Norwegian rat (Rattus norvegicus). These rats, landing on new island homes and able to reproduce quickly, found abundant food in the form of native seeds, plants and invertebrates—and no predators. They laid waste to plant life with shocking speed. An aerial view of a toromiro in Barcelona, Spain Daderot via Wikimedia CC0 Early European accounts and pollen records tell us that by about 1600, forests in the island’s craters had disappeared, and, with that, the toromiro declined into long-term scarcity and then extirpation. The New Zealand anthropologist Steven Fischer has noted that the last forest was probably cut for firewood around 1640, making wood the most valuable commodity on the island. Driftwood became precious. So scarce was wood, Fischer observes, that the pan-Polynesian word rakau, meaning “tree,” “timber” or “wood,” came to mean “riches” or “wealth” in the old Rapa Nui language—a meaning not present in any other use of the word elsewhere in Polynesia, including in Tahiti, Tonga, Hawaiʻi and New Zealand. It’s ironic that after the deforestation of the island’s trees, new linguistic meanings sprouted out of the island’s impending botanical doom. Amid these centuries-long difficulties, but long before the toromiro disappeared, a wood-based culture thrived. The Rapa Nui had a particular passion for carving; beyond their giant stone statues, they favored the toromiro for its durable and fine-grained wood and reddish hue. Although primarily used for ritual objects, the toromiro was also serviceable for building material in houses, household utensils, statuettes and paddles. These artifacts survive in museums around the world. Some of them are hundreds of years old, and they might provide unexpected addenda to our understandings of the tree’s deeper history, offered up through dendrochronological analysis. Studying the annual growth rings in the wood could provide details we lack: the pace of growth of the wood, environmental pressures acting on the tree, its ultimate size and many of the other clues revealed through laboratory work with wood specimens. Part of our lack of knowledge about the tree’s wood is because it has always been uncommon on the island, at least since Western contact. Rapa Nui came with inherent geographic disadvantages for plant survival, including few sheltered habitats with steep hillsides or deep ravines in which toromiro could remain hidden away from humans. The three volcanic craters on the island are the only such hiding places. In 1911, the Chilean botanist Francisco Fuentes noted that the toromiro was rare, only to be found in Rano Kau, the largest of the craters. The Swedish botanist Carl Skottsberg, who also worked on Hawaiian flora, visited Rano Kau in 1917 and found only a single specimen. A compelling global exploration of nature and survival as seen through a dozen species of trees. The final contact with the tree on its native soil occurred when the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl collected seeds from the last surviving example. This was likely the same tree that Skottsberg had found in the shelter of Rano Kau. The egg-shaped crater is about a mile across and has its own microclimate, largely out of the winds and weather, and protected from grazing ungulates by a rock formation. Foot traffic remained down in the last century, as little else lives in the crater that can be harvested or cut down. Innumerable swampy pockets of water make the area difficult to traverse. A beautiful, multicolored, shallow lake of open water and floating mats of peat cover much of the bottom of the crater. There, the tiny toromiro held on. Heyerdahl, who had already been traveling around the Pacific Ocean in the 1940s, became famous, or infamous, for floating a radical new theory: that the islands in the Pacific had been populated initially by American Indians from the mainland of South America, rather than by people from Asia or from other Polynesian islands. In 1947, he launched an expedition with a primitive raft named Kon-Tiki and made a 5,000-mile journey, heading west from Peru. What’s often lost in the voluminous writings about Heyerdahl and his oceanfaring obsessions was his interest in Rapa Nui. Björn Aldén, a Swedish botanist with the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, became friends with Heyerdahl and has worked to return the toromiro to its native land. In a letter to Björn, Heyerdahl decried the “tankelöse treskjaerere,” or “thoughtless woodcutters.” He noted how good it felt to have helped to save the species by collecting a handful of seeds that hung from the tree’s sole remaining branch. Heyerdahl couldn’t recount the exact date, or even the year, but thought it was sometime in late 1955 or early 1956. Heyerdahl handed the seeds off to paleobotanist Olaf Selling in Stockholm. They went to Gothenburg from there. Locals have a strain of national pride in Gothenburg for their role in the tree’s cultivation and survival. But recently, researchers in Chile discovered that another botanist preceded Heyerdahl in getting seeds off the island. Efraín Volosky Yadlin, an Argentinian-born immigrant, participated in the first agronomic studies on Rapa Nui. Sent there by the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture in the early 1950s, Volosky Yadlin collected seeds, apparently from the same tree that Heyerdahl would come upon a few years later, and proceeded to carry out his own propagation tests on the toromiro. Now the tree remains far afield, surviving in about a dozen locations around the world, mostly in botanical gardens including in Chile, in London and in southern France. Ultimately, researchers want to return the toromiro to Rapa Nui. But the tree still confronts challenges to surviving on its native ground, including a lack of genetic diversity and degraded soil on Rapa Nui. Past efforts to reestablish the tree have failed, but botanists are doing their best to overcome these hurdles. More studies will help researchers understand just what it will take to help the tree take root back on Rapa Nui and successfully end a long and difficult voyage. Excerpted from Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future by Daniel Lewis. Published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox. A Note to our Readers Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.

Disruptive innovation is the key to plastics sustainability

Plastic plays a critical role in virtually all industries, from agriculture and construction to healthcare and manufacturing. Time magazine has called plastic one of the four materials (along with cement, steel, and ammonia) without which modern societies would not be possible. However, as global production of this cheap, lightweight, and highly versatile material doubled during the past two decades, plastic consumption grew even faster, according to the OECD, creating significant sustainability challenges. Meeting those challenges will require disruptive innovation from companies both large and small. “Many companies are under significant pressure from employees, customers, regulators, and investors to show progress toward sustainability goals,” says Paige Marie Morse, sustainability lead at AspenTech, an industrial software provider. “For the companies that make plastics, they also feel a responsibility to meet the increasing demand for resources among a growing population, but without sacrificing sustainability.” KEY TRENDS EMERGING Three noteworthy trends in the plastics sustainability movement are legislation and mandates for increased use of recycled content in manufactured products and elimination of single-use plastics, efforts to make packaging more easily recyclable, and growing recognition that mechanical recycling alone will not be enough to meet the growing demand for recycled raw materials, says Kevin Quast, global  business lead for Honeywell’s plastics circularity business. Honeywell UOP, which develops technology and processes for the petrochemical industry, has been an innovator for more than a century. “We have been known for helping our customers transform and transition as society, technology, and regulatory environments have evolved,” Quast says. “We are not just focused on plastics circularity, we are investing in and commercializing solutions for energy storage, clean hydrogen and carbon sequestration, as well as green and renewable fuels, bioplastics, and other areas related to circularity, sustainability, and environmental improvement.” Quast notes that about 60% of Honeywell’s research and development (R&D) budget goes toward creating sustainability solutions, such as its UpCycle Process Technology. This new technology expands the types of plastics that can be recycled and creates recycled polymer feedstock (RPF), which is then used to make recycled plastics with a lower carbon footprint. SIZE DOESN’T MATTER  Plastics circularity is on the radar of most companies these days, regardless of size or where on the plastics chain they reside. Jay Baker, CEO of Jamestown Plastics, a contract packaging business based in Brocton, New York, is responding to sustainability trends by proactively assuming responsibility, before regulation demands it, he says. For example, he recently developed a circularity option to keep the plastic trays used by one of his customers out of the landfill. “We collect the old trays, grind them up, and send them back to the extruder,” Baker explains. “The extruder then makes ‘new’ recycled material, and we use that material to form recycled plastic trays for this customer and keep those expended trays out of the waste stream for as long as possible.” Across the country in Palo Alto, California—and at the other end of the size spectrum—HP is taking multiple steps to improve its plastics circularity. “The elimination of unnecessary plastic is the first priority when it comes to our circularity strategy,” says James McCall, HP’s chief sustainability officer. “As of 2021, we achieved a 44% reduction in single-use plastic packaging, towards our 2025 goal of a 75% reduction compared to 2018.” Additionally, HP has committed to a goal of using 30% post-consumer recycled plastic across its personal systems and print product portfolio by 2025, and it aims to achieve 75% circularity for its products and packaging by 2030. WORLDWIDE CONCERN Plastics sustainability is a global challenge requiring global solutions, of course. Braskem, an international petrochemical company headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is working with other innovation leaders around the world to do just that. “We believe that the transition from a linear to a circular economy is key to driving sustainable development in the plastics production chain,” says Antônio Queiroz, vice president of innovation, technology, and sustainable development. “Promoting sustainable development in our operations is in our DNA. We are consistently focused on developing sustainable solutions that improve people’s lives through chemicals and plastics.” Braskem has committed to a 15% reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and to becoming a carbon neutral company by 2050. It was the first company in the petrochemical industr y to develop a large-scale biopolymer from sugar cane, and it develops partnerships focused on both mechanical and advanced recycling. It has multiple ventures underway in its home country, the latest being Cazoolo, an innovation hub to help customers, brands, designers, startups, and universities develop more sustainable packaging in an effort to improve plastics circularity and reduce environmental impact. Braskem is also partnering with like-minded enterprises around the world in its push for plastics sustainability. Its investment in U.S.-based Nexus Circular, an advanced recycling company, is part of its effort to expand its circular polymer portfolio. Such collaborations have helped in Braskem’s development of two new polypropylene grades with post-consumer recycled (PCR) content that can be used in a wide range of FDA food contact applications. BETTING ON INNOVATION “We know that in order to achieve real sustainability, we also need to bet on innovation when creating new business,” says Queiroz. Braskem increased its R&D budget by 50% this year, and it maintains multiple centers for disruptive innovation in Brazil and the U.S. It has partnered with Danish company Topsoe to develop a greener version of MEG, a component for producing PET plastic bottles that is widely used in plastics manufacturing. Derived directly from sugars, this green MEG has the potential to disrupt the polyethylene value chain as it significantly improves its carbon footprint. “We believe transformation is everywhere,” says Queiroz. “It’s time to use our potential to establish a new relationship with our ecosystem and tackle climate change as our planet’s greatest challenge. We understand that the more people and organizations are engaged, the more we can do to build a better world for current and future generations.”

Plastic plays a critical role in virtually all industries, from agriculture and construction to healthcare and manufacturing. Time magazine has called plastic one of the four materials (along with cement, steel, and ammonia) without which modern societies would not be possible. However, as global production of this cheap, lightweight, and highly versatile material doubled during the past two decades, plastic consumption grew even faster, according to the OECD, creating significant sustainability challenges. Meeting those challenges will require disruptive innovation from companies both large and small. “Many companies are under significant pressure from employees, customers, regulators, and investors to show progress toward sustainability goals,” says Paige Marie Morse, sustainability lead at AspenTech, an industrial software provider. “For the companies that make plastics, they also feel a responsibility to meet the increasing demand for resources among a growing population, but without sacrificing sustainability.” KEY TRENDS EMERGING Three noteworthy trends in the plastics sustainability movement are legislation and mandates for increased use of recycled content in manufactured products and elimination of single-use plastics, efforts to make packaging more easily recyclable, and growing recognition that mechanical recycling alone will not be enough to meet the growing demand for recycled raw materials, says Kevin Quast, global  business lead for Honeywell’s plastics circularity business. Honeywell UOP, which develops technology and processes for the petrochemical industry, has been an innovator for more than a century. “We have been known for helping our customers transform and transition as society, technology, and regulatory environments have evolved,” Quast says. “We are not just focused on plastics circularity, we are investing in and commercializing solutions for energy storage, clean hydrogen and carbon sequestration, as well as green and renewable fuels, bioplastics, and other areas related to circularity, sustainability, and environmental improvement.” Quast notes that about 60% of Honeywell’s research and development (R&D) budget goes toward creating sustainability solutions, such as its UpCycle Process Technology. This new technology expands the types of plastics that can be recycled and creates recycled polymer feedstock (RPF), which is then used to make recycled plastics with a lower carbon footprint. SIZE DOESN’T MATTER  Plastics circularity is on the radar of most companies these days, regardless of size or where on the plastics chain they reside. Jay Baker, CEO of Jamestown Plastics, a contract packaging business based in Brocton, New York, is responding to sustainability trends by proactively assuming responsibility, before regulation demands it, he says. For example, he recently developed a circularity option to keep the plastic trays used by one of his customers out of the landfill. “We collect the old trays, grind them up, and send them back to the extruder,” Baker explains. “The extruder then makes ‘new’ recycled material, and we use that material to form recycled plastic trays for this customer and keep those expended trays out of the waste stream for as long as possible.” Across the country in Palo Alto, California—and at the other end of the size spectrum—HP is taking multiple steps to improve its plastics circularity. “The elimination of unnecessary plastic is the first priority when it comes to our circularity strategy,” says James McCall, HP’s chief sustainability officer. “As of 2021, we achieved a 44% reduction in single-use plastic packaging, towards our 2025 goal of a 75% reduction compared to 2018.” Additionally, HP has committed to a goal of using 30% post-consumer recycled plastic across its personal systems and print product portfolio by 2025, and it aims to achieve 75% circularity for its products and packaging by 2030. WORLDWIDE CONCERN Plastics sustainability is a global challenge requiring global solutions, of course. Braskem, an international petrochemical company headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is working with other innovation leaders around the world to do just that. “We believe that the transition from a linear to a circular economy is key to driving sustainable development in the plastics production chain,” says Antônio Queiroz, vice president of innovation, technology, and sustainable development. “Promoting sustainable development in our operations is in our DNA. We are consistently focused on developing sustainable solutions that improve people’s lives through chemicals and plastics.” Braskem has committed to a 15% reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and to becoming a carbon neutral company by 2050. It was the first company in the petrochemical industr y to develop a large-scale biopolymer from sugar cane, and it develops partnerships focused on both mechanical and advanced recycling. It has multiple ventures underway in its home country, the latest being Cazoolo, an innovation hub to help customers, brands, designers, startups, and universities develop more sustainable packaging in an effort to improve plastics circularity and reduce environmental impact. Braskem is also partnering with like-minded enterprises around the world in its push for plastics sustainability. Its investment in U.S.-based Nexus Circular, an advanced recycling company, is part of its effort to expand its circular polymer portfolio. Such collaborations have helped in Braskem’s development of two new polypropylene grades with post-consumer recycled (PCR) content that can be used in a wide range of FDA food contact applications. BETTING ON INNOVATION “We know that in order to achieve real sustainability, we also need to bet on innovation when creating new business,” says Queiroz. Braskem increased its R&D budget by 50% this year, and it maintains multiple centers for disruptive innovation in Brazil and the U.S. It has partnered with Danish company Topsoe to develop a greener version of MEG, a component for producing PET plastic bottles that is widely used in plastics manufacturing. Derived directly from sugars, this green MEG has the potential to disrupt the polyethylene value chain as it significantly improves its carbon footprint. “We believe transformation is everywhere,” says Queiroz. “It’s time to use our potential to establish a new relationship with our ecosystem and tackle climate change as our planet’s greatest challenge. We understand that the more people and organizations are engaged, the more we can do to build a better world for current and future generations.”

‘Earth To Beer’: Oregon, US breweries join project to brew a beer with environment in mind

The Portland-born effort asks breweries to source environmentally responsible ingredients for a beer then donate to a local environmentally focused nonprofit. Also in this beer news roundup, North Portland's Mayfly throws a three-day party this weekend for its fifth anniversary.

Editor’s note: This is a re-publication of the Oregon Brews and News weekly beer and cider newsletter, written by Oregonian/OregonLive beer writer Andre Meunier. To subscribe to have the newsletter delivered every Thursday at noon to your email inbox, go to oregonlive.com/newsletters and sign up.***Eric Steen is a brewing industry renaissance man. From marketing, to media relations, to event planning, to beer expert TV appearances, he does it all. And, more importantly, he’s a great human who cares about people.One of Steen’s passions is conservation and environmentalism, and in the past he has brought his interests together with projects like Cheers to the Land, The Oregon I Am, and Beers Made By Walking. Now, Steen is organizing Earth To Beer, a national movement with a goal for participating breweries to create a packaged beer that’s better for the planet. The initiative asks breweries to intentionally source environmentally responsible ingredients for their beer, then donate a portion of proceeds to a local environmentally focused nonprofit.Steen’s work is highly recognized and respected in the brewing world, so it’s no surprise that more than 35 breweries are on board, including Oregon names like Hopworks, Steeplejack, Little Beast, Level and Ferment. They will begin releasing beers starting on April 1, and continue through Earth Day on April 22.“We created Earth To Beer to advance the conversation about the importance of sourcing sustainable ingredients and supporting good agriculture,” Steen said. “While this is a national campaign in terms of the range of breweries involved and the audience we’re trying to connect with, it’s very much a local initiative in terms of the very real impacts we expect and hope to see.”Each brewery picks its own style to make, based on what sustainable ingredients they choose to use and what beer they know their fans will want. They also receive a unique, eye-catching label, created by Earth To Beer and designed to align with individual brewery’s branding while employing a common Earth to Beer layout supporting the movement’s overall look and feel.The project also offers scholarships — funded by Earth To Beer sponsor Arryved — to BIPOC-owned and newly opened breweries to cover costs.“Because beer is an agricultural product, I’ve been inspired by the relationship between conservation and craft beer for years,” Steen said. “It just feels like a really organic pathway to make some real change and work with a lot of people who often have the passion to make more sustainable choices but need help establishing a jumping off point.”Cheers to the project and to Eric. Start looking for Earth To Beer cans soon, and get a full list of participating breweries and sponsors at earthtobeer.com.Mayfly buzzing at 5 years oldRyan Born opened Mayfly Taproom & Bottle Shop nearly a year to the day before COVID-19 shut the city down, making its first year — always tough for a new business — even harder.“Pivot after pivot, the roller coaster ride is real,” Born says. “My original manager Morgan talked about it not being the kind of roller coaster you ride at a big theme park, but the kind at a state fair that they just assembled and is being operated by some 17-year-old kid who got just a few hours of training. It feels like it might all come crumbling down any minute.”Well said, Ryan and Morgan, but the crew at the excellent North Portland beer bar has made it to five years, and they’re ready to party for three days this weekend, from Friday through Sunday.“We made it to 5 thanks to our ridiculously amazing community,” Born says. Here are all the details:Friday: The day will feature “our friends Taylor and Kailin from Steward’s Valley Farm,” Born says. “They are amazing folks with a great little family farm in Oregon City.” The first feature will be a special one-off keg of Babi from Living Häus Beer Co., a Czech-style black lager that is easy drinking and refreshing with just a touch of roast character and a toasty malt bill. It’s been infused with a Steward’s Valley roasted coffee from Guji, Ethiopia. The second feature will be part of Little Brother PDX’s pop-up menu, featuring some overwintered kale as well as dried beans and chilies from last year’s harvest. Their full menu consists of their “Looper Burger,” house bratwurst, braised kale and beans, and banana bread with chocolate chips and hazelnuts.Saturday: Champs Burgers will be debuting a new burger grind made from 50-day dry-aged NY strips, Drag Bingo with Peachy Springs, and Yovu Beer from Nate Yovu, a North Portlander who brewed up a special batch of what he’s calling a “White Lager” —  a sort of Cold IPA/Hazy hybrid. It’s called Ghostman and clocks in at 5%.Sunday: This is Mayfly’s fifth year partnering with Yoga+Beer, so what better way to start its sixth year with a morning practice. Tickets available here. Machetes.PDX makes psychedelic looking marbled “quesadillas.” This Mexico City street food is a long tortilla (shaped like a machete blade) that you can fill with up to four guisados (braised or stewed meats, vegetables, etc).“The road to 5 hasn’t been easy,” Born says, “but treating Mayfly (and our plaza) as a community space to host pop-ups, book clubs, makers markets and many other events has allowed us to support so many additional small/tiny businesses in our community, and the relationships that have been formed have helped us get to where we are today.“We look forward to hosting many more of these events and continuing to bring people together over a good pint, and a great plate of food,” he says.Noon-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday, noon-9 p.m. Sunday. 8350 N. Fenwick Ave.Best of Craft Beer Awards heldThe Best of Craft Beer Awards were just held in Redmond, and the competition, billed as “one of America’s fastest growing beer awards,” featured 389 breweries that submitted almost 2,000 entries in 55 categories. Over 100 judges sampled the offerings over three days, then awarded 169 gold, silver, and bronze medals to 123 breweries located around the world. The highlights:2024 Large-Sized Brewery of the Year: Breakside Brewery & Taproom of Milwaukie2024 Medium-Sized Brewery of the Year: Best Day Brewing of Sausalito, California2024 Small-size Brewery of the Year: McMenamins Old Saint Francis School of BendGet all the results here.Sports Bra snub not appreciatedMy colleague Lizzy Acker is, like me, a fan of The Sports Bra, the women’s sports themed bar on Northeast Broadway. So Lizzy, a trending and arts reporter, was not pleased this week when a list of the country’s best sports bars came out and listed one particular Portland sports bar but not another particular sports bar. Read her entertaining take here to learn more.Beer of the WeekBier Wulf Bavarian IPA by Double Mountain Brewery & CideryCourtesy of Double Mountain Brewery & CideryBier Wulf Bavarian IPA, Double Mountain Brewery & Cidery: The Hood River brewery describes its newest seasonal release as a “testament to the Bavarian IPA style but with a twist. It unifies the earthy tones of German hops with the vibrant citrus notes of American counterparts. The German malts provide a complementary foundation, allowing the hops to take center stage. While the use of Hygge yeast lends a clean ferment with light fruit esters, resulting in a dry finish and a pleasantly bready mouthfeel.” Brewery notes: “Notes of ripe citrus, grapefruit pith, and spicy evergreen howling across the palate. The appearance of Bier Wulf is akin to “Sunshine in Brugge,” while its aroma evokes images of wildflowers, bright citrus, and sticky fruit. With a medium bitterness on the tongue and a dry, crisp finish complemented by hints of pineapple, orange, lemon, and pine, Bier Wulf promises an exploration of all of your inner wolf senses.” Bier Wulf also comes with an accompanying Spotify playlist curated by the brewers — scan the code on the bottle with Spotify to access the playlist. Bier Wulf now available for purchase in 500ml refillable bottles and on tap at all Double Mountain locations and in retail throughout the Northwest.What to do, what to do?Upright Brewing 15th anniversary: I’ll be writing more in depth on this soon, but mark the date on Saturday, April 6, when Upright will throw down to celebrate 15 trips around the sun. Founder and head brewer Alex Ganum hosts the bash at the brewery’s main location, 240 N. Broadway, with collabs and a new Upright release. This party, from 1-9 p.m., is sure to draw the who’s who among the Portland brewing community to celebrate this cherished brewery. See you there.Tualatin Valley’s Tap Season: Launched by Explore Tualatin Valley, the destination marketing organization that markets Tualatin Valley as a travel destination, Tap Season is a promotion for beer and cider lovers that includes exclusive event and specials, as well as the re-launch of the successful Tualatin Valley Ale Trail Mobile Passport — a digital passport where beer connoisseurs will earn points for prizes by checking in to any of the 37 participating producers, including Breakside, Ancestry, Bull Run Cider, Cooper Mountain, Golden Valley and Portland Cider.Events include:Alpaca Happy Hour 1: Noon-3 p.m., Hillsboro Downtown Station, 320 S.E. Baseline St., Hillsboro. Come to the food carts at Hillsboro Downtown Station and snap a pic with the alpacas, enjoy happy hour specials on some of your favorite Tualatin Valley beers and ciders, and hang out with the Tap Season Street Team, which will be handing out free swag)Alpaca Happy Hour 2: 4-6 p.m., Stickmen Brewing’s Tualatin Beer Hall, 19475 S.W. 118th Ave., Suite 1, Tualatin. The Beer Hall is also hosting an alpaca happy hour. Meet the alpacas while you enjoy happy hour specials on some of your favorite Tualatin Valley beers and ciders. The Tap Season Street Team will hand out free Tap Season swag again.Hood River Hard-Pressed Cider Fest: Now in its ninth year, this annual event, held this year on April 27, invites seasoned and novice cider enthusiasts to sample ciders from Columbia River Gorge and Pacific Northwest hard cidermakers. It offers over 60 ciders on tap from more than 30 cideries. Held at the Port of Hood River Event Site, this year the event expands its footprint to provide beachfront access to the Columbia River and the option for attendees to bring their own glass, contributing to what organizers call an “immersive and sustainable Hood River experience.” Beyond cider sampling, the daylong event boasts artisan food, art vendors, music and a children’s play area. For more information or tickets, visit hoodriverciderfest.com. For more information on Hood River, or to book a stay at one of Hood River’s lodging options visit visithoodriver.com/stay.New Releases of NotePaloma Sour, Migration BrewingColby SchlickerPaloma Sour, Migration Brewing: This beer, released for the second time on Wednesday, won the Experimental Beers category at the Best of Craft Beer Awards. This gently tart, golden soured ale was fermented before being inoculated with Migration’s house lactobacillus culture, then was aged in Reposado Tequila barrels before being blended with ample amounts of grapefruit puree, lime juice and zest. A dusting of Hawaiian sea salt was added to round out this Paloma-style cocktail sour. Brewery notes: “Hints of oak complement delicate tequila and citrus notes, while gentle acidity and light salinity combine for a complex refreshing beer that resonates with beer and cocktail drinkers alike.”Farm-to-Market Hazy Imperial IPA, Laurelwood Brewing and Zupan’s Markets: The 28th installment in Zupan’s Farm-to-Market beer series, which began in 2015, is this hazy double IPA with the Northeast Portland brewery — the second between the two. Brewery notes: “Smooth, resiny grapefruit flavor with a tropical, dank citrus aroma, set against a backdrop of rosy straw-orange haze and a light yellow-orange tan head. The beer is crafted from a blend of premium malts and a diverse selection of hops for a complex yet balanced profile.” Available exclusively at Zupan’s Markets in 16-ounce cans.Fresh Squeezed Non-Alcoholic IPA, Deschutes Brewery: The Bend and Portland brewery’s latest release is a nonalcoholic version of its No. 1 selling IPA, Fresh Squeezed. Deschutes has invested heavily in NA over the past five years, and NA Fresh Squeezed is crafted in-house through a partnership with Sustainable Beverage Technologies and uses the company’s patented BrewVo® technology in combination with Deschutes’ proprietary brewing methods. Brewery notes: “Brilliantly balanced and features the same Citra and Mosaic hops as the original, delivering refreshing notes of bright citrus and tropical fruit, with less than 0.5% ABV.” Fresh Squeezed NA comes on the heels of Deschutes’ first packaged non-alcoholic beer, Black Butte Non-Alcoholic, which quickly became the brewery’s highest rate-of-sale six-pack. Both are available nationwide at select retailers, bars, and restaurants. Use the “beer finder” to find the closest retailer or here to purchase the new non-alcoholic options online.McMenamins Hard Seltzer – Lemon Raspberry, McMenamins West Linn Brewery: The brewery group is the latest to enter the “seltzer space,” as industry lingo calls it. McMenamins says it plans to have different flavors of its Hard Seltzer in the future, but as a tribute to its well-known Ruby Ale, Raspberry is the first. Brewery notes: “Light and refreshing, this low calorie sipper delivers delicious flavors of raspberry and a hint of lemon for a crisp and effervescent experience.” Now available on draft at McMenamins locations and in cans starting Friday, March 29.— Andre Meunier has been writing about Northwest beer and breweries since 2016; reach him at 503-221-8488 or ameunier@oregonian.com, and sign up for his weekly newsletter, Oregon Brews and News. Instagram: @oregonianbeerguy

Organic farms seem to trigger more pesticide use on conventional farms

Insects tend to be more abundant on organic farms than conventional ones, which may cause the pests to spill over into neighbouring fields, prompting these farmers to increase their pesticide use

Organic farms appear to inadvertently cause greater pesticide use on surrounding fields with conventional agricultural practicesDanielle Balderas/Shutterstock Organic farmers dedicate their working lives to producing food with minimal help from pesticides, but in curbing the use of chemicals on their own land, they may unwittingly be triggering a spike in pesticide use over their neighbour’s fence. Ashley Larsen at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues assessed land-use and pesticide data across 14,000 fields in Kern County, California. This is one of the largest crop-growing counties in the state, with produce including almonds, grapes, carrots and pistachios. The team found that when organic farmland is surrounded by conventional agriculture, the neighbouring farmers seem to increase their pesticide use, with a 10 per cent rise in organic cropland being linked to a 0.3 per cent increase in total pesticide use on conventional fields. Most of this is driven by increased use of insecticides, the researchers found. This may be because more insects – pests or otherwise – tend to be present on organic land and “spill over” into neighbouring conventional farmland, prompting these farmers to increase their pesticide use. “Pests arrive and seed a new outbreak, and they [farmers] increase pesticide use,” Larsen told reporters during a press briefing. The effect appears to be strongest when neighbouring fields are within 2.5 kilometres of the organic “focal field”. Conversely, the researchers noted that the presence of organic farmland is linked to a reduction in pesticide use on neighbouring organic fields, with a 10 per cent increase in the area of surrounding organic cropland being associated with a 3 per cent decrease in total pesticide use on organic focal fields. This may be because the larger area of organic farmland allows for a bigger and more stable community of beneficial insects. Organic agriculture only covers about 2 per cent of land globally, but in Kern County, about 5.5 per cent of the agricultural area is organic. When organic agriculture makes up a high proportion of farmland – perhaps 20 per cent or more – net pesticide use decreases regardless of where the organic fields are sited, say the researchers. But when relatively small areas of organic farmland – such as in Kern County – are evenly dispersed through the landscape, net pesticide use may in fact be higher than when no organic farmland is present. “Our simulations suggest that at low levels of organic agriculture in the landscape, we can actually see an increase in net insecticide use,” said Larsen. However, this impact can be entirely mitigated by clustering organic farmland together to minimise potential pest spillover, she said. “It might be worth considering, at the policy level, how to incentivise spatial clustering of new organic fields to basically leverage the pest control benefits of organic and limit any potential costs of organic on conventional growers.” This could include subsidy payments for farmers to convert more of their land in certain areas to organic practices, or even the creation of buffer zones between organic and non-organic land. Robert Finger at ETH Zurich in Switzerland says the findings demonstrate the need for policy-makers to consider land-use policy at the “landscape scale” to maximise the environmental benefits of organic farming. “Fundamentally, just thinking about single fields or single farms is not enough,” he says.

“An Astounding 20 Feet Long”– Scientists Discover New Species of Giant Snake in the Remote Amazon

A team of scientists on location with a film crew in the remote Amazon has uncovered a previously undocumented species of giant anaconda. Professor Bryan...

Scientists have discovered a new species of giant anaconda, the northern green anaconda, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The discovery was made during an expedition invited by the Waorani people. The team’s findings highlight the genetic uniqueness of the species and the ecological threats facing the Amazon, underscoring the urgent need for conservation efforts. Credit: Jesus RivasA team of scientists on location with a film crew in the remote Amazon has uncovered a previously undocumented species of giant anaconda.Professor Bryan Fry from The University of Queensland led a team which captured and studied several specimens of the newly named northern green anaconda (Eunectes akayima), located in the Bameno region of Baihuaeri Waorani Territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon.“Our team received a rare invitation from the Waorani people to explore the region and collect samples from a population of anacondas, rumored to be the largest in existence,” Professor Fry said. “The indigenous hunters took us into the jungle on a 10-day expedition to search for these snakes, which they consider sacred. We paddled canoes down the river system and were lucky enough to find several anacondas lurking in the shallows, lying in wait for prey. The size of these magnificent creatures was incredible – one female anaconda we encountered measured an astounding 6.3 meters (20.7 feet) long. There are anecdotal reports from the Waorani people of other anacondas in the area measuring more than 7.5 meters (24.6 feet) long and weighing around 500 kilograms (1100 lbs).” A northern green anaconda. Credit: Bryan FryProfessor Fry said the northern green anaconda species diverged from the southern green anaconda almost 10 million years ago, and they differ genetically by 5.5 percent.“It’s quite significant – to put it in perspective, humans differ from chimpanzees by only about 2 percent,” he said. “This discovery is the highlight of my career.”Collaboration and Conservation ConcernsThe new anaconda species was found while filming with National Geographic for their upcoming Disney+ series Pole to Pole with Will Smith, on which Professor Fry, a National Geographic Explorer, was the expedition’s scientific leader.“Our journey into the heart of the Amazon, facilitated by the invitation of Waorani Chief Penti Baihua, was a true cross-cultural endeavor,” he said. “The importance of our Waorani collaborators is recognized with them being co-authors on the paper.”A Eunectes akayima breeding ball. Credit: Jesus RivasThe scientists also set out to compare the genetics of the green anaconda with specimens collected elsewhere by world-leading anaconda expert Dr Jesus Rivas from New Mexico Highlands University, and use them as an indicator species for ecosystem health.Professor Fry said the Amazon continues to face alarming ecological threats.“Deforestation of the Amazon basin from agricultural expansion has resulted in an estimated 20-31 percent habitat loss, which may impact up to 40 percent of its forests by 2050,” he said. “Another increasing problem is habitat degradation from land fragmentation, led by industrialized agriculture and heavy metal pollution associated with spills from oil extraction activities. Forest fires, drought, and climate change are also notable threats. These rare anacondas, and the other species that share this remote ecosystem, face significant challenges.”Professor Fry said his next research project would focus on heavy metal pollution in the Amazon.“It’s not only these gigantic snakes that are facing environmental threats, but almost all living things in the region,” he said. “The discovery of a new species of anaconda is exciting, but it is critical to highlight the urgent need to further research these threatened species and ecosystems. Of particular urgency is research into how petrochemicals from oil spills are affecting the fertility and reproductive biology of these rare snakes and other keystone species in the Amazon.”Reference: “Disentangling the Anacondas: Revealing a New Green Species and Rethinking Yellows” by Jesús A. Rivas, Paola De La Quintana, Marco Mancuso, Luis F. Pacheco, Gilson A. Rivas, Sandra Mariotto, David Salazar-Valenzuela, Marcelo Tepeña Baihua, Penti Baihua, Gordon M. Burghardt, Freek J. Vonk, Emil Hernandez, Juán Elías García-Pérez, Bryan G. Fry and Sarah Corey-Rivas, 15 February 2024, Diversity.DOI: 10.3390/d16020127

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