Some years ago, when we moved to our current cottage, we were puzzled by the death, one by one, of our hitherto robust, lay-an-egg-a-day-without-fail chickens. 

There was no obvious distress. They first stopped laying, then stopped scratching the lawn and, finally, hunched dolefully on their perches, they stopped breathing altogether. 

It turned out they had been poisoned by the magnificent male yew tree which dominates our back garden and sheds its toxic leaves and spent flowers across the lawn.  

This was a somewhat brutal introduction to the yew’s back story. 

They are known as the ‘tree of death’ and almost every part of them – leaf, bark, flower, seed – are extremely toxic. Our chickens were just a small addition to the large number of livestock that die from eating yew foliage each year and, even though a fatal dose for a human would be 50 grams of yew needles – not easy to do by accident – it does happen: even inhaling the sawdust has been known to kill people. The Latin name for the tree, Taxus, shares a root with ‘toxic’ (from toxon ‘bow’, the connection being poisoned-tipped arrows).

This association of yews with death stretches back at least as far as Ancient Greece where the tree was sacred to Hecate, goddess of magic and witchcraft, who was also associated with death. Yews were planted with cypresses and laurels in cemeteries – their roots were believed to seek out the mouths of corpses and to ferry the souls to the afterlife. This idea seems to have emerged in Celtic cultures too, where yew trees were also associated with burial and rebirth. 

English churchyards are still full of yews. Because it turns out that the ‘tree of death’ is also the ‘tree of life’. 

Yews can live for an unimaginably long time. The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, Scotland, is estimated to be at least 2,000 years old – some estimates put it at 5,000 years old, which means it was planted during the Bronze Age. At least 10 other British yews are thought to date back to the first millennium. 

John Mitchinson's yew tree

Yews have other miraculous powers that add to this sense of immortality. When most other trees split, they perish because fungal diseases thrive in the fracture. Not so the yew. Indeed, cut the trunk of a yew, or bury one of its long branches in the ground, and vigorous new growth emerges, even on an ancient tree. As Wordsworth wrote in his poem ‘Yew-Trees’, they are:

A living thing

Produced too slowly ever to decay;

Of form and aspect too magnificent

To be destroyed.

But the story of the yew is one of exploitation as well as veneration. 

The slow-growing wood is both hard and flexible which makes it perfect wood for longbows. The demands of medieval warfare were such that the population of yews in France and Italy were decimated almost to the point of extinction and have never recovered. 

And what of our killer yew? It is easily the oldest living thing in the parish, but it is some way from the churchyard. 

Though notoriously difficult to pin down the age of a yew, a rough estimate based on its girth puts it between 600 to 700 years old. That takes us back to the late 14th Century, a period when the village lost almost a third of its population to plague. There is a tradition of yew trees being planted over plague pits, to purify the ground and keep the tainted corpses pinned in the earth. A map from the 18th Century suggests the site of the tree was on one of the main roads leading out of the village. It’s impossible to prove, but the facts fit.
For me, it’s the double quality of the yew that keeps its symbolic dimension so potent. The poison that killed our chickens is extracted to produce Taxol, a life-saving drug used in chemotherapy. The only part of the yew that isn’t toxic is the sweet red berries or arils that surround the toxic seed encouraging birds and animals to eat and pass them unharmed enabling new yews to grow. The dense foliage provides homes to nesting birds and roosting bats but was also believed to harbour sprites and demons. The yew is a constant reminder that life and death are two sides of the same coin.

Modern scholars now think that the World Tree – Yggdrasil – of Norse Mythology was a yew not an ash. Our yew has something of that symbolic immensity to it: it feels like a guardian, a luck-bringer, a home to bats and thrushes and hedgehogs, but also a daily reminder of mortality and the limits of our human scale. 

To be honest, having that in your back garden is worth not being able to keep chickens.

About a week before the removal of the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River in Old Town, Maine, Dan Kusnierz dragged his sons to the riverside to take their picture in front of the aging structure. They had just come from a little league game. “They were being goofy and didn’t understand it,” Kusnierz, the water resources program manager for the Penobscot Indian Nation, recalls. It was 2012, and with the dam’s removal imminent, the river — New England’s second-largest — was about to transform. 

For nearly two centuries, the Penobscot had been choked with logs and pulp as the timber and paper industries — both long-standing cornerstones of Maine’s economy — used it both as a lumber byway and waste receptacle. From just 1830 to 1880, more than eight billion feet of timber floated down the river. To power all this industry, dams were erected, 119 in the Penobscot River Basin alone. Two in particular, the Great Works and the Veazie, posed an outsized threat to the river’s health. 

A stereograph from the 1870s shows the view from Ripogenus Falls on the Penobscot River. Credit: A.L. Hinds / Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library

Perhaps irrelevant to his children posing for a picture at the time, Kusnierz, who is not Penobscot but has served the Nation for 20 years, was one the members of an unprecedented coalition of scientists, Indigenous people and conservationists working to remove both dams in order to free the Penobscot River and hopefully restore its health in the process.

The river had been sick for generations. Butch Phillips, a Penobscot Nation elder, recalls growing up on Indian Island, the Penobscot tribe reservation located near Old Town on the river, in the 1950s. By that time, the Penobscot was unrecognizable to the body of water it had once been, with drifting logs so gridlocked at times on the eastern side of the island that the river was impassable for boats and people alike. This posed an ongoing dilemma for the Penobscot people who, prior to the construction of a bridge in 1950, used canoes to travel to and from the mainland. 

The Veazie Dam before removal. Credit: Joshua Royte / The Nature Conservancy

Despite the discharge coming from the mills, the river was still central to the Penobscot Nation’s everyday life. “[The river] was our playground,” Phillips says. “We were either canoeing on it, fishing, swimming in it and in the wintertime we were skating on it.” But the relationship had been affected. Living so closely with a body of water like the Penobscot for so many generations, he explains, “you develop a river culture. We are river people, we’re canoe people. And when you take away that element, that river and the use of the river, then you take away the culture as well.”

One of the worst blows to the river, though, was to its 12 species of sea-run fish. The Great Works, Veazie and Howland dams, all built in the 19th century, severed access to the river’s headwaters, which fish like alewives and shad, shortnose sturgeon and Atlantic salmon used as spawning ground. When the dams were erected, the effects on the fish population were almost immediate: By the 1850s, salmon no longer inhabited most of the rivers in southern Maine and their populations continued to decline so dramatically that in 1889, the US government opened the Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery in Orland, Maine to support the besieged fish. For the next 50 years, it was the primary source of salmon eggs for the region.

Credit: Kea Krause

The Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery has been raising Atlantic salmon, an iconic species of the northeastern US, since the late 19th century.

Yet salmon numbers continued to decline. By 1948, the final year of the commercial fishing industry for wild Atlantic salmon, only 40 were reported caught in the Penobscot watershed. In the late 1980s, around 2,000 salmon made it to the Veazie Dam (the first dam fish returning from the ocean encounter on the river), a number drastically whittled down from the species’ original population of about 200,000 annually. In 2009, wild Atlantic salmon were added to the endangered species list.      

These were the stakes when the dams’ licenses were up for renewal in 1998, and leaders of the Penobscot Nation saw an opportunity to make a significant change to the status quo. The tribe’s plan was to purchase the dams — and then destroy them. So they joined with the Atlantic Salmon Federation to open a dialogue with the dam owner, a company called PPL Maine, to buy them. The cohort gathered more participants — American Rivers, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and Trout Unlimited — and formed an alliance called the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. 

Alewives spend most of their lives at sea but rely on Maine’s inland waters for spawning habitat. Credit: Bridget Edmond / The Nature Conservancy

The river was in crisis: In addition to the dwindling salmon population, only two alewives were counted at the Veazie Dam in 2010 (NOAA estimates historically the river had 14 to 20 million), arguably one of its most alarming health indicators yet. Alewives, a type of river herring native to the Penobscot, feed just about everything and everyone, from the bottom of the food chain up. With no alewives, there would be no otter or fishers or osprey or eagles.

“The impacts of a dam are especially local,” says Laura Rose Day, executive director of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. So while the Trust engaged in years-long negotiations with PPL, community outreach became an equally key component to the project’s success. Rose Day, along with Cheryl Daigle, an outreach coordinator for the project, and Butch Phillips, who was tapped as an ambassador for the Penobscot people, set out on a lengthy effort to share the good news of the project with the community. Individually, they logged hours of knocking on doors, maintaining tables and booths at sports shows, hosting the Penobscot River Revival Festival and just persistently showing up for people who came to them with questions and concerns. 

The Great Works Dam mid-removal. Courtesy of the Natural Resources Council of Maine

It wasn’t always easy to find receptive minds. “In the broadest sense, change is an obstacle,” Molly Payne Wynne, the project’s monitoring coordinator and project associate, explains. “You’re essentially coming into a community, and you’re asking that the one thing that they see every day, or the one constant that they know — this structure in the river — you want to remove that and totally change the visual and what that means for them.” 

“The key to all of these projects is finding the right equation to meet public and business and Indigenous and other rights and interests and needs, based on the place,” Rose Day reflects. Daigle says she often found herself translating the science of the project for people and also managing the varying perspectives of how a river should be: “Part of it is not being afraid to venture into that territory where there’s conflicting views about use of a resource.” 

Credit: Stephen G. Page / Shutterstock

“We are river people, we’re canoe people. And when you take away that element, then you take away the culture as well.” –Butch Phillips

For his part, Phillips discovered that there was a dearth of knowledge community-wide when it came to the tribe’s relationship to the river. “My ancestors have been on this river for literally thousands of years,” he notes. “And that connection goes really deep because through those many, many generations, the people depended on the river and the surrounding land for their everyday living: Their food, their shelter, their weapons, their transportation, clothing, everything came from the river and the land.”

Phillips felt it was crucial to add that perspective to the project. “I was talking about the connection of Penobscot to the river and the fish and all the creatures, and to many of those listening, it was the first time they heard it,” he says.     

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Daigle’s experience reflected a similar revelation: that communicating the science was important but, perhaps, what mattered more were small moments of communion that involved the river itself. After the dams were purchased, as some of their impoundments were being let out, there was an effort to move the river’s freshwater mussels to safety. For several weeks, Daigle, along with close to seventy volunteers, waded through the waters of Penobscot, moving the mollusks out of harm’s way. “It was sort of this intimate act to move these mussels, and build a little sense of community around that,” Daigle recalls.

The project was unprecedented in its ambition and its success. The Trust ultimately raised $60 million to purchase the Veazie, Great Works and Howland dams in 2008. In 2012, the Great Works Dam was the first to go, followed by the Veazie in 2013. The Trust was unable to convince the community of Howland to remove its dam, and so a compromise was reached in which a fish bypass was added to the dam to allow an open route for returning fish. As a result, nearly 2,000 miles of habitat was opened for salmon and other species.

The Howland Dam bypass enables fish to pass safely through. Credit: Brandon Kulik / Kleinschmidt

In the nine years it took to come to an agreement with PPL, which included generating more power at alternate dams so there wouldn’t be a decrease in hydroelectricity, scientists were able to seize the opportunity to really study the river, and what happens to one before and after a dam removal.      

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When you dam a river, it’s like flooding a house. Water pools and settles, as does sediment, and what you get is a warm, still environment, nothing like the lively, textured existence of a flowing river. But when you remove a dam, the river’s rebound is robust and swift. In 2018, just six years after the removal of the first dam, more than two million river herring (which includes alewives) were counted passing through a local fish lift in addition to 772 salmon. “When we do on-the-ground restoration actions with these fish, they respond immediately,” says Payne Wynne. “It’s fascinating. And it’s unique in the restoration world, because in other spheres of restoration, it can take decades to see any real response to the actual, immediate restoration activity.” 

The breaching of the Veazie Dam in 2013. Courtesy of the Natural Resources Council of Maine

Though the agreement and planning took several years, when the Great Works and Veazie dams were finally demolished, the river’s recovery was dramatic and swift.

The degree of the project’s success — the river’s surprising return — has bolstered hope that future efforts like it will only continue to improve the outlook for Atlantic salmon and other fish species. Though the Trust has since dissolved, work continues to remove dams further upstream along the Penobscot’s many tributaries, which would open up more cold-water spawning habitat to all the sea-run fish. But as the nearly 15-year effort of the Trust demonstrates, dam removals are arduous, persisting battles. A win is not to be taken for granted. 

In contrast to the river herring, the salmon population’s recovery has been more modest, with around 1,500 returning to the Penobscot this year — the most since 2011 but still just a slight 10-year increase. “It’s a really hostile environment for Atlantic salmon in the North Atlantic right now,” says Rory Saunders, NOAA Fisheries’ Downeast coastal salmon recovery coordinator, referring to the challenges posed by climate change. “The Penobscot run in particular is almost entirely dependent on the hatchery at this point.”

A pregnant salmon at the hatchery is held up for inspection. Credit: Kea Krause

At the hatchery this fall, 250 mature females prepared to spawn, their dappled bodies taut with eggs. The fish had migrated to the likes of Newfoundland and back, and now they swam lazily in their tank, a sign of late pregnancy. I stood in the tank observing the Fish and Wildlife techs as they scooped each female gently up in a net — taking hold of her tail and lifting her delicately, always supporting her head — for the inspection of a biologist. 

The fish weren’t quite ready to spawn, but they were getting there, and learning this distinction took years of experience, of plucking expectant females from tanks and pinching their bellies, of discerning the difference between the feeling of a ziplock baggy full with water and one that’s bursting. These fish would need another week. Then the techs would do it all again—scoop, pluck, pinch. 

Once the females spawned, the eggs would be fertilized and incubated, and eventually some would be placed in man-made salmon redds, tiny depressions made in the sand normally by the wiggle and swoop a female’s body, through a hole drilled in ice. This is the ritual—tender and technical—of saving the last wild Atlantic salmon on the planet.

“The Penobscot project is a tremendous first step, but it’s not a silver bullet. We need to continue to think about upstream habitat,” acknowledges Saunders. There are hopes to remove more dams along the Piscataquis River, a tributary to the Penobscot, which would allow for access to more good, cold water for the salmon, but this could take years. 

Still, there is much to celebrate. “We went from 2,000 animals to five million animals in the span of 12 years. That’s as good-news-story as you see in ecology, as you see in natural resources,” says Saunders. The return of the salmon holds significance to the Penobscot Nation as well. “It’s not just the fish,” explains Kusnierz. “It’s restoring a huge part of the culture of the tribe. Those are their relatives that have long been gone and are here again. That’s what the vision of the tribe was in those negotiations. [It] was kind of the opposite of ‘build it, and they will come.’ It was ‘take it down and they’ll return.’”

Butch Phillips and Barry Dana of the Penobscot Nation offer a blessing at an event celebrating the Great Works Dam’s removal. Credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service

In the tradition of the Penobscot Nation, Phillips has collaborated on the construction of two different birch bark canoes and in one instance, took the boat up the Penobscot toward Mount Katahdin, toward the headwaters. Phillips, along with other community members including one of his sons, was retracing the path of generations before him — up the river and toward the mountain, which never seemed to disappear from view despite the constant bend and curve in the water’s trajectory. 

At one point, after a particularly tough paddle through an ancient waterway on the west side of the river, Phillips turned to his son. “I told him, Let’s stop, and we laid on the ground,” he recalls. The moment was one of providence: “We’re walking in the same footsteps as our ancestors have for thousands of years.” This was in 2002, prior to the removal of the dams, and the group had to maneuver the canoe around them on their journey. The restoration project was in its nascent stages then, and the hope to someday see the river healthy and unrestricted still seemed like a moon shot, even to Phillips. 

“I’m just so happy that I lived long enough to see at least a portion of our river free-flowing, so that the sea-run fish can ascend the river and go to their ancestral spawning ground as they did before the dams went up,” says Phillips. “As my ancestors witnessed.”

The post ‘Take It Down and They’ll Return’: The Stunning Revival of the Penobscot River appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine.

The sun sits low in the sky as David Borbón walks from one young mangrove to another, treading carefully so as not to disturb their roots. A golden glow lights the plants as he delicately checks for flowers and new growth, removing strands of dried algae and seagrass that accumulate on the saplings with the coming and going of tides. Every so often, he lets out a joyful cry upon finding a new propagule — a small, green bean–shaped seedling — growing on a tree he has planted: “My grandchild!” He takes out his phone to capture a picture of the new family member. It has taken him over a decade to get to this moment — a shoreline filled with thriving mangroves where before there was only sand — his devotion to his work unwavering.

Back in his boat, we slowly navigate the narrow channels from Borbón’s mangroves to his nearby home in the small fishing community of Campo Delgadito, mindful of our course with the dropping tide. Shorebirds scurry on the exposed mudflats, digging for their next meal. Situated on the Pacific coast about halfway down the peninsula of Baja California, Mexico, El Delgadito — “the little narrow one” — is a long spit of land jutting northwest into the mouth of Laguna San Ignacio. It’s home to 54 permanent residents, with up to 85 inhabitants during the most important fishing seasons.

White pelicans rest on a sandbar exposed at low tide. Behind them, scores of shorebirds forage for food. Over 200 bird species have been identified in Laguna San Ignacio, representing almost half of all the species found in the state of Baja California Sur, Mexico. The mangroves serve as excellent resting places and feeding grounds for many of these species. Credit: Gemina Garland-Lewis
To the left of Campo Delgadito, Mexico, lies the Pacific Ocean and many of the small islets where David Borbón focuses his work. On its right, mangroves grow right up and into residents’ backyards. The community is located at the southern entrance of Laguna San Ignacio, part of the Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaíno. The sanctuary is an important site for gray whales during their birthing and breeding season and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Credit: Gemina Garland-Lewis

Borbón first arrived in El Delgadito as a young man in 1980, and he returned seasonally for the fishing — lobster, sea bass, halibut and clams. “[Back then], mangroves were just branches that were in the way of navigating to go fishing. I didn’t have the slightest idea of their importance,” he recalls. By the time he permanently settled in the community in the early 2000s, he was hearing stories of overfishing, even in this remote area. Fishermen boated farther, used more gear and more gas, yet still came back with smaller catches and smaller fish. Borbón and his wife, Ana María Peralta, could see the changes but weren’t sure what to do. A conversation with their daughter, who was away at university, gave them insight into their next steps. She told them what she had been learning about mangroves: how they prevented coastal erosion, stored carbon and provided a nursery habitat for myriad fish and crustacean species, many the same as those Borbón and other fishermen in El Delgadito were catching. The trees he had barely paid any attention to became the sole focus of his attention.

Gemima Garland-Lewis

Tens of thousands of shells of callo de hacha, the pen shell clam, are piled deep surrounding the dump in Laguna San Ignacio. This species is one of several clams that form an important part of the income in this area. Many in El Delgadito, as the community is known by those who live there, believe that their children will not be able to make a living fishing as they have done. “We are taking and not putting back,” says one of El Delgadito’s fishermen.

Four species of mangroves — red, white, black and sweet — grow throughout the state of Baja California Sur, which covers the lower half of the Baja California peninsula, and elsewhere in tropical and subtropical latitudes around the world. Mangroves are perhaps not what jumps to mind in desert ecosystems like that of El Delgadito, however, which sits less than one-half of one degree south of all mangroves’ northern limit in the entire eastern Pacific. Mangroves here grow short and stunted compared with their tropical counterparts — even when fully developed, a species that reaches over 25 meters in height in the tropics may barely make two meters in this region. Their small stature doesn’t make them any less mighty from the standpoint of the ecological services they provide. Studies in Baja California Sur and the adjacent Gulf of California have shown that not only do fisheries landings increase in areas where there are more abundant mangroves but also that these mangroves match or even outperform tropical mangrove ecosystems in their carbon sequestration abilities.

Borbón stops to clean debris off some of the oldest mangroves in the area, estimated to be around 250 years old. Shortly after learning about mangroves from his daughter, a serendipitous visit from a researcher doing her thesis project on the vulnerability and resilience of the mangroves on Baja California’s Pacific coast provided him an opportunity to understand more about the life cycles of the different mangrove species and the threats they are facing. When people in his community told him he was crazy for starting to plant mangroves, she offered encouragement. To this day, he still keeps a copy of her thesis in his home. Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

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The “prop” roots of the red mangrove. Studies show that Baja California Sur’s desert mangroves grow on top of their own root remains, forming a type of peat that serves as a highly efficient environment for carbon sequestration. This peat extends to depths of more than three meters, and core samples indicate that, in some areas, it has been storing carbon at the same rate for over 5,000 years. It has also historically provided mangrove ecosystems in this region with a mechanism for keeping pace with sea level rise. Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Baja California Sur is the least densely populated state in all of Mexico, and extreme loss of mangroves is concentrated in the urban spaces of La Paz and Los Cabos. Construction of fishing camps around El Delgadito in the 1980s led to the removal of some of the area’s mangroves, but nothing has done as much damage in recent years as climate change, says Borbón. Higher tides and stronger currents undercut the sandbars that support the mangroves, carving underwater caves that eventually cause the entire root system to collapse, especially among younger trees.

Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Mature mangroves in this desert ecosystem barely stand out in the background, size-wise. El Delgadito sits less than one half of one degree south of all mangroves’ northern limit in the entire eastern Pacific, making even these centuries-old trees look short and stunted. Although mangroves make up less than one percent of the terrestrial area of the Baja California peninsula, they store about 28 percent of the total below-ground carbon in this arid climate. This makes them by far the biggest carbon sink in the region, a feature that Borbón and his wife, Ana María Peralta, know will be monumental in tackling the local impacts of climate change.

Rising sea temperatures trigger mass die-offs of seagrasses, which are swept by the currents onto mangroves, often smothering them or ripping their young roots from the substrate. Borbón painstakingly removes these deposits both from trees he has planted and from those that have grown naturally. Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Though never formally trained in the sciences, Borbón has an incredible aptitude and devotion toward experimentation. Taking what he knew from being raised in an agricultural region of Mexico, he carried out early iterations of his work growing mangroves in a greenhouse. He soon found that the young trees couldn’t handle the shock of being transplanted, so he and Peralta started “playing scientists,” as he calls it, planting propagules in the places surrounding El Delgadito where they ultimately wanted them to grow. Over the years, they have perfected the process to a point where they may very well know more than anyone else about growing mangroves in this desert ecosystem, though they never stop experimenting with new ideas.

Borbón checks on some of his two-year-old trees. When he first started, he’d experiment with spacing between the plants as well as their distance from the high tideline. He also tested how wind, current, waves, and cardinal direction to these natural forces changed his success. “Do you know what the most important thing is?” he asks me. “Not science, not technology. Heart.” Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Peralta and Borbón with the mangroves across the dirt road from their home. In recent months, Borbón has been invited to present at international conferences, heard pitches from the World Bank, and been asked to begin a train-the-trainers program for others trying to restore mangroves in their communities. “We are not talking about sustainability,” he says, “we are talking about regeneration — and it’s worth fighting for, whatever is required, because it’s necessary. It’s very necessary in these communities to avoid emigration, to create opportunities for both young and old, for men and women, for people on the coast and people on ranches in the sierras [mountain ranges], because this is wonderful.” Credit: Gemima Garland-LewisToday, Borbón and Peralta have a team of over 20. It is paid work—the only of its kind in this area that isn’t from fishing. Funding now comes from partnership with a US-based environmental services company instead of from the couple’s own pocket. Their team members range in age from 19 to 60, though the majority are youth. “Our focus is more with the younger than the older generations,” explains Peralta. “You can’t change what they’re accustomed to. But the young people are learning. They’re the future of here, the future of Mexico, the future of everything, to continue with the mangroves.”

Borbón helps Victoria, one of his core team members, transplant a year-old mangrove. He is worried he planted last year’s trees too close together and is experimenting with moving them farther apart while they are still young. These year’s propagules will be placed farther apart from the get-go. Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Borbón and Peralta soak the propagules for eight to 11 days in fresh water to stimulate the growth of root nodules. Then, with their team of young community members, they count the propagules and place them in buckets to take into the field, doing quality control along the way. Borbón has learned over the years that it’s best to target those that have developed to the point where they are still attached to the parent tree but fall off easily, like ripe fruit.

During the summer months, they take scouting trips to monitor the development of new red mangrove propagules and tend young trees. Come October, they harvest the propagules and soak them in fresh water for just over a week. At the restoration site, one person walks a transect line using a wooden tool to punch a small hole into the sediment while another follows with the propagules. It takes just a second to plant each one, and over the past 12 years they’ve planted an estimated 1.2 million and watched stretches of bare sand transform to green. It’s still too soon to see the impact on local fisheries, but Borbón has no shortage of hope: “The fact that we plant mangroves generates life. We expand the possibilities of helping nature by allowing them to naturally repopulate and recover.” He adds that the “constant attack” from fishing limits recovery, but he’s not deterred. “That is why it is so important that we continue with our efforts.”

Working as a team, community members of El Delgadito plant new red mangrove propagules alongside one-year-old trees from last season’s work. Borbón and Peralta have found that, aside from the direct investment in mangroves, hiring youth also takes away some of the impact of local fisheries by providing people with an economic alternative. “We need jobs for young people. Because many can’t get an education, and they get married very young and want to do the same as their parents, they become fishermen and fish as much as they can. They need jobs, another type of work,” Peralta explains. Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Credit: Gemima Garland-Lewis

Areas that started as bare sand quickly developed vegetation once the young red mangroves stabilized the soil. Species like Salicornia and white mangroves sprout on their own, forming a cover of green.

In early September 2022, Hurricane Kay made landfall several hours north of El Delgadito. Colder surface waters on the Pacific coast of Baja California have historically made it rare for a storm system to make its way this far north along the peninsula. Mangroves have been shown to absorb 70 to 90 percent of a wave’s energy, and the storm put Borbón and Peralta’s work to the test. Areas that had their first mangroves planted 10 years prior were destroyed, leaving almost nothing but sand where the highest branches once reached overhead. The couple was devastated, and Borbón’s eyes filled with tears when he broke the news to me. He estimates that, in addition to those first trees he planted, close to 300,000 young trees were lost. Soon after, a marine biologist friend brought an impact assessment expert from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to see El Delgadito. She looked at the proximity of the mangroves that had been destroyed to the community and told the couple that their work very likely prevented the loss of much of their community.

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The researcher’s comments provided hope for the future and validation to Borbón and Peralta that their efforts weren’t for naught. Today, looking out from the driver’s seat in his small boat, Borbón envisions what is to come. “My dream for this region has no limits; what can be done is wonderful. We have dedicated ourselves to conservation because it is very clear to me that the day mangroves end, life ends in this region.” Tomorrow, he’ll wake at dawn and drink a cup of coffee before driving down the road to his boat, never missing a beat in his dedication to making his vision a reality.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

The post Generating Life on the Baja Peninsula, One Mangrove at a Time appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

A blue whale can ingest about 10 million pieces of microplastics per day. This alarming fact, drawn from a recent study, underlines what has become increasingly clear: Microplastics — solid plastic particles up to five millimeters in size that are not biodegradable — are pretty much everywhere. 

They have been detected in over 1,500 different marine animal species. They also find their way into our bodies via the water cycle and the food chain. In fact, the average person consumes up to five grams of microplastics per week. That’s as much as a credit card. The consequences for our health and the environment remain to be seen. 

In a move to stave off further damage, the European Union has now banned intentionally added microplastics. This applies to plastic glitter or polyethylene particles used as abrasives in scrubs, shower gel and toothpaste (these have been banned in the US since the 2015 Microbead-Free Waters Act). Under the terms of the ban, some products, such as plastic glitter found in creams or eye shadow, have been granted a transitional period to give manufacturers a chance to develop new designs.

In some of its products, LUSH uses salt in place of microplastics. Courtesy of LUSH

But some manufacturers are years ahead of the game when it comes to pioneering the move away from microbeads. LUSH and The Body Shop are among the companies that have long been offering natural alternatives, using ground nuts, bamboo, sea salt and sugar. The really big players, such as Beiersdorf AG, have also been working on solutions for several years.

The Hamburg-based consumer goods group has not used microbeads for exfoliation purposes since 2015. Instead, it has used, for example, cellulose particles or shredded apricot kernels. Since the end of 2019, all Beiersdorf wash-off products have been free of microplastics. In addition, the company uses almost no microplastics in creams and other leave-on cosmetics for its two major body care brands, Nivea and Eucerin. “Our ambition is to use only biodegradable polymers in our European cosmetic product formulas by the end of 2025,” explains a company spokesperson. However, these polymers can take many months to degrade. And they may prevent the development of more sustainable solutions.

LUSH’s Bjork sugar cleanser uses sugar in place of microplastics. Courtesy of LUSH

There have also been alternatives for artificial turf pitches — which use tons of microplastics as loose fill — for some years now. There are more than 9,500 such sports pitches in Germany alone. “These particles can quickly be carried into the environment by wind and weather or sports shoes,” says Jürgen Bertling from the German Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology (Umsicht). According to the European Chemicals Agency, artificial turfs release up to 16,000 tons of microplastics into the environment in the EU every year.

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But a few years before the EU ban, Germany stopped providing public funding for artificial turf pitches with granules containing a high proportion of microplastic. As a result, the country already has hundreds of pitches that are filled with cork and sand instead of microplastics, according to the International Association for Sports and Leisure Facilities. Ground olive stones or corn-based fillings have also been used on some pitches. 

One of the most sustainable facilities in Germany was completed a year ago by the Lower Saxony club VfL Sittensen. Their artificial grass is made from plant-based polyethylene. The granules are produced mostly from hemp and chalk. Compared to other artificial turf pitches, this pitch only needs a fifth of the amount of granulate. In addition, a filter system for the rainwater run-off prevents the remaining microplastic and fiber residues from entering the environment. “We receive many inquiries from other clubs and local authorities who want to follow this example,” says Egbert Haneke, the association’s chairman.

Hundreds of artificial turf pitches in Germany are filled with cork and sand instead of microplastics. Courtesy of VfL Sittensen

But there are other, much bigger sources of microplastics in Germany. According to a study by the Fraunhofer Institute Umsicht, artificial turf pitches are only the fifth-largest source. And though cosmetics are the one that the public tends to hear the most about, they are a relatively insignificant source compared to the heavy-hitters, like waste disposal, building materials, road wear and fibers released through textile washing.

Germans produce an estimated four kilograms of microplastics per capita in the environment every year. At around 1.2 kilograms per capita, tire abrasion is the most important contributor. Tiny particles are released through the wear and tear of tires, and counterintuitively, the move toward electric vehicles will actually exacerbate this problem. Electric cars are significantly heavier than combustion engines due to their batteries. A toxic compound released by tire abrasion has even been linked to the deaths of coho salmon on the US West Coast.  

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A startup in the UK has found a possible solution: The Tyre Collective has developed a suction device that can be fitted directly behind the tires on the underbody of a car. 

The patent-pending technology uses electrostatics and airflow to attract tire particles. Together with the London logistics company Zhero, The Tyre Collective tested prototypes on London’s streets for three months. According to the startup, over half of the particles that the device captured were below 0.01 millimeters in size. Particles of this size are considered “the most harmful to human health and the environment,” according to The Tyre Collective. Working with designers, the start-up has also developed various products made from tire particles and recycled plastic using 3D printers. A vase, speaker, lamp and acoustic panel were exhibited at the London Design Festival at Material Matters in September 2023. 

A prototype of The Tyre Collective’s suction device. Courtesy of The Tyre Collective

But by far, the greatest potential for reducing microplastics lies in not producing them in the first place: for example, by driving less or slower so fewer particles are released via tire wear, or by changing the composition of the material of tires or the design of the tread. And microplastic emissions from textile washing could be reduced by using different materials and designs. 

That’s why, though the ban is an important step, experts like Jürgen Bertling are hanging their hopes on the EU’s ecodesign guidelines, which will be developed for the various product groups over the coming years. Something to look forward to, for humans and blue whales alike. 

The post The EU Just Banned Microplastics. How Are Companies Replacing Them? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.