FALL 2015
’ NATURE SVOICE
For the 2.4 million Members and online activists of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
IN THIS ISSUE
The recovery of gray wolves and grizzly bears remains fragile.
New Era Dawning in Climate Fight Defending Yellowstone’s Wolves and Grizzlies Fracking Threatens Florida Panther Bees Can’t Bayer It
NRDC works to safeguard the earth — its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.
Victory
SHELL QUITS THE ARCTIC! It’s a banner day for the environment. As we go to press, Royal Dutch Shell has announced it will drop its controversial plans for oil drilling in the Arctic after its exploratory well failed to yield enough oil and gas to justify the high risk and cost. The oil giant’s about-face is great news for Arctic wildlife, our planet’s climate and NRDC Members, who deluged the Obama Administration with messages protesting Shell’s plan. Widespread public opposition — and years of NRDC lawsuits — pushed Shell to exit, with the company acknowledging the major hurdles to getting drilling plans approved.
Victory
A POLLUTER BROUGHT TO JUSTICE In a big win for NRDC and the Maine People’s Alliance, a court has held Mallinckrodt US LLC accountable for tons of mercury that its chlorine bleach plant dumped into Maine’s Penobscot River, a major source of fish and shellfish for millions of people. The polluter has been ordered to begin an immediate intensive search for remedies to restore the river; this could cost upwards of $100 million. NRDC has been pursuing the company through the courts since 2000.
Create a Lasting Legacy The holiday season is a great time to make sure that nature is protected for generations to come by remembering NRDC in your estate planning. To learn more about becoming an NRDC Legacy Leader, please contact Michelle Mulia-Howell, gift planning director, at 212-727-4421, or go to www.nrdc.org/future.
C OV E R A RT I C L E
New Era Dawning in Climate Fight I n a move hailed as potentially game-changing, President Obama has unveiled a landmark plan that will dramatically rein in carbon pollution from U.S. power plants — the first such federal limits ever imposed on an industry that has long ranked as the single biggest source of climate-wrecking air pollution in the country. The president’s Clean Power Plan reflects years of advocacy by NRDC and others who have been at the forefront of the fight to combat global warming. It comes at a critical moment as nearly 200 nations prepare to gather this December in Paris, where they will present climate action commitments aimed at
keeping the worst of climate chaos at bay. “Our nation will cut dangerous carbon pollution from the dirty power plants that account for roughly 40 percent of our national carbon footprint,” says NRDC President Rhea Suh. “By refusing to let these plants go on using our air as a dumping ground, we’ll have the same enormous impact as taking 70 percent of the cars off our roads.” The president’s plan is likely to face a barrage of legal challenges from big polluters, and NRDC is preparing to defend it in court. In the meantime, the United States has staked out a position of leadership heading into the Paris climate summit. Pope Francis lent his own moral
authority to that position when he called for bold action on climate during his historic visit to Washington in September. Far-reaching international action is urgently needed if we are to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2˚C, regarded as the threshold for major climate disruption. That warning was echoed by NRDC Trustee Robert Redford in June as he addressed the United Nations in anticipation of the talks in Paris. “The time for half measures and climate denial is over,” Redford told a gathering of climate delegates from around the world. “The mission is as simple as it is daunting: save the world before it’s too late.”
S P E C I A L R E P O RT
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Obama Administration Cracks Down on Ivory Sales Here at Home The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delivered a blow to the illegal ivory trade over the summer when it proposed regulations essentially banning the interstate sale of ivory. While the proposed rules would prevent the vast majority of illegal ivory commerce, NRDC is still fighting to strengthen them. For example, as it stands now, a hunter is allowed to bring an unlimited number of elephant trophies into the United States. The administration’s new regulations would cut that number to two, but we want it
cut still further. “There should be no tolerance for trophy hunting of endangered species like elephants,” says Andrew Wetzler, director of NRDC’s Wildlife Program. The United States is one of the largest ivory markets in the world, helping to drive the decimation of African elephant populations by poachers. Researchers estimate that 100,000 African elephants were killed between 2010 and 2012, leaving an estimated 450,000 across the continent. “If we are going to get serious about saving elephants, we need to close down
the ivory market,” says Wetzler. “The incredible spike in demand and the value of ivory have sent poaching rates through the roof.” NRDC has helped enact laws in New York, New Jersey and, most recently, California that ban in-state ivory sales. Stopping intrastate sales of ivory is crucial because they are not covered by the federal rules.
TURBINES © WELCOMIA/SHUTTERSTOCK; ELEPHANT © VICTOR SOARES/SHUTTERSTOCK; POLAR BEARS © SERGEY URYADNIKOV/SHUTTERSTOCK
G O O D N EWS
CA M PA I G N U P DAT E
YELLOWSTONE’S ICONIC WILDLIFE
ew species have come to symbolize the Rocky Mountain West so much as the gray wolf and the grizzly bear, both for their iconic connection to the region’s wilderness heritage and for their struggle to survive in a landscape radically altered by development. Once nearly eliminated in the lower 48 states, their recovery across wide swaths of the mountain wilderness where they long roamed free remains fragile, even as modern-day science affirms that these keystone species are crucial to maintaining a healthy ecosystem in Greater Yellowstone and beyond. “We’re at a crossroads,” says Matt Skoglund, director of NRDC’s Northern Rockies office in Bozeman, Montana. “There are a lot of people out there saying, ‘The job is done; these animals have recovered.
It’s time to move on.’ But NRDC is going to keep fighting to protect grizzlies and wolves, both to preserve the incredible progress we’ve made over the past several years and to ensure robust populations that can thrive into the future.” For starters, we’ll need to head off any more missteps like the premature decision by federal wildlife officials and Congress to strip wolves of their endangered species protections across much of the Northern Rockies in 2011. Although a landmark NRDC court victory last year restored those protections to wolves in Wyoming, neighboring Idaho and Montana have permitted indiscriminate wolf hunting and trapping seasons. Now the Fish & Wildlife Service appears poised to remove grizzlies from the endangered species list
as well, despite a broad consensus among conservation scientists that the Greater Yellowstone population remains isolated from other grizzlies in the Northern Rockies and that big questions remain about the impacts of development, global warming and changing food sources on the bears. NRDC has been at the forefront in challenging rollbacks in federal safeguards for wolves and grizzlies, marshaling the expertise of leading wildlife geneticists and other experts to advocate for strong wildlife protections based on sound science, not politics. And as in the legal battle over the fate of Wyoming’s wolves, we stand ready to fight in federal court to defend these keystone species from further assault. While courtroom action remains a vital component of NRDC’s overall campaign to The recovery of gray wolves and grizzly bears remains fragile.
secure wolf and grizzly recovery, we are also employing innovative approaches that are already showing great promise in overcoming an age-old barrier to progress. Large carnivores have to share the landscape with cattle, sheep and other livestock. When they attack a cow or sheep, they can be killed by the rancher or by a government agency, and sometimes an entire wolf or grizzly family is killed — a pair of wolves with pups or a mother bear with her cubs. “For far too long, there has been an us-versus-them mentality, that you can’t have wolves or bears coexisting alongside, say, a cattle ranch,” says Zack Strong, an NRDC wildlife advocate in Montana. “But by partnering with forward-thinking ranchers and other landowners and working with them to adopt nonlethal ways of protecting their livestock, NRDC is proving that saving livestock and saving large carnivores doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.” These “coexistence” strategies, which prevent conflicts from happening in the first place, include hiring range riders to deter wolves and grizzlies through human presence, removing livestock carcasses that can attract the large predators, and installing field cameras to monitor their activity. For the past three years, NRDC has been working directly with ranchers in places such as Montana’s Tom Miner Basin, just north of Yellowstone National Park, to implement proactive stewardship practices, and the success of these pilot projects has started to attract substantial interest among the broader livestock community. In January, NRDC helped organize a first-of-its-kind coexistence workshop for livestock owners in southwestern Montana, where the rate of wolf conflicts is among the highest in the state. The program was so well attended and received that it was hailed as a “landmark” and a “success” by one local agricultural publication, and the Montana director of the federal agency Wildlife Services, NRDC’s partner in organizing the event, is now fielding requests from livestock [Continued on next page.]
WOLF © DANIEL J. COX/KIMBALLSTOCK; BEARS © SKIBRECK/ISTOCKPHOTO
NRDC’s Fight Goes on for Wolves, Grizzlies F
A landmark NRDC court victory last year restored endangered species protections to wolves in Wyoming.
associations seeking similar workshops. That Wildlife Services is willing to work with NRDC to prevent the unnecessary killing of wolves and grizzly bears is, itself, emblematic of the shift in thinking toward these top predators that is occurring across the West. With an annual budget of more than $100 million, Wildlife Services kills tens of thousands of ecologically important carnivores each year as part of its “predator control program,” primarily in response to conflicts between wildlife and livestock. Reforming the agency and its lethal tactics is an NRDC priority. The stakes are high. Last year, there were an estimated 1,657 wolves in 282 packs roaming across Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Some of those wolves were confirmed as the killers of 136 cattle and 114 sheep. Meanwhile, ranchers
One of the best ways to ensure the survival of grizzlies and wolves is to work with those people who share the land with them. and government agents killed 161 wolves for attacking livestock. Reducing these conflicts will help advance our mission of rebuilding healthy wolf and grizzly populations in the Northern Rockies. But it will also help fend off aggressive hunting and trapping seasons for wolves, which are often held on the pretext of reducing conflict with livestock. That same misguided rationale could be used for hunting grizzlies if they lose their endangered species protections. As Strong says, “Clearly, one of the best ways to ensure the survival of grizzlies and wolves is to work with those people who share the land with them, having them adopt nonlethal measures to protect their livestock. Keep livestock alive, keep carnivores alive. Everyone wins. It’s conservation at its best.”
NRDC Brings Plight of Monarchs to World’s Attention Thanks to the relentless advocacy of NRDC and our Members, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee has announced it will study the plight of monarch butterflies, a move that could lead it to add Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve to its “World Heritage in
Danger” list. Millions of monarchs migrate south to the reserve each winter in one of North America’s most spectacular natural phenomena. But since the 1990s the migrating population of monarchs has plummeted 85 percent, due largely to the skyrocketing use of the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as Roundup by Monsanto. The herbicide kills milkweed, the butterfly’s main food supply, in its breeding habitat in the United States and Canada. “If we’re going to boost monarch populations in the Biosphere Reserve and preserve its world heritage value, then these two nations must act immediately to protect their milkweed habitat,” says NRDC Senior Attorney Rebecca Riley. “The World Heritage Committee cannot force countries to act, but it can help galvanize political pressure for new limits on glyphosate use.” Riley delivered more than 50,000 petition signatures from NRDC Members to the World Heritage Committee during its meeting in Bonn, Germany.
Subway Gets the Message, but Will It Deliver? Just days after NRDC launched a national campaign demanding that Subway, the world’s largest fast-food chain, commit to phasing out the purchase of meat raised with the routine use of antibiotics, the company publicly stated for the first time that it supports that goal. It has also been reported that Subway plans a transition in 2016 to chicken raised without antibiotics important to human medicine. “We are pleased that Subway is starting to respond to consumer demand,” says Lena Brook, an NRDC food policy advocate, “but the devil is in the details. Still missing are specific commitments, concrete timelines and action on turkey, beef and pork.” Facing pressure from NRDC and others, many of Subway’s competitors — including McDonalds, Chick-Fil-A and Chipotle — have announced major initiatives to eliminate the excessive use of
antibiotics by their suppliers. In the United States alone, 70 percent of medically important antibiotics are sold for use in the livestock industry. The drugs are used to promote growth and help animals survive on factory farms under stressful, crowded and often unsanitary conditions. Overuse of antibiotics in agriculture and human medicine creates drug-resistant infections that kill more than 23,000 Americans each year.
There are only 100-120 Florida panthers left in the wild.
Oil Development Threatens Florida Panther Prowling through the swamps and dense pinelands of Big Cypress National Preserve, endangered Florida panthers could soon encounter a new threat: fracking operations. This 700,000-acre protected area in the heart of the Everglades provides critical habitat for the big cats, which number only 100 to 120 individuals in the entire state. But the energy industry is now proposing seismic exploration on 70,000 acres of the preserve. To stop these reckless plans in their tracks, we have mobilized NRDC Members, demanding that the National Park Service safeguard the panther’s last home. “If the oil industry gets its way, this extraordinary piece of our natural heritage will become an industrial sacrifice zone,” says Sharon Buccino, an NRDC senior attorney. Oil companies would begin by invading more than 110 square miles of the irreplaceable preserve with seismic survey operations, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake — building roads up to 50 feet wide, wiping out vast swaths of trees and sending heavy trucks, off-road vehicles and even helicopters rumbling through a pristine environment. If energy companies find profitable amounts of oil, then fracking would begin, requiring even more infrastructure in the form of well pads, pipelines and additional roads. Collisions with cars and trucks are already the leading cause of panther deaths, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has made clear that “every individual is important for the panther’s survival.” The last thing panthers need is oil and gas development.
BUTTERFLY © KONSTANTIN SUTYAGIN/SHUTTERSTOCK; CHICKENS © LANCE CHEUNG/USDA; PUMA © JENN DOMASHEVICH/U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS
[Continued from previous page.]
FOLIAGE © GLORYFIN/ISTOCKPHOTO; BEE © BORYAK/ISTOCKPHOTO
If you’re like most Americans, you probably know Bayer as the company behind a host of medicine-cabinet staples, including its signature aspirin as well as Aleve, One A Day vitamins and AlkaSeltzer. But did you know the German corporate giant is also the world’s number one manufacturer of bee-killing pesticides called neonics? Call it Bayer’s billion-dollar
in America’s bee populations, the chemical maker has remained defiant, continuing to ply the market with these beetoxic pesticides. Bayer’s leading neonic products — imidacloprid and clothianidin — have topped a staggering $1.5 billion in annual sales. Now, in a dramatic escalation of our ongoing fight to protect bees from the deluge of agrichemicals that are killing them, NRDC has launched a full-fledged campaign to expose Bayer’s role in this crisis and build a groundswell of public pressure on the company to pull its neonics off the market. “The latest annual survey of
Honeybee
dirty secret. Even as a growing body of scientific evidence points to the skyrocketing use of neonics as a prime culprit in the drastic declines
American beekeepers showed that more honeybees died during the summer of 2014 than over the winter, the first time that’s ever happened,” says NRDC
Senior Scientist Jennifer Sass. “It’s critical that we rein in the use of bee-toxic pesticides as quickly as possible.” But rather than heed the latest science, Bayer has steadily ignored or attacked the mounting evidence that neonics can debilitate, sicken and kill bees — all while waging a slick PR campaign that casts itself as a friend to bees. For example, its mobile Bee Care Tour travels around the country “to celebrate pollinators” — without mentioning the dangers of neonics. To counter the impact of Bayer’s well-oiled publicity machine, NRDC’s own Bees Can’t Bayer It! campaign is shining a spotlight on the company as the biggest maker of neonics by reaching millions of consumers via email, social media and online video. We’re also taking the fight to Bayer’s doorstep with a full-page ad in Die Zeit, the highest-circulating newspaper in Germany, that calls on the company to “Stop Killing America’s Bees.” Meanwhile, NRDC is calling on the EPA to ban neonics once and for all. “We can’t afford to lose our bees,” says Sass. “Not when one in every three bites of food we take depends on them.”
Whales Get Their Day in Court — and Win! By Rhea Suh, President
For more than a decade, NRDC has been watchdogging the U.S. Navy and pursuing it through the courts on behalf of whales in the Pacific. On September 14, the whales won. In a landmark settlement, the Navy finally agreed to meet its obligation under the law, committing for the first time to put vital ocean habitat around Southern California and Hawaii off-limits to the use of powerful sonar and high explosives during
training and testing operations. Captains and commanders will now have to plan their expeditions and steer vessels to give a wide berth to whales in these areas. Because marine mammals depend on their finely tuned sense of hearing to communicate, navigate and find food, sonar and explosives can not only cause injuries but impair their ability to survive. They can go silent, become panicked or be driven from their habitats. The Navy’s own environmental review conceded that sonar use across all ranges could kill nearly 1,000 marine mammals over the next five years and cause more than 13,000 serious injuries. As a result of the new settlement, spelled out in a court order, the Navy must cease using sonar and high explosives in waters critical to the most vulnerable of these creatures. That’s good news for an array of species, including
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Canadian Lynx
hundreds of endangered blue whales — the world’s largest animals — that return each year to feed off the coast of Southern California. We couldn’t have done it without you, our stalwart Members. Together with high-profile advocates like Pierce Brosnan, you ignited a public outcry and flooded President Obama and the secretary of defense with hundreds of thousands of messages demanding protection for whales. And your generous financial support gave us the critical funds needed to stay in court for as long as it took to prevail. Our job now is to expand this victory to the Navy’s other ranges, in the Gulf of Alaska, off the northwest and southeast coasts and elsewhere. As always, we’ll be counting on your strong support of this historic work in defense of whales.
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Bayer, Stop Killing America’s Bees!
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