Noah's Ark
Oklahoma Interstate 82, a beetle, and the ESA
In 1988, Oklahoma was addressing an infrastructural shortcoming still commonly found in many states – inadequate roads. In this specific case, building a highway would not simply create a crossable pathway for travelers, it would literally pave a road from malady to health.
The Choctaw Nation Indian Hospital is located in remote, southeastern Oklahoma near the Sans Bois Mountains. At the time, the hospital was cash-strapped and could not afford to operate an ambulance service. For Choctaws who lived on the opposite end of the mountain, this meant that in order to receive medical care, they would have to traverse a forty-eight mile winding trek that could take hours in the dead of winter. In an effort to shorten this journey, the Choctaw Nation made it a priority to allocate all their funds towards the expansion of State Highway 82. Instead of having to navigate old dirt roads, this new, direct path would enable safer and more efficient travel.
The Oklahoma Department of Transportation was highly supportive. Such an expansion of Highway 82 would reduce travel time for coal companies, gas companies, and students in the region. The Oklahoma legislature and Federal Highway Administration both gave their support and respective funding, and the project was given a greenlight.
It would have certainly been convenient if the story ended here and all the Oklahomans ended up with their fresh, new highway. I’m sure you can guess this is not how the story ends.
Let’s back up a little bit. The year is 1960 and insect enthusiasts are beginning to notice the American Burying Beetle, Nicrophorous Americanus, had become extremely difficult to come by. The small beetle, around an inch and half long, had once been found frequently in 35 states. As one of nature’s most efficient recyclers, they roam grasslands and oak hickory forests seeking out carrion. Unlike all other beetles, the American Burying Beetle makes a concerted effort in taking care of its offspring with its partner. After locating a dead animal, a male beetle will attract a female and to celebrate their insect honeymoon, they’ll move the carcass together until they find a suitable burying ground. They then dig the substrate under the carrion, forming a makeshift tomb for the remains. The beetles mate and the female lays eggs near the tomb, providing food for her future offspring.
Photo courtesy of Roger Williams Park Zoo
While scientists noticed way back in 1960 that the beetle had decreased in numbers, it took around another 20 years for it to pick up national attention. In The Coleopterists Bulletin, Lloyd Davis highlighted that the beetle had not been found by a collector for decades. Around the same time the article was released, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was ramping up its commitment to include insects on the endangered species list. Michael Bentzien was handed with this task, and he made a national notice for scientists to write to him insects they believed were in danger of disappearing forever. One of Davis’ colleagues, Lorus Milne, saw the notice and successfully contacted Bentzien. After consulting museum records, the beetle was given a “Category 2” status, which meant that subsequent investigations would take place to determine if the beetle was indeed endangered.
Bentzien’s approved research led to beetle surveys across America, and scientists determined there had been a 99.9% decrease of all American Burying Beetles. The small orange-spotted beetle had gone from being found in 35 states to only two locations. The first was Block Island (a strip of land in between Connecticut and Rhode Island) and the second is right where you’d expect – along the proposed Highway 82 expansion in Oklahoma. The drastic decrease in the beetle’s population led to the beetle getting listed as “endangered” and consequently, receiving ESA sponsored protections. Because the development of Highway 82 would likely act as a detriment to the beetle’s survival, the plans for the highway had to be cancelled.
Fortunately, the Choctaw Nation found a way to overcome this unforeseen hurdle. In 1999, the Choctaws built the first ever tribe-funded hospital, the Choctaw Nation Health Care Center. The impressive 140,000 square foot square foot facility was constructed in Talihina, Oklahoma, providing health care to 10 counties in southeast Oklahoma. Remarkably, seven outlying clinics were also built in an effort to provide services to Choctaws throughout the region.
The Choctaws would remain an outlier – for the following decades, the beetle remained a thorn in the side for Oklahoma state officials even after the highway cancellation. Coal companies, pipeline companies, and even the National Guard flooded the office of state officials responsible for enforcing beetle conservation efforts. Proposed oil and natural gas developments required supplemental surveys and investigations of the beetle, delaying projects and oftentimes cancelling them altogether. While the beetle had won a series of battles, the onslaught of attacks would only prove to get worse.
A Sinking Ship
The Environmental Species Act provides the framework of protection for all animals classified as “endangered.” While the legislation was passed nearly 50 years ago, it contained tremendous foresight to the dangers of increased consumption and natural resource exploitation. The contrast between the environmental rhetoric used by Nixon in 1967 vs. Trump today is stark to say the least.
Nixon: Shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and being to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?
Trump: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make the U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
The drive towards endless consumption has already decimated our future. While the ESA has survived 378 attacks on its protections since its inception, these victories can be seen as moral ones at best. Oil spills, ocean acidification, and the burning of fossil fuels have set us on a trajectory for the largest extinction we’ve seen in 66 million years. As Andrew Yang put it in last week’s debate, “We are ten years too late.” This is not to say we should embrace an ethos of complete nihilism and give up, but rather that our technological hubris will come to bite us in the ass sooner than later. We’ve just endured the hottest July ever (resulting in 500,000 people in China enduring a drought and cities in India literally running out of water), and it’s anticipated that there could be up to 1 billion climate refugees by 2050.
You would think that in a world already feeling the tangible results of climate change, there would at least be an effort to stop more ecological devastation. Yet, it’s just been more of the same. “Climate change is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese.” “Carbon dioxide is the main building block of life.” “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.” All of these tweets have been made by Trump, but they only show the tip of our quickly melting iceberg.
In the last year, there have been at least 378 bills aimed at reforming the ESA, each of which weakens it in a different way. The ESA historically had been design to protect endangered species from extinction, “whatever the cost.” One of the bills proposed seeks to change this framework altogether and make economic cost a relevant factor when determining whether an animal should receive protection. In essence, proponents of this bill are placing a price on the survival of entire species.
Maybe this isn’t that radical an idea for the staunch economists in the room. Perhaps you see no inherent value in the existence of other non-human species. Even if your anthropocentric logic were correct (I’ll drop a link to why it might be wrong here), the problem is that the existence of other animals is vital to ensure the long-term survival of humans. Biodiversity, which is the variety of life on Earth on all levels, slows down the pace of global warming, purifies drinking water, and provides the basis for various pharmaceuticals. Additionally, the loss of biodiversity is often cascading – after one species goes poof, dozens more join in the disappearing act.
While tiny, the beetle has demonstrated time and time again that it has immense political strength due to its “endangered” status. Ever since the insect was found along the proposed highway in 1979, it has remarkably stopped oil and gas companies from drilling in its environment in Oklahoma.
Unfortunately, oil and gas companies have also proven to be resilient. Members in the Western Congressional Caucus have all become oil drunkards, lobbying for the aforementioned bills that weaken the ESA. Representative Rob Bishop has received over $400,000 from oil and gas companies. Representative Bruce Westerman, who in addition to taking over $100,000 from oil and gas companies, has said the ESA relies on “fake science.” The Deputy Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt, was elected by Trump and served as a lobbyist for clients like the Independent Petroleum Association of America, Cobal International Energy, and Samson Resources. This is especially jarring as the Department of the Interior is responsible for the conservation of federal lands and controls the enforcement of provisions laid out by the ESA.
The list grows longer. Senator Inhofe shares the home state of Oklahoma as our small insect friend, and he has been adamantly championing a bill aimed at removing protections on the beetle. A climate change denier, Inhofe attempted to slip provisions stripping the beetle of its protections into a must-pass defense spending bill as a rider. The nature of spending bills makes debate over specific provisions almost impossible – there is only a short window to get the bill passed since funding for the defense programs will run dry if a resolution is not achieved.
In an incredible display of corruption, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (also managed by former oil lobbyist Bernhardt) felt its need to participate in the environment-bashing party as well. Wyatt Hoback and Douglas Leasure, both beetle experts, were hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct a species status assessment to determine if the beetle should still be listed as “endangered.” Oil and gas corporations petitioned to have this assessment done in the first place, and they were determined to get the “data” they were looking for. Hoback and Leasure had recently published a map of Nebraska where the beetle could be found. However, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service combined their map with what the agency deemed was similar cropland in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. While the beetle is not currently found in any of these states, the agency reasoned that if similar environments existed in these other states, the beetle could be found there as well. Through a corrupt sleight of hand, decimating the beetle’s Nebraskan environment became justified.
The scientists were understandably appalled with this egregious mapping decision as there was no evidence that the beetles could even survive in these other states. Hoback and Leasure were only given one day to resolve their complaints, and both quit their project as they believed the agency was riddled with corruption. Nevertheless, even after Hoback and Leasure quit, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to selectively use portions of their analysis to demonstrate that the beetles could be found in multiple states. In an interview with The Washington Post, Hoback said, “It felt like the fish and Wildlife Service wanted to conclude that agriculture is not a risk to the beetle and were going to use the data in a way that made that conclusion, no matter what.”
Last May, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service released a proposition to change the listing of the American Burying Beetle from “endangered” to “threatened.” While “threatened” species still receive some forms of protection, the protections are nowhere near as comprehensive. The proposition would grant very little protection to the population of beetles in Oklahoma, but the reasoning for this was quite surprising. The report doesn’t make the argument that the beetle population in the region is healthy and sustainable, but rather that climate change will make the Southern Plains region uninhabitable for the beetle anyways. Essentially, the agency has admitted that climate change will wipe out the beetle, so might as well let companies drill.
This logic is faulty on many fronts. I had a quick chat with Rhode Island zoologist and American Burying Beetle enthusiast, Louis Perrotti, to discuss this report. He made it clear that there is no definitive evidence that climate change will extirpate the beetle in this region in the next 40 years. Additionally, the report’s surveys of healthy beetle populations in other regions should be taken with a grain of salt – the proposition fails to take into account the drastic annual variance in beetle populations attributable to weather, carrion supply, and number of surveys taken.
Even if the report were correct in its assessment why should we throw our hands in the air and give up especially when oil corporations are responsible for our trajectory towards extinction begin with? From the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report to the Department of Defense, government agencies have admitted that global warming is real and a threat multiplier. While this admission is imperative, the next step should be halting all activities that will only make our climate crisis worse. Perhaps the beetle is already on a track that will lead to its eventual extinction, but we shouldn’t throw all the animals off the ark – facilitating more hydrocarbon extraction will simply sink the whole ship.
I’m not telling anyone to buy a hybrid, recycle, or buy into the Beyond Meat hype, – I actually think this sort of logic convinces individuals they have control over the climate catastrophe when in reality, corporations are holding all the cards here. But, for those who hold positions of power with widespread influence, consider how your actions will affect the survival of all inhabitants of Earth, including humans. If even conservative-led government agencies are admitting to the threat of global warming, don’t vote for representatives who have the scientific understanding of Kyrie Irving. Advocate for corporate change and invest in the sustainable companies you think will provide the ballast that will keep us afloat.
As Louis Perrotti explained to me, various species are interconnected like the spokes in a bike wheel. Remove a few spokes and the bike might still work. Remove too many, and the whole thing collapses and no one gets anywhere.
In an effort to not seem too nihilistic, I’ll leave you with a story of environmental optimism. Transcanada sought out to streamline their supply-chain and boost their profits by converting the port of Gros Cacouna in Quebec to a heavy oil terminal. Activists put their lives on the line, contesting the conversion in one of the largest rural protests ever. Those blocking the conversion did not only consider their livelihoods but also understood that oil spills could lead to disastrous effects on the nearby ecosystem. Using the endangered beluga as a legal tool to rally around, the Quebec Environmental Law Center and its plaintiffs filed for an injunction against Transcanada. This legal action, along with its accompanying protest, stifled Transcanada’s proposed development.
Late is always better than never.
Special thanks to Louis Perrotti and Jake Li for taking the time for beetle talk with me this week.