Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
What 120 Degrees Looks Like in One of Mexico’s Hottest Cities (NYT)
Nations set to agree on shipping emissions cuts but fall short of aligning with climate goals (AP)
3 reasons to be optimistic about climate tech in the second half of 2023 (G)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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Avaada Group raised ‘Historic’ INR 10,700 Cr ($1.3B) for the integrated energy platform headquartered in Mumbai, India (PR).
NoTraffic, a traffic management platform from Tel Aviv, raised $50M in a Series B round led by M&G Investments and others (TC).
A Swiss plastic recycler DePoly secured a $13.8M seed round co-led by BASF (GV)
Berlin, Germany-based EV charging installer Service4Charger raised €10M in Series A funding from bp ventures and Smart Energy Innovationsfonds (TE)
Ampd Energy raised $8M. 2150 and Taronga Ventures led the round for the Hong Kong startup manufacturing battery energy storage systems (DA).
Planckian, a quantum battery storage startup based in Pisa, Italy, raised a pre-seed round of €2.7M led by Eureka! Venture and others (TE).
Green Theory
Howling for Biodiversity
Wolves once howled across North America. They invoked fear and hatred from farmers, and other settlers and colonists, who defined wilderness as “evil in its resistance to their control”, and falsely imagined un-Europeanized land to be “uninhabited”. Intentional extermination, and multi-source habitat destruction, drove wolves near extinction in the US, as the nation approached the year 1900.
Gray wolves’ reintroduction into Yellowstone, starting in 1995, holds inspiration and promise. Decades of research yielded, and a fairly stable population maintained, the project largely attracts attention as a success. Still, evolutionary theory and recent field evidence suggest that preserving biodiversity will take more than an apex predator. 50 years since the Fish & Wildlife service declared the northern Rocky mountain wolf as endangered, let’s reflect on the comeback of this majestic mammal.
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Trophic Cascade
Wolves brought excitement to many ‘90s enthusiasts, eager to see their return to Yellowstone. For one thing, large predators contain a special “capacity to thrill and surprise us,” as Hugh Webster wrote in British Wildlife. At the same time, it was the wolves’ impact on the other animals and their environment (the trophic cascade) that really caught the public’s attention.
Phoebe Weston summarizes the dramatic story of Yellowstone’s new trophic cascade:
The wolves also indirectly changed the way their prey moved around the park. The elk became less likely to graze large open river valleys because of the fear of attack. This meant that new areas were able to regenerate, creating benefits that cascaded down ecosystems, resulting in habitats for beavers, fish, small mammals, amphibians and insects, among many others. –Phoebe Weston, Guardian
Examples of flora and fauna rebounds abounded, and life in Yellowstone appeared to be flourishing. Indeed, increasing biodiversity supports positive feedback loops for biological ecosystem services.
Limits to Adaptation
Reintroduced wolves doubtlessly changed other Yellowstone species, and the terrain itself. More recent studies suggest, however, researchers and media tended to overstate cascade effects. Both can be true.
Even when comparing reintroductions of the same species, outcomes aren’t reliable. As Weston reports, a “2010…paper concluded that the trophic impacts of wolves in Banff, Isle Royale and Yellowstone were all different.” Evolutionary theory predicts that, although we consider a species to be the ‘same’, its reintroduction is complicated by the changes that both the species and the environment have undergone during their separation.
The wolves kicked off profound changes, while external climatic factors also heavily influence the vegetation and environmental health. Communities and policymakers need to consider the other levers available to support a “wild” ecosystem, but large predator reintroduction still offers potential.
Wolfing Down Doubters
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As more rewilding projects—from large predators to small pollinators—allow generations to evolve, and ecosystems to respond, we’ll learn more about how to protect our environment, and the plants and animals that protect our environment, too. For now, Western ecologists can already look to Indigenous practices on Indigenous lands: the best examples of protecting biodiversity at scale.
The full moons of Yellowstone no longer silently mourn the wolves. Even if the wolves can’t protect the entire park on their own, their power of inspiration and influence spreads far beyond the range of their packs’ harrowing howls.
The Closer
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Have a great weekend!