How environmental scientists keep going
A front-row seat to destruction
Door Eoin Gallagher
By Eoin Gallagher
Eoin Gallagher
When wildlife researchers Petra de Goeij and her husband Theunis Piersma moved to his homeland of Friesland twenty years ago, they would lie happily in the grassy fields around their home watching the skylarks as their songs filled the air. But that time is gone.
De Goeij recalls watching those fields, once filled with flowers and life, being turned into the green agricultural deserts of today. ‘It just got so creepy. So, so dark, so empty and quiet.’
The destruction of nature and the rapid changing of the climate are never far from the news. Environmental researchers like De Goeij are forced watch the decay of the natural world they love and bear the emotional toll while doing research which stands as a painful reminder of what is happening around them.
Mowed to death
For years, De Goeij studied black-tailed godwits, the national bird of the Netherlands, as they returned to nest and raise their chicks in the Frisian grasslands. Every spring, when the godwits would come back from Africa, she would be really happy. However, her research always took a dark turn when the chicks would hatch. Each year, fewer survived, mostly because of industrial farming practices.
I don’t think we are as flexible as the birds
Even though farmers get government subsidies to keep them from mowing before the month of June in order to protect godwit nests on their land, after that, they are very eager to mow. Because the chicks cannot fly yet, they get caught in the machines. Others starve afterwards because of the lack of insects in the mowed fields.
De Goeij would work with farming organisations, conservation groups, political groups, and individual farmers in her spare time. Everything to try and get the mowing to be done later in the year. Some farmers would cooperate, but most didn’t. ‘They had kept the nests safe, but they didn’t care beyond that.’
Before long, she became depressed by the whole situation. Every spring, she watched the fields being mowed and felt desperate and hurt, knowing that life was being ripped from the land and that she only saw the world changing for the worst.
Concern
She is not the only researcher battling these feelings. ‘In our community, there’s a hell of a lot of concern about the future’, says Piersma, who is an internationally renowned researcher on the subject of migratory birds.
He may be an optimist himself, he says, but he, too, is worried. ‘We’ve been living in a world with losses, losses, losses.’ Through his research, he has seen the decline of many bird species, but he is still more hopeful for their prospects for survival than our own. ‘I don’t think we are as flexible as the birds.’
After years of fighting, publishing papers, and advocating, De Goeij couldn’t keep going. She switched to studying the more hopeful spoonbills on the Wadden Islands. These birds prefer nature reserves and are in less danger. But coming home to the godwit area each week is still difficult. ‘I’m already so sad when I reach my house.’
At home, she hides herself away and tries not to think about what is going on around her village. ‘I cannot live with the idea of the destruction of agricultural land.’ She has thought of moving, ‘but where else can you go where you won’t see the degradation of nature?’
Thinning ice
Nowhere is a clearer picture of this degradation painted than in the Arctics. ‘Climate change is hitting there much more even than over here’, says arctic researcher Maarten Loonen, who has been living on Svalbard every summer for the past thirty years. ‘In that sense, the area is a canary in the coal mine.’
You can tell your grandchildren that you’ve tried to do something
The nature there is still magnificently beautiful, he says, sitting in his office with his polar bear socks on, and a paper mache walrus head hanging on the wall. ‘But it has changed a lot.’
The ice has thinned massively since he began coming to Svalbard. More polar bears turn up on the grasslands as their habitat dwindles, and each year he can go somewhere new by boat as the ice retreats.
Grandchildren
He finds himself resigned to a pessimistic view of the future, but the prospect of what it means for the people he loves still leaves him emotionally fraught. ‘Like when I think about the consequences for our grandchildren.’
He sees a future where the sea levels rise in the Netherlands, causing huge damage, mass migration and war for higher ground. They will have to deal with that, and all because of our actions today.
‘I still remember asking my father what he knew during the Second World War about what happened to the Jews, and he said: “I didn’t know”.’ Loonen feels that we won’t have that excuse. ‘You can’t change the world that much, but you can prepare for your grandchildren’s questions, so you can say that you’ve tried to do something.’
Frustration
Loonen is still actively producing research papers, but he feels that is not enough, and that they do not tell the story of climate change effectively to the public. ‘I’m a little bit disappointed in that’, he says.
The frustration of trying to tell this story through science is a common experience for researchers right these days. ‘There is a lot of science denial going on at the moment. In a really strange and aggressive way’, says Frits Steenhuisen, who researches global mercury emissions at the Arctic Centre. ‘It is not necessarily that people are skeptical, it’s just that they are fed with information which often isn’t true.’ And it is difficult for them to know what is and isn’t true, he adds.
All you can do for your own sanity is to keep your head down and do your bit
In the past, people trusted science more. When the ozone hole was discovered, countries came together to tackle the problem, even with the backdrop of the Cold War. Today, everything is questioned and the influence of political and lobby groups with financial interests make it harder to implement solutions. That is difficult for Steenhuisen to watch.
Maria van Leeuwe, who researches micro algae in the Antarctics, recognises this from when she worked for environmental NGOs. ‘My interest is nature. Now people have to think about the economy, or whatever, and I couldn’t deal with that.’ She returned to the university and is happier doing research.
Taking action
None of the researchers expected climate change to go so fast and be so impactful when they started. Van Leeuwe was motivated to answer basic questions, like: how do things work? How is nature performing? ‘Climate change was not the issue it is today.’
Steenhuisen remembers that when he came to the UG in the 1990s, he never thought the climate situation would get this bad. Reading one bad report after another is difficult, but stopping research isn’t an option for him. ‘All you can do for your own sanity is to keep your head down and do your bit to help things move in the right direction.’
But how?
Loonen tries to devote as much time to telling his story as he can, making videos in the Arctic, teaching at the university, and giving talks to the public about climate change in an accessible and human way. These activities help him stave off fatalism. ‘Having the opportunity to inspire people is just unique,’ he says.
Piersma, along with other researchers from the UG, set up BirdEyes, a research centre that tries to inspire and inform by telling stories about our world from the birds’ perspective. ‘They are much smarter and faster at solving their problems than we are, it seems, and we can learn so much from them.’
Working in a community of like-minded researchers is a way to institutionally cultivate hope and deal with the difficulties of their research. But staying optimistic is also a solo mission for him. It is a mindset he has to work on, by thinking about it, by looking for inspiration from nature, and by focusing on positive stories. ‘There are always glimmers of hope.’
Scientific curiosity
Van Leeuwe, too, remains optimistic by focusing on the small scale, remembering that many people want to do good, and continues to pursue the scientific curiosity that inspires her.
It’s important to continue researching, she says. ‘If there would not be such a thing as climate science, if all of us would stop now, because it’s voiceless, useless, that wouldn’t work either. We need to continue.’
And even when so many beautiful things around us disappear, she tells herself this: ‘No matter what happens to us, nature will go on.’