By Susan Cosier
Loretta Johnson tortures plants. She sets them in awkward positions, deprives them of water or gives them too much, then watches how they react. Her victims are tall grasses—big bluestems, specifically, an icon of the midwestern prairie. Johnson isn't tormenting the plants for kicks; she's investigating how they fare under different climatic conditions. And so far, her observations provide clues to how the Great Plains could change within the next century.
Climate models show that warmer temperatures will likely continue to shift north over the next 75 years. Rainfall patterns are also expected to change, with portions of the big bluestem's midwestern range likely becoming drier for at least part of the year.
Big bluestems, which grow throughout nearly all of the U.S., make up 70 percent of the Midwest's tallgrass prairie. How these grasses grow, however, varies quite a bit by region. In drier areas, like eastern Colorado, the plants are short and stumpy. In the wetter eastern Midwest, such as Illinois and parts of Kansas, they reach up to nine feet tall. But no matter where big bluestem grows, cattle love to eat it—and if the grass stops thriving in certain places, ranchers could feel it in their wallets.
For the past seven years, Johnson, a professor in Kansas State University's division of biology and a codirector of the school's Ecological Genomics Institute, has belonged to a research team whose members hail from a number of states and scientific disciplines, including botany and climatology. To get a handle on what a changing climate might mean for the big bluestem, the scientists collected seeds from pristine prairies (those not degraded by agriculture or mining) in regions with various rainfall patterns. They then planted the seeds in three gardens—a wet locale in Illinois, a wet area in Kansas, and a dry area in Kansas—to test how the grasses might adapt under different conditions.
Interestingly, when these big bluestems grew, they did so exactly the way they would have in their home prairies. No matter how much rain, sunlight or wind (or the types of grasses growing around them), they didn't change. The regional differences between the plants, it appears, are genetic. The grasses may belong to the same species, but they represent what scientists call different ecotypes.
And that could be bad news for cattle ranchers. According to Bruce Anderson, an agronomy professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who has studied cattle and foraging grasses for 35 years, good bluestem land can feed more livestock than other types of land. He said grazing cattle on these plants, which grow well in the summer months, instead of solely on grasses that thrive in the spring, can result in a 20 percent to 25 percent increase in how many animals can feed off the land. If weather conditions change to no longer match the needs of the big bluestems that sustain cattle in an area, those plants would be less productive, which could then affect cattle operations.
We don't know exactly how climate change's impacts on big bluestems might, in turn, influence cattle production, said Melinda Smith, director of the Semi-arid Grassland Research Center at Colorado State University (she is not a member of Johnson's research team). But we do know that changing climate conditions will alter what grasses thrive on the plains.
Take Kansas, for example, where ranchers operate on a third of the land. The state is home to the bluestem pasture region, one of the largest remaining swaths of tallgrass prairie. Smith's research here shows that forbs, which cattle don't like as much, replace grasses during an extreme drought. The bluestems stop growing, but they don't die out (like trees do under similar situations). When and if the rain finally returns, the bluestems come right back, showing resilience.
Researchers are now considering how best to preserve those bluegrass ecotypes that are expected to face soggier or drier seasons. Big bluestems can survive as long as 20 years, but reproducing during that time under suboptimal conditions is not guaranteed. They may release seeds into the wind, but the seeds may not be able to drift far enough to reach an area where conditions are more hospitable. Human intervention may be required.
Johnson and Sara Baer, a soil and grassland ecologist from Southern Illinois University, are looking into moving big bluestems to different locales but say the idea of doing so raises questions about the species' future genetic diversity and its ability to mix certain ecotypes. Because the grasses' traits are so regionally specific, they flower at different times. "Their timing is off by, like, a month," said Johnson, and that may prevent them from interbreeding. Plus, the plants (or their hybrids) may not grow as well in their new homes, which could change the quality and quantity of plant material available to cattle.
Transporting certain types of big bluestem to new regions also raises questions of where exactly to put them. After all, just 4 percent of the original tallgrass prairie remains. (Less than 1 percent is left of Illinois's historically expansive prairie).
Baer, who has focused on prairie restoration for 20 years, says that small plots of restored prairie exist all over, and that making them more biologically diverse is important. If we plant grasses that can survive the changing conditions, more plant species—and their genetically different ecotypes—just may thrive. Then, she said, we can connect remnant prairies with those that have been restored, creating corridors where the grasses can disperse. That would be ideal.
In the meantime, Baer, Johnson and the rest of the team plan to dig deeper into bluestem's genetic differences and potential climate scenarios. Sorry, bluestems—it's time for a little more torture...
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.