I am a biodiversity scientist who values nature. I’m also keenly aware that nature and natural processes are under threat by many forces, and to properly understand them, we must cast a wide net and think about many inter-connected factors—from weather and climatic trends to human population trends to governance and the economy, to civil wars and the threats of an Earth-changing nuclear war. These factors have vital implications for human welfare and security. And they have important implications for an ‘October Surprise’ before the election.
NOAA weather forecasters predict a higher-than-normal hurricane season in the North Atlantic this year. Mega-storms are more likely given that as the Earth heats up, warm air holds more water, which falls as precipitation. The high rainfall storms we’ve been having recently will be part of the new normal.
A Katrina-like mega-storm hitting the US will cause a lot of human suffering. Since we’ve already had major rainfall events in June that have displaced many and threatened key dams, as the summer progresses, more people will literally be underwater—physically and financially because fewer people are able to afford homeowners insurance in flood-prone areas. Government relief can be a lifeline, but it alone is unlikely to make people whole again. Given the performance of recent unnatural disasters, it may take a while for the government relief to help them out. Effective and efficient relief could help Biden’s chances of shifting some undecided voters to vote for him, but inefficiencies in its distribution are unlikely to help.
A mega-storm need not hit the US to have profound impacts on the election. A devastating storm could certainly impact many migrants from other countries passing through Central America, causing a humanitarian crisis. This could drive a wave of migrants northwards, creating new strains on our borders. This would most certainly hurt Biden’s chances of re-election.
It’s not just our borders that are vulnerable to a human-caused natural disaster. Nuclear saber-rattling by Russia over Ukraine risks the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945. This is while the risk of shelling Europe’s largest nuclear power plant—the Ukrainian-owned but Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear power station—remains real.
The nuclear fallout from breeching Zaporizhzhia’s reactors will create a nuclear disaster across much of Eastern and Western Europe. If we look back to the lessons of the Chernobyl meltdown, we can expect some immediate deaths and increases in mutation rates in most living things in the immediate area and increases in the rates of some cancers. These effects will dissipate with distance from the reactors, but the effects will persist for generations. Ironically, we can also expect an increase in biodiversity in what will become radiation-restricted zones because people are not otherwise interfering with nature.
The symbolic value of targeting a nuclear power plant in a war is huge and will likely forever doom the expansion of this source of carbon-free power in the United States. The stigma associated with nuclear power makes it all the more difficult to transform quickly to a carbon-free future, which is essential if we are to reduce the production of greenhouse gasses and try to minimize the destruction caused by a rapidly heating world.
But it’s not just nuclear power. Russia might actually use a nuclear weapon. US leadership and restraint in response to this ecological and humanitarian catastrophe should benefit Biden because he is a proven and effective institutionalist who can bring together allies in times of threat. Managing the response to a nuclear attack by Russia will be a challenge, and the symbolic value of using nuclear weapons will make it all the more likely that they will be used in the future. The risks of a nuclear winter are real. This happens when firestorms following even a limited nuclear exchange darken the sky and reduce global temperatures, leading to crop failure, famine, and massive biodiversity loss. All who value biodiversity and human welfare should be working all out to prevent such a scenario from ever happening.
Broadly, I am interested in the evolution of social and antipredator behavior and the ramifications mechanisms of behavior have for higher level ecological processes and for wildlife conservation. I have spent over a decade studying the evolution of complex communication and sociality and used the 14 species of marmots (cat-sized sciurid rodents found throughout the northern hemisphere) as a model system. Much of my marmot work now focuses on the yellow-bellied marmots of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (www.rmbl.org) which have been studied continuously since 1962. A main theme in my research is integrating knowledge of animal behavior into conservation biology. Ultimately, I aim to illustrate, through examples, how knowledge of behavior should influence policy. In addition to my more theoretical work, I’ve been actively engaged in using ecotourism as a form of community development and as a way to conserve natural resources. My theoretical research interests are particularly relevant to the applied work because ecotourism can adversely impact wildlife. Ultimately, it is the wildlife’s perception of human impacts that matters.
