Around the world, animals that exhibit rare color morphisms—including lighter colored variants with albinism or leucism and dark-colored variants with melanism—are often the subject of both veneration and fear in humans. A recent study by UC Berkeley wildlife biologists is one of the first to explore how human preference for these unusual color variations impacts how animals are perceived and treated. 

For the study, which was published in Human Ecology this spring, the researchers surveyed news articles and scientific publications for observations of animals with novel colorations, noting whether they were treated as nuisances or with adoration and protection. 

They found multiple places in the US where it’s illegal to hunt white stags or albino, white-tailed deer, but not melanistic deer. They also found that both white and black squirrels are celebrated and protected in parts of the country. Brevard, North Carolina, is a squirrel sanctuary and hosts a White Squirrel Weekend focused on its leucistic squirrels, and in Olney, Illinois, white squirrels get right-of-way when crossing the street. Kent State University’s annual Black Squirrel Festival celebrates the campus’s black squirrel population, which was imported from Canada in 1961.  

While the study found that generally people are more interested in herbivores like deer and squirrels, there were instances of predators benefitting because of their unique color. For example, a black coyote roaming neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia—where trapped coyotes are required by law to be euthanized—was instead relocated to a sanctuary.

“Conservation scientists use evidence-based approaches informed by research and literature, but they are still human beings with natural, internalized biases and preferences,” said co-author Tyus Williams, a graduate student in the lab of Assistant Professor Christopher Schell, which focuses on urban wildlife ecology. “Critically examining those feelings can help us better inform policies to effectively look after the animals we’re trying to steward.”

Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future

By Jonathan Mingle, MS ’09 Energy and Resources
Island Press

Independent journalist Jonathan Mingle’s latest book provides a gripping account of the David versus Goliath battle surrounding the Atlantic Coast Pipeline proposed by utility giant Dominion Energy. The book recounts the six-year-long effort of farmers, nurses, scientists, innkeepers, and other rural Virginians to stop the 600-mile-long project. The pipeline’s developers insisted that the pipeline was in the public interest because it would carry natural gas, touted by the industry as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future, despite experts’ warnings that it would lock in decades of climate-warming emissions. The grassroots coalition persisted against Dominion’s deep pockets and unparalleled influence over lawmakers and regulators. Eventually they won: Dominion sold most of its gas assets and pivoted to building the country’s largest offshore wind farm. Mingle’s narrative offers insights into the political influence of the utility and gas industries, the risks posed by continued investment in fossil gas infrastructure, and the power of ordinary citizens to shape the decisions that will determine America’s energy future. 

Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability

By Manisha Anantharaman, PhD ’15 Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

MIT Press

In Recycling Class, Manisha Anantharaman grapples with the complexities of pursuing sustainability in a deeply unequal and exploitative world through a ten-year study of garbage politics in Bengaluru, India. Over the past decade, members of the city’s middle class have developed neighborhood groups to support recycling, composting, and zero-waste lifestyles as solutions to the growing crisis of unmanaged waste. The book details how waste pickers—those who make a living by reclaiming value from discards—organized to obtain inclusion into these decentralized systems. Although these “DIY infrastructures” have created economic and political opportunities for waste pickers, these configurations also continue to reproduce class, caste, and gender-based divisions of labor. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that under the logic of neoliberal, racial capitalism, inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility. Anantharaman argues that urban sustainability transitions and circular economy initiatives must repair past harms and confront their gendered and racialized dynamics to avoid perpetuating existing patterns of exploitation and dispossession.