From the corporation which wants to control the world by controlling the food, this video tells how Monsanto wants to patent the pig. But how can a corporation get a patent on something that already exists? http://www.documentarywir…
Jane Akre, from that great video about Monsanto, bovine growth hormones, and Fox News, “The Corporation- Unsettling Accounts”, is also in this video. http://www.youtube.com/wa…
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SEATTLE ,July 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — As news spreads ofOntario’s commitment to protect over 55 million acres ofCanada’s Boreal Forest, an area the size of theUnited Kingdom , leading international scientists and conservationists are expressing their strong support for PremierDalton McGuinty’s science-based leadership.
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Species already listed as endangered may be racing toward extinction 100 times faster than originally thought, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Author Brett Melbourne says today’s extinction-risk models have drastically underestimated the speed at which endangered species will perish.
“It’s a mathematical misdiagnosis,” said Melbourne, an assistant professor in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at CU-Boulder.
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Capt. Charles Moore wasn’t always obsessed with plastic. His fixation began in 1997, while sailing back to Los Angeles from Hawaii after a yacht race. He took an unusual easterly route, snubbed by most sailors for its lack of wind, and discovered what’s now called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a soupy expanse of plastic bits and marine debris that extends from the Sea of Japan to within 500 miles west of California.
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WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, Jun. 30 -/E-Wire/– The Center for Biological Diversity, Florida Biodiversity Project, and Natural Resources Defense Council today notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that they will challenge the agency’s failure to adequately protect the critical habitat of the highly endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow.
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California’s unique native plants are so vulnerable to global climate change that two-thirds of the state’s endemic plants could suffer more than an 80 percent reduction in geographic range by the end of the century, according to a new study led by Scott Loarie, a Ph.D. candidate with Stuart Pimm at the Nicholas School for the Environment.
Click here to read the article published today in the open access journal PLoS ONE.
Click here to see maps of the impacts of climate change on individual plants.
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By Tim Drake
www.primitivepursuits.net
Research suggests that young people who spend time in nature grow up to have a greater awareness of environmental issues, yet Richard Louv points out in Last Child in the woods that children of this generation are spending far less time in nature. David Orr puts it simply: “The ecological crisis is in every way a crisis of education.” Despite evidence that ecological literacy and time spent outdoors is critical, the National Environmental Education & Training Foundation reports that, “U.S. environmental and sustainability education . . . has yet to achieve ‘core’ subject status,” and that environmental education is only taught by 44% of high school teachers.
Where does this leave the rest of us …. I like to say it leaves us with an overwhelming need to be great role models! Ask questions, make observations, and share your enthusiasm for nature. At any time we can reach out with excitement to the person closest to us and ask “What kind of bird was that” and who knows what will happen next!
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The junk is made, literally, from junk: 15,000 plastic bottles, a Cessna cockpit, and a used sail.
(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)
Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn’t waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.
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By Jim Motavalli
 |
| On the outside looking in: a border fence separates San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico. |
| © Francisco Santos |
In 2006, USA Today ran a lengthy story entitled “How Will the USA Cope with Unprecedented Growth?” The country’s population had just crossed the 300 million mark, up from 200 million in just 39 years. Writer Haya El Nasser listed the many environmental problems made worse by rapid population growth, from traffic congestion to dwindling open space. But El Nasser’s story left one question unanswered: Why is the U.S. virtually the only industrialized country with a rapidly growing population? The key word is “immigration,” but El Nasser never uses it.
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For such a drab looking creature, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow has sure had a colorful history.
Its name seems bigger than its bulk. It has survived fire, flood and human meddling, yet its numbers have dwindled drastically in recent years. Now, the fate of this scruffy little puff of feathers depends on the restoration of the Everglades, the only place on the planet it can be found.
→ No CommentsTags: S. L. Pimm · Saving Species
Aquatic wildlife of the Great Barrier Reef gets a boost from Marxan software
Nothing pushes a species to extinction like wiping out its habitat. Consider the Hawaiian Islands: They were originally covered in trees, but by the 1950s three-quarters of the islands’ natural forests had been destroyed to make way for animal pastures and crops. Many other habitats were overrun by introduced pigs and rats. The effect on Hawaii’s indigenous species was devastating: In the last 200 years, 28 species of birds alone were wiped out, including the large Kauai thrush. Once widespread throughout the Hawaiian Islands, this thrush has not been seen since 1989. It is considered extinct by the World Conservation Union.
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It’s fashionable to fret about how climate change will harm polar bears and penguins. But scientists now predict that, at least among insects, global warming will take its biggest toll in the tropics–home to more than half the world’s species.
Climate change models agree that temperatures will increase more near the poles than near the equator. Where it’s currently chilly, a couple of degrees of initial warming could launch a positive feedback loop: as snow and ice melt, they can’t reflect heat from the earth, which then warms even more. Because tropical warming will be less extreme, scientists sometimes suppose that tropical species will suffer less from climate change.
→ No CommentsTags: S. L. Pimm · Global Warming
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 3 (Tierramérica) - “When we harm nature, we are harming ourselves,” says Aaron Bernstein, a doctor at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the upcoming book “Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity”.
“Few people realise that our health is directly tied to the health of the natural world,” Bernstein told Tierramérica
Bernstein and Harvard colleague Eric Chivian wrote and edited contributions from more than 100 leading scientists in their new book, launched Apr. 28 by Oxford University Press and available in May.
Written for a general audience, “Sustaining Life” draws on the latest scientific evidence to make a persuasive case that the current extinction crisis, with species vanishing every day, is a serious threat to humanity equal to, if not greater than, climate change.
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Environmental issues, particularly global climate change, enjoyed a star turn a few years ago, mainly as the result of some very bad weather and a newly hirsute Al Gore and his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.
For a time, as the initial presidential contenders began their campaigns, there seemed to be an historic number of pols willing to accept the premise that climate change was a reality and that environmental issues were at the forefront of voters’ minds.
→ No CommentsTags: Conservation · C. N. Jenkins
It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
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LONDON, April 29 (Reuters Life!) - Are you feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of global warming and battered by the constant stream of warnings about coming calamity?
Oxford University professor Norman Myers has a message that might help you square your shoulders and face the future.
“If you feel you are too small to make a difference then you haven’t been in bed with a mosquito,” Myers said.
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DURHAM, N.C. th Tropical moist forests are home to a majority of the Earth’s terrestrial species, yet human activities such as logging, road building and agriculture destroy between one and two million square kilometers of these vital habitats every decade. But a new paper by a trio of Duke University researchers, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers cause for cautious optimism th with a major caveat.
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Protected areas don’t always protect as well as they should, study reveals
Conservation projects often hinge on areas of land being given protection, but little is known about how well many protected areas actually do their job. Studying four of the world’s major moist tropical forests, a group of Duke University researchers led by Stuart Pimm found that inaccessibility can be a tree’s best friend. Protected areas within the Amazon and Congo forests, for example, nestle within largely well-forested surrounding areas, which keeps them relatively safe. The Atlantic Coast and West African protected areas, by contrast, are more fragmented: unfortunate, given their status as biodiversity hotspots. The study, published this week in PNAS, nonetheless throws welcome light on the way that large scale conservation initiatives work, or don’t. Source: Joppa LN, Loarie SR & Pimm SL (2008) On the protection of “protected areas”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0802471105
Image © Joe Gough
HANOI (AFP) — Asia’s rainforests are being rapidly destroyed, a trend accelerated by surging timber demand in booming China and India, and record food, energy and commodity prices, forest experts warn.
The loss of these biodiversity hot spots, much of it driven by the illegal timber trade and the growth of oil palm, biofuel and rubber plantations, is worsening global warming, species loss and poverty, they said.
Globally, tropical forest destruction “is a super crisis we are facing, it’s an appalling crisis,” said Oxford University’s Professor Norman Myers, keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Forestry Week conference in Hanoi.
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Stuart Pimm
The “old media” — the main way I communicate my ideas and results has served me very well, thank you very much. With colleagues, I write my papers, they are reviewed, modified, submitted again, and published — typically a couple of years after we first obtained the key results. It’s a complicated game. For some, there’s an urgent need to see their results in print quickly. Frankly, most science can wait a bit.
The main issue is fame. Getting cited is important — in fact, it can be everything, a life-or-death issue as far as a career is concerned. Here’s the problem: most papers are never cited or cited only by their authors. Their authors totally fail to communicate. Read journals and you’d understand why. There are thousands of papers published each month in my field, I can’t read them all, and for many that I do, I wish I’d done something else, like watching paint dry. Finding the signal amid the noise is hard work.
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