Wildlife – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

Rewilding Challenge: North American Jaguar

Intro to Rewilding: George Monbiot

Just in case you are not acquainted with “rewilding,” the best introduction I know is a short video with George Monbiot below. Actually I was introduced to Monbiot by the audio of this talk on NPR about ten years ago. The video adds a couple of dimensions, but it might detract from the enthusiasm in Monbiot’s voice. (His enthusiasm is contagious, so if you are looking for a contagion to improve on COVID and flu, a listen here could lift your spirits.) He relates a snippet of his personal journey and expands the view to a planetary scale. If you’ve already heard it, you might still enjoy another go. Check it out:

NEXT: To see what an effort rewilding a significant portion of our planet’s land will take, we have to look at what humans have already seized, largely in the form of agriculture.

The landuse challenge, by the numbers

In Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie reports that almost half of the world’s habitable land (land not covered by glaciers and deserts) is used for agriculture. A thousand years ago, roughly 4 million square kilometers—less than 4% of habitable land—was used. Now that’s up to 48 million out of 106 million square kilometers: 45%.

Continue reading “Rewilding Challenge: North American Jaguar”

The Protein Predicament: Livestock’s Impact on Human and Environmental Health (and What to Do About It)

Report says red meat OK for human health

By now you have likely heard of a report recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that concludes “there’s no need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health,” as summarized in the Washington Post.

Beef: good (for protein), bad (for the environment, and probably for health), and kinda ugly (for aesthetics, if that matters)

Kaboom! Went the plunge of this report into the midst of what had been a gathering consensus about the many ill effects of a meat-heavy diet.

RECOMMENDATION: before you read the full Washington Post piece, first read its last two paragraphs (beginning with “Willettt says the panel’s conclusions and recommendations do not reflect the study’s findings . . .” – emphasis mine). They indicate that the editorial board of the Annals etc. have spun the data in favor of the red and processed meat industry. In the editorial itself, the writers bury concerns about the environmental impacts of meat consumption in the final paragraph.

If you read the complete piece in the Post, you will see that the conventional nutritional wisdom, that it’s healthier to eat less meat, still has solid support among almost all nutritionists. Walter Willett pointed out that the study itself associates moderate reduction in meat production with a 13 percent lower mortality, and said, “if a drug brought down the number of deaths to that degree . . . it would be heralded as a success.” Certainly such a drug would be heralded as a success by a multi-billion dollar drug company. There is no multi-billion dollar profit-making enterprise to curb the consumption of red meat.

Once the media, always on the hunt for controversy, had taken up the report it went mainstream (as in the Washington Post, the New York Times etc.) accompanied by a glut of social media chatter. And then came a firestorm of backlash such as you can read of in a litany of objections from nutritionists, doctors, and researchers found on this page of WebMd.

The study is tainted by past ties of one of the research’s co-leaders to an industry trade group, the “International Life Sciences Institute” (ILSI)—a connection he did not disclose because technically the connection did not fall within the past-3-year reporting requirement for publication. While the earlier study—which incidentally was an attempt to allay health concerns about sugar additives—was published in December 2016 (less than 3 years ago), researcher Bradley Johnston said he was paid for the research in 2015 (more than 3 years ago). Ergo he was not obliged to disclose the connection because the payment fell outside the 3-year window. . . . Did he really think this was not going to come out? Did he really think that no one would suspect he might be eyeing future funding by the ILSI, having insinuated himself further into their good graces with the red meat study? Maybe in the context of runaway mendacity and moral obtuseness in the twenty-teens he saw no reason to observe the spirit of disclosure rules.

Continue reading “The Protein Predicament: Livestock’s Impact on Human and Environmental Health (and What to Do About It)”

Crimes against Nature, I: Border Wall

Inhumanity compounding inhumanity: the monumental price of “homeland security”

Trump’s border wall, an embodiment of cruel immigration policies, is inhumane to people to a degree that is criminal—if not according to written law, then according to moral laws we grasp by intuition. Even many of those whose job it is to enforce draconian immigration policies intuit those laws—it’s just that they don’t obey them.*

Border Wall dividing and conquering life

There’s another, less visible, less publicized inhumanity, that is not so plainly criminal. But in the long run it may be just as devastating to the living world as to refugees and asylum seekers. That’s the way a continuous wall carves up vital, often fragile habitat, puts up barriers to creatures who have neither understanding of, nor use for, political boundaries, and robs the environment of resiliency. We know how habitat fragmentation has diminished the capability of living things to cope with such additional man-made injuries as climate change. However, some things that fragment and destroy habitat have at least the excuse of some utility: roads, farms, power lines, airports, wind farms, solar energy arrays, etc. But this ugly artifice has little purpose besides division for division’s sake. It is a monument to human vanity, and especially the vanity of one corrupt, depraved individual, U.S. President Donald Trump.

So many wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are already under assault by the Wall or are soon to be, that I gave up trying to list them here. Just do a search on a string such as “threatened wildlife refuge border wall,” or similar keywords, and you’ll find enough of them to make you seethe, or weep. One particular lovely and imminently jeopardized landscape can be seen at Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge

The horrific and potentially irreparable damage resulting from extensions of a continuous border wall would spread well beyond wildlife refuges, as described in a paper in the journal Bioscience and summarized last summer in an article in Cosmos. (I referred to this same piece in a post last year; it’s even more urgent today.) The article had 16 co-authors and was endorsed by 2,500 scientists worldwide.

Continue reading “Crimes against Nature, I: Border Wall”

Animals Get Help from Above

Eyes in the sky usher in new era for monitoring animal diversity, numbers, and movement

Drones and satellites radically change the game in forestalling the worst in animal declines and species extinctions. Key to wildlife conservation is just getting the facts—and there are a lot of facts to get when it comes to the complexity of the natural world. Without accurate and comprehensive information on what is actually happening on the ground, prioritizing and designing conservation efforts are mostly guesswork. Such is the growing enormity of human impacts on the biosphere, research methods must scale up, or fall behind the accelerating pace of change.

How best to scale up is with devices that can remotely gather vast amounts of data on both groups and individuals—seeing both the forest and the trees. The best positioning for these devices is up in the sky, and their primary data-gathering methods are electronic.*

Continue reading “Animals Get Help from Above”

Cruelty Paired with Environmental Havoc: Border Barriers Harming Wildlife

U.S. border wall – a looming crime against wildlife

Before getting to the matter of barbed wire fences in Europe, let’s address the never=ending saga of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—which the Trump administration keeps alive despite budget-busting increases in defense spending and, not coincidentally, the cost of beefing up border security with police and ICE agents.

A wall substantial enough to keep out immigrants would also stop the comings-and-goings of animals across the U.S.-Mexico border: more environmental havoc by the Trump administration. Scientists have risen up in opposition, now having accumulated more than 2,500 signatures in support of a paper describing the damage to wildlife that the wall would entail. Read about it at: Wildlife-hostile border wall

Continue reading “Cruelty Paired with Environmental Havoc: Border Barriers Harming Wildlife”

Silent Spring Nights: Amphibian Decline Hits Home

PREFACE: Since I began this post in April, there have been some signs indicating the situation with local amphibians is not quite as bad as I originally portrayed – see the Addendum at the bottom. (But it’s still bad.)

It can happen here – is happening

A typical reader of this blog will know that, worldwide, amphibians—principally frogs and toads—are being ravaged by lethal fungal diseases and diminished habitat. Some species have already gone extinct, and many are sure to follow. The foremost villain in these fungal epidemics is world trade in animals. When one thinks of trade in exotics, one usually thinks of highly visible animals—colorful birds (or uniquely gifted birds such as the African Gray parrot), big cats, rare dog breeds, snakes, lizards, and such. But amphibians, despite small size, are valued by collectors for their calls and colors. And any one of them, usually from the tropics, may carry a disease that will lay waste to the toads and frogs in your neighborhood, should it escape. Even in an absence of local release, local populations are vulnerable to the plague creeping across all populations at a rate comparable to the spread of Dutch Elm Disease 50 years ago.

Something like that may have happened in or near our neighborhood in semi-rural Virginia. For whatever reason, this year our spring nights have gone silent in the absence of calls by amphibians—primarily the Gray Treefrog and the Cope’s Gray Treefrog, whose calls you may be familiar with. You can listen to their overlapping calls in the last 15 seconds of this sweet little clip:

Of course, on YouTube you can listen to a host of frog and toad calls as varied as their physical sizes and colors. Probably more varied—the diversity is astonishing!

Continue reading “Silent Spring Nights: Amphibian Decline Hits Home”

Some “Good” Environmental News: Tigers Again

All Is Not Lost

To seek good environmental news nowadays feels like seeking fragments of Earth-friendly flotsam bobbing on toxic seas of human depredation of our living world. But at times glimmers of hope help ward off despair.

Herewith three glimmers from the world of tigers:

First, a survey, announced in 2016, found wild tiger numbers up worldwide for the first time in a century. See Survey finds tiger numbers up 2010-2016

(It’s sad indeed that we have to consider tiger numbers in the three-to-four thousands as a success, when at the beginning of the last century the number the tiger population was estimated at 100,000.)

Note there are six existing subspecies of tiger (according to National Geographic), of which there are stunning pix and capsule descriptions to be found here.

“Subspecies” are populations of tigers that are separated by geographic range and/or morphology; all can viably interbreed, but they do not cross paths. Bengal tigers—the ones you’re most likely to see in a zoo—make up about 70% of the aggregate number of wild tigers. With the other 30% split up among the remainder, the risk that any single subspecies could get wiped out is great. Indochinese and South China tigers are especially imperiled.

Continue reading “Some “Good” Environmental News: Tigers Again”

Some Sort-of Good News on Endangered Species

Amid the deluge of sickening environmental news in the U.S., there are a few somewhat bright spots from abroad

On Tigers: Cautious Optimism in Thailand: Tigers here

China’s Move toward Shutting Down Ivory Trade: Chinese crackdown on ivory trade

Environmental Impacts of Chinese Looting of Resources Worldwide

China Resource Grabs

More “charismatic” animals such as elephants could slow Chinese resource exploitation around the world. The sad and not-so-sad reality is that elephants are easy to love, and their killers easy to hate. Most of the endangered species on Earth do not have an equivalent “poster child” to represent them, and they are quietly being crushed under the bulldozer of economic “progress.” In a world where celebrity tweets get more of our attention than trees and rivers, there’s little standing in the way.

Not So Fast with Public Lands Sell-Off: Sportsmen’s Hornets’ Nest

Jason Chaffetz Runs from Army of Hornets

Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz unleashed a storm of protest from sportsmen left and right when he introduced a bill that would direct the Bureau of Land Management to sell off 3.3 million acres of federally owned land.

The CEO of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Land Tawney, warned: “Mr. Chaffetz, you’ve kicked the hornets’ nest, and the army is amassing. . . . The only thing you can do to make this right is to pull those bills back.” He was joined by the National Wild Turkey Federation, Pheasants Forever, Trout Unlimited, Remington Arms, as well as the National Wildlife Federation, who joined to circulate a petition that quickly gathered 46,000 signatures.

Continue reading “Not So Fast with Public Lands Sell-Off: Sportsmen’s Hornets’ Nest”

How Much Does Elephant Slaughter Matter?

Every 15 minutes, a poacher kills an elephant for its tusks.

Does one elephant matter? Check it out:

https://www.paulallen.com/china-takes-aggressive-steps-to-close-ivory-trade/#1545-2

Previously I raised the issue of, how much do we want to pour resources into the protection of “charismatic” species such as the elephant, when more humble unnoticed creatures (and plants) go ignored at the planet’s peril? Not to mention the multitudes of suffering human beings.

It’s a serious question, but let me be irrational for the moment, since it seems that a little irrationality can go a long way toward positive outcomes, where sheer logic falls short (read Antonio Damasio).

Continue reading “How Much Does Elephant Slaughter Matter?”