The recent killings of wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains states have killed approximately 16% of the wolf population, and about 20% of the wolf population in the Rockies.

These current killings alone don't threaten the persistence of the species in the area, but do threaten the ability of the population to fulfill it's ecological function. They also are but one year's worth of what is liable to be a policy of many years, unless people intervene.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is currently reviewing the status of gray wolves in these states and may list them.

EDIT: Well, regardless of what the Fish and Wildlife Service says, federal protections are restored for the subpopulation.

I found this article on some of the strange reasoning that has gone into economic cost-benefit analyses of climate change both thought-provoking and disturbing:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-11-15/the-climate-crisis-as-seen-by-the-economics-mainstream-2/

A quote:
"Another ecological economist, Clive Spash, explains how a methodology like this, that aggregates gains and losses in money figures, means that dead people in China and India are compensated for by extra golfing holidays in Florida."

There's other weird stuff in there too, like some models valuing the lives of rich people more highly than the lives of poor people.

These examples strike me as obviously wrong, but I wonder how common this type of thinking is in environmental cost-benefit analyses.

Thoughts?

I found this video a few days ago from the Surfrider Foundation on marine plastic pollution. It's 12 minutes long, but if you have the time, it's worth the watch.

 http://vimeo.com/18305022

This is a question a bit in advance. I am going to be doing a lot of vegetable growing this year, and our back garden is highly prone to getting lots of slugs and snails.

Now, I dont want to poison them. Especially as we get quite a lot of wild birds in the garden not to mention local cats.
I also dont actually want to kill the slimy persons (they might be annoying but its not thier fault)

Basically I need a way to trap them, so I can move them to the front garden instead (they would then need to climb over the house to get to the back garden again, hehe)

So have you any good ideas for trapping slugs and snails without hurting them, so they can be transported?  Other years I have gone rund daily and picked them up by hand, but with a job, a theatre company and a masters degree, I really will not have the time to do that this year. Please remember I am UK based so theres absolutely no point in reccomending USA brandnames to me! Instead, "how to build/ bait humane ways of catching them" is what I am looking for.

Did anyone else watch ABC's Earth 2100 last night?

As someone who's been concerned about climate change and peak oil (which I was surprised was covered so minimally) for years, I can't say I learned much but I hope it was eye-opening for other people. I missed the first 20 minutes or so and showed up somewhere around 2030 and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, which I think, frankly, we may already be too late to prevent.

( Trailer for the documentary )

For those who did find it more eye-opening, I thought you might be interested in some links relating to the topic.

Transition Towns
Transition United States and the Transition US Social Network
Future Scenarios
Post Carbon Institute
PeakOil.com
Wildlands Network

Please feel free to discuss Earth 2100 in comments, or share other organizations you know of that are working towards building a more sustainable future.

I mentioned my biggest disappointment with the Obama administration the other day, but overall, I've been pretty pleased with the actions they've taken on environmental issues. Grist has a good write up of Obama's environmental actions and accomplishments so far.

I also found this interesting analysis of the wolf issue, which suggests that Obama might be making a political calculation to appease Western states in advance of a big push for clean energy and other climate issues. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this were true, I just wish wolves weren't caught, quite literally, in the crosshairs. :(

In what has been, for me, one of the greatest disappointments of Obama's presidency so far, gray wolves were delisted today in Idaho, Montana, and the Great Lakes. They were NOT delisted in Wyoming, although several groups have sued the government in an attempt to force that to occur.

To stay updated on the wolf situation in the Northern Rockies, I recommend these blogs:

Ralph Maughan's Wildlife News (wolf category)
My Yellowstone Wolves

One of my favorite blogs, The Ethicurean (here on Dreamwidth as ethicurean_feed) posted a link to this delightful article on the common honeybee earlier: Let's Hear It For the Bees.

Though a bit heavy-handed at the end, it first goes into a lot of very interesting detail about the curious language and circadian rhythms of honeybees.

I just stumbled across an interesting website (also a book, apparently) called Future Scenarios that focuses on the interplay between peak oil and climate change and how they is likely to affect the environment and the human race.

The author, David Holmgren, offers four possible scenarios for the future:

1. Brown Tech (slow oil decline, fast climate change)
2. Green Tech (slow oil decline, slow climate change)
3. Earth Steward (fast oil decline, slow climate change)
4. Lifeboats (fast oil decline, fast climate change)

The site focuses more on speculation than on activism and problem solving designed to actively work towards one or another scenario, but I thought it was very interesting and thoughtfully done.

I thought today might be a good day for an introduction post, now that the community's growing larger.

I'm sasha_davidovna both here and on LiveJournal. I've been an environmentalist for basically my whole life. (I'll be 27 next month.) My dad works for the US Park Service and we always did a lot of camping and hiking when I was growing up, plus my parents always had a huge organic garden, so I got exposed really early to a lot of environmental and sustainability issues.

My main interests are in wildlife/habitat conservation and restoration, sustainable agriculture and development, and climate change, but I am a pretty all purpose environmentalist, really. I'm currently a SAHM to my daughter but in my spare time, I write a lot of articles for various websites on environmental and sustainability issues both well known and obscure. As a lifelong Nebraskan, one of my major passions is prairie restoration and conservation. I'm a big supporter of a modified version of the Buffalo Commons idea proposed in the 80's by the Poppers, preferably also incorporating wind energy.

Feel free to ask questions if you'd like to know more, and if you'd like, please share your own environmental backgrounds and interests so we can get to know each other a bit better.

Source

Have I mentioned how much of a relief it is to have an administration that actually pays attention to science? \o/

( Watch one of the ads )

The ads will run in Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia through early May as part of The Cap Solution campaign and Less Carbon, More Jobs.

Source

A new report from the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) claims that breeding populations of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna in the Mediterranean will collapse by 2012 if fishing continues at its current rate. Demand for the fish is driven primarily by sushi restaurants in Japan and elsewhere.

Source

The WWF has information about how to avoid irresponsibly harvested tuna, as does Seafood Watch.

As a lifelong gardener, I've been following the news on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has been killing off honeybee colonies en masse for several years, pretty closely and was very excited to hear the other day that researchers may have found a cure.

Apparently the latest suspect is a parasite called Nosema ceranae and they've had very good luck improving survival rates once treatment for this particular parasite is begun.

Source

Meanwhile, I've been choosing plants for my garden specifically to attract both honey and native bees, in the hope of giving them a little bit of a hand.

A few of the useful resources I've found include:

Urban Bee Gardens
The Xerces Society
ATTRA: Native Bees

If you're not familiar with CCD, Haagen Dazs has set up a site with a helpful introduction to the topic: Help the Honey Bees. It also happens to be one of the prettiest uses of Flash I've ever seen.

I thought this was pretty cool: a former NFL linebacker is building the first solar city in Florida.


Source

I thought the inaugural post of this community should be something happy, so here's some good news for one of our most endangered relatives: researchers in Borneo have found 219 orangutan nests, which may house up to 2000 previously unknown wild orangutans! With only 50,000 known orangutans in the wild, that's an increase of up to 5%.

In even better news, the Indonesian government is considering protecting the area of the discovery in order to ensure it remains undeveloped.

Source

This community is for discussing environmental news and issues.

Topics include:

* conservation
* endangered species
* climate change
* pollution
* sustainability
* green living

( Rules )

Thanks for your interest in this community!

~ sasha_davidovna