environment
revere | January 30, 2008Americans are very generous. Consider they have just given away access to 3 million acres (5000 square miles) of wilderness to logging, mining and road building companies to use as they see fit. Very generous indeed:
The Bush administration plan for the [Tongass] forest, the largest in the US at nearly 17m acres, would open 3.4m acres to logging, road building and other development, including about 2.4m acres that are currently remote and without roads. About 663,000 acres are in areas considered most valuable for timber production.
The move, the latest in a long-running saga over the Tongass…
gregladen | January 29, 2008Ecuadorean officials are investigating the slaughter of 53 sea lions from the Galapagos Islands nature reserve, which were found with their heads caved in.
[source]
Thanks, Coturnix, for the tip.
gregladen | January 25, 2008
Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal of Human Evolution concludes that many Pleistocene megafauna managed to go extinct by themselves, but that humans were not entirely uninvolved.
The paper by Pushkina and Raia ("Human influence on distribution and extinctions of the late Pleistocene Eurasian megafauna") examines sources in the literature and a number of databases for Eurasian…
mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2008Some people erroneously, since the U.S. water supply system is actually cleaner than most bottled waters, buy bottled water to avoid contaminated water. Unfortunately, there's no way to buy bottled air. And in Beijing, air pollution is a real threat.
Last time there was a major smog outbreak in Beijing, I wondered if the air would present a health hazard to the 2008 Olympians. I didn't blog about it because I felt that it was too deep into tin-foil helmet territory (even for me). Turns out I wasn't so crazy after all:
To protect the athletes, Mr. Wilber is encouraging them to train…
gregladen | January 24, 2008The amount of ice lost to the sea from Antarctica has increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years. This is the result of an increase in glacial flow. It had previously been thought, and perhas was the case, that Greenland ice loss outpaced the Antarctica. This is no longer the case.
An article coming out in the next issue of Nature Geoscience, by Rignot et al ("Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling") is the most detailed study of this phenomenon to date.
There are two factors that affect the flow of ice into the sea at the edge of the…
revere | January 23, 2008This week sees the tenth anniversary of an important event in the American environmental movement, although few people know it (even some who were there had forgotten the date). In late January, 1998, a group of 32 environmental scientists, activists and scholars sat down together at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin to hash out a consensus statement on The Precautionary Principle. After a grueling three days, the statement was put into final form on January 25 (just in time to see my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the Superbowl. Is history repeating itself? Aargh!).
In…
voltagegate | January 23, 2008I just read a great editorial from E-Commerce Times discussing the grossly inflated advertising claims from businesses scrambling to embrace, at the very least, the imagery associated with the recent push in the environmental movement.
...this of course calls to mind the super-green-men of the new branding circus. As the green signal zips across the globe, the army of re-packaging experts awaits in their shiny green suits, carrying green flags while humming the song of the unicorn.
Branding. I remember hearing this term spewed by every advertising/PR major bustling in and out of the newspaper…
revere | January 22, 2008Recently we posted on the EPA highly unusual (as in unprecedented) decision to reject Californian's new greenhouse gas regulations. Why did they do it? Good question and one the California Congressional delegation wanted an answer to. To whom did EPA talk about the regulations? Who advised them to reject it? Sorry. Mum's the word. Actually its words. Executive privilege:
Invoking executive privilege, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday refused to provide lawmakers with a full explanation of why it rejected California's greenhouse gas regulations.
The EPA informed Sen. Barbara Boxer…
voltagegate | January 21, 2008
On my way from an interview the other day, on my way home, I was winding up a mountain in a little town called Windber when the tree line broke to my right, revealing a panoramic, and quite startling sight. Spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table, so to speak, was a huge expanse of what was once the beginnings of Windber, and many little towns before and after, the remnants of a giant coal mine. Naturally, I took some time to take a closer look and a few photos.
The mine itself was called Mine 40, while the town that cropped up around it, created and managed by the…
gregladen | January 18, 2008A translocated population of the Critically Endangered Laysan Duck has reached 200 in only three years.Anas laysanensis is commonly known as the Laysan Duck. It occurs in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, and nowhere else, though it was once found across the Hawaiian Island chain. They were nearly wiped out by 1860, confined thereafter only to Laysan Island.
One of the problems for these ducks is that invasive rats eat their eggs.
In 2004 and 2005, 42 individuals made a 750-mile voyage across the Pacific and were released at Midway Atoll NWR, managed by the U.S. Fish and…
gregladen | January 17, 2008Things are just not like what they used to be. You know this. You know that the Age of Dinosaurs, for instance, was full of dinosaurs and stuff, and before transitional fossil forms crawled out of the sea to colonize the land, all animals were aquatic, etc. But did you know that from a purely modern perspective, the Miocene was the most important geological period?
First, lets get one thing straight. We are not in the so-called "Holocene." The so-called "Holocene" is a totally bogus geological period. Saying "Hey, we're in the Holocene, not the Pleistocene ... the Pleistocene is over…
revere | January 16, 2008Another one of those stories about what is truly, a technological marvel: shrinking a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer down to the size of an iPod, with the target size being that of a matchbox. Designed by MIT engineers, the device which can analyze the air for hazardous gases (and could be adapted for other media like water) is touted as a possible distributed sensor for water supplies to protect us against chemical attacks or in subway systems to warn of terrorist attacks. I think this is bullshit and I'll explain why after a description of this ingenious device:
Their detector uses gas…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2008According to the Boston Globe, bisphenol A levels lower than those found in 93% of people led to obesity in mice:
Thousands of chemicals have come on the market in the past 30 years, and some of them are showing up in people's bodies in low levels. Scientists studying obesity are focusing on endocrine disrupters - which have already been linked to reproductive problems in animals and humans - because they have become so common in the environment and are known to affect fat cells.
...A recent US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that about 93 percent of the US population…
mikethemadbiologist | January 9, 2008No, I'm not referring to the Jetsons. By way of Phronesisaical comes this story about an air-powered car:
BBC News is reporting that a French company has developed a pollution-free car which runs on compressed air. India's Tata Motors has the car under production and it may be on sale in Europe and India by the end of the year.
The air car, also known as the Mini-CAT or City Cat, can be refueled in minutes from an air compressor at specially equipped gas stations and can go 200 km on a 1.5 euro fill-up -- roughly 125 miles for $3. The top speed will be almost 70 mph and the cost of the…
voltagegate | January 9, 2008Help us celebrate, if you would. Oekologie started one year ago on January 15 at The Infinite Sphere, and Jen will be hosting again this January 15 for the anniversary edition. Send us your latest and greatest posts about ecology and let's get another year under our belts.
If you're interested in hosting Oekologie, please send me an email. We need some hosts for later this year.
voltagegate | January 9, 2008Man that's an ugly title.
Not much time to post today (until later perhaps) but I did come across an interesting study that improves on geographically-driven predictions of adaptations to climate change. I blogged about a paper on British butterflies earlier this year that studied how much each species depended on the particular climate, and whether or not they would be susceptible to a climate shift based on their environmental preference.
This new study is trying to make migratory predictions based on the organism's physiology, rather than the changing climate of a particular habitat:
Most…
voltagegate | January 7, 2008
I had the chance to cover some winter activities for PA state parks last week, which meant I had the fortune of a couple of visits for photos and interviews. As I browsed around online and in the park offices and exhibits for info, I couldn't escape references to either the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Work Progress Administration, which I've read about before, but never realized just how much work they did in the Appalachian region. The history of these organizations opens a whole box of interesting questions for the future, believe it or not, as this was a pivotal moment in…
voltagegate | December 31, 2007Here's an interesting story from Northern Arizona U. A researcher named Brian McRae, a recent forestry graduate who used to be an electrical engineer, used his knowledge of circuit theory to craft a new model for gene flow through landscape corridors:
McRae had been struggling with how to predict genetic effects of landscape pattern while working with Beier on a study of cougars in the southwest United States. "We had maps of cougar habitat and genetic samples spread across four states," he said, "but no way to predict how habitat pattern was driving gene flow across the region."
Using…
voltagegate | December 31, 2007Just got the e-mail. The carnival of environmental education has a new website and a new email address and they're looking for posts. Shoot em one at thelimb [at] mac.com or by using this form.
grrlscientist | December 29, 2007tags: outback mosaic, Australia, NewScientist, Image of the Day
Outback mosaic.
Australia is the world's driest inhabited continent and has the most variable rainfall.
Image: Carole Tilney 2007 (NewScientist calendar 2008). [Much larger view]