Feds may slash butterfly habitat in half
Environmentalists call federal proposal ‘recipe for extinction’ for endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly
Federal wildlife officials Thursday proposed slashing by almost half the amount of land they designated earlier as “critical habitat” for the Quino checkerspot butterfly, one of Southern California’s most endangered animals.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed reducing the amount of land targeted for special treatment under the Endangered Species Act from 172,000 acres to 98,000 acres. Officials said the revision was necessary to focus on saving those areas where significant butterfly populations still exist.
As in the past, the agency’s strategy for saving the insect focuses solely on Southwest Riverside County and the Otay Mountain area of southern San Diego County —- the only known places where the butterfly still lives… [more]
Lawmakers: Wolves still endangered
By Gazette News Services [here]
Five congressmen from the House Natural Resources Committee want to delay a plan to remove gray wolves in the Northern Rockies from the federal endangered-species list.
In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the congressmen wrote that states “hostile to wolf conservation” could reduce today’s 1,500 wolves to “as few as 300″ if the predators lose protected status.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which Kempthorne oversees, plans to announce the delisting of wolves in the Northern Rockies next month.
That would allow Idaho, Wyoming and Montana to host public hunts for the animals. The states already are setting hunting seasons and quotas.
Last year, more than 140 wolves were killed in the Northern Rockies by federal and state officials and ranchers in response to wolves’ preying on livestock.
The Dec. 17 letter to Kempthorne was signed by Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va.; Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.; Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash.; Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md.; and Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J.
Wolves in the Great Lakes region were removed from the endangered species list in 2007.
USGS Scientist Reveals 2007 California Wildfire Impacts on Wildlife
The Southern California wildfires in late 2007 impacted more than humans. Wildlife also suffered. Listen to USGS Biologist Robert Fisher describe what USGS scientists discovered about the wildfire impact on wildlife by listening to episode 25 of CoreCast, the USGS podcast.
“Certain groups of animals seem to be disproportionately impacted by the fires, such as non-forest salamanders and shrews,” said Fisher. “We are not sure whether there is a physical change in the landscape after the fires where these animals do not have enough wet habitats to live in or whether there is a toxic effect of ash that may be directly causing mortality.”
Scientists are also concerned about the wildfire impact on the landlocked southern steelhead rainbow trout population in the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County, Calif., because it may be the last genetically pure form of its kind in these mountains. Most other fish populations in this area have been wiped out over the past 20 years due to drought and flood conditions.
“When I was in the Santa Ana Mountains in July, there seemed to be a little more than 100 rainbow trout of all different size classes, scattered in about a quarter of a mile in the canyon, primarily in 10 to 12 pools,” said Fisher. “So it really is a restricted area, a restricted population, and any additional stresses in that type of situation are really going to have an impact on them.”
While examining a post-wildfire burn site, scientists observed extreme dry ravel events - a river of rocks - falling down hillsides and filling up the pools of water where the trout live. If the trout survived the dry ravel, the next impact could be when rain mixes with the dry ravel, and the mixture begins to move. This mixture could fill in the creek systems in the canyon and remove the rest of the water sources, Fisher said… [more]
Decision on Listing Polar Bear Postponed
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Federal officials said Monday that they will need a few more weeks to decide whether polar bears need protection under the Endangered Species Act because of global warming.
The deadline was Wednesday, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it now hopes to provide a recommendation to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in time for a decision by him within the next month.
The department has never declared a species threatened or endangered because of climate change, Hall said.
“That’s why this one has been so taxing and challenging to us,” he said.
Environmental groups that petitioned to protect polar bears, arguing that warming threatened their habitat, said they would go court to ensure a timely decision.
“We certainly hope that the polar bear will be listed within the next month,” said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity… [more]
Biomass would help decrease fire danger, and heat high school, too
The idea of turning thousands of tons of forest waste into heat for South Tahoe High School is a step closer to reality thanks to a $243,500 grant from the U.S. Forest Service.
The grant would pay for half the cost of a biomass boiler at the school, which can convert chipped forest material into heat and energy. If implemented for the 2007-08 school year, the biomass boiler would be the first for a California public school - and proponents of the idea say it would help reduce the threat of a catastrophic wildfire in the Lake Tahoe Basin.
“No one has done a project like this in California,” said Steve Morales, district facilities manager for Lake Tahoe Unified School District.
With an annual 25,000 tons of forest waste in the basin, including debris such as branches and pine needles, the fuel is there to propel a wildfire. Politicians including Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., have pushed for the reduction of forest fuels with environmental agencies signing on.
“There is a lot of interest in this and the facts are Tahoe is going to save a bunch of money putting this in,” said Bruce Goines, U.S. Forest Service biomass utilization coordinator for the Pacific Southwest region.
Morales said a biomass facility could consume as much as 2,200 tons of chipped material from forest waste each year. Although it represents only 9 percent of total annual forest waste, many say it’s better than nothing in protecting a pristine lake and communities with few evacuation routes out of the basin.
Hurdles remain. Permits from El Dorado County Air Quality Management Board and Tahoe Regional Planning Agency must be obtained, followed by a bidding process. Lastly, a supplier has to be found to deliver the forest waste in bulk. And that’s what worries Rex Norman of the U.S. Forest Service.
“The technology of biomass is doing great, but it’s the supply chain, the system, that has to be built,” said Norman, a spokesman for the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.
“We’ve got the fuel. We’ve got the technology. It’s what’s in between that’s the problem,” Norman said. “It’s the access to the material and a reliable supply chain.” … [more]
Important Note: this news report is from May, 2006.
A Nation of Dim Bulbs
The nasty little surprise hidden in the new energy bill.
by Andrew Ferguson
The Weekly Standard 12/31/2007, Volume 013, Issue 16 [here]
On December 19, President Bush signed an energy bill that will, among many, many other things, force you to buy a new kind of light bulb. He did this because environmental enthusiasts don’t like the light bulbs you’re using now. He and they reason, therefore, that you shouldn’t be allowed to have them. So now you can’t.
Ordinary consumers may be surprised, once they understand what’s happened. They probably haven’t known that the traditional incandescent light bulb, that happy little globe shining so innocently from the lamp in the corner, has been a scourge of environmentalists for many years. With their stern and unrelenting moralism, the warriors of Greenpeace have even branded lightbulb manufacturers “climate criminals” for making incandescents, which are, they say, a “silent killer.” …
American environmental groups have long called for an outright national ban on the old-fashioned bulbs. But then they came to the realization, as a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times this spring, that such a ban might “anger consumers.” “We’ve given up a sound bite, ‘ban the incandescent,’” the spokesman said.
Instead the groups joined with the Bush administration this year in advocating a steady increase in federally mandated efficiency standards for light bulbs. The effect of the tightened standards is to make it illegal to manufacture or sell the inefficient incandescent bulb by 2014. So it’s not a ban, see. It’s just higher standards. Which have the same effect as a ban-a slow-motion ban that’s not really a ban. Not surprisingly, in long, self-congratulatory remarks at the bill signing last week, Bush neglected to mention that he and Congress have just done away with the incandescent light bulb. Maybe most of us won’t notice until he’s back in Crawford…
more »
Hunter-gatherers: Noble or savage?
The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden that some suggest
HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the very first expansion out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago.
About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”, as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?
Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of Siberia, it was full of a new and clever kind of people who had originated in Africa and had colonised first their own continent, then Asia, Australia and Europe, and were on the brink of populating the Americas. They had spear throwers, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They painted pictures, decorated their bodies and believed in spirits. They traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas. They sang songs, told stories and prepared herbal medicines.
They were “hunter-gatherers”. On the whole the men hunted and the women gathered: a sexual division of labour is still universal among non-farming people and was probably not shared by their Homo erectus predecessors. This enabled them to eat both meat and veg, a clever trick because it combines quality with reliability.
Why change? In the late 1970s Mark Cohen, an archaeologist, first suggested that agriculture was born of desperation, rather than inspiration. Evidence from the Fertile Crescent seems to support him. Rising human population density, combined perhaps with a cooling, drying climate, left the Natufian hunter-gatherers of the region short of acorns, gazelles and wild grass seeds. Somebody started trying to preserve and enhance a field of chickpeas or wheat-grass and soon planting, weeding, reaping and threshing were born… [more]
A cold spell soon to replace global warming
MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) – Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.
Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.
The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.
Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.
This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check… [more]