DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 22, 2016

Drone On

Drones provide a low cost opportunity to monitor wildlife.  In this case inventorying North Atlantic right whales is a perfect opportunity to use this cost effective, efficient technology.

Drones and wildlife don't always mix -- people using their off-the-shelf drones to capture images of animals can harass and cause stress to the wildlife -- but scientists and environmental groups have found numerous ways to use the technology for good. From watching out for poachers to conducting field studies, drones have become one of the best tools for monitoring wildlife.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has taken note, using the technology on various studies, and is now training their researchers to use a variety of drones out in the field. Two marine mammal researchers recently became certified NOAA unmanned aerial system (UAS) pilots and carried out a three-day study of critically-endangered North Atlantic right whales.

On a boat in Cape Cod Bay they launched a research hexacopter for several flights a day, each lasting 15 to 20 minutes. During the flights, the drones captured images to use for identification of individual whales and photogrammetry studies which allow them to take body measurements from the photos.

There are fewer than 500 North Atlantic right whales remaining because of threats like boat strikes, fishing gear entanglement, climate change, noise and more. The drone surveys will allow researchers to see where and when the whales are most impacted by these threats and hopefully lead to better protections for the animals.

Brexit Fallout

So not only is the UK bailing on the EU, but it looks like Ms. May is going to abandon the entire planet.  What a tool.

Theresa May has been elected as the UK’s prime minister in a rather undemocratic way: after the previous PM David Cameron resigned following the Brexit vote, the members of the ruling party (Conservative) elected a new leader, and the leader automatically became PM. Nevertheless, she is quite popular and is generally regarded as strong enough to manage the difficult times ahead. But at least on one point, she’s already failing dramatically, and that’s environmental. Less than a day after becoming the U.K.’s unelected leader, Prime Minister Theresa May closed the government’s climate change office, moving the responsibility over to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. That’s basically like telling a sheep to work in a wolf’s den.

“This is shocking news. Less than a day into the job and it appears that the new prime minister has already downgraded action to tackle climate change, one of the biggest threats we face,” said Craig Bennett, CEO of the environmental group Friends of the Earth.

Oil and Natural Gas Extraction

So, there are many ways for the extraction industry to kill people.  Here is a new one.

The paper, published yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine, focused on Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale, one of the country's most active and notorious fracking regions. In the years between 2005 and 2013, the area has seen 6,253 unconventional natural gas wells spudded (the start of drilling) on 2,710 pads. Another 4,728 wells were stimulated and 3,706 were in production.

For the study, lead author and PhD candidate Sara G. Rasmussen, MHS and her colleagues analyzed health records from 2005 through 2012 from the Geisinger Health System, a health care provider that covers 40 counties in north and central Pennsylvania. The researchers identified more than 35,000 asthma patients between the ages of five and 90 years, identifying 20,749 mild attacks, 1,870 moderate ones and 4,782 severe attacks. They then mapped where these patients lived relative to nearby well activity.

The data revealed that people who live nearby a large number or bigger active natural gas wells were 1.5 to 4 times more likely to suffer from asthma attacks compared to those who live farther away. The risk also showed up in all four phases of well development: pad preparation, drilling, stimulation—the actual fracturing—and production.

While the exact cause of the trend was not identified, the authors of the paper suggested that exposure to air pollution and psychosocial stress—increased truck traffic, loud noises and bright lights disrupting sleep—from drilling operation can exacerbate asthma.

Three Wise Men

So the environmental movement is going to fail and with it the fate of the world is sealed.  Good news.

Ronald Wright, Canadian author of the bestseller, A Short History of Progress, who studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, sees a pattern in our refusal to take our collective foot off the accelerator and slow the greedy advance of civilization.

Civilizations rise and fall, prosper then collapse when the very technologies that created prosperity and success in the first place become liabilities, said the scholar who described this in his Massey Lectures. He calls this downfall of societies the progress trap and refers to examples in Easter Island, ancient Rome, Sumer and more, where innovations created new problems of their own, conditions that were worse than those that existed before the innovation.

Canadian geneticist, science broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki couldn't agree more and said the problems we face regarding energy and environmental issues are not technological, political or economic. They are psychological, and the path forward lies in learning to see the world differently.

"The environmental movement has failed," he said, because although we now have laws that protect clean air, clean water, endangered species and millions of hectares of land—we have not changed the way people think. "The failure was, in winning these battles, we didn't change the way we see the world ... We didn't get across the idea that the reason we wanted to stop logging here, or this dam, or this offshore drilling is we're a part of the biosphere and we've got to begin to behave in a way that protects the most fundamental things in our lives—air, water, soil and other species. That's the lesson of environmentalism and we failed to inculcate that in society," he said.

Modern cultures are famously myopic when it comes to their world view, concurs Canadian anthropologist and ethno botanist Wade Davis, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence whose work has taken him from Peru to Polynesia, from the Amazon rainforest to the Mali desert. "That kind of cultural myopia has been the curse of humanity, and today it is evident in the way we think about the natural world," Davis said.

Most traditional cultures and indigenous people have a reciprocal relationship with the world. "They don't see it as just a stage upon which the human drama unfolds," he said. "They see it literally as a series of reciprocal exchanges in which the Earth has absolute obligations to humanity, and humanity has obligations to the Earth."

We in the western world were raised to believe the mountains are there to be mined, "which is completely different from a child of the Andes raised to believe that that mountain above his community was an Apu spirit, a deity, that would direct his destiny for the rest of his life." Here on the west coast of British Columbia, Davis said, we grow up believing forests exist to be cut. That makes us very different from a First Nations elder raised to believe those forests are the domain of spirits.

Shark Alley Empty Soon

This is more bad news.  Shark alley is awesome and so much effort has gone into the preservation of the great white.  Tragic.

Great white sharks in South Africa could be nearing extinction, according to a new study.

Research from Stellenbosch University in South Africa shows there are only some 353 to 522 individual sharks left in the country's waters.

"The numbers in South Africa are extremely low. If the situation stays the same, South Africa's great white sharks are heading for possible extinction," said Dr. Sara Andreotti of the Department of Botany and Zoology at SU and lead author of the study.

Andreotti says that the decline in the number of sharks is due to the impact of fishing -- especially the implementation of shark nets and baited hooks along the country's eastern seaboard.

But poaching, habitat encroachment, pollution and depletion of their food sources have also contributed to the decline of great whites.