DAILY QUICK READ - JULY 3, 2016

More Trees, Less Assholes

Tweets Don’t Save Lions

Excellent framing of the real threats facing lions in Africa.  Hint – it isn’t Minnesota dentists.

THE killing of Zimbabwe’s celebrated Cecil the Lion by a Minnesota dentist, on July 1 of last year unleashed a storm of moral fulmination against trophy hunting. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued an official statement calling for the hunter, Walter J. Palmer, to be hanged, and an odd bedfellow, Newt Gingrich, tweeted that Dr. Palmer and the entire team involved in the killing of Cecil should go to jail. The television personality Sharon Osbourne thought merely losing “his home, his practice and his money” would do, adding, “He has already lost his soul.”

Unfortunately, the furor did almost nothing to slow the catastrophic decline in lion populations, down 43 percent over the past two decades. That’s because trophy hunting was never really the main problem. Lions are disappearing in Africa for a reason far more complicated and less susceptible to either moral grandstanding or easy solutions: Impoverished Africans are eating the lions’ prey and killing the lions themselves — at a rate estimated at five to 10 times the take from trophy hunting.

As a result, lions are now effectively extinct across much of West and Central Africa; two populations, totaling about 400, remain. Continentwide, only about 20,000 lions survive, according to a new report, “Beyond Cecil: Africa’s Lions in Crisis,” just issued by Panthera and another conservation group, WildAid. That’s down from 200,000 in the mid-20th century, and populations are likely to drop by half, except in southern Africa, over the next two decades.

Elephants Don’t Like Chili

Turns out not only does it keep elephants away from other crops, but it’s also a very profitable crop on its own.

Grace Kipwola is solely responsible for supporting her six kids, including paying school fees for two in secondary school. But elephants made it difficult for the Ugandan farmer to earn a steady income.

When it’s harvest season, elephants from nearby Murchison Falls National Park raid village farmlands to snack on rice and maize. “If I had a spear, I would probably have killed them,” Kipwola admits. “But now, I have no problems with them.”

What prompted her attitude change? Kipwola joined an agricultural project being implemented by the Uganda Wildlife Authority and AWF under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)/Uganda Biodiversity Program. The project provides support to farmers to grow chili peppers.

Greed, Greed, Greed

Columbia’s diversity under attack for cocaine, gold and timber.

Colombia is one of the world’s 17 most biodiverse countries. Due to the great variation in altitudes and climates within the country — from high mountains to pristine white sand beaches — this South American nation is home to many rich and varied ecosystems. Its 314 types of ecosystems host nearly 10 percent of the planet’s biodiversity. Worldwide, it ranks first in bird and orchid species diversity and second in plants, butterflies, freshwater fishes, and amphibians.

Nowhere is this rich and complex array of life more evident than in its network of 59 national parks, which span snow-capped mountains of the Andes, the Amazon rainforests, coastal cloud forests, open savannas and the Caribbean islands. These parks hold within them archaeological treasures, uncontacted indigenous tribes, endangered flora and fauna, such as jaguars, cotton-topped tamarins, and spectacles bears, black cedar, and Colombian palm, and (perhaps unfortunately) a wealth of mineral resources.

However, the parks are also home to guerrilla insurgents and criminalized paramilitary groups that have been drawn to the wilds by the lucrative prospect of exploiting coca crops and cocaine production and illegal mining and logging. The invasion of these underworld networks has been accompanied by ecological destruction and contamination that threatens the future of some of Colombia’s most fragile protected areas.

July 3, 1863 - Last Day At Gettysburg

The army of secession attempts a final gamble and breaks itself against the Union.