DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 31, 2016

The Age of Humans Begins

If we continue our current habits, this will be a very short epoch.  Look at the list of human accomplishment below. 

The Anthropocene Epoch has begun, according to a group of experts assembled at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa this week.

After seven years of deliberation, members of an international working group voted unanimously on Monday to acknowledge that the Anthropocene—a geologic time interval so-dubbed by chemists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000—is real.

The epoch is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when human activity, namely rapid industrialization and nuclear activity, set global systems on a different trajectory. And there's evidence in the geographic record. Indeed, scientists say that nuclear bomb testing, industrial agriculture, human-caused global warming and the proliferation of plastic across the globe have so profoundly altered the planet that it is time to declare the 11,700-year Holocene over.

• ·        Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is now on course to see 75 percent of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue.
• ·        Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.
• ·        Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover.
• ·        Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with our fertilizer use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years.
• ·        Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.

More Evidence of the Anthropocene

The conspiracy of virtually every government agency, academic institution and anyone with any common sense apparently believes that human activity may be the cause of global warming.  Bunch of fools – the carbon energy industry has the proof – global warming is a hoax. 

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.

This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat.

But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.

The increasing pace of warming means that the world will heat up at a rate “at least” 20 times faster than the historical average over the coming 100 years, according to Nasa. The comparison of recent temperatures to the paleoclimate isn’t exact, as it matches modern record-keeping to proxies taken from ancient layers of glacier ice, ocean sediments and rock.

Habitat Loss

The Tricolored Blackbird is heading toward the brink and we of the West Coast could actually do something to save this incredible social species.  Will we?

The Tricolored Blackbird breeds in groups of thousands, forming the largest colonies of any species in North America. Like the Passenger Pigeon, the bird's colonial nature makes it particularly vulnerable to rapid population declines: Tricolored Blackbird populations have plummeted by roughly 66 percent over the past six years due to habitat loss. An estimated 140,000 birds remain; all are in California.

American Bird Conservancy's Western Program, formed in 2015, is on a mission to save the Tricolored Blackbird from extinction. Working with researchers, ranchers, dairymen, state public officials, and several NGOs, ABC aims to identify and conserve key remaining habitat for the species.

Now May Be A Good Time - For A Pep Talk

• 
  

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 30, 2016

Dogs Brains Process Speech the Same Way as Human Brains

This is not a surprise to dog owners, but it has interesting ramifications across many species.  This capability is not a learned or evolutionary response caused by domestication. 

Dogs really can understand what we’re saying to them, according to a new study that seems to confirm the dearest wish of many a dog-lover. And yes, that does mean if you say a mean thing to a dog in a friendly tone, the dog knows.

Most importantly, dogs are smart enough not to be tricked by gibberish said in a happy voice. They can put vocabulary and tone together, and the reward areas of their brains are most active when they hear both positive words and positive tones. One reward area didn’t activate at all if positive words and positive tones weren’t used.

Domestication might have helped dogs learn to process language in both parts of the brain, but it’s unlikely that it’s the sole reason behind it, they say. This suggests that maybe it wasn’t human language that made our brains process speech with both sides. Rather, it might be that many animals — including humans and dogs — use the same areas to process language.

Plant Extinction – A Slow Process

Invasive plants crowd out native plants leading to extinction.  It’s a slow process, but it leads to less environmental diversity.

Researchers from South Africa and Australia teamed up to study how invasive plants were linked to the extinction of native species. In order to have a framework to study and discuss their observations, they developed an "extinction trajectory" that consists of six steps plant species go through during the extinction process.

Though there have been no proven plant extinctions as a result of invasive species to date, the authors of the study believe that many may already be functionally extinct. In other words, the plants do not have the means to sustain their population.

"The main reason why there is no clear evidence of extinction that can be exclusively attributed to plant invasions is that invasions have not been around long enough," co-author and professor at Stellenbosch University's Centre for Invasion Biology Dave Richardson said in a release.

“No African Benefited From That”

Kaddu Sebunya is the president of one of Africa's largest conservation groups, the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF).  Here are excerpts from an interview he give on a recent visit to Zimbabwe.

What poaching is doing to us today is what another form of poaching did to our grandmothers and grandfathers a century ago, if you remember our history well, through slavery. People came here and picked our brothers and sisters. Today, we keep asking what did our mothers and fathers, our ancestors, do to prevent slavery. People just came here, took our people and sold them off! No African benefited from that. But back to poaching; your children and your grandchildren will also ask you the same question 40 to 50 years from now. They will say: what did you do to prevent poaching? They will ask us how we lost all our elephants. Poaching is dire. I think we are under a serious crisis in Africa. Africa, for the last couple of years, has been losing 30 000 elephants annually. Many African countries have, in the last 30 years, lost all their rhino populations. All! It is now Zero! It is worrying! We have lost elephants through poaching, trafficking, not through any legal mechanism. That is the crisis we are against as AWF. Our lion population has halved globally. We need to do something about it. If we don't do anything about that, Africa will lose all its lions in the next 20 years, in your lifetime.

…let's not concentrate so much on animals as if they dwell in living rooms. The real threat is on the habitat. We need to start talking about the space. What space does Africa want to leave for wildlife? Our human population is increasing and we are urbanising fast. If the population of Zimbabwe is going to double, what space will we leave for wildlife?

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 29, 2016

Donald Trump Is Dangerous

OK.  That’s not a man bites dog headline is it?  The Republican Party’s assault on science has culminated in Trump’s studied ignorance of the real world.  Now Scientific American is calling him out on that ignorance.

…one of the two major party candidates for the highest office in the land has repeatedly and resoundingly demonstrated a disregard, if not outright contempt, for science. Donald Trump also has shown an authoritarian tendency to base policy arguments on questionable assertions of fact and a cult of personality.

…the major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago, we can only hope that there is nowhere to go but up.

We encourage the nation's political leaders to demonstrate a respect for scientific truths in word and deed. And we urge the people who vote to hold them to that standard.

Third Pole Is Melting

One billion people may lose the source of the water within 50 years.  But, Everest may become a much easier climb in shorts and t-shirts. 

The Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau, dubbed the "Third Pole" for having the largest ice mass on Earth after the polar regions, are rapidly losing their glaciers. Eighteen percent of China's glaciers have vanished in the past 50 years according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Air pollution and rising air temperatures are combining to increase glacial melt, threatening water supplies for one billion people.

Most of the 5,500 glaciers in the Himalaya-Hindu-Kush region—home of Mount Everest—may vanish by the end of this century. The long history of climbing through the Khumbu Icefall and up the Lhotse Face may become a rock scramble instead.

Hummingbirds Are Simply Amazing

A 3,000 mile migration for some, extinction for many.  Habitat destruction is the leading cause.  That’s something we could fix.

Imagine a Rufous Hummingbird traveling more than 3,000 miles on his annual spring migration from Mexico to British Columbia. Armed with a prodigious mental map of every place he's ever found food, the tiny bird heads to a familiar spot in California where he remembers a field full of flowers. He arrives only to find a big-box store and a giant parking lot. No flowers, no nectar. But the hummingbird has no time to waste; he spends the majority of his waking life gathering food to survive. So he flies on.

The Americas are home to 365 species of hummingbirds. Of these, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists 28 species, or roughly 8 percent, as endangered or critically endangered. For most of these declining hummingbirds, loss of habitat is the leading threat to their survival.

11 Places to See

Before it’s too late.  Even, always optimistic travel publicans are facing the reality of global warming.  These are good places to go, however, as you won’t run into any Republicans at any of them, otherwise they might have to admit that climate change is real.

Get your reservations.

Climate Change Isn’t The Only Problem

Human behavior is a larger threat today than climate change.  We might not be able to fix climate change tomorrow, but there are things we can do to protect wildlife right now.

Climate change is dangerous, and it’s happening now. It threatens wildlife and the ecosystems they live in. It will make life harder for billions of people, with the greatest harm hitting the world’s poorest people. It may make some parts of the world uninhabitable for humans, and will almost certainly drive many species to extinction.

But there are a half-dozen other environmental threats that are even worse.

That’s according to a study published this month in Nature, generally considered the world’s most respected scientific journal. According to the study, which lists ten kinds of human-caused environmental damage and ranks them according to the number of wildlife species they now threaten, climate change comes in at just seventh place behind things like logging, farming, and urban development.

National Parks At 100

Great collection of vintage posters promoting our national parks.

A collection of posters created to promote tourism to the national parks is part of the creative legacy of the New Deal developed by Franklin D Roosevelt. Between 1938 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration and its Federal Arts Project designed a series of artworks promoting, and inspired by, the landscapes and wildlife of the parks. The collection is housed in the Library of Congress.

POST FROM THE PAST - California Law Banning the Possession and Sale of Shark Fins Upheld By U.S. Supreme Court (5/25/16)

Two Federal laws (passed in 2000 and strengthened in 2010) made removal of shark fins illegal, but did not ban the possession and sale of the fins.  Every year millions of sharks are killed only for their fins.  The remainder of the shark is dumped back into the ocean to die.  A 2013 California law made possession and sale of shark fins illegal.  A group including restaurant owners, shark fin suppliers and Chinese American community organizations filed suit against the state.  Monday the United State Supreme Court upheld the California law.

California’s ban on the possession and sale of shark fins survived a legal challenge Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Bay Area suppliers and sellers of shark fin soup, a traditional dish in the Chinese American community.

Federal law prohibits shark “finning,” the removal of fins from sharks, but does not forbid possessing or selling shark fins. California lawmakers went a step further with a statute that took effect in July 2013 and had the impact of removing shark fin soup from restaurant menus.

What cultural relevance is gained by driving a species to extinction?

Many species of sharks are currently in danger due to shark finning, including the scalloped hammerhead, which is endangered, and the smooth hammerhead, which is vulnerable according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Between 1.3 and 2.7 million of just these two sharks are killed every year in the shark fin trade, and the northwestern Atlantic population of the scalloped hammerhead declined from around 155,500 in 1981 to 26,500 in 2005. Today, some shark populations have decreased by 60-70% due to human shark fisheries.

For more information on the impact of the war on sharks read this report.

August 28, 2016

Here is an update on the law and more details on additional actions to save the world's sharks.

POSTS FROM THE PAST - 1,000,000,000 Birds - Just Gone (5/19/16)

The just released State of North America’s Birds report is grim reading.  Based on a comprehensive evaluation of species population size and trends, ranges and threat severity the assessment reaches a stark conclusion.

 A billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970, and a third of bird species across the continent are threatened with extinction...

The first State of North America's Birds report finds that of 1,154 bird species that live in and migrate among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, 432 are of "high concern" due to low or declining populations, shrinking ranges and threats such as human-caused habitat loss, invasive predators and climate change.

Complied by experts from Mexico, the United States and Canada, the report breaks down species risk in 10 habitats. Even when these "high concern" species are protected by international agreements and or endangered species protection they are placed at risk by both human encroachment and the impact of climate change  on breeding grounds and food sources.

Most threatened, with more than half the species of "high concern" are ocean birds such as northern gannets, tropical and sub-tropical birds, including many that breed in Canada and the U.S., but winter in Mexico.

There are also steep declines in coastal shorebirds like semipalmated and western sandpipers and red knots, which have lost 90 per cent of their population; grassland birds such as the greater sage grouse, Sprague's pipit and chestnut-collared longspur; and aridland birds.  

Species with long migration paths have sustained population losses of 70% over the last half century.

...species in coastal, grassland, and aridland habitats are declining steeply. In particular, long-distance migratory shorebirds and species that migrate from the Great Plains to Mexico’s Chihuahuan grasslands have lost, on average, almost 70% of their continental populations...

Among the bad news, the report highlights some successes as examples of cooperation between governments and conservation organizations resulting in stable or growing species populations. However, efforts that have sustained waterfowl populations may not apply to many of the most threatened species.

The North American wetlands and waterfowl conservation effort capitalized on synergies between continental policy and funding (North American Wetlands Conservation Act), coordinated science across species’ ranges (North American Waterfowl Management Plan), and the delivery of habitat conservation on the ground by local groups (regional conservation partnerships called Joint Ventures). Nonprofit conservation groups played a pivotal role in this model by harnessing the energy of a crowd of enthusiasts, funneling their philanthropy and their constituent voices toward directed policy objectives, and fueling conservation mechanisms through matching funds. The success of this habitat conservation model has helped support consistently rising populations of waterfowl.

We have models that work, but do we have the will to implement them?  None of this is easy and the obstacles are immense.  We have a choice.

On the centennial of the Canada/U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty and the 80th anniversary of the Mexico/U.S. bird treaty, the governments and citizens of our three countries must develop a vision for migratory bird conservation in this century.  

If we fail the sky will be empty in the next century.

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 26, 2016

Everything Is Connected

This is a stunning piece.  Our national parks are our national treasure.  They are where, if we are lucky, we can discover our true place in the world.  Read it!

The most remote place in the contiguous 48 states, the farthest you can go to get away from it all – the only place you can be more than 20 miles from a road – is deep in the south-eastern corner of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

It wasn’t going to be easy – it would take a week of backpacking to hike in and out – but I’d done several long trips into Yellowstone and thoroughly looked forward to this one. I chose Dave Gaillard, a long, lean, carrot-headed scientist as my partner. An indefatigable backpacker, Gaillard was a specialist in endangered species, namely the wolf, wolverine, grizzly and lynx. These are species that only thrive where there are very few humans.

“Today there are an estimated 1700 wolves in the Northern Rockies,” Dave said. “They are a keystone species.”

A keystone species is one that directly impacts the balance of the ecosystem. In Yellowstone, the extermination of wolves caused the elk population to explode. With no wolves to disperse them, elk chewed down the aspen saplings and willows along streams, which depleted the food source for the beavers, reducing their numbers.

Fewer beavers caused a drop in beaver dams, which reduced the amount of cool, shaded water, which reduced the fish populations. Fewer willows caused a drop in migrating neotropical songbirds.

"Everything is connected,” said Dave, poking the fire with a stick.

…is this not the very point of a national park? To reveal a world in which humans are just another species in a beautifully intricate ecosystem.

Please, No More Climate Change

Climate change may be a hoax to one of the United States major political parties, but maybe the world would be a better place if they actually paid attention to it.  Climate change has driven human conflict for centuries and as the impact of global warming accelerates the conflicts will only increase.

A team of European scientists say they can demonstrate, "in a scientifically sound way," a link between civil violence based on ethnic divisions and episodes of drought, intense heat or other climate-linked weather extremes.

The latest finding carries lessons for a planet that has yet to confront the demands of climate change.

Researchers who looked at the patterns of political disturbance and climate-related events weren't especially concerned with climate change: They were looking for connections. And they found one: a demonstrable probability that inter-ethnic divisions could be brought to flashpoint by extended periods of drought.

They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that in the study period of 1980 to 2010, almost a quarter of all armed conflict in ethnically-divided societies could be connected to extremes of heat or drought.

"Although we do not report evidence that climate-related disasters act as direct triggers of armed conflicts, the disruptive nature of these events seems to play out in ethnically-fractionalized societies in a particularly tragic way," they concluded.

But, Really…..

Isn’t every day National Dog Day?   They are the wild that lives with us.

National Dog Day celebrates all breeds, pure and mixed and serves to help galvanize the public to recognize the number of dogs that need to be rescued each year, either from public shelters, rescues and pure breed rescues. National Dog Day honors family dogs and dogs that work selflessly to save lives, keep us safe and bring comfort. Dogs put their lives on the line every day - for their law enforcement partner, for their blind companion, for the disabled, for our freedom and safety by detecting bombs and drugs and pulling victims of tragedy from wreckage.

I’m sure there will be tears involved.

Thank You, Mr. President

President Obama creates the largest protected area on the planet. 

Capping a week of 100th anniversary celebrations for the National Park Service, President Barack Obama on Friday turned to the ocean to create the largest protected area anywhere on Earth—a half-million-square-mile arc of remote Pacific waters known for both exceptional marine life and importance to native Hawaiian culture.

The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, established in 2006 by President George W. Bush, already covered 140,000 square miles of ocean around the uninhabited northwestern islands of Hawaii, Obama’s home state.

Obama more than quadrupled Papahānaumokuākea’s size, to 582,578 square miles, an area larger than all the national parks combined. Using his executive authority under the U.S. Antiquities Act, he extended most of the monument’s boundary—and its prohibition of commercial fishing—out to the 200-mile limit of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Doing what’s right for the planet isn’t without a fight.

Citing that imbalance and the impact to Hawaii's longline fleet, the fishing industry vigorously fought the Papahānaumokuākea expansion—in TV ads and YouTube videos, in town hall meetings and in the capitols in Washington and Honolulu. Ultimately, support from Hawaii lawmakers helped cinch the president’s decision. U.S. Senator Brian Schatz brokered a compromise that maintained the monument’s existing boundary on its far eastern end, allowing fishermen from Kauai and Niihau to continue working their traditional grounds inside the EEZ.

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 25, 2016

Imagine All That Happened

Not the most attractive tree in Europe, but maybe the oldest.  A living thing that was growing and surviving without a thought to the history of war, plague and “progress” that was happening around it.

…in Europe, trees that reach 1,000-years-old are a rarity. So the discovery of a Bosnian pine tree (Pinus heldreichii) that is at least 1,075-years-old is a big deal. It stands in a grove in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece along with of a dozen other pines at or close to the millennia mark. The tree, dubbed Adonis, is believed to be the oldest living tree in Europe.

“It is quite remarkable that this large, complex and impressive organism has survived so long in such an inhospitable environment, in a land that has been civilized for over 3,000 years,” Paul Krusic a member of the expedition that found the tree says in a press release.

So Just Move!

This is a tragic story.  Shishmaref, Alaska has been occupied for more than 400 years (the oldest colonial city in the United States was founded 450 years ago) and now it is uninhabitable due to climate change.  But, the real tragedy of this piece is that the climate denying nut jobs are blaming the occupants of Shishmaref for having the ground literally washed from beneath their feet.

Because of complications due to climate change, Shishmaref is gradually being devoured by the Chukchi Sea. The island is eroding because the permafrost that was its fundamental foundation is disappearing and because the ocean doesn't freeze as long and as hard as it used to freeze.

Since the Chukchi Sea is where typhoons eventually go to die, and since they no longer can beat themselves to death over deep sea ice, the storms regularly tear great chunks out of the island. Houses have collapsed. You can see the legacy of the ongoing losing battle against the winds and tides in the hunks of the previous seawalls that are strewn around the rocky beach.

People have been living in Shishmaref for over 400 years. On Friday, the residents of Shishmaref voted (again) to abandon their village rather than try to save it from the merciless pounding that doesn't seem to promise to get better any time soon.

We Saw Ourselves

Fifty years ago this week mankind got its first look at Earth rise as seen from just above the surface of the Moon.   There have been more iconic photos of the Earth from space, but this was the first time that we could actually see this tiny speck as it might appear from another celestial body.  It’s a reminder that this remarkable place is the only planet we have.  And, this is the story of how that photo (and many more) have been preserved for mankind.  Not just preserved, but restored to their full resolution and quality.  Hopefully, we can preserve the planet with as much diligence.

On Aug. 23, 1966 — 50 years ago Tuesday — Lunar Orbiter 1 took the above photo: the first-ever of Earth rising up above the cold, bright dust of our planet's biggest satellite.

However iconic, it looks pretty crummy.

That's because 1960s technology couldn't access the full depth of the data NASA had on its tapes. So after printing out what it needed to select landing sites, the space agency mothballed the tapes in a Maryland storage unit.

The tapes were well-kept, but the refrigerator-size tape drives — the only devices capable of accessing the data — had sat in the barn of Nancy Evans, a former NASA employee who saved them from going into the garbage, for the better part of a few decades.

That is, until space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo found out about the situation through a web group in 2005.  Wingo immediately contacted Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and founder of NASAWatch.com, for help.

Climate Change – A Hoax

If only those kooks and nuts trying to sell this bogus theory of global warming (fat Al Gore included) would just produce peer reviewed science like Exxon and Koch Industries provide.  Oh wait, do I have that wrong?  What’s this – human influence on climate change as early as the 1830s?  Unpossible!

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, no one would have thought that their burning of fossil fuels would have an almost immediate effect on the climate. But our new study, published Wednesday in Nature, reveals that warming in some regions actually began as early as the 1830s.

That is much earlier than previously thought, so our discovery redefines our understanding of when human activity began to influence our climate.

By pinpointing the date when human-induced climate change started, we can then begin to work out when the warming trend broke through the boundaries of the climate's natural fluctuations, because it takes some decades for the global warming signal to "emerge" above the natural climate variability.

According to our evidence, in all regions except for Antarctica, we are now well and truly operating in a greenhouse-influenced world. We know this because the only climate models that can reproduce the results seen in our records of past climate are those models that factor in the effect of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by humans.

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 23, 2016

Anybody Think Climate Change is Involved?

Thousands of dead fish.  Warmer water, less winter snow and melt in the spring.  Fish in this situation are more stressed and disease prone.  Each little piece is connected and part of an unfolding disaster.

On August 12, Montana officials realized that the mountain whitefish of Yellowstone River were dying en masse. They sent corpses off for testing and got grave news in return: The fish had proliferative kidney disease—the work of a highly contagious parasite that kills between 20 and 100 percent of infected hosts. Tens of thousands of whitefish were already dead, and trout were starting to fall.

Humans can spread the parasite from one water source to another. So, on the morning of August 19, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks closed a 183-mile stretch of the Yellowstone River, banning all fishing, swimming, floating, and boating. “We recognize that this decision will have a significant impact on many people,” said FWP Director Jeff Hagener in a press release. However, we must act to protect this public resource for present and future generations.”

The killer?  Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae, a remarkable parasite.

It is part of a group called the myxozoans. They spend most of their lives as microscopic spores that are made of just a few cells. Despite their appearances, these creatures are animals. And although they are obscure, you have definitely heard of their closest relatives—jellyfish, corals, and sea anemones. Yellowstone River is now closed because more than half a billion years ago, a jellyfish-like animal started transforming into a parasite.

America’s True Treasures

Our national parks are in jeopardy.  Climate change and a brain dead Congress (at least one political party) could destroy a century of conservation and, in some cases wipe out some of the planets most miraculous wild places and iconic national monuments.

After a century of shooing away hunters, tending to trails and helping visitors enjoy the wonder of the natural world, the guardians of America’s most treasured places have been handed an almost unimaginable new job – slowing the all-out assault climate change is waging against national parks across the nation.

As the National Parks Service (NPS) has charted the loss of glaciers, sea level rise and increase in wildfires spurred by rising temperatures in recent years, the scale of the threat to US heritage across the 412 national parks and monuments has become starkly apparent.

As the National Parks Service turns 100 this week, their efforts to chart and stem the threat to the country’s history faces a daunting task. America’s grand symbols and painstakingly preserved archaeological sites are at risk of being winnowed away by the crashing waves, wildfires and erosion triggered by warming temperatures.

Salmon Farming = Environmental Disaster

Canadian First Nations representatives attempt to shut down four salmon farms.  The farms are fouling the Nations fishing grounds and spreading disease among wild salmon. 

Last week a small flotilla of boats from Kingcome Village, Gilford Village and Alert Bay, with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's research vessel Martin Sheen in the background, handed eviction notices to four Cermaq Canada salmon farms. Hereditary chiefs said notices will be issued to all 27 farms in their territory.

With chiefs in traditional robes, drumming and singing, the group ignored efforts by Cermaq employees to prevent them from landing, handed over the notice and then held a cleansing ceremony and wild salmon barbecue at one of the farms.

"Our people have spoken. We want salmon farms out of our territory," said Chief Councillor Willie Moon, the first to pull into the farm off northern Vancouver Island.

People Are Stupid – That is All

Harambe’s death was tragic and senseless.  Now the pain that the staff at the Cincinnati Zoo feels is magnified by insensitive buffoons on the Internet.

The director of the Cincinnati zoo has pleaded with people to stop making memes and humorous online comments about Harambe, the gorilla that was shot and killed after a child fell into its enclosure, because of the effect upon grieving staff.

Online interest in Harambe has flowered since May, when the 17-year-old male western lowland gorilla was shot after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure after climbing over a barrier that has since been heightened. Fearing the boy could be dragged around and drowned in the moat surrounding Harambe’s home, zoo officials decided to kill the gorilla.

“We are not amused by the memes, petitions and signs about Harambe,” Maynard told the Associated Press. “Our zoo family is still healing and the constant mention of Harambe makes moving forward more difficult for us. We are honoring Harambe by redoubling our gorilla conservation efforts and encouraging others to join us .”

One Person Can Make A Difference

Small steps can become giant leaps.  Thank Tim Wong for a little bit of beauty saved for the world.

One person can't make a big difference in the world by himself, right? If you believe that, it's time to adjust your attitude. Tim Wong just proved you wrong. He has successfully begun repopulating a rare butterfly species—and he did it in his spare time, in his backyard.

Wong is an aquatic biologist by trade, employed by the California Academy of Sciences. These days, people are starting to call him the "Butterfly Whisperer." That's not far from the truth. Butterflies are Wong's off-duty passion. He's loved them since he was a boy. When he discovered one particularly beautiful type had essentially disappeared from the San Francisco area, he wanted to do something about it.

Some Beauty for the Day

From Tree Hugger, The Wave in Coyote Buttes (Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness in Arizona) – photo by Rollie Rodriguez.

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 22, 2016

Insects Will Take Over the World

After we wipe out predators, then only insects will be left.  And, then they will wipe us out with diseases.  Mess with ecosystems and pay the price.

Every year, at least 30,000 people — and possibly 10 times that — are infected with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, most in the Northeast and upper Midwest. Symptoms can include fatigue, joint pain, memory problems and even temporary paralysis. In a small minority of cases, the malaise can persist for many months.

Lyme disease is transmitted by bites from ticks that carry the Lyme-causing bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi. Ticks get it from the animals they feed on, primarily mice and chipmunks. And rodents thrive in the fragmented, disturbed landscapes that, thanks to human activity, now characterize large sections of the Northeast.

If humans have inadvertently increased the chances of contracting Lyme disease, the good news is that there’s a potential fix: allow large predators, particularly wolves and cougars, to return.

Coral Suffering

This is an amazing time lapse study of coral bleaching shows an actual organism under stress.  Often, I think we look at bleaching as a passive event.  It is violent. 

“When you actually show the coral going through these physical efforts, it is a much more vivid way of conveying the science to the public,” says Andréa Grottoli, a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University, in a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor. “It adds emotional content to something we know.”

The relationship between coral and algae is a prime example of symbiosis in the animal world. Coral polyps provide a perfect protective home for tiny zooxanthellae algae. In exchange, the photosynthetic algae provide nutrients and color to their (naturally colorless) coral landlords.

But if sea temperatures rise even a few degrees over the normal thermal maximum, corals will begin to expel algae from their bodies and turn white. The whole bleaching process can take as few as 10 days.

England Extinction

Scientist, environmentalist and conservationist say we are facing a crisis.  When will we accept that fact?

Hundreds of the country’s best-known animals - including types of woodpecker and butterfly - will have an uncertain future with some disappearing completely as their numbers decline rapidly, the State of Nature 2016 report will say.

Sir David Attenborough, writing in a foreword for the report, is expected to label the drastic changes a “crisis”. The report, which will be published on September 14 and includes research from experts across 53 wildlife organisations, will point to agricultural policy as one of the aggravating factors.

It comes after an initial report  into the state of the country’s wildlife was published three years ago. The new document is expected to provide an update as well as further information following an assessment into the status of 4,000 species.

Extinction Tourism

Let’s take massive shiploads of people to visit the soon to be destroyed homes of whole societies that we have devastated through our addiction to growth at any cost and the indiscriminate consumption of carbon energy.  I would be embarrassed to take part in such this disaster porn.

In a few days, one of the world’s largest cruise ships, the Crystal Serenity, will visit the tiny Inuit village of Ulukhaktok in northern Canada. Hundreds of passengers will be ferried to the little community, more than doubling its population of around 400. The Serenity will then raise anchor and head through the Northwest Passage to visit several more Inuit settlements before sailing to Greenland and finally New York.

It will be a massive undertaking, representing an almost tenfold increase in passenger numbers taken through the Arctic on a single vessel – and it has triggered considerable controversy among Arctic experts. Inuit leaders fear that visits by giant cruise ships could overwhelm fragile communities, while others warn that the Arctic ecosystem, already suffering the effects of global warming, could be seriously damaged.

 “This is extinction tourism,” said international law expert Professor Michael Byers, of the University of British Columbia. “Making this trip has only become possible because carbon emissions have so warmed the atmosphere that Arctic sea ice in summer is disappearing. The terrible irony is that this ship – which even has a helicopter for sightseeing and a huge staff-to-passenger ratio – has an enormous carbon footprint that is only going to make things even worse in the Arctic.”

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 19, 2106

Birds Do It

So, birds communicate with the chicks while still in their eggs.  And, they can apparently inform/prepare the young for the climate they are about to hatch into.  In other words, birds can warn their young of the potential impact of climate change.

A new study shows that the songs zebra finches sing to their eggs late in development may give the young a head start in dealing with warm weather once they hatch.

Researchers have long known that birds like chickens or quails, which hatch fully capable of fending for themselves, can hear through their eggs—allowing them to imprint things like who their mother is. But or around 50 years, nobody believed anything happened inside the egg with birds that hatch dependent on their parents.

A new study published today in Science upends that wisdom, showing that certain zebra finch calls can change their young's growth and behavior in adulthood. 

“This acoustic signal is potentially being used to program the development of offspring," says Kate Buchanan, an associate professor of animal ecology at Deakin University in Australia and the senior author of the new paper. “Hearing the call affects your rate of growth relative to the temperature that you experience.

Birds Can Figure It Out - People Can't 

Watching their homes burn up in a firestorm whose intensity is a direct result of global warming and yet they are unwilling to believe in the possibility of global warming.  But, a bird is capable of warning a chick in the egg that global warming is real.

“Climate change is real and it is with us,” Robert Bonnie, undersecretary for natural resources and environment at the US Department of Agriculture, told the Guardian in February. “The whole US Forest Service is shifting to becoming an agency dominated by wildfires. We really are at a tipping point. The current situation is not sustainable.”

 This is news to some of those caught up in the Blue Cut fire, many of them political conservatives. “Climate change? A farce. I’ve been here since 1996 and it’s been the same: it gets hot in summer and the place burns,” said Rich Kerr, mayor of Adelanto.

 Ryan Gilmore, 21, and Sonya Haffner, 42, “horse people” from Riverside, drove overnight on their own dime to help residents evacuate animals. “This,” said Haffner, indicating the smoke, “is just a hot period. It’ll go back eventually.”

 Gilmore agreed. “The world goes through cycles. Global warming is a bunch of crap.” He flicked some ash from his shoulder. “It’s just another excuse for people to whine about something.”

Environment Crime

Is it the known criminals or the major corporations that prop up the criminals?

A recent study by UN Environment Programme and Interpol determined that environmental crime is now worth up to $ 258 billion. That is up 26 % on estimates from 2014. “Ecocrime” is the fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world after the drug trade, counterfeiting and human trafficking.

Environmental crime negatively affects nature and has knock-on effects for human health. Every year, miners in the Amazon tip 30 tonnes of mercury into the region’s rivers and lakes. Doctors have diagnosed brain damage from mercury poisoning as far as 400 kilometres downstream. Loggers illegally chop down trees and in doing so degrade water and air quality.

Seeds of Extinction

We will have to change the way we approach our lives if we want to save the planet and ourselves.

Ashley Dawson, author of Extinction: A Radical History, will be featured on Truthout on August 21 in a question and answer about his book. At one point in the interview, he tells Truthout:

Capitalism is predicated on endless expansion. It is a socio-economic system that must grow indefinitely or cease to exist. And it has to grow at a compound rate, leading it to commodify and consume ever-greater portions of the planet at an accelerating velocity. Since we only have one planet, there is clearly a fundamental contradiction between our economic system and the environment upon which it, and all of humanity, ultimately depends. But since capitalism grows in a spatially uneven manner, some people can live obscenely affluent, insulated lives while other people face stark ecological catastrophe. But at some point capitalism will take the entire planet past a point of ecological destruction from which there will be no return, at least on any time scale that is meaningful for human beings.

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 18, 2016

Cereal Without Bananas!

Genetic diversity is critical to survival.  Bananas apparently didn’t get the memo.

The Cavendish banana plants all originated from one plant and so as clones, they all have the same genotype — and that is a recipe for disaster.

Researchers have discovered how three fungal diseases have evolved into a lethal threat to the world’s bananas.  

The discovery, reported online in PLOS Genetics, better equips researchers to develop hardier, disease-resistant banana plants and more effective disease-prevention treatments.

 “We have demonstrated that two of the three most serious banana fungal diseases have become more virulent by increasing their ability to manipulate the banana’s metabolic pathways and make use of its nutrients,” says University of California, Davis plant pathologist Ioannis Stergiopoulos, who led the effort to sequence two of the fungal genomes.

In reality, the global banana industry could be wiped out in just 5 to 10 years by fast-advancing fungal diseases. And that would prove devastating to millions of small-scale farmers who depend on the fruit for food, fiber, and income. Already, Sigatoka — a three-fungus disease complex — reduces banana yields by 40 percent.

Unfortunately the current solution may well be massive and frequent drenching of the banana crop in herbicides. 

The constant threat of the disease requires farmers to make 50 fungicide applications to their banana crops each year to control the disease.

And for those growers who can afford fungicide, the applications pose environmental and human-health risks.

Happy Birthday!

At 100 the Migratory Bird Treaty continues to be a brilliant example of international conservation action.

One hundred years ago, on August 16, 1916, the United States and Canada reached a landmark agreement to protect migratory birds, many of which were being hunted to the brink for fashion or food. The Migratory Bird Treaty became U.S. federal law in 1918 as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, one of the nation's earliest and most influential—if least well known—pieces of environmental legislation.

A century later it is clear that the MBTA set a standard for international cooperation that we still follow today. With the centennial of the treaty very much in mind, scientists, conservation biologists, and policymakers from more than 40 countries are descending on the nation's capital this week for the largest gathering of ornithologists in history. The North American Ornithological Conference, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, draws them here to share the latest ornithological research and conservation news.

When we help birds, we help other species, including our own. We find ourselves in a staredown with many global environmental challenges, including food security, energy development, water availability, public health, and climate change—all magnified by the growing global human population, expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. How we as a society address such challenges will have indirect and direct impacts on the future of birds, other wildlife, and services provided to humans by a healthy environment.

What Is Wrong With Us?

Giraffes murdered for their tails alone.  We can must do better.

Garamba is Africa’s second oldest national park and has been hit hard by poaching in recent years as civil unrest has escalated in the region. Its rhinos have been wiped out, and elephants have suffered huge losses. The same goes for its Kordofan giraffes, one of Africa’s nine giraffe subspecies.

Fewer than 2,000 now roam central Africa, according to Julian Fennessy, co-director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, a Namibia-based organization. Garamba’s Kordofans represent the last population in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “If the number slips in half, then we’re in a real dire situation,” Fennessy says. “Every single giraffe is valuable.”

Congolese usually kill the giraffes for one body part: their tails, considered a status symbol in some communities. Meanwhile men from neighboring South Sudan target the giraffes for their meat to feed impoverished villagers.

One Person Can Make A Difference

For example, Weber Silva, who discovered this species and now works diligently to save them from extinction. 

The discovery of a spectacular new bird species, the Araripe Manakin, in northern Brazil thrilled bird enthusiasts around the world 20 years ago. But as researchers learned more about the manakin, their initial excitement gave way to a sense of urgency.

That's because fewer than a thousand of these endemic birds remain. Making matters worse, Araripe Manakins depend upon a very specific type of forest found only at the base of the Araripe Plateau in Brazil's Ceará state. And encroaching human development—including farming, cattle grazing and home construction—means they face extinction.

But if Weber Silva, a Brazilian ornithologist, has his way, that will never happen.

Silva's painstaking fieldwork provides invaluable information about the Araripe Manakin: everything from breeding habits to population density. This data, Silva hopes, will supply conservationists with the insights they need to make smart decisions and help ensure the manakin's survival. And he's wasted no time putting it to good use.