8. Champions of a Sustainable World

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 8

April 6. Press Release 11-071: Precedent-Setting Evidence of the Benefits of Biodiversity. National Science Foundation News. Excerpt: … Bradley J. Cardinale of the University of Michigan has produced a new study that finally verifies that biodiversity promotes water quality and explains how it does so. Specifically, the study reveals how biodiversity helps remove excess levels of nutrients from streams that commonly degrade water quality….

2010 June 8. Using the Internet to Save the Rainforest. By Juliane Von Mittelstaedt, ABC News. Excerpt: …The Surui will be soon be one of the first indigenous peoples that will be paid by the world to preserve its forest. They are being advised by investment bankers, lawyers, and managers. But the decisions will be all their own, taken at a gathering of 1,300 native Indios. Almir Surui believes his people need modernity to help them maintain their traditional way of life, that this is the only way they can save their forest, their culture, and their tribe. But because it is an experiment, the outcome is uncertain -- for both the Surui and the rest of the world.
…Just last year, 130,000 square kilometers of forest was cut down or burnt, at least 10,000 square kilometers of this in Brazil. That may be the lowest figure in decades, but it's still too much. Twenty percent of the Amazon rainforest has already disappeared. The same amount has been damaged. On a purely proportional scale, the greatest amount of forest has been lost in the state of Rondônia.
…When the chief returned to his village, he brought with him a computer and an idea: that the Surui's only hope for survival lay in combining the two worlds of technology and tradition. It was the dawn of a new era.
…The chief's words convinced nearly all the Surui, who avidly began breeding and planting seedlings. Gradually the forest returned. Ignoring the rain and the heat, they planted more and more species: Açai palms, Ipé (trumpet trees), Brazil nut, mahogany. Women, children, and the elderly all lent a hand, clearing scrubland that looks like forest but is no more than brushwood, palm trees, and ferns. They are still planting to this day.
…Almir Surui first heard the term REDD -- or "retchy", as he pronounces it -- three years ago. The acronym stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. He discovered that forests trap carbon dioxide, and companies around the globe are willing to pay a lot of money to have the trees soak up carbon dioxide on their behalf. They don't pay for a forest that is merely in existence, but rather for preventing its destruction.

2009 October 7. Peter Zahler: Saving Afghanistan's wildlife. By Phil McKenna, NewScientist. Excerpt: Interview with biologist Peter Zahler, who oversees the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society's work across Asia and the South Pacific. He established the Afghanistan office in Kabul in 2006. ...The country has become synonymous with human conflict, but there's another battle going on – for its biodiversity.
...Why are you doing conservation work in Afghanistan?
It's a fascinating place in terms of biodiversity. Afghanistan is a crossroads of northern and southern species as well as mountain specialists like snow leopards and Marco Polo sheep.
...What is the biggest threat to wildlife in Afghanistan?
One of the major threats is the wildlife trade, mainly furs. We have discovered the primary driver for this trade is actually the international community: people in the military or in construction who are making a pretty decent salary but don't have much to spend it on....

2009 June 9. Afghanistan Protects 33 Species. By Andrew C. Revkin, The NY Times. Amid Afghanistan’s struggles to stem violence and political instability, the country is slowly moving forward to protect its biological and environmental patrimony. The country recently established its first national park and now has created a list of 33 protected species, ranging from the snow leopard to the obscure goitered gazelle and paghman salamander. The Wildlife Conservation Society on Tuesday released photographs of snow leopards taken last month in the Wakhan Corridor region using automatically-triggered camera traps...

2008 August 22. Vote in Alaska Puts Question: Gold or Fish? By WILLIAM YARDLEY, The New York Times. Excerpt: DILLINGHAM, Alaska — Just up the fish-rich rivers that surround this tiny bush town on Bristol Bay is a discovery of copper and gold so vast and valuable that no one seems able to measure it all. Then again, no one really knows the value of the rivers, either. They are the priceless headwaters of one of the world’s last great runs of Pacific salmon.
...What people are doing is fighting as Alaskans hardly have before. While experts say the mine could yield more than $300 billion in metals and hundreds of jobs for struggling rural Alaska, unearthing the metals could mean releasing chemicals that are toxic to the salmon that are central to a fishing industry worth at least $300 million each year. And while the metals are a finite discovery, the fish have replenished themselves for millenniums.
“If they have one spill up there, what’s going to happen?” said Steve Shade, 50, an Alaska Native who has fished on Bristol Bay all his life, for dinner and for a living. “This is our livelihood. They’re going to ruin it for everybody.”
...On Tuesday, Alaskans will vote on Measure 4, an initiative intended to increase protections for streams where salmon live. Over just a few months, the measure has become one of the most expensively fought campaigns in state history, with the two sides expected to spend a total of more than $10 million. Opponents of the measure have outraised supporters by more than two to one.
...Opponents of the Pebble Mine worry that it will open the entire area to mining. For now, the most likely possibility is that Pebble Mine would be a combination of open-pit and underground, because of the way minerals are dispersed. Both methods could require huge holding areas for toxic mine waste with walls hundreds of feet high, as well as a facility for processing ore, pumps that remove millions of gallons of water from the ground and an 80-mile road in an area that is now accessible only by helicopter....

2008 July 2. Species extinction threat underestimated due to math glitch, says CU-Boulder study. Excerpt: Extinction risks for natural populations of endangered species are likely being underestimated by as much as 100-fold because of a mathematical "misdiagnosis," according to a new study led by a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher.
Assistant Professor Brett Melbourne of CU-Boulder's ecology and evolutionary biology department said current mathematical models used to determine extinction threat, or "red-listed" status, of species worldwide overlook random differences between individuals in a given population. Such differences, which include variations in male-to-female sex ratios as well as size or behavioral variations between individuals that can influence their survival rates and reproductive success, have an unexpectedly large effect on extinction risk calculations, according to the study.
"When we apply our new mathematical model to species extinction rates, it shows that things are worse than we thought," said Melbourne. "By accounting for random differences between individuals, extinction rates for endangered species can be orders of magnitude higher than conservation biologists have believed."...
"We suggest that extinction risk for many populations of conservation concern need to be urgently re-evaluated with full consideration of all factors contributing to stochasticity," or randomness, the authors wrote in Nature...

2008 April 30. An Unlikely Way to Save a Species: Serve It for Dinner. By Kim Severson. The NY times. Excerpt:  Some people would just as soon ignore the culinary potential of the Carolina flying squirrel or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga.  But not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them. Mr. Nabhan's list, 1,080 items and growing, forms the basis of his new book, an engaging journey through the nooks and crannies of American culinary history titled "Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods".
…He organized his list into 13 culinary regions that he calls nations, borrowing from Native American and other groups. The Pacific Coast from California to northern Mexico is acorn nation. Its counterpart on the mid-Atlantic coast is crab cake nation. Moose nation covers most of Canada. New Yorkers, for the record, live in clambake nation.
…Leading the way are members of the gastronomic group Slow Food U.S.A., which assesses whether foods on Mr. Nabhan's list are delicious and meaningful enough in the communities where they originated to be worth reviving and promoting. Foods that do become part of what the group calls its Ark of Taste. The Chefs Collaborative, a group of more than 1,000 professional cooks and others dedicated to sustainable cuisine, willingly signed on, too. Several members incorporated traditional ingredients into modern restaurant dishes, holding a series of picnics last year to show off their work.  And everyone in Mr. Nabhan's alliance tried to encourage farmers and ranchers to grow the seeds and the breeds, promising to deliver buyers if they did. That is the most complicated part of reviving traditional food, said Makalé Faber Cullen, a cultural anthropologist with Slow Food U.S.A. who contributed to the book. Farmers are often more concerned with innovating and crossbreeding than in preserving cultural traditions or encouraging biological diversity.
...But Mr. Nabhan doesn't want people to eat everything on his list. The idea of eater-based conservation, which holds that to save something, one has to eat it, works well for agricultural products and some wild foods like clams that benefit from regular harvesting. For some wild species, however, like the foot-long, pink-fleshed Carolina flying squirrel, a harvest would create too much pressure on a tiny population. The squirrels used to make regular appearances in Appalachian game-meat stews. But as their forests declined, so did the squirrel population; they are now on state and federal endangered species lists. Even if catching them were legal, Mr. Nabhan says a trapper would be hard-pressed to bag more than half a dozen a season. Because the squirrel was once so important to the diets of North Carolina and east Tennessee, Mr. Nabhan included it on his list, along with a recipe for the thick vegetable stew called Kentucky burgoo. It calls for corn, lima beans, spring water and two pounds of cubed and fried squirrel meat. Just don't use flying squirrel. At least not yet.

14 August 2007. Call It a Comeback: Ferret Population Shows Big Growth in Wyoming. By HENRY FOUNTAIN, NY Times. Excerpt: Black-footed ferrets in the Shirley Basin in central Wyoming would seem to have had everything going against them a decade ago. A population of 228 was bred in captivity and introduced into the wild in the early 1990s as part of a program to save the species, but by 1997 most were wiped out by disease. Only five ferrets were spotted, and the animal, the most endangered mammal in North America, was thought to be well on the road to extinction.
But Martin B. Grenier of the University of Wyoming and colleagues report in Science that the ferrets have made a remarkable comeback. Starting in 2003, when more than 50 of the animals were spotted, the population has grown rapidly, and the observed population is now close to the original number. ...The ferrets also seem to have overcome the problems of disease and low prey availability (their main food source, a type of prairie dog, is not very abundant and hibernates in the winter).

15 October 2006. Salmon Find an Ally in the Far East of Russia. New York Times. C.J. Chivers.
Excerpt: UTKHOLOK RIVER BIOLOGICAL STATION, Russia - All six native species of Pacific salmon remain abundant  on the Kamchatka peninsula in Eastern Russia. One river alone, the Kol, is reported to have  as many as five million returning salmon each year. Each year, Russian and American scientists say, a sixth to a quarter of the North Pacific's salmon originate in Kamchatka, a peninsula about the size of California. Estimates of the salmon fisheries' annual value  in this region reach $600 million, and the fish are a crucial source of employment for Russia and other nations.
Now, in a nation with a dreary environmental record that is engaged in a rush to extract its resources, the peninsula's governments are at work on proposals that would designate seven sprawling tracts of wilderness as salmon-protected areas, a network of refuges for highly valuable fish that would be the first of its kind. Kamchatka is selecting protection zones not to create wildlife reserves, Mr. Chistyakov said, but because fish runs are the best foundation for the peninsula's economy. Oil, gas and mining sectors will be developed, he said, but will provide a comparably brief revenue stream. Sustainable fishing, he said, can last generations.
Encompassing nine entire rivers and more than six million acres, the protected watersheds would exceed the scale of many renowned preserved areas in the United States. Together they would be more than four times the size of the Everglades, nearly triple that of Yellowstone National Park and slightly larger than the Adirondack Park, which is often referred to as the largest protected area in the lower United States.
These areas would be protected from most development. Their purpose would be to produce wild salmon - for food, profit, recreation and scientific study, and as a genetic reserve of one of the world's most commercially and culturally important fish. "What makes this special is that these rivers are being protected while they are still amazing fish producers," Mr. Klimenko said. "To preserve something that is not destroyed is much less expensive than restoring an ecosystem that is already broken."

Endangered species from The Center for Biological Diversity

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 8

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