Not helpful, Mr. President

Obama recently signed legislation that will increase the number of sea turtle deaths allowed on fishing lines by some 30 percent. Because, you know, we weren't having problems with that to begin with. For those of you who don't know, sea turtle deaths on long lines occur exactly like dolphin deaths on the same--turtle gets snagged, turtle runs out of oxygen, turtle drowns. This would be a big deal in the environmental community even if sea turtles weren't endangered (which species? Every single one!), which they are. That endangered status makes the loss of even one turtle catastrophic. After all, that turtle might have contained genetic material found nowhere else in the population. Fortunately for the sea turtles, the Center for Biological Diversity is taking this to court. Still, legal battles take a long time, and even if successful a lot of turtles will have died in the meantime. Fantastic.

How soon we forget

Remember all the furor over the black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes) back in the 1980s? The mammals were so rare they were thought to be extinct until 1981, when a farm dog found one and took it home. In 1986 the total census of black-footed ferrets was 14 in the state of Wyoming, the country, and the world. Thanks to the hard work of the dedicated biologists at Sybille Wildlife Research Center in Meteetse, Wyoming, the University of Wyoming, and the Wyoming and Colorado Game and Fish Departments, the population has rebounded. There are over 700 ferrets in the wild, and some 400 in captivity. As of the end of June this year, 317 kits had been born. The black-footed ferret is North America's only endemic ferret, and is well-adapted to prairie life. So how did it face near-extinction?
The answer, as one might expect, is human disturbance. When the white man arrived on the scene he began plowing vast tracts of prairie for farming, resulting in habitat loss. He also brought with him the sylvatic and bubonic plague. While the ferret is not susceptible to these diseases, the black-tailed prairie dog is (in fact, a few students who work with prairie dogs at Colorado State University have been infected with and survived the plague). This caused a huge decline in prey, thus a decline in the ferret population. The plague, however, had the most devastating effect, and the sylvatic plague hampered restoration efforts in the mid-80s.
Another major problem for the ferrets was the poisoning of praie dogs. Prairie dogs are considered a nuisance by farmers and ranchers. The dogs dig holes, eat grain, and if a horse or cow is really unlucky it might step in one of those holes and break a leg. Poisoning would be a great control tool if it could be done in a closed system, but the system isn't closed. If you've read Silent Spring, you know that cumulative effects of DDT in prey led to the decline in the osprey population, and it works the same way with ferrets. The prairie dog eats the poison, then the ferret eats the prairie dog, and after a few prairie dogs the ferret either dies from the poison itself or (like the osprey) ends up with a severely compromised reproductive system.
Skip to present day. Guess what? The Department of Agriculture is moving to usepoisoning as a tool in prairie dog control yet again. The specific poison they are advocating is called Rozol. I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say the effects aren't pleasant. Right now Defenders of Wildlife is running a campaign on how inhumane it is. (Defenders is a good organization, but I'd really like to see it use more science and less emotion to persuade government agencies of its positions.) This poison will kill anything that ingests it--prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, cats, dogs, birds, even people. Young as I was, I seem to remember a lot of people being upset when the poison killed their dogs the last time around, and I doubt things will be much differrent this time. I'm sure all the wildlife biologists who worked so hard to bring the ferret back from the brink will be immensely pleased to see their hard work destroyed. Someone once said that those who do not remember the past will be doomed to repeat it. Well, guess what...

Overpopulation

Greenies--that is, absolute, 100 percent, no TV, no electricity greenies--tend to be very self-righteous in saying that we are using too much fill-in-the-blank. It's not necessarily that we're using too much (though in some cases we are), it's that there are too many of us. There are 6 billion people on the planet, far exceeding the carrying capacity of a few million. Say each of us cut down a tree; that's 6 billion trees right there, and many of us use more than that. There are a lot of extremely poor people in the Amazon, and the trees are disappearing rapidly. Why? People have to eat to survive, and those people were born into an environment where they have to keep moving and cutting down trees in order to grow enough food to survive. If our cities weren't continually expanding, we would not have as many problems with lion attacks and deer in our yards.
Unfortunately, this problem is not easily solved. China, with its population of 1 billion, discovered after it instituted its 1 child per family policy that if each family only had 1 child, there would not be enough people to provide elder care years on down the road, let alone support the infrastructure. Then, too, some countries may breed themselves out of existence, as with India. So many families prefer boys that the younger generations are low on females. Some Indian men have turned to mail-order brides.
The topic of overpopulation came up on Facebook (never have a conversation on Facebook if you are looking for people who actually think) in connection with a discussion on global warming. Somebody said that before we can do anything about global warming we have to address overpopulation. It's well-worth doing, and if we'd started 50 years ago that strategy might have worked, but now we have too many environmental problems to take them one at a time. Note to the Duggars: it doesn't matter how religious you are if you can't take care of your own children without outside help from television broadcasts and are directly contributing more than your fair share to an already overburdened planet. You're just lucky you're in America; if you lived in Ethiopia at least half your family would be dead from starvation and war.

Help! We're being oppressed!

Well, we've done it. We've managed to piss off the snowmobile lobby once again. And how? By increasing the protected area for lynx by 39 thousand acres in the states of Wyoming, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, and Maine. Matt Mead, a spokesman for a Washington snowmobile group, claims that this has nothing to do with the lynx. Rather, we environmentalists have been looking for ways to get snowmobilers off the land. Gee, there's no paranoia in that statement, is there? He might take another look at the Endangered Species Act.
Lynxes need quiet areas free from disturbance by automobiles and other off-road vehicles. They also need a broad food base. Favored prey is the snowshoe hare, which has lost a lot of habitat (which just happens to be lynx habitat as well). Thus, there has been a tremendous reduction in lynx numbers. Pretty simple cause and effect.
Do we environmentalists have an agenda? Yes, we do. However, it is beyond maddening to have the ignorant claim that we are doing something to them just because we don't like them. Pot calling the kettle black, I think. At the moment, this habitat designation is tied up in court, and has been since May. Ahh, yes, another favorite method of the ignorant to impede environmental progress--if you don't like it, litigate it. That way we can spend thousands of dollars in lawsuits against lawyers who have sound science on their side. It'll give them at least a little longer to try to see if they can do enough damage to the habitat to render it useless to continue the suit.
Sorry (almost) for the sarcasm, but I've just about had it with such ridiculous opinions being given national attention.

Plants matter, too

Plants aren't usually what we think about when we think of the Endangered Species Act, perhaps detrimentally. If there are no plants, there is no wildlife. Readers may remember me writing a couple of years ago about invasive species and how they push out native plants. Well, invasives are only one of the threats faced by native vegetation. Like animals, their habitat is depleted by construction projects, erosion, off-roading--in short human activity.
Two rare plants in Oregon--the Cook's lomatium and the large-flowered wolly meadowfoam--recently won protection under the ESA. The species were designated endangered in 2002, but Congress only just designated critical habitat--11,038 acres in all--for them. Until there is critical habitat, it's pretty tough to protect anything. Both species rely on epheral wetland areas for germination and reproduction. I've already covered how much the European settlers loved wetlands, but just to recap, the United States has lost as much as 80 percent of its natural wetlands to the farming and construction industries.
Ephemeral (or vernal) pools exist only during the wet season. That doesn't leave much time for the plant to grow and reproduce before things dry out again. We know where it is likely that these pools will develop, but it's pretty hard to convince a developer of that when as far as he can tell there is nothing there.
Cook's lomatium has sprawling yellow flowers, is a member of the carrot family, and is only present in two areas of southeastern Oregon.
Large-flowered woolly meadowfoam has large white flowers shaped like bluebells with the circumference of morning glories. It is only somewhat more abundant than the lomatium.

For more on these plants and to see pictures, head on over to the Center for Biological Diversity's webpage at www.biologicaldiversity.org.

Making a mockery of hunting or I have a conscience

Those of you who know me know that I am still plugging away at the job search. Seems I am overeducated, undereducated, or underabled for most of the things out there. Maybe part of my trouble stems from an overdeveloped conscience. Earlier this week a career counselor told me that Halliburton is hiring, and I said I could not possibly work for Halliburton if it was the last corporation on earth! However, there are plenty of other places like that.
Today I was considering working at a place in Texas as a fawn caretaker. With the location in there, I was suspicious, went to the website, and had my suspicions confirmed. The 'farm' genetically modifies deer so they have bigger racks, the kind macho Texas hunters want on their walls. My job would be to get the fawns comfortable with humans, presumably so they won't have to be tracked. The 'farm' offers 'hunts' for corporations, individuals, and 'handicap' hunters. (Honestly, you'd think that even Texans value good grammar. The phrase is handicapped hunters! Handicap hunters has a different meaning altogether.) So basically, the idea is for lazy, city-dwelling hunters to shoot a deer that can be easily baited in because they know that if they went on a real hunt by themselves they wouldn't get anything. But what can we realistically expect from Texas hunting programs? This is the same state that for a time allowed handicapped veterans to point and shoot live ducks on a computer, and then didn't even go out to retrieve the meat! I guess all it takes to be really macho is to go out and shoot something.
I have little sympathy for the kind of hunter who would resort to canned hunting, even if that hunter is handicapped. Being handicapped myself, I have had to realize that there are a lot of things that I might have been able to do in other circumstances that, things being what they are, I can't. It has been a long, slow process that is still going on. I don't have anyone catering those might-have-beens to me.
The more I think about it, the angrier I get, but then, what did I really expect from a deer 'farm' in Texas? That's a pretty sad commentary on Texas.

Cap and trade

A lot of environmentalists are pushing cap and trade on carbon emissions. The idea is that all companies get a cap on the amount of carbon they can emit per year, and if some companies go over that they can buy unused carbon credits from companies that don't emit as much. I am afraid I see little environmental benefit in all this. What it essentially says is that big companies can go on polluting as they have been for years, provided they have enough capital to pay other companies for their unused credits. Sure, it might be great economically, but where's the environmental benefit? The obvious argument is that if all companies are given a limit on how much carbon they can emit, even with the trade provision we can limit how many tons of carbon dioxide go into the air. It's a sight better than what we have now, I suppose, but why not just cap the carbon emissions and insist that all companies meet them? Why only shoot for better when we can shoot for ideal? Because for some reason America isn't ready for ideal yet, at least not environmentally, that's why. We've been going back and forth on this for years now, and somehow we're still not ready. Why must environmental crisis always be the prime motivator?