If I hear "Al Gore" one more time...

Some friends and I were discussing what makes a Democrat a Democrat and a Republican a Republican the other day, and of course one of the traits listed was 'antienvironment.' A Repub in the group spoke up with, "It's not so much that we're antienvironment, we're just in the group that didn't bow down and worship Al Gore and his 80-minute PowerPoint." This was very distressing and insulting to me, and I told him so. A comment like that makes it sound like we environmentalists never use our brains. After seven years in school for my master's degree, I am positive I worked really hard to get where I am. I know for damn sure that my peers worked as hard or harder for the same results. So why put it all on Al Gore? Where do they think he got his facts? Certainly not from climate monitoring, which began in the late 1800s, or from ice cores analyzed by people who know more about science than he ever will.
Well, Al Gore just happens to be the one who brought global warming to a broader audience. But wait...I'm not a climate scientist. I studied ecology, in the proud tradition of Aldo Leopold, John James Audubon, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry David Thoreau, and numerous others. Fortunately, I am scientifically literate enough to understand the procedures used in other forms of science, and guess what...They make sense! It seems like a small thing to get riled about, but I'll bet the other side wouldn't like me telling them how to run their businesses any more than I like them telling me how I learned about biology. Maybe we should just stick to what we do best.

It's fracking obvious

Oil fracturing has been used for quite some time to get natural gas out of the ground. The principle is simple--just apply extra pressure to existing rock fractures to widen them further, and the gas comes up out of the ground. The gas itself is more or less harmless--harmless, anyway, until it is ignited. There have been several cases of water wells blowing up in Pennsylvania and one of a house blowing up in Ohio when gas from nearby pipes leaked into the wells and the basement of the house.
Now, mining natural gas should not be that big a deal. It isn't as environmentally destructive as other types of mining, and has even been endorsed by the Sierra Club. However, the problem comes in with what substances are used for fracturing. The companies who do the mining use several cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene, to create the pressure necessary to fracture the rock. When the gas comes out, the benzene stays where it is, at least until it finds other fractures and works its way to the surface. Many Pennsylvanians are now complaining about their well water being cloudy where it used to be clear. All of these wells are near fracing operations and test positive for chemicals used in the fracing process.
One of the arguments for oil fracking is that since the oil and natural gas is found at least a mile below the surface, groundwater cant reach it. The problem comes when the substances left behind work their way through other fractures and eventually reach areas where groundwater can carry it to less desirable areas, like water wells.
That being said, the mining companies take every possible precaution. Few companies want to be responsible for someone else's misery. However, this is one of those times where we need to decide whether it is more important to have oil and natural gas or clean drinking water. We can live without one, but we can't without the other.

What part of native do you not understand?

A couple of months ago, I got an update on Macho B, the last known jaguar in the United States, from the Center for Biological Diversity. Macho B died under suspicious circumstances early last year. The head of the Arizona Game and Fish Department said that he did not understand all the fuss since no red-blooded, patriotic American should want them (jaguars) here. And to think I'd actually been trying to get a position at the AZGFD! I'm not sure I want to work with people who seem to think that the jaguars were only here because we allowed it! (Given current extinction rates that rings all too true, but it's not like the jaguars purposely invaded the land. They were here long before they 'had permission.') Bush's legacy lives on. Bush authorized the southern states to build a (useless) border fence to keep out illegal immigrants, and environmental groups worried about the fence fragmenting jaguar habitat. No more jaguars, no more worries for the environmental groups, right?
I thought I'd heard it all, but just this morning an e-mail notice from Defenders of Wildlife quoted the governor of Utah as saying, "We don't want wolves here." Ah, yet another government official who understands nada about native predatorrs, predator/prey dynamics, and migration; or if he does, he prefers to hide it for fear he might appear too intelligent. After all, it's all about winning, not telling the truth.
This brings me back to sometime early last decade when my cousin was telling me she had had the opportunity to go to Sacramento to talk to one of their senators. "What are you going to do about us invading the mountain lions' territory?" she asked him. "We're not invading their territory, they're invading ours," he replied. Clearly, Manifest Destiny is still in full swing. I think there are some long retired and possibly long dead teachers who need to take a refresher in biology and ecology.

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.