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A Jury Of Your Pyrrhus

G8 climate deal is failure or triumph, depending whom you ask Welcome to another installment of “Days of Our G8 Lives.” Yesterday, the G8 agreed to a climate deal it’s been fine-tuning for weeks. It notably did not commit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 50 percent by 2050, but it […]

Gore wins!

Spain’s Prince of Asturias award for international cooperation, that is. Can the Nobel be far behind?

Beak Squad

Bird biologists are increasingly like hospice workers The sorry state of many of the world’s bird species — like vultures in Southeast Asia and northern spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest — is turning wildlife biologists into virtual hospice workers: they come to know and care for their patients, but can do little to stop […]

How wildlife biologists are becoming hospice workers

This guest essay comes from Meera Subramanian, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and writes about culture and the environment for The New York Times, Salon, Audubon, and other publications.

A year ago, I was sitting in New York City's Bryant Park interviewing a wildlife biologist about vultures, three species of which are well on their way to extinction in South Asia. Munir Virani, who oversees the South Asian Vulture Crisis project for the Peregrine Fund, dropped a phrase that sank like lead. "We are monitoring to extinction," he said, his dark eyes instinctually looking up, scanning the stretch of sky among the trees for life, maybe even a peregrine falcon that nests on the nearby MetLife Building in midtown.

He is a biologist, the name of his field spawning from the Greek root word for life. And yet he and many others in his field have become the equivalent of hospice workers. They come to know and care for their ward, but they are working in defense mode, backs pressed up against a wall of looming threats to all forms of life on earth -- terrestrial and aquatic; mammalian, avian, and amphibian.

Whether or not Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson is right when he estimates that we are losing 30,000 species per year -- that's three species per hour -- there is no denying that this is a time of loss. "We are monitoring everywhere in a rapidly changing landscape. It's incredibly frustrating," Virani told me. "There is no feel-good effect in this work."

By all reckoning, it's too late for the vultures. By the time scientists isolated a livestock drug as the cause of the deaths, 95 percent of the population had crashed in less than a decade, and there weren't enough left in the wild to begin a captive breeding program.

Tim Lambert …

… dismantles NYT columnist John Tierney’s latest attack on Rachel Carson.

They may not all be bad.

Two recent news stories from the Chesapeake illustrate well the opposite poles in the debate on invasive species. The first details the appearance of the cuddly-sounding mitten crab in Chesapeake waters, an Asian species that has also hitchhiked in ships to California, Germany and Great Britain. Articles about it use terms like alien and exotic for the little fellas, often pitting them against the beleaguered native blue crabs.

So the news that a foreign species of aquatic vegetation, once considered a major nuisance when it began rapidly colonizing the nearby Potomac River, has instead benefited the watershed's ecosystem interested me. Hydrilla first appeared in 1983 and created dense vegetation masses and even impeded boat traffic in some areas. It was feared that it would interfere with the native vegetation, itself an important food source for waterfowl and fish.

This 17-year study of hydrilla, though, found that not only did it not crowd out native species, but the natives actually increased. Hydrilla also became an important winter food source for waterfowl communities, which increased over this period. All of which makes me wonder about the hype and hyperbole used to describe each new "invasion."

Raptor ‘Round Their Fingers

U.S. suggests saving imperiled owls by shooting other owls Despite 17 years of conservation measures, the northern spotted owl is still in trouble. So the Bush administration has issued a cease-and-desist order on logging in the owl’s Pacific Northwest habitat. Ha ha ha! No, the feds’ recent draft spotted-owl protection plan instead vilifies the barred […]

Happy World Environment Day

Have you hugged your ecosystem today?

An Ugly Alternative

In Colombia, biofuels push inspires land grabs, violence In case you need more evidence that biofuels are not the Big Green Conscience-Easing Solution: a disturbing pattern has emerged in Colombia, where vast palm-oil plantations are taking the place of tropical forests and farmland. Aid organizations working in the area say paramilitary gangs are seizing land […]

Make Our Green Day

We green your day each and every day — today, it’s your turn to green us Dearest Grist reader, we won’t beat around the bush: it’s summertime, the livin’ is easy, and we’d like you to send us some of your hard-earned cash. In return, you’ll receive (in no particular order): our endless appreciation; ever […]