Articles by Biodiversivist

Alternative fuel update

I noticed that part of the funding from the latest defense spending bill (the same one that failed to drill in the Arctic Refuge) will be used to study the use of alternative fuels in the military.

This got me to wondering if the military is already using biodiesel, which led me to this older article on Wired, which suggests that the U.S. military may be the biggest consumer of biodiesel in the U.S. What a brilliant backdoor means of subsidizing American farmers. Order the military to use biodiesel (apparently regardless of cost) whenever it is available -- sweet. Now, if they can just convince us to flush it down our toilets.

Thailand jumps on the bandwagon, joining Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa, and South America in the frenzy to feed our rainforests and food crops to our cars:

Paving the road

Oh crap. From an excellent article in the Boston Globe:

Along hundreds of miles of the north-south highway that bisects the Brazilian Amazon, the canopy of rain forests has been wiped out. Where the road is paved, loggers, ranchers, and commercial farmers have razed the landscape, removing valuable hardwoods and clearing fields for cattle and soybeans as far as the eye can see.

My father made a living as an excavator. I grew up watching him "raze landscapes" with his bulldozers. I recall the time he brought home a baby owl found in a tree he had knocked down. The first piece of equipment I learned to operate was the International TD20. It was the only dozer that had an automatic transmission and, therefore, the easiest thing for a fourteen-year-old to drive. But anyway ...

Biophilia this

The word biophilia means the love (philia) of nature (bio), and was popularized by E.O. Wilson in a book back in 1984. I requested a Wikipedia article on the topic several months ago. Looks like someone jumped on it and did a pretty good job.

A friend of mine is an avid birder and maintains an impressive backyard wildlife habitat. However, her bird feeders also attract squirrels and rats. The squirrels were becoming a nuisance so she had traps set for them a week ago. She figured there were three or four problem animals. The fourteenth squirrel has been eliminated and they are still coming. As for the rats, well, that's what rat poison is for.

Bears in Napa Valley are being shot to protect grapes and wolves in Idaho are being shot and poisoned for lots of reasons. You can go here to learn how to poison a wolf.

I think Wilson really missed the mark on that one. People are to biodiversity on Earth what a drop of penicillin is to bacteria in a petri dish.

Game over, man?

Greenpeace is taking on the French government ... again:

Africa has already lost two-thirds of its ancient forests in the last thirty years, industrial logging threatens most of what remains. In as little as five to ten years Africa's apes, the gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, will disappear with the last undisturbed forest areas.

And France, by accepting timber from illegal and destructive sources, is also jeopardizing the development of legitimate trade in legal and environmentally and socially responsible timber.

Click here for the government's response to date.

That five-to-ten-year time frame also applies to Orangutans in Asia. Is this the end? As I have said before, extinction in the wild is extinction, period. Zoos are just fleeting holding tanks for creatures that no longer have a place on our planet. The great apes are our closest remaining cousins and when they go, there will only be us and the monkeys. Shiver ....