Articles by Biodiversivist

Back home in Indiana … not

Conservation in Indiana is synonymous with pheasant, duck, and every other kind of hunting you can think of. Having grown up there, I used to do some hunting myself. I gave it up shortly after watching one of my friends use a barn owl for target practice. Things like that happen a lot when people go hunting. A few years later another hunting buddy (my girlfriend's brother) was involved in a fatal shooting accident and had been carried out of the woods by his father.

So anyway, Sprol has recently listed an area of Northern Indiana as one of the worst places in the world.

Some of Washington’s government-owned forest areas aren’t friendly to hikers

Yes, those are bullet holes from an automatic weapon, and no, this picture was not taken in a war zone. I took it just a few days ago along the shore of an undeveloped lake located near Washington State's Tahuya forest. This now bullet-riddled outhouse had been placed beside the lake as a public service and is designed like a concrete bomb shelter specifically to take the abuse the public was going to dish out. Instead of providing inexpensive and easily replaced facilities, someone had decided to build an outhouse version of the Maginot line. I cannot imagine what it must have cost to put there.

Synthetic monkeys to replace real ones

It looks like wild orangutans are going to be extinct in my lifetime. * A pessimist would view this as a disaster, but as an optimist, I see only opportunity here. Not only do I plan to buy stock in Indonesian palm oil companies, but also I am thinking of marketing weather-resistant synthetic replicas of orangutans (see prototype above) to hang in the palm oil trees. I expect to garner a secondary income stream from tourists who will flock to the plantations to see them hanging in trees in an area that once harbored their natural habitat -- a theme park if you will. Covering all bases, I will also corner the market on bumper stickers that read, "Boycott products made from palm oil!" **

The only hope I see is that the Chinese, who are funding these new palm oil plantations, will step in and insist on some kind of conservation plan, putting our version of capitalism to shame. What are the odds that a senior member of China's ruling elite is reading this blog right now?

*Start of sarcasm.
**End of sarcasm.

On habitat protection, zoning restrictions, and angry citizens

Amazing ... these stairs are testament to how far some people will go to lay claim to beachfront property. According to this study, half of Oregon's fish are facing extinction from human impact. I strongly suspect that a similar situation exists in every state. Dams, logging, sport fishing, and development are combining to finish the job started by the Fish and Wildlife Service when they began planting non-native fish for people to catch. Large buffers against logging and development along lakes and streams would do wonders.