Articles by Grist staff

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 […]

We’re Sorry, Angela

G8 participants report climate-agreement highs and lows We can’t possibly do justice to the intricacies of this week’s G8 summit in this space. So brace for some injustice: German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants the G8 to agree to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. U.S. President George Bush doesn’t dig that […]

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.

(Or take the bus)

From Wired: How much are you paying for gas? Depends on where in the world you’re parked. In oil-producing nations like Venezuela and Iran, you can fill up for as little as 17 cents a gallon. But in tax-happy Germany and South Korea, you’ll pay more than six bucks. So even when prices hit near-record […]