habitat loss

On the Bush administration’s deal for Columbia and Snake River salmon and steelhead

Recently news broke in Grist of an agreement brokered by the Bush administration and several Northwest tribes affecting endangered salmon, litigation, and dam operations on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Now that the dust has settled, here is one view of this deal's details and implications.

First, it is worth highlighting that this deal came during the same week that a government council decided on unprecedented closures for salmon fishing on the West Coast in response to another precipitous drop in salmon stocks, this time on the Sacramento River.

Salmon populations and coastal communities have suffered under the current administration's science-free salmon policy. This year's declines on the Sacramento, like recent declines on the other big salmon rivers -- the Klamath and Columbia-Snake -- can be traced to harmful dams, habitat destruction, and politically driven management decisions and illegal plans by our federal government.

So, what will this agreement mean for Columbia Basin populations and the decades-long courtroom battles?

Environment Day? Triage Day? The holiday needs more than a new name

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

I have a new piece in Salon: "Let's dump 'Earth' Day." It is supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day has been on my mind for a while.

An excerpt:

Do humans deserve to find life on other planets?

An explosion in our ability to detect planets in other solar systems has made astronomers increasingly confident that it's only a matter of time until we discover life on other planets. Astronomers just discovered methane on a planet 63 light-years from Earth -- a sign that life just might exist. Here's what Carl B. Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, said following the discovery in this fascinating Washington Post article by Marc Kaufman.

There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and probably a hundred billion other galaxies with as many stars as ours, so it seems highly unlikely that there are not Earth-like planets orbiting some of them out there, waiting to be discovered.

I find the idea of life on other planets enormously uplifting: life is a miracle. But the idea of our civilization finding life on other planets fills me with apprehension. After all, civilization "discovering" new worlds teeming with life is nothing new to us: we've been doing it since agricultural civilization started expanding from Mesopotamia millennia ago.

But for as long as we've been discovering these new worlds, we've been destroying them, whether it was the Clovis people slaughtering the woolly mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers that used to make North America home, the Sumerians turning wetlands and forests into wheat fields, or our own civilization slaughtering everything from the dodo to the bison to (just last year) the Baiji dolphin formerly of China's Yangtze River. And now we're turning our attention to the world's remaining tropical forests.

Peruvian Amazon under threat from oil exploration, illegal logging

There’s no better way to start off a Monday than with depressing news from the Peruvian Amazon, which is under threat from both fossil-fuel development and illegal logging. Despite protests from environmental and human rights groups, Peru’s government plans to auction off dozens of parcels of remote rainforest for oil and gas companies to explore. […]

World’s tiger population unwell, WWF says

Photo: Paul Buxton The world’s tiger population is doing poorly and may have been halved in the last 25 years, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The group estimates that the global tiger population has plummeted to about 3,500 today from as many as 7,500 in 1982. Habitat destruction and poaching to feed the thriving […]

USDA head suggests harvesting switchgrass on conservation land

Department of Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said Tuesday that it would be a “great idea” to allow farmers to grow and harvest biofuel-bound switchgrass on land currently set aside as wildlife habitat. More than 34 million acres in the U.S. are in the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners to convert cropland to native grasses […]

Even more numbers to illuminate the vast ocean

Perhaps because it was released the same week as Ben Halpern and colleagues' excellent human impacts map, the new U.N. report "In Dead Water" has been met with little fanfare. It's too bad, because the report is a natural complement to the scientists' graphic illustration of the intersection between humans and the seas.

"In Dead Water" takes a big-picture look at the five primary threats facing the oceans: pollution, climate change, overfishing, invasive species, and habitat loss. You can download the report here (PDF); I plucked out some of its major findings in an oceanic ode to the Harper's Index. With apologies to Lewis Lapham:

Nearly all of world’s oceans tainted by human activity, says study

Human activity has tainted all but 3.7 percent of the world’s oceans, and 41 percent of the world’s waters have been heavily impacted, says a new study in Science. A graphic map illustrates in all-too-clear terms that the briny deep has taken a terrible toll from 17 human threats, including climate change, overfishing, fertilizer runoff, […]

EPA set to kibosh Mississippi Delta boondoggle

Successive presidential administrations -- including the current one -- have tried to rein in the Army Corps of Engineers and its projects, which are mostly known for their tangy combination of high cost, arguable utility, and disregard for the environment. Tried -- and largely failed, thanks to the level-10 force fields erected by congresscritters who covet the flood of Corps project dollars into their districts.

So it's startling and welcome news that apparently, the EPA is initiating the process to veto a massive Corps project known as the Yazoo Pumps.