This post on the New Yorker website from some months ago caught our attention but we resisted linking it here for some reason now forgotten. But it should be read by anyone interested in conservation and climate change. The title is provocative, no doubt attractive to deniers but instead meant to raise attention on an issue we are sure most people of all walks of life, and all around the world have reason to be concerned about:

ARE CONSERVATIONISTS WORRYING TOO MUCH ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?

By Michelle Nijhuis

In January of this year, James Watson, an Australian scientist who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, noticed an image that had been tweeted by a friend of his, a physician in Sydney. With a chain of progressively larger circles, it illustrated the relative frequency of causes of death among Australians, from the vanishingly rare (war, pregnancy and birth, murder) to the extremely common (respiratory disorders, cancer, heart disease). It was a simple but striking depiction of comparative risk. “I thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done something like this for the rest of nature?’ ” Watson recalled.

The answer was that, until recently, nobody had the data. While many scientists have studied the vulnerability of individual species or groups of organisms (corals, say, or birds) to extinction, only in 2010 did ecologists, conservationists, taxonomists, and naturalists begin to more comprehensively assess the threats posed to species of all kinds—an effort to assemble what the biologist E. O. Wilson has called a “barometer of life.” Continue reading →