South America, the EU and south E-east Asia are among the places from which the UK sources its food Photograph: Andre Penner/AP

We know local food is better for many reasons. We tend not to think about the negative impacts on those places where food is sourced from as a reason to source more locally. Thanks to the Guardian for this article:

More than half of the UK’s food and feed now comes from overseas, which is burdening poorer countries with the related environmental impact, a new study says.

More than two-thirds of the land needed to produce the UK’s food and feed is based abroad, researchers said, meaning 64% of the related greenhouse gases are emitted on foreign soil.

Since 1986, the size of this land has grown by 23% to match increasing demand, with associated CO2 emissions rising by 15%, the research published in the Journal  of the Royal Society Interface states. Continue reading →

Black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes). Photo © Kimberly Fraser/USFWS

The first half of this article is a bit gruesome, due to the particulars of how this species arrived at the brink of extinction. The second half is the “bright horizon” side of the story, and thanks to The Nature Conservancy for sharing it (among all their other good works):

…Until 2013 willing landowners were hard to find. But that year the Fish and Wildlife Service implemented a “Safe Harbor” program by which the agency promises not to prosecute participants for accidental take of ferrets if they agree to protect prairie dogs and allow ferret monitoring and plague management. What’s more, in some states the Natural Resources Conservation Service pays them for hosting ferrets. Without Safe Harbor the Endangered Species Act tends not to work on private land; and without private land ferret recovery can’t happen. Continue reading →

A herd of elephants run from bee sounds in Samburu national park in Kenya. Photograph: Lucy King/AP

This article from today’s Guardian‘s Environment section touches on a trifecta of our core values:

A community near the famed Serengeti national park in Tanzania is enlisting the help of bees to reduce escalating tensions with elephants that enrage locals by trampling upon their crops.

A fence made of beehives is being constructed around a one-acre farm close to the Ngorongoro conservation area as part of the pilot project to see if the buzzing bees will deter elephants that stroll on to cropland.

Continue reading →

Nils Warnock holding a Sharp-tailed Sandpiper/ Photo: Ake Lindstrom

Thanks to the current issue of Audubon Magazine for bringing to our attention the remarkable work of scientists studying the even more remarkable bird journeys that make up one of North America’s many migration paths:

A decade ago, a group of biologists made an astounding discovery: By tracking Bar-tailed Godwits, they found that the one-pound shorebirds—that have bills longer than their heads—were flying non-stop for up to 7,000 miles over the Pacific Ocean, from their wintering grounds in New Zealand to their breeding grounds in Alaska. Continue reading →

It’s a new day, a new year, and all that. We were thinking (as usual) in the last days of 2015 about the highest best use of our collective talents, where to apply them to have the maximum best impact in 2016. In case you missed the ongoing series of posts by our colleague Phil Karp, see the most recent post first, and then go back and read the rest of them. He is applying his experience from a long professional career in development to do something he cares deeply about, applied to one very specific ecological challenge. And we are particularly intrigued by the approach, which we call entrepreneurial conservation, that he has taken.

We also appreciate Mr. Sala’s example, and the fact that a major media publication continuously provides examples like this, and hope to live up to that standard this year (including sharing even more posts linking to stories like this):

In 2007, Enric Sala, a marine ecologist, quit his job in academia, saying he was “tired of writing the obituary of ocean life.” Only 1 percent of the ocean is currently protected, marine scientists say, and the rest is being disrupted by overfishing, pollution, climate change and species extinctions. Dr. Sala said he felt the need to take action. Continue reading →