Valparai, Tamil Nadu
Bird of the Day: Crested Serpent Eagle
Valparai, Tamil Nadu
Birding from VdF: Todos Santos
Oasis Playa Las Palmas de San Pedro, near Todos Santos
Check out my last post for an introduction to this series and to read about the Sierra de la Laguna.
At three hours away from Villa del Faro, the town of Todos Santos is a bit of a stretch for a day trip, but could be accomplished by a determined driver or could be an addition to a stay here on the East Cape. Todos Santos is a very pleasant town on the Pacific coast of the southern Baja Peninsula, and two spots in particular are relatively well-visited by birders in the region: a little wetland area right by the beach at the southern edge of town called La Poza de Todos Santos (poza meaning “pool” or “puddle”) and a hotel associated with the spot called Hotel Posada la Poza (posada meaning “inn” or “lodge”).
Fiber Fashion
PiñatexTM production will bring new income opportunities for pineapple harvest farmers in developing countries, with the initial development stage taking place in the Philippines
We’re not insensitive to the frequent commentary on both news and social media by animal rights activists against viewing animals as commodities. With those feelings in mind, this discovery of Ananas Anam, a not for profit organization that is developing leather-like textiles using natural fibers that are the by-product of the pineapple harvest, is an exciting one.
I’ll definitely be on the look out for Pinatex products and hope our readers will as well!
ananas- anam – new materials for a new world
OUR SOCIAL IMPACT
Ananas Anam supports pineapple-farming communities in the Philippines. We are developing a new industry that will enhance the social network in rural areas as farmers will be able to sell fibres as a commercial and viable proposition.
Furthermore, the farming communities will benefit from the potential output of natural fertilizer/biogas which is the by-product of fibre extraction.
Other pineapple-growing developing countries will join the Philippines in the production of Piñatex, which will support local economies and strengthen their exports. Continue reading
Coffee Grounds To The Rescue
Kevin O’Mara/Flickr.com
Thanks again, after a series of earlier excellent items, Anthropocene:
A caffeine fix for heavy metal cleanup
Each year, coffee drinkers across the globe create six million pounds of waste in the form of spent coffee grounds. Some of us chuck it in our compost pile, but most of it becomes just another garbage disposal challenge. Continue reading
Click, Listen, Then Email Or Call
Bird of the Day: Chestnut-capped Laughingthrush
Outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia
The Journey We Are All Responsible For
28 Millimeters, Women Are Heroes. Action in Phnom Penh, Open Eyes, Cambodge, 2009
A big part of what we do when we are not adding to these pages involves helping people all over the world plan journeys. We want them to stay in places that we have developed and/or that we manage because we have worked to reduce our contribution to negative anthropocentric travel impacts. There are positive impacts also, of course, including resources flowing to places where they are needed for human development, which in turn increases the likelihood of conservation efforts succeeding.
I was happy to see this newly revamped online publication back in these pages recently, and today as I went to their website I am even more happy to see this amazing article by a writer who was liberally linked to in our first couple of years on this platform. We have enormous respect for Mr. Revkin’s commitment to many of the same things we work on day in and day out. This is a long article, but worth the time and attention:
An Anthropocene Journey
The word “anthropocene” has become the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this turbulent, momentous, unpredictable, hopeless, hopeful time—duration and scope still unknown
By Andrew C. Revkin
October 2016My reporting career has taken me from smoldering, fresh-cut roadsides in the Amazon rain forest to the thinning sea ice around the North Pole, from the White House and Vatican to Nairobi’s vast, still-unlit slums. Throughout most of it, I thought I was writing about environmental and social problems and solutions.
Lately I’ve come to realize that my lifelong beat, in essence, has been one species’ growing pains. After tens of thousands of years of scrabbling by, spreading around the planet, and developing tools of increasing sophistication, humans are in surge mode and have only just started to become aware that something profound is going on. The upside has been astounding. Child and maternal mortality rates have plunged. Access to education has soared. Deep poverty is in sharp retreat. Despite the 24/7 distilled drama online and on TV, violence on scales from war to homicide has been in a long decline.
Library Luxury of a Different Sort
The exterior of the Fort Washington library the year it opened, 1914. The top floor windows are for the apartment. (Photo: New York Public Library/Public Domain)
The beautiful Beaux-Arts design of many of the buildings in the New York Public Library system represent only one definition of luxury. The idea of children growing up playing and reading in the stacks at night produces the colorful imaginings of literature where children spend nights in museums, or ramble about in the “tippy-top floor of the Plaza Hotel”.
I’m sure most of us haven’t heard of the custodian apartments that used to grace New York City’s branch libraries, and I for one, am grateful to Atlas Obscura for sharing this curious history.
Inside the New York Public Library’s Last, Secret Apartments
There are just 13 left.
There used to be parties in the apartments on the top floors of New York City’s branch libraries. On other nights, when the libraries were closed, the kids who lived there might sit reading alone among the books or roll around on the wooden library carts—if they weren’t dusting the shelves or shoveling coal. Their hopscotch courts were on the roof. A cat might sneak down the stairs to investigate the library patrons.
When these libraries were built, about a century ago, they needed people to take care of them. Andrew Carnegie had given New York $5.2 million, worth well over $100 million today, to create a city-wide system of library branches, and these buildings, the Carnegie libraries, were heated by coal. Each had a custodian, who was tasked with keeping those fires burning and who lived in the library, often with his family. “The family mantra was: Don’t let that furnace go out,” one woman who grew up in a library told the New York Times. Continue reading
Adorable, Luminous, and Rare
The rare patch of black feathers is evidence that the bird is leucistic, not albino. Photo: Brad R. Lewis
Hummingbirds are frequent visitors to this site, including the Anna’s hummingbird. All hummingbirds are known as tiny winged gems flitting from flower to flower or feeder to feeder, so the individual pictured above is especially startling. The term “leucistic” is new to us, and we thank Audubon.org for bringing this to our attention.
Rare White Hummingbird Steals the Spotlight at California Garden
In the Australian Gardens at the University of California, Santa Cruz Arboretum, a dozen Anna’s Hummingbirds dart between golden banksia flowers and various pink and white blooming shrubs. Their feathers are bright, iridescent shades of emerald, pink and gray. The grove is awash with color.
Except for one strange bird that’s sitting in a cypress tree, watching the flurry of feeding and fluttering. It’s an Anna’s Hummingbird—and it’s almost entirely white. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Keel-billed Toucan
Gallon Jug Estate, Belize
Rights, Entities & Conservation
Mount Taylor, from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Zuni believe Mount Taylor is a living being. Photograph: Morgan Petroski/AP
Thanks to the Guardian for this editorial opinion in their Environment section:
What if nature, like corporations, had the rights of a person?
For some people, like the Zuni in New Mexico, wild places are considered living beings. In western society, it’s companies that assume that privileged position
Chip Colwell
In recent years, the US supreme court has solidified the concept of corporate personhood. Following rulings in such cases as Hobby Lobby and Citizens United, US law has established that companies are, like people, entitled to certain rights and protections. Continue reading
Hydroelectric & Its Discontents
Ladybower Reservoir in Derbyshire. Credit: justfluff via Flickr.
We only said a brief note of thanks for the arrival of the new version of what used to be Conservation magazine, one of our most-cited sites. Now, after some days of observing Anthropocene, we are even more grateful for their effort at overhaul:
Dam greenhouse gas emissions really add up
For all their ecological faults, hydropower dams are usually thought of as a source of green, carbon-neutral energy. But it turns out that the reservoirs behind dams release a significant amount of greenhouse gases that, until now, have gone unaccounted for in global carbon budgets. Continue reading
Salmon Cam, Daylight Hours Only
Salmon returning to spawn in the Shasta River. Photo © Bridget Besaw.
We missed this when it was first published a couple months back, so a belated thanks to The Nature Conservancy for pointing us to the site where we can see underwater, in real time, and hopefully observe fish in their natural habitat. Salmon Cam is only visible during daylight hours so click on the website during California daylight hours:
Salmon Cam: Watch Migratory Fish Live
BY MATT MILLER, CHRIS BABCOCK
If you’re a fan of Salmon Cam, you may have noticed a change of scenery when you’re viewing. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Jerdon’s Leafbird
Bangalore, Karnataka
Perspective On Life, Micro View
From the macro to the micro, some detailed reporting on a topic we need to be more informed about; in this book review of the recent book by Ed Yong (science reporter, another of our frequent fliers; see his recently filmed lecture on the topic below):
Reader, as you read these words, trillions of microbes and quadrillions of viruses are multiplying on your face, your hands and down there in the darkness of your gut. With every breath you take, with every move you make, you are sending bacteria into the air at the
rate of about 37 million per hour — your invisible aura, your personal microbial cloud. With every gram of food you eat, you swallow about a million microbes more.According to the latest estimates, about half of your cells are not human — enough to
make you wonder what you mean by “you.” Your human cells come from a single fertilized egg with DNA from your mother and father. Microbes began mingling with those human cells even before your first breath, the first kiss from your mother, your first taste of milk. And your human cells could not have built a healthy body without intimate help from all those trillions of immigrant microbes — your other half. Continue reading
Big Data & Environmental Activism
Kate Brandt speaking at the 2016 SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Diego Donamaria
We do not see enough of this type of story:
How Google is using big data to protect the environment
Google’s sustainability officer Kate Brandt outlines the company’s wide-range interest in sustainable fishing, green buildings and renewable energy
by Ucilia Wang
For many people, Google is simply the gateway to a vast archive of facts and memories. For those who pay closer attention to its business dealings, the company also invests billions to find new ways to use the power of computers: it’s developing robots, virtual reality gear and self-driving cars. Remember all the hubbub about Google Glass?
Google has been using the same approach in sustainability – spreading its wealth in a variety of projects to cut its waste and carbon footprint, initiatives which may one day generate profits. During the SXSW Eco conference this week, I caught up with Google’s sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, to find out more. Brandt joined the company in July last year after serving as the nation’s chief sustainability officer in the Obama administration. Continue reading
Ice Melt, Harbinger Of Accelerated Melting
When water accumulates on the surface of an ice sheet, more sunlight gets absorbed, which results in more melt, in a cycle that builds on itself. This year’s melt season began so early that many scientists couldn’t believe the data they were seeing. PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL BELTRÁ
Elizabeth Kolbert has appeared in these pages about as frequently as any other individual we admire (McKibben, an activist and a writer, wins the race with a few more posts pointing his way), or any other topic (take your pick between libraries, entrepreneurial conservation or a few others that nudge past EK in the same race) we care deeply about. She is an activist through her writing, advocating on behalf of our better understanding of the challenges facing the next generations. Epochal challenges that we have some ability to influence the outcome of. So, when she delivers biblical proportions of reporting, we read every word and pass it on:
GREENLAND IS MELTING
The shrinking of the country’s ice sheet is triggering feedback loops that accelerate the global crisis. The floodgates may already be open.
Not long ago, I attended a memorial service on top of the Greenland ice sheet for a man I did not know. The service was an intimate affair, with only four people present. I worried that I might be regarded as an interloper and thought about stepping away. But I was clipped onto a rope, and, in any case, I wanted to be there. Continue reading
Bass, Harbinger Of Hope
Its numbers fluctuate, but the striped bass is far more common than it was just a few decades ago. Credit Getty Images
Thanks to Mr. Taft and the New York Times for this note of reversed fortunes for the fish, and for the anglers who champion them most vocally:
Striped Bass of the Hudson
By
With the jutting jaw of a mob kingpin and the pinstripes of a Wall Street executive, striped bass swim through the brackish waters of New York Harbor like old-school New Yorkers — as if they own the place. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Verdin
Baja California Sur, Mexico
National Park of the Week: Tongariro National Park, New Zealand
Source: nz-autraliatours.com
New Zealand’s oldest national park and the fourth national park to be created in the world, Tongariro National Park is internationally recognized for its outstanding volcanic features and is historically venerated by the Maori people. The park encircles three volcanoes, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe, and Raupahu and covers almost 80,000 hectares of contrasting terrain. The three volcanoes are active, Raupehu being one of the most active volcanoes in the world, but that does not deter visitors from hiking up to the top and gazing out into the exotic conic formations.
Organikos 