Sharks & Jets

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Thursday morning someone among us posted this. I read it and cheered. Getting on a jet plane to escape to nature, which is problematic to begin with, is made ultra-problematic by landing in the vicinity of a biodiversity hotspot and swimming with trapped animals. We are opposed to it, putting it mildly. Get on a jet, immerse in nature, but let sharks be sharks.

Thursday evening Amie and I were dining with friends who we met in Costa Rica when they were on vacation. They have not been to Baja California Sur, and we were encouraging them to go to Villa del Faro with their kids, who love nature. The mom in the family said, half jokingly, that she had been thinking about going to get into one of those shark cages. We all said, polite-laughingly, that we would be there to support her from the shore. We did not feel the need to get serious and educate about why we would not really support her doing this. 12 hours later this video showed up in the Guardian, and I sent the clip to them, adding to the viral status it now has, to point out the coincidental extra humor. Two days later, not so funny:

Shark conservationists fear backlash after viral cage-smashing video

Experts emphasize that the incident, in which a great white broke through a cage holding a diver, was a ‘one in a million occurrence’

in New York

Shark enthusiasts are concerned about the impact of a viral video that showed a great white shark breaking into a cage occupied by a diver in Mexico.

The diver survived, but the harrowing video shed light on a decades-old tourism industry that allows people to be within an arm’s length of great white sharks, separated only by the sea and some metal bars. Continue reading →

Hello Anthropocene

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We have been looking forward to seeing you:

We are a digital, print, and live magazine in which the world’s most creative writers, designers, scientists, and entrepreneurs explore how we can create a sustainable human age we actually want to live in.

Make A Difference When You Can

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“What can we do to make a difference?”The Thinker

Thanks to EcoWatch for passing this along:

The Question I Get Asked the Most

Bill McKibben

The questions come after talks, on twitter, in the days’ incoming tide of email—sometimes even in old-fashioned letters that arrive in envelopes. The most common one by far is also the simplest: What can I do? I bet I’ve been asked it 10,000 times by now and—like a climate scientist predicting the temperature—I’m pretty sure I’m erring on the low side. Continue reading →

Beware & Resist The Frack

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Countryside near the village of Kirby Misperton in North Yorkshire where a planning application by Third Energy to frack was recently approved. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

Many claim to tire of hearing about climate change, species extinction, threats from fracking and other environmental issues of great importance. Thanks to the Guardian for continuing to pay attention:

Majority of potential UK fracking sites are rich in important wildlife

Almost two-thirds of proposed areas have higher biodiversity, valuable for functions such as pollination and pest control, analysis shows

Many of the areas that have been recently marked as potential sites for fracking are rich in wildlife that perform crucial functions from pollination to decomposition, researchers have found.

Scientists say that almost two-thirds of the areas that have been labelled as suitable for shale gas extraction have levels of biodiversity equal to or above the national average, according to a new analysis of records collected from across the country. Continue reading →

Bravo, Trip Advisor!

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PHOTOGRAPH BY NORBERT WU, MINDEN PICTURES

In a world where economics often focus on the concept that “the customer is always right” it’s heartening to see even large companies re-evaluate policy, and make make changes in the face of facts.

Our work in India has often placed us face to face with the common practices of human-animal interaction written about below, and we don’t promote the  “elephant rides” that are often on travelers’ agenda. Change occurs along  with a shift in understanding, and our goal has always been to craft travel experiences that are both authentic and educational.

So “Bravo!” and a hearty welcome to any company willing to join us in achieving that goal!

TripAdvisor Halts Ticket Sales to Cruel Wildlife Attractions

By Rachael Bale

TripAdvisor, the popular travel review website, and its ticket sales company, Viator, said Tuesday they no longer will sell tickets to hundreds of tourist attractions that are widely accepted as cruel to wild animals, reversing a policy under which the companies had resisted considering the welfare of animals when promoting trips.

The move to stop selling tickets to elephant rides, swim-with-dolphin experiences, and attractions that allow visitors to pet tigers and other exotic animals comes after a one-and-a-half-year protest campaign by the London-based animal welfare group World Animal Protection and reporting by National Geographic’s Wildlife Watch, which drew attention to TripAdvisor’s continued promotion of such attractions at a time when dozens of other tour and travel companies were moving away from them.

Such attractions have been shown to cause animals psychological and physical trauma that can shorten their lives. They also result in more animals being taken from the wild for tourism.

Continue reading →

Nudging In The UK

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Electric cars using the bus lane (left) during morning rush hour in Oslo, Norway. Photograph: Pierre-Henry Deshayes/AFP/Getty Images

Like the little victories in wilderness conservation, which may be too little to late or maybe a bright spot on a bleak horizon, the small moves in the right direction on other environmental fronts seem promising, and therefore worthy of note. We salute Mayor Khan for his efforts to get Londoners to do their part, according to this story below. It reminds me of Richard Thaler‘s explanation of the power of nudging things along in the right direction, and wishing these nudge stories were more commonplace in the eight years since we started hearing about them:

Electric vehicles could go first at traffic lights under UK clean air zone plans

Government proposals to tackle air pollution in five UK cities could see electric vehicle drivers using bus lanes and getting priority at traffic lights

Drivers of electric vehicles could be allowed to use bus lanes in five UK cities and even go first at traffic lights, to tackle illegal levels of air pollution, the government has suggested. Continue reading →

Elephants & The Buzzer

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The arrest of a key member of an ivory-trafficking group is a bright spot in an otherwise complicated season for African elephants. PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK ROBERT / SYGMA / GETTY

We wish conservation was always all about warm and fuzzy topics, but it is not. We are mostly confronted with habitat loss, climate change and other human-initiated causes of threat to species’ survival. The worst of all, from a jolting immediacy perspective, but probably the simplest to counter, is the poaching. Men take animal lives only for body parts that have a mystique–medicinal, ornamental, or whatever–to people in faraway lands willing to pay a price that poachers cannot say no to. That is the problem.

Stories like this one below are too seldom to allow us to have confidence in the underdog winning. The underdog in this game is many points behind, and the clock in this game is ticking down very quickly. We vigilantly watch for stories like this in hope that the elephants beat the buzzer:

A WIN IN THE GROUND WAR AGAINST ELEPHANT POACHERS IN AFRICA

By

Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, in northern Republic of Congo, consists of sixteen hundred square miles of Central African rain forest and is jointly administered by the Congolese ministry of forests and the Wildlife Conservation Society, of the Bronx.

Lying just east of the Sangha River, the park is home to significant populations of western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, giant forest hogs, and, above all, to some five thousand forest elephants. Like elephants everywhere in Africa, those in the park are, increasingly, under siege. Two years ago, when I visited,  the park’s technical adviser, Tomo Nishihara, told me that the numbers of elephants in the park and its surrounding buffer zones had fallen from ten thousand to five thousand in just five years. “That gives us five more years before they’re gone,” he said. Continue reading →

Solar’s Silicon Future

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Thanks to the BBC for this story:

Why Apple And Google Are Moving Into Solar Energy

Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are investing in renewable energy in a serious way – a sign, perhaps, of rapid changes in the energy market.

By Chris Baraniuk 14 October 2016

Most people think of Apple as a company that makes phones, computers and smart watches – not an energy provider. But in August all of that changed when the firm was given permission to sell energy from a Californian solar farm that it acquired last year. Continue reading →

Birds, Family, Bonds

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Australia has a uniquely down under way of delivering powerful stories about man’s relationship with nature:

Penguin Bloom: how a scruffy magpie saved a family

Penguin Bloom is the story of an Australian family who rescued a ‘a tiny, scruffy, injured’ magpie chick they called Penguin. In caring for the newest member of their family, the Blooms – including mother Sam, who was herself coming to terms with paralysis after an accident – found that Penguin helped them to heal emotionally. Their story went viral on Instagram and has now been turned into a book, royalties from which will go to Spinal Cure Australia and Wings For Life in the UK

Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive Continue reading →

Brazil, Climate & Coffee

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A worker separates coffee cherries during harvest at a plantation in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state. Brazil’s coffee exports fell to 2.6 million bags in June, a 12 percent drop from a year ago, according to a report last week by Cecafe, the country’s coffee export council. Patricia Monteiro/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Brazil is not a frequent focus of posts on this platform, primarily because we have not had a project there since before this platform began. But we almost certainly will before too long. And the country’s history in leadership, and in retreat, with regard to the environmental vanguard, are always of interest to us. Coffee and climate change are constant topics here, so this item at National Public Radio (USA) has our attention, with Brazil’s approach to saving its coffee from the ravages of climate change as a hook we are intrigued by:

Coffee And Climate Change: In Brazil, A Disaster Is Brewing

Coffee lovers, alert! A new report says that the world’s coffee supply may be in danger owing to climate change. In the world’s biggest coffee-producing nation, Brazil, the effects of warming temperatures are already being felt in some communities. Continue reading →

South India Via NYC

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Before moving to India in 2010, my search for the perfect Indian restaurant, in North America and Europe and anywhere else Indian expats were numerous, was a constant. Now, when I travel outside India, my culinary quests are inverted; I never search for Indian while traveling. But Pete Wells makes me think I should rethink next time I am in New York City:

Pondicheri Makes Indian Flavors an All-Day Affair

By PETE WELLS

“This is the first place you’ve taken me where I’d come back and spend my own money,” a friend said in the middle of lunch at Pondicheri. He is highly sensitive to pretension and unjustified expense, so whenever I take him along on one of my hunting parties, I try to pick something with a high ratio of flavor to price. At Pondicheri, I finally hit his sweet spot. Continue reading →

Birding from VdF: Sierra de la Laguna

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Sierra de la Laguna and its highest point, El Picacho, as seen from SJD International Airport

Check out my last post for an introduction to this series and to read about the San José Estuary.

Down here at the tip of Baja California Sur, some part of the Sierra de la Laguna mountain range can be seen pretty much from anywhere with a good view inland. In fact, when you land in the Cabos airport, it feels next-door. When we were last here at Villa del Faro in July, Jocelyn wrote about some spots in the southern region of the Sierra Biosphere Reserve, and for our second trip last week, we visited the north (the middle is the most mountainous, with no access roads that we know of, just 6-hour hiking trails).

Continue reading →

Great Brothers

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Frank Craighead, left, with a goshawk, and John Craighead, right, with a peregrine falcon, in the late nineteen-thirties.

It is rare that we link to remembrances or obituaries in these pages, but the rare occasions are typically when it was someone(s) who we did not know about and realize we should have. This seems to me to be one of those cases where I can recommend the short read about two superstars of the best variety. It starts with a melancholy air, but gets bright and is worth reading to the end:

REMEMBERING THE CRAIGHEADS, PIONEERS OF WILDLIFE BIOLOGY

By

At dawn on Sunday, September 18th, a blanket of clouds hung over the tawny grass mountainsides around Missoula, Montana. The cottonwoods had begun to turn yellow. Continue reading →

Paris Gardens

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By the year 2020, the City of Paris wants to add 100 hectares of vertical gardens and roofs, with a third dedicated to urban agriculture.The Vertical Gardens by Patric Blanc / Flickr

Greening La Ville Lumière is as good a new objective as we can think of for a city that already has alot going for it (thanks to EcoWatch for the story):

Paris Becomes One of the Most Garden-Friendly Cities in the World

Lorraine Chow

Earlier this summer, Paris quietly passed a new law encouraging residents to help green the City of Light by planting their own urban gardens. Continue reading →

The Great Iguana Comeback

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The Jamaican rock iguana, a critically endangered species, is making a comeback. Robin Moore

We love comeback stories! Here is a great one from an island country that was featured in these pages much more last year, and we miss hearing about the place:

Jamaican Rock Iguanas Get a Shot at a New Home in the Wild

By JOANNA KLEIN

Meet the Jamaican rock iguana. Its scaly body stretches around two feet long, tail not included. Slate blue spikes stick up along its spine, and a saggy sac of loose skin wraps around its head like a hoodless cowl. When cornered, it strikes with its front claws — one reportedly ripped an eye from a dog. Continue reading →