Almatti Backwaters, Vijaypura, Karnataka
Decline Of Mackerel Fisheries
In the UK the Marine Conservation Society has issued this guideline on mackerel:
We’ve updated the environmental sustainability ratings on our Good Fish Guide in line with the latest scientific advice.
We reviewed 186 environmental ratings for seafood, with 20 seafood ratings moving to the ‘Fish to Avoid’ list and only 15 seafood ratings joining the green-rated, ‘Best Choice’ list with this season’s ratings update. Unfortunately, Northeast Atlantic mackerel has moved on to the amber list, having been on the charity’s green list since before 2011. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Rufous-tailed Hummingbird
Centro Manú, Costa Rica
Final Words On P-22
We linked to stories about this great cat frequently enough that its demise was sad news. So this requiem is overdue and quite welcome. We rarely have words with no images, but for P-22 it seems like the way to do it (as is the reference to a domestic cat in the author’s life):
Requiem for a Great Cat
The beloved mountain lion P-22 connected humans to feline mysteries.
The citizens of Los Angeles have not forgotten about P-22, the furtively majestic mountain lion of Griffith Park, who died a week before Christmas, at the age of about twelve. A handsome beast with amber eyes and a white muzzle, P-22 was probably born in the Santa Monica Mountains, the coastal range west of L.A. His father was P-1, the first animal to have been tagged in a National Park Service mountain-lion study that began in 2002. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Carrion Crow
Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France
Brazil’s Amazon Complications, 2023 Onward
On the road from Novo Progresso to Baú Village.
We are always thankful to Jon Lee Anderson for his illuminations on complicated places, such as Brazil:
Dulce Sousa, a resident of Novo Progresso, agrees with the former President Jair Bolsonaro that local residents should be free to profit from the forest’s resources.
Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, promises to keep miners and loggers from destroying the rain forest. On the ground, the fight is complicated.
The Brazilian Amazon is riven by two long highways, in the shape of a cross: the BR-163, which extends more than four thousand miles from north to south, and the Trans-Amazonian, which runs twenty-four hundred miles from east to west. The roads were carved from the jungle in the nineteen-seventies, to open the wilderness to settlers and development. The effects have been calamitous. As colonists flooded in, the human population in Brazil’s Amazon has quadrupled, to nearly thirty million. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Lilac-breasted Roller
Etosha National Park, Namibia
Bees’ Brains
Bees are in a class by themselves as pollinators, a role that requires a sophisticated mind, says one expert. Photograph: Alamy
Stories about bees in our pages are the proverbial bees knees, again, this time with some information on their sense of the world:
‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers
‘Fringe’ research suggests the insects that are essential to agriculture have emotions, dreams and even PTSD, raising complex ethical questions
When Stephen Buchmann finds a wayward bee on a window inside his Tucson, Arizona, home, he goes to great lengths to capture and release it unharmed. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Indian White-eye
Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand
Yosemite, John Muir & Robert Underwood Johnson
The Three Brothers, taken just east of El Capitan, by Carleton Watkins, ca. 1865. “A sharp earthquake shock at 7:30 a.m.,” Muir wrote in his journal on January 5, 1873. “Rotary motion tremored the river. . . . A boulder from the second of the Three Brothers fell today.” (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
This book review in the LA Times will be of interest to those who find the history of conservation innovations entertaining:
The odd couple that saved Yosemite
John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson were unlikely allies in the war to preserve Yosemite. Muir, son of a Scripture-quoting Scottish immigrant father, was raised poor on a Wisconsin farm, but he wrote and spoke with the fervor of a prophet, and his craggy visage, tough constitution and unshakable devotion to the natural world drew admirers like a magnet. The urbane and cultured Johnson was an insider with a vast network of contacts in publishing and politics. The editor of one of the country’s preeminent magazines, Johnson hosted New York literary salons, mingled with America’s elite and eventually became the U.S. ambassador to Italy.
John Muir in California nature, 1902, left, and Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of the Century Magazine, at his office on Union Square in New York City. Their complementary skills helped carve out Yosemite National Park.(Courtesy of the Library of Congress; Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It was improbable that they even met — Muir was on the West Coast, Johnson on the East. But on one memorable journey into the California kingdom now known as Yosemite National Park, the two agreed to pull together to wage the nation’s “first great environmental war,” battling through the administrations of seven presidents to save Yosemite. It’s fair to say that the valley’s matchless terrain and fragile ecosystem would have been logged, plowed and plundered without their relentless efforts. Veteran nonfiction writer Dean King tells their story in “Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite.” Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Lineated Foliage-gleaner
Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica
Taste Of Place & Tofu Love
David Huang
We occasionally post about food, notably during stretches where it intersects with our work. Also when someone brings to our attention something fresh in a fun way. Case in point:
China has spent millennia exploring the culinary possibilities of soybean curds. The West has barely scratched the surface.
Guiyang didn’t have many restaurants, per se. The metropolis was more of a city-wide night market. Even in the pre-COVID days, streets like Qingyun Road were only half-filled with cars, to leave room for tents and tables that stretched to the horizon, and for smoke and steam that rose into the clouds. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Red-billed Pigeon
Escazú, Costa Rica
DRC’s Price Paid For Our Electric Future
Miners haul sacks of cobalt ore at the Shabara mine near Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. JUNIOR KANNAH / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Jocelyn C. Zuckerman leads a conversation below that puts our electric future in a very particular context:
For Your Phone and EV, a Cobalt Supply Chain to a Hell on Earth
The race for high-tech metals has sparked a cobalt boom in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has come at a steep human cost. In an e360 interview, author Siddharth Kara talks about the horrific conditions in the mines that are putting thousands of workers at risk.
As countries around the world look to pivot quickly to clean energy, demand for the lithium-ion batteries used to charge our smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles is booming. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Least Sandpiper
Sipicate, Guatemala
Trashy Fashion
Congolese artist Nada Thsibwabwa photographed by Colin Delfosse wearing a costume made of mobile phones in Matonge district, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. All images © Colin Delfosse
Congolese artist Hemock Kilomboshi posing in his rubber costume in Matonge district, Kinshasa. A member of the Kinact platform, Kilomboshi performs in Kinshasa’s streets to raise issues about globalisation and economic plunder in the DRC.
We featured an African social enterprise in our pages, back in the days of our Ghana work, that today’s story reminds us of. Whether on the streets of Accra, or the streets of Kinshasa, we love the creative approach. Click any image, or the title link below, to see the entire collection in the Guardian:
Rubbish fashion: street art costumes of Kinshasa – in pictures
In his series Fulu Act, Brussels-based documentary photographer Colin Delfosse captures street artists in Kinshasa, who craft striking costumes out of everyday objects found littering the streets, such as discarded wigs, wires, soda cans and bottle lids, to raise awareness of environmental issues facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “The statement behind their costumes is to condemn and inform about overconsumption and its side effects, namely pollution, poverty, lack of reliable investments and so on,” says Delfosse. “By capturing these images, I’m giving an echo to their crucial work.”
Congolese artist Jean Precy Numbi Samba, AKA Robot Kimbalambala, pictured in his costume made of car spare parts in the Ngiri-Ngiri district, Kinshasa, December 2019. The car market in the capital’s suburbs is mostly made of highly polluting secondhand (or thirdhand) vehicles from Europe.
Bird of the Day: Band-tailed Barbthroat
La Unión de Guápiles, Costa Rica
Op-Ed For Amphibians
Photographs and video were taken by Bobby Altman at the Francis Marion National Forest, S.C., with assistance from Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, a national nonprofit.
Every now and then we link to a gem by Margaret Renkl, and these often calm the environmentally-rattled nerves, as is the case today:
Why Tiny Ponds and Singing Frogs Matter So Much
NASHVILLE — I wish you could hear what it sounds like to sleep near an ephemeral pond in early springtime on the Cumberland Plateau, especially on a rainy night. As darkness begins to fall, the small frogs called spring peepers begin to sing. At first their song is the sonic equivalent of the way popcorn pops: each peep a single sound, each sound buffered on either side by silence. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Yellow-naped Parrots
The Lost Tinamou Nature Reserve, Guatemala
Beasts That Bluff
Whether to ward off predators or to exploit their victims, creatures can gain advantage by posing as different creatures. Illustration by Lou Benesch
When Elizabeth Kolbert reviews a book we know that at least the review is a must-read:
Why the Animal Kingdom Is Full of Con Artists
Some crows “cry wolf” to snatch food from their neighbors; some caterpillars trick ants into treating them like queens. What can we learn from beasts that bluff?
On April 20, 1848, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates set off for the Amazon on a boat named Mischief. The two young men—Bates was twenty-three, Wallace twenty-five—had met a few years earlier, probably at a library in Leicester, in England’s East Midlands. Both were passionate naturalists, and both were strapped for cash. (Neither had been able to afford university.) To finance their adventures, they planned to ship specimens back to London, where they could be sold to wealthy collectors.
For reasons that no one has ever been able to explain—but that many have speculated about—Wallace and Bates separated soon after they reached Brazil. In the decade that followed, Wallace amassed an immense trove of new species; lost most of them in a ship fire; set off again, for Southeast Asia; and, with Charles Darwin, discovered natural selection.
Bates, meanwhile, remained in Brazil. He sailed up the Tapajós, an Amazon tributary, and then up the Cupari, a tributary of the Tapajós. Travel in the region was often agonizingly slow; to get from the town of Óbidos to Manaus, a journey of less than four hundred miles, took him nine weeks. (At some point during the trip, he was robbed of most of the money he was carrying.) Bates would find a congenial town and spend months, even years, there, making daily forays into the surrounding rain forest. He tromped around in a checked shirt and denim pants, an outfit considered outré by the British merchants he encountered in Brazil, who wore their top hats rain or shine. Continue reading
Organikos 