EcocentricWildlife
I’m currently blogging to you from the Acela train en route to Washington for the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, otherwise known as nerdapalooza. (Just outside Philadelphia now, to which I can only say—go Phils!) I’ll have lots to write about today, over the weekend and early next week on the …
EcocentricWildlife
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is no one’s idea of an environmentalist. Putting aside his more general authoritarian tendencies, TIME’s 2007 Person of the Year has squeezed the space for civil society to operate, including in Russia’s nascent environmental movement. He’s favored the exploitation of Russia’s bountiful …
EcocentricWildlife
Bucking the trend of global environmental summits over-promising and under-delivering, representatives from nearly 190 nations came together in Nagoya at the end of the two week-long Convention on Biological Diversity and signed an important deal that aims to greatly expand the portions of the planet that are under protection and …
EcocentricWildlife
Can you put a price on a tree? How about a babbling brook? Or an unspoiled mountain vista?
It turns out you can—and this is not a Mastercard commercial. Early this morning at the Nagoya meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations released The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study, one …
EcocentricWildlife
It’s an undeniable fact—the most complete rainforests and the richest biodiversity on the planet tends to be concentrated in some of the poorest countries. Madagascar, Suriname, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Micronesia, Belize, Costa Rica—all tropical nations that are gifted with astounding natural beauty, but which also …
EcocentricWildlife
Wild tigers are dying. There’s no other word for it. Their numbers have declined in the wild from perhaps 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century, to more than 10,000 in the 1980s to less than 3,500 today. Their habitat in India, Russia, China and Southeast Asia has been carved up, their prey has been taken away from them and tigers …
EcocentricEcocentric
Scientists have been puzzled about a strange disease that began attacking bats in New York state in 2006. The bats would suddenly awaken from hibernation in midwinter, their faces covered in a white fungus. Already weakened, they struggle to find food and die in large numbers. Called white-nose syndrome (WNS), the disease has spread …
EcocentricEcocentric
Positive feedback cycles—they’re what keeps climatologists up at night. The term describes the way that certain ecological responses to a warming climate can further accelerate warming, creating a feedback cycle that can spiral out of control. Take the billions and billions of tons of methane buried beneath the Arctic permafrost. …
EcocentricWildlife
Burma is best known to the West as the home of one of the most repressive military regimes in the world, a country where more than 2,100 political prisoners remain behind bars. The U.S. has strict economic sanctions against Burma—a policy President Obama just renewed last week—and the country’s most famous citizen, democratic icon …
