Avoiding Collapse in Modern Civilization

THE NATURE OF THE NEW WORLD
October 2, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

Plan B 2.0 Book Byte:

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an “overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 sequestration.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so forth.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off.

Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to a complete collapse. It is not always clear which it will be. In the former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today’s population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing entirely in the face of environmental adversity.

Even as the global population is climbing and the economy’s environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping oil with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and turn downward. Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high-yielding biofuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.

As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.

You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.

In addition, here is a synopsis of Jared Diamond's book entitled Collapse:

Diamond lists eight factors which have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:

1. Deforestation and habitat destruction
2. Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
3. Water management problems
4. Overhunting
5. Overfishing
6. Effects of introduced species on native species
7. Human population growth
8. Increased per-capita impact of people

Further he says four new factors may contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future societies:

1. Human-caused climate change
2. Buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment
3. Energy shortages
4. Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity

Yangtze River Dolphin: Likely Extinct

Rare Yangtze River dolphin probably extinct: study
August 7, 2007 -- By Michael Kahn, Reuters

The long-threatened Yangtze River dolphin in China is probably extinct, according to an international team of researchers who said this would mark the first whale or dolphin to be wiped out due to human activity.

The freshwater dolphin, or baiji, was last spotted several years ago and an intensive six-week search in late 2006 failed to find any evidence that one of the rarest species on earth survives, said Samuel Turvey, a conservation biologist, at the Zoological Society of London, who took part in the search.

He said the dolphin's demise -- which resulted from overfishing, pollution and lack of intervention -- might serve as a cautionary tale and should spur governments and scientists to act to save other species verging on extinction.

"Ours is the first scientific study which didn't find any," he said in a telephone interview. "Even if there are a few left we can't find them and we can't do anything to stop their extinction."

The team, which published its findings in the Journal of the Royal Society Biology Letters on Wednesday, included researchers from the United States, Britain, Japan and China. The survey was also authorized by the Chinese government, Turvey said.

The last confirmed baiji sighting was 2002, although there have been a handful of unconfirmed sightings since then. The last baiji in captivity died in 2002, Turvey said.

During the six-week search, the team carried out both visual and acoustic surveys and used two boats to twice cover the dolphin's 1,669 kilometer range stretching from the city of Yichang just downstream from the Three Gorges dam to Shanghai.

The last such survey conducted from 1997 to 1999 turned up 13 of the mammals, but Turvey said fishing, pollution and boat traffic in the busy river, home to about 10 percent of the world's population, has likely meant the baiji's end.

"We covered the whole range of the dolphin twice," Turvey said. "It is difficult to see how we could miss any animals."

The dolphins will now be classified as critically endangered and possibly extinct but Turvey said there is little chance any remaining baiji are alive.

Researchers have known for years about the dolphin's precarious situation but indecision about how best to save the species meant little was actually done, he added.

This underscores the need to act quickly to prevent the extinction of other similar shallow-water aquatic mammals like the vaquita found in the Sea of Cortez and the Yangtze finless porpoise, Turvey said.

"One really needs to learn from this to make sure future conservation efforts are more dynamic," he said. "There has always been so much focus on 'save the whale' and 'prevent whaling' that it has led to these range-restricted shallow cetaceans slipping through the crack."

Sustainable Development: A 21st Century American Vision?

As I watched E.O. Wilson speak on BookTV today I was reminded once again of how finite the world's resources are for ourselves and future generations. If every human consumed at equal rates to Americans, it would require four Earths to sustain it. This somber statistic persuaded me to post this snippet I read during a recent BART ride.

Excerpts from:
Learning from History: U.S. Environmental Politics, Policies, and the Common Good
November 2006 -- By Richard N.L. Andrews, Environment

In 2005, the United Nations commissioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that over the past 50 years, rapid and extensive change in human ecosystems has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. More land has been converted to cropland since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined, and water withdrawals from rivers and lakes have doubled since 1960. Since 1750, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major contributor to global warming, has increased, with 60 percent of that increase happening between 1959 and the present. Fifty percent of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used has been applied since 1985; flows of biologically available nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems have doubled since 1960 and may increase by two-thirds more by 2050. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction.

These changes have contributed to substantial gains in human well-being and economic development at growing costs to the essential services that ecosystems provide to human societies: providing food, water, fuel, wood, and fiber, supporting and regulating natural processes that are necessary for human life and health (nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, the climate system, and the control of disease organisms), and providing spiritual and recreational values. These damaging trends are substantially reducing the availability of these services for future use.

U.S. environmental policies have been prominent causes of these damaging trends and must be part of any solution. Throughout American history, the United States' dominant policies have been to promote the economic exploitation of natural resources, first nationally and now globally...

At times throughout this history, U.S. environmental policies also have included initiatives to manage and protect the natural environment...

The net effect of these policies has been to provide unprecedented levels of material comfort to many people and extraordinary affluence to a few and to reduce and even repair some environmental damage.

It would be a mistake to attribute the vast environmental changes in the United States entirely to public policies. Policies tend to lag behind economic and social trends, because government typically acts only in response to a buildup of pressure for collective action...

The enduring challenge for U.S. environmental policy is to build, maintain, and constantly renew public support for effective environmental governance, at home and worldwide. To meet that need, U.S. environmental policy today must recover an essential missing element: a broadly shared vision of the common environmental good. Such visions have emerged at several points in the past. Examples include the sanitation movement of the nineteenth century; the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s; the Progressive civic reform and conservation movements that followed it; the New Deal vision of combining ecological, social, and economic recovery; and the vision of a modern society in harmony with its natural environment that was articulated in NEPA and widely voiced by the American public on Earth Day in 1970...

The closest current approximation to such a vision is perhaps the idea of sustainable development, as articulated by the United Nations' World Commission for Environment and Development in 1987 and in the Agenda 21 document endorsed by the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The commission envisioned sustainable development as a pattern of development that would meet the needs of human communities today without jeopardizing those of the future, and its vision specifically included economic development, ecological sustainability, and social equity as essential and interdependent elements...

Barring some new defining crisis or leadership commitment, the future of U.S. environmental policy will be shaped by the reemergence--or failure to emerge--of a new broad-based national coalition for an ecologically sustainable economy and inclusive and democratic society.

Voluntary Restrictions Protect Quarter of World's High Seas from Trawling

Nations seek end to trawling seas
May 5, 2007 -- Associated Press via CNN

More than 20 nations agreed Friday to discourage unregulated and destructive bottom trawling on the South Pacific high seas, a victory for environmental groups.

The agreement, which takes effect September 30, is intended to protect about a quarter of the world's high seas, a vast area extending roughly from the Equator to the Antarctic Circle and from Australia and New Zealand to the west coast of South America.

Observers and ship locator monitoring systems are to be used, and vessels must remain at least five nautical miles (9,260 meters) from deep-water corals and other vulnerable marine ecosystems.

The agreement reached in Renaca, Chile, follows a U.N. General Assembly resolution in December aimed at getting tough on high-seas bottom trawling, which involves fishing boats that drag giant nets along the sea floor.

Enormously effective at catching fish, the nets also wipe out almost everything in their path, smash coral and stir clouds of sediment that smother sea life, marine experts say.

Orange roughy is the main commercial fish in the South Pacific high seas, mainly caught by New Zealand fishing vessels. Estimates of the fishing trade range up to about $10 million (euro7.4 million).

New Zealand officials agreed to the voluntary restrictions in the South Pacific high seas, but they said the restrictions could "severely constrain" its fishing vessels. The ecological costs of the huge nets are far higher, environmental groups said.

"This area contains thousands of these underwater sea mountains, or seamounts, that are considered to be some of the most ecologically rich habitats in the world," said Joshua Reichert, director of the private Pew Charitable Trusts' environment division, which coordinated the groups' campaign. "For all of us, this really represents a major step forward for marine conservation."

A U.N. report last year called bottom trawling a danger to unique and unexplored ecological systems. It said slightly more than half the underwater mountain and coral ecosystems in the world can be found beyond the protection of national boundaries.

The new agreement is among members of the fledgling South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization: Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cook Islands, Ecuador, the European Commission, Federated States of Micronesia, France, Japan, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, the United States and Vanuatu.

Absent-minded killers

Absent-minded killers
March 22, 2007 -- By Jeffrey Sachs, Project Syndicate

We kill other species not because we must but because we are too negligent to do otherwise.

As a species, human beings have a major self-control problem. We humans are now so aggressively fishing, hunting, logging, and growing crops in all parts of the world that we are literally chasing other species off the planet. Our intense desire to take all that we can from nature leaves precious little for other forms of life.

In 1992, when the world's governments first promised to address man-made global warming, they also vowed to head off the human-induced extinction of other species. The Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at the Rio Earth Summit, established that "biological diversity is a common concern of humanity." The signatories agreed to conserve biological diversity, by saving species and their habitats, and to use biological resources (e.g. forests) in a sustainable manner. In 2002, the treaty's signatories went further, committing to "a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss" by 2010.

Unfortunately, like so many other international agreements, the Convention on Biological Diversity remains essentially unknown, un-championed, and unfulfilled. That neglect is a human tragedy. For a very low cash outlay - and perhaps none at all on balance - we could conserve nature and thus protect the basis of our own lives and livelihoods. We kill other species not because we must, but because we are too negligent to do otherwise.

Consider a couple of notorious examples. Some rich countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Australia, and New Zealand, have fishing fleets that engage in so-called "bottom trawling". Bottom trawlers drag heavy nets over the ocean bottom, destroying magnificent, unexplored, and endangered marine species in the process. Complex and unique ecologies, most notably underground volcanoes known as seamounts, are ripped to shreds, because bottom trawling is the "low cost" way to catch a few deep sea fish species. One of these species, orange roughy, has been caught commercially for only around a quarter-century, but already is being fished to the point of collapse.

Likewise, in many parts of the world, tropical rainforest is being cleared for pastureland and food crops. The result is massive loss of habitat and destruction of species, yielding a tiny economic benefit at a huge social cost. After cutting down a swath of rainforest, soils are often quickly leached of their nutrients so that they cannot sustain crops or nutritious grasses for livestock. As a result, the new pastureland or farmland is soon abandoned, with no prospect for regeneration of the original forest and its unique ecosystems.

Because these activities' costs are so high and their benefits so low, stopping them would be easy. Bottom trawling should simply be outlawed; it would be simple and inexpensive to compensate the fishing industry during a transition to other activities. Forest clearing, on the other hand, is probably best stopped by economic incentives, perhaps combined with regulatory limits. Simply restricting the practice of land clearing probably would not work, since farm families and communities would face a strong temptation to evade legal limits. On the other hand, financial incentives would probably succeed, because cutting down forest to create pastureland is not profitable enough to induce farmers to forego payments for protecting the land.

Many rainforest countries have united in recent years to suggest the establishment of a rainforest conservation fund by the rich countries, to pay impoverished small farmers a small amount of money to preserve the forest. A well-designed fund would slow or stop deforestation, preserve biodiversity, and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide the burning of cleared forests. At the same time, small farmers would receive a steady flow of income, which they could use for micro-investments to improve their household's wealth, education, and health.

Aside from banning bottom trawling and establishing a global fund for avoided deforestation, we should designate a global network of protected marine areas, in which fishing, boating, polluting, dredging, drilling, and other damaging activities would be prohibited. Such areas not only permit the regeneration of species, but also provide ecological benefits that spill over to neighbouring unprotected areas.

We also need a regular scientific process to present the world with the evidence on species abundance and extinction, just as we now have such a process for climate change. Politicians don't listen very well to individual scientists, but they are forced to listen when hundreds of scientists speak with a united voice.

Finally, the world should negotiate a new framework no later than 2010 to slow human-induced climate change. There can be little doubt that climate change poses one of the greatest risks to species' viability. As the planet warms, and rain and storm patterns change dramatically, many species will find themselves in climate zones that no longer support their survival. Some can migrate, but others (such as polar bears) are likely to be driven to extinction unless we take decisive action to head off climate change.

These measures are achievable by 2010. They are affordable, and in each case would ultimately deliver large net benefits. Most importantly, they would allow us to follow through on a global promise. It is too painful to believe that humanity would destroy millions of other species - and jeopardise our own future - in a fit of absent-mindedness.

Al Gore Excerpt With House & Senate Committee: March 21, 2007

"I promise you--I say this to each of you as individuals--I promise you a day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they'll ask one of two questions. Either they will ask, "What in God's name were they doing? Didn't they see the evidence? Didn't they realize that four times in 15 years the entire scientific community of this world issued unanimous reports calling upon them to act. What was wrong with them? Were they too blinded and numb with the busyness of political life or daily life to take a deep breath and look at the reality of what we're facing? Did they think it was perfectly alright to keep dumping 70 million tons every single day of global warming pollution into this earth's atmosphere? Did they think all the scientists were wrong? What were they thinking? Or, they'll ask another question. They may look back and they'll say, "How did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?" And do what some said was impossible and shake things up. And tell the special interest, "Okay, we've heard you and we're going to do the best we can to take your considerations into account, but we're going to do what's right." I'm going to do my part to make sure that you have all the support that I and lots of other folks can muster for you in both parties. When you do the right thing."

- Al Gore, March 21, 2007

Check out another nice post from Grist

Seeds of Hope

In this weeks edition of The Economist, an article enititled 'Seeds of hope' discusses "An international seed bank being set up in the Arctic". Here is the article:

If catastrophe were to befall humanity—be it plague, nuclear war or an asteroid striking the Earth—what provision could be made for the survivors? This week work began on a project to re-establish agriculture should such a calamity occur. On a remote Arctic island, a vault is being dug to house the seeds of up to 3m different crops, as part of plans to protect food supplies across the world.

The Svalbard International Seed Vault, as the facility is called, will cost the Norwegian government, which is paying for it, about $3m. Eventually it will contain samples of every known crop variety that can be grown from seed, from the tropics to the highest latitudes.

Svalbard was chosen because it is cold and remote. The island is expected to remain frozen for the next hundred years, despite changes in the world's climate, and the vault is being carved out of the ice and rock. Seeds deposited in the bank will be preserved by the cold, certainly for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years. The freezing conditions, not to mention polar bears, should put off any unwelcome visitors. Just in case they do not, the bank will be 70 metres (230 feet) underground, inside concrete walls more than a metre thick and behind a strong security door and a perimeter fence.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust, a charity involved in the creation of the vault, estimates that there are now some 1,400 gene banks for crops, scattered on every inhabited continent. It is developing plans to conserve every important crop on the planet. Some do not have seeds and so cannot be stored on Svalbard. Bananas, for example, are estimated by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to be the world's fourth most consumed food (after wheat, rice and maize) and form the staple diets of some 400m people in the tropics. Bananas can only be conserved as cuttings, and these must be cut back and replanted every few months. Work is under way to develop better ways of preserving such crops.

Many of the gene banks are in countries where the crop is not native, to make it more likely that the species will survive a disaster. (The banana bank is in Belgium.) The Svalbard vault fulfils this criterion for any seed you can think of. Whether anyone will be able to reach it if catastrophe strikes is another question.

Africa: Investing in Conservation

On June 20th 2006, CNN wrote this article on sustainable development throughout Africa.

"People who think that development and conservation cannot go hand-in-hand are wrong," President Marc Ravalomanana said Tuesday at the opening of a major international symposium on Africa in the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo. Organized by Conservation International, a Washington-based environmental group, the five-day conference of more than 400 delegates will examine how to use Africa's unmatched biodiversity to ease poverty and lay a foundation for sustainable development.

"In Africa and elsewhere, let us all put an end to the exploitation of natural resources for one-time payoffs, and instead develop strategies for using them sustainably, in ways that will benefit all people," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement before the conference.

Oil-rich Equatorial Guinea announced Tuesday that it was creating a new national forest of more than 1.2 million acres and establishing a $15 million conservation trust fund. Fortunato Ofa Mbo, the former Spanish colony's minister of fisheries and the environment, told the conference the new national forest would increase Equatorial Guinea's total protected territory to 37 percent of the tiny country nestled between Cameroon and Gabon on Africa's western coast. That is one of the highest percentages of any country in the world.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf also appeared in a videotaped statement to announce her government would make forest conservation a key component of development policies after years of ruinous civil war. Johnson-Sirleaf said new regulations would seek a balance between the development benefits from logging, including job creation and foreign exchange, and the benefits from conserving forests that provide clean air and water, food and other vital resources. "My government is committed to protecting these benefits," she said, announcing that legislation is being prepared to create a $30 million conservation trust fund that will finance the creation and maintenance of new protected areas. "We need to invest in the future of our people."

Protecting nature means safeguarding the cheapest and most effective source of clean water, food, natural resources and other benefits of ecosystem services, said Conservation International President Russell Mittermeier. "The challenge is how to maximize these benefits in a sustainable way through biodiversity conservation, so that they exist in perpetuity," Mittermeier said. "That is exactly what the Madagascar symposium will be tackling."

One strategy is branding, in which developing nations such as Madagascar market their unmatched nature as ecotourism destinations. Such policies signal stability and control of natural resources to the international community, attracting increased foreign investment, said Juan Carlos Bonilla, head of Conservation International's Central Africa program. "It's something we've seen happening in places like Costa Rica and Belize," he said. "They have progressive environmental policies and they also have liberal economic frameworks. While unrelated, the two have worked well to attract both investment and eco-tourists." Madagascar has dozens of species of lemurs along with colorful birds and frogs, huge bats known as Madagascar flying foxes, giant plants and flowers found nowhere else on Earth. Many are threatened with extinction. By protecting their habitat, Madagascar invests in its nature as a commodity that cannot be matched by even the most powerful nations.

In Mitsinjo, Madagascar, they are growing seedlings of native tree species to plant as new forests that will ingest fossil fuel emissions in the atmosphere, mostly from industrialized nations. The carbon-consuming role of the forests will be sold as carbon credits on the global market under a system given impetus by the Kyoto Protocol that limits fossil fuel emissions in member countries, said Rainer Dolch of Mitsinjo, a private initiative specializing in conservation and ecotourism.

Impoverished local communities also benefit from re-established forests that provide traditional resources such as fruits, medicines, fibers and housing materials, as well as higher yields in their subsistence farming of native species, Dolch said. Persuading subsistence farmers to take part in the planting expected to begin in January has been challenging, due to the abstract concept of a forest having economic value. "They wondered how they can get money for nothing," Dolch said.

Giant Panda Scat Survey

On June 20th 2006, Helen Briggs wrote this encouraging article for the BBC on a recent survey of Giant Pandas.

Fears that the giant panda is on the brink of extinction may be unjustified, research suggests.

Scientists believe populations have been underestimated in past surveys and there may be as many as 3,000 pandas left in the wild. Numbers in reserves could be restored if conservation efforts continue, they write in Current Biology. The panda once inhabited much of China but is now found only in the forested mountain areas of the country. Its survival has become a cause celebre of the conservation movement, attracting worldwide attention. The giant panda has long suffered at the hands of poachers and loggers, and was hit by the large-scale die-off of bamboo in the 1980s. Numbers in the wild have been put at about 1,000 but the animal's elusive and wary nature has made it difficult to conduct accurate censuses.

Previous surveys have used conventional techniques which estimate how many pandas there are based on the amount of droppings found in a given area. However, researchers in China and the UK tried out a new hi-tech method based on analysing DNA recovered from panda droppings. This enables individuals to be identified and tracked across a wide area, giving information on their age and sex.

The study also provides evidence that pandas in the most important habitat of its kind have not suffered genetically over this period - there is no evidence of the sort of inbreeding or low genetic diversity that might threaten the species' long-term survival. "DNA profiling in pandas can give us much more precision in identifying individuals and hence population numbers," said study co-author Prof Michael Bruford of Cardiff University, UK.

The results suggest that about 66 pandas live in the Wanglang Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province, more than twice as many as were estimated in a survey conducted in 1998. "If that were to be repeated across the range there could be as many as 2-3,000 pandas in the wild but a very important point is that this work needs to be replicated in other reserves," he added.

Conservationist groups stress that moves to protect the panda through bans on poaching and deforestation must be maintained. Half of the panda's mountainous bamboo habitat was lost between 1974 and 1988. There are now 40 panda reserves in China compared to 13 two decades ago. "Whilst this is potentially exciting and promising news, it also reinforces the fact that giant panda numbers are still dangerously low," said Mark Wright, Conservation Science Advisor at WWF-UK. "It looks like we are moving in the right direction but we must continue with our efforts to conserve this species and the threats to its habitat if it is going to survive in the long-term."

The Origin of Tree-Sitters

On June 18th 2006, Henry Fountain wrote a New York Times article entitled, 'Rising Above the Environmental Debate'. Here is a brief history of tree-sitting:

When and where did tree-sitting originate? It began, by most accounts, in a grove of old-growth Douglas firs in the Willamette National Forest in western Oregon in the spring of 1985. Members of two environmental groups, Earth First and the Cathedral Forest Action Group, were trying to block logging in the forest and were frustrated that their tactics, including blockades and sit-ins on cartons of explosives used to blast roads, were not having much effect.

Mikal Jakubal, one of the protesters, recalled that at a campfire meeting one night, the subject of putting people in the trees came up. No logger, the thinking went, would cut down a tree with a person in it. But an old-growth fir, which has no branches for the first 50 or 60 feet, is not an easy tree to climb. Mr. Jakubal, who now lives in Redway, Calif., was a rock climber who had climbed El Capitan in Yosemite the year before. "I said, 'Well, I could get up in one of those old-growth trees no problem.' " Two mornings later, on May 20, Mr. Jakubal climbed the tree, hammering nails into the trunk every few feet to hang his climbing gear. When he got about 60 feet up, he spread out a portaledge — a platform used by rock climbers — and set up shop.

Since his climb, hundreds of people have taken up residence high in trees, usually to protest clear-cutting. The most famous tree-sitter, Julia Butterfly Hill, lived 180 feet up in a California redwood for 738 days, coming down in 1999 after a lumber company agreed to spare her tree, which she named Luna, and others in a three-acre tract. Tree-sitting was seen by some as a nonviolent alternative to "monkeywrenching," or environmental sabotage like tree spiking and vandalizing of equipment. "People thought if you were going to break the law, you should do it in a way that puts your own body on the line," Mr. Hirt said. The tactic was useful in getting news coverage. "Tree-sitting had a real interesting social order," he said. "There were the people who would climb the trees, and a whole support crew on the ground, including people who brought media people to the tree."

Loggers responded by trying to scare sitters — felling trees near them or occasionally cutting part of the way through an occupied tree. When that didn't work the companies opted for "extraction," most often accomplished by sending a crew up the tree.

Mr. Jakubal came down on his own, at the end of the first day. Loggers had cut down all the trees around him and he wanted to inspect the damage. "It was my first direct action," he said. "I was very naïve. The police were waiting in the bushes."

Mr. Jakubal was arrested, and the tree was cut down the next morning.

Too Much Blubber?

In the June 15th issue of The Economist, auctioning whale-hunting rights is proposed as a solution to the current debate between environmentalists and the International Whaling Commision.

The idea of charismatic megafauna hardly existed in 1948. There needs to be an honest debate about how humanity should treat whales. Both sides muddy the waters. Conservationists protest about the methods used to kill whales, saying they are cruel. They might be, but that is not the point, unless there really is a lobby that would accept the humane killing of whales. On the other side, the Japanese and their Icelandic allies hunt minke whales, which are still reasonably abundant, under the guise of scientific research. In practice, this is commercial fishing with a side order of science.

Should whales be treated like any other type of animal which some humans want to hunt, namely protected when rare, but hunted when common? Or is there something special about them that means that they should never be hunted? Biologists have come to recognise that great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and so on) have mental faculties of self-awareness and consciousness that they share with humans but that neither shares with, say, monkeys. A few other big-brained social mammals, such as elephants, are thought by some to have evolved similar capacities. Whales may be among these species. Some places—Spain, for example—are discussing changing the law to recognise this distinction in apes. But on whales, there are no data.

In the absence of data, the commission should stick to its brief. But here is a suggestion: put the whole thing on a proper economic basis. The Japanese fleet is heavily subsidised. Without government cash, there would be less enthusiasm to hunt a creature ever fewer Japanese want to eat. Sadly the commission has no remit over that; but, if it does vote to resume commercial whaling (as it has the right to do), it should not create a system of quotas allocated by country. Instead, it should put whale-hunting rights up for auction, allowing both killers and conservationists to bid. The chances are that those who prefer whales to swim free would be able to outbid the few remaining humans who like eating them.

Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

On June 15th 2006, BBC.com wrote this article on the creation of the largest marine sanctuary in the world!

US President George W Bush has designated a swathe of Hawaiian islands as a US national monument, making them the world's largest marine sanctuary.

He signed a law on Thursday which will give the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands the highest protected status in US law.

The area, nearly as big as California, supports more than 7,000 species, a quarter of which occur nowhere else.

Environmental groups welcomed the decision, although fishing industry bodies have raised concerns.

The designated site - more than 140,000 square miles (362,000 square kilometres) of reefs, atolls and shallow seas - is just larger than the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia, previously the world's largest protected marine area.

The remote and uninhabited islands and surrounding seas are important breeding grounds for sea turtles, and are home to the only remaining population of the endangered Hawaiian monk seal.

The new restrictions will mean all fishing is phased out within five years and visitors will need permits to snorkel or dive in the area.

The islands were already being considered for designation as a national marine sanctuary.

But Mr Bush has used his powers under the 1906 National Antiquities Act, which allows the president to give instant protection to important sites, in a decision which will bypass a year-long process of consultation and afford a greater level of protection.

"This is really for the first time saying the primary purpose of this area of the ocean is to be a pristine, or nearly pristine, kind of place," David Festa, director the ocean programme at Environmental Defense, told the New York Times.

"It would take it off the books as a fishing ground. That's really the first time we'll have done that in any kind of sizeable area," he said.

In an interview with the Washington Post, local Democrat representative Ed Case lauded the president for undertaking "the most revolutionary act by any president, any administration, in terms of marine resources".

Although only eight fishing boats are licensed to fish in the area, a local fisheries body says it plans to fight a complete ban on fishing.

"We supported the sanctuary concept but wanted the continuation of our healthy bottom fisheries up there," Kittie Simonds of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, told the New York Times.

According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, lobster populations in the area have not recovered from aggressive exploitation in the 1980s and 1990s, although this is now banned.

Recent research also shows signs of over fishing in the islands' remaining fisheries, the organisation says.

Although environmental groups welcomed the news, many remain strongly opposed to other Republican policies on the environment, including a push to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas exploration.

The Green Wall of Mexico

On June 6th 2006, Mark Stevenson wrote this article on how "Mexico's 'Green Wall' Preserves, Protect the Rio Grande". Environmental News Network posted the article via the Associated Press.

Mexico is creating an environmental reserve about 30 feet wide and 600 miles long on the Texas border, a "green wall" to protect the Rio Grande from the roads and staging areas that smugglers use to ferry drugs and migrants across the frontier.

Much of this border zone is remote and inhospitable -- generally too rough to hike through unless you're a black bear or a pronghorn sheep, species that have flourished in the area's deserts and mountains.

And that's the way Mexico wants to keep it.

While the proposed Rio Bravo del Norte Natural Monument is only about 30 feet wide, it will connect two large protected areas south of the river. When a third nature reserve, known as Ocampo, is created this year, the protected areas in Mexico will form a "wall" of millions of acres of wilderness, matching Texas' Big Bend parks foot-by-foot along the border.

"This stretch of border is the safest one we have. It's safe because it has wilderness on both sides," said Carlos Manterrola, who heads the environmental group Unidos Para la Conservacion.