I just heard the distinct sound of laptop typing coming from a stall in the men’s bathroom. I guess this is now officially a blog about academia.

• This paper’s got legs! Over the past 50 years, more than 80% of the world’s conflicts have taken place in and around the most diverse places, according to a new paper by Thor Hanson et al. in Conservation Biology. Picked up by, among others, Revkin, GEF Blog, SCB Journal Watch, PlanetSave, Scientific blogging, inkbluesky, Reuters, and AFP. It’s a cool study, but the question is if there’s any causation, and in which direction (Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01166.x).
• One day after its minister of environment approved a plan to convert peatlands into oil palm plantations, Hillary Clinton and the UN praise Indonesia for its work on climate change.
• Another new mammal species has been described. It’s the Hamiguitan hairy-tailed rat.
• Thanks in large part to efforts by WCS, Cameroon has a new national park for gorillas.
• The Bushmeat Crisis Task Force is celebrating its 10th year.
  
• More on the line between science and policy from Kent at Uncommon Ground. Meanwhile, James Hansen will be demonstrating against a coal power plant in D.C. Fortunately, if EPA has anything to say about it, the whole thing may be unnecessary.
  

Following up from that story on Detroit’s zoo, here’s a documentary on Detroit’s wildlife:



Detroit Wildlife from florent tillon on Vimeo.

A haunting portrait of Detroit’s abandoned zoo. “Even stranger were the plants growing inside each enclosure, non-native species probably chosen carefully long ago to resemble the flora of wherever the animal was from but not to tempt them into nibbling. Even a simulacrum of wildness, abandoned, will become truly wild given enough time.”

• George Church (director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School) reflects on the benefits and pitfalls of biotechnology in solving environmental problems. Unforgivably, no mention of bringing back the woolly mammoth.
• A deeper article from the NY Times on the Macquarie Island debacle (introduce cats, cats decimate island, remove cats, rabbits decimate island) covered earlier this year.
• Environmental groups want federal government to stop paying for wildlife to be slaughtered to protect livestock. Best reason I’ve ever heard: “the use of helicopters and small planes to fly low enough for contracted sharp shooters to pick off the coyotes has resulted in plane crashes killing 10 and injuring 28 from 1979-2007.” But won’t somebody think of the cattle?!? But seriously, beef is really emissions-heavy. Even local, grass-fed beef. (I need to remind myself every once in a while…)
• I will not even try to conservation-spin this in a “they’re getting rid of corn syrup, that’s great” way. I am just psyched that Pepsi will be selling Pepsi made from cane sugar in the United States again (and not just on Kosher-heavy holidays). “Pepsi throwback.”

• Sorry I missed it on the 12th, but Revkin wrote an elegant piece on Darwin and conservation.
• Shifting baselines are a real problem.
• The stimulus bill has lots of money for protected areas.
• Erik Meijaard writes about what it’s like being a conservationist for TNC in Indonesia: “much of our time is spent in offices and meeting rooms.” One sentence in particular stands out: “…nature conservation has little to do with nature, but a lot to do with people.”
• At least 235 species occur at both the north and south poles.
• The editor of Conservation Letters looks back on its first year (and a succesful year it’s been!).

Agh!

It’s all online.

Wilderness (e.g. % of US that is “wilderness,” 36; % of Africa that is “wilderness,” 30)

Birds (e.g. Chances that college student select as “most desirable” the same face as chickens, 49 in 50)

Mammals (e.g. Reported cases of peopl bitten by rats in New York City in 1985, 311; of people bitten by other people, 1,519)

etc… it gets a bit confused between conservation/conservative and nature/AIDS (?).

From McSweeneys:

Darwin takes advantage of the current interest in natural fashion products. Begins marketing items like organic-cotton neckties and honey-flavored lip gloss. Darwin-sanctioned “stylish feces beads” appear soon after.

• 408 mammal species have been discovered in the past 15 years.
• “Remarkable footage” of arctic unicorns narwhals.
• Hurray for more climate change hysteria (no sarcasm — I think a little scientific hysteria is a good thing): Australian fires are a “wake up call.” Much as we saw after Katrina, some are proposing that climate change be taken into account when re-building. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s environment chief has banned climate change ads for being “insidious propaganda.” Um, okay.
• No, seriously. We need to get more hysterical — a recent study showed that the words used by the IPCC in its recent climate report are understood very differently than they are meant. Although “Very likely” is specifically defined as “more than 90% chance”, more than half of the participants in the study often scored “very likely” as less than 66% certain! And yet Vicky Pope at the Guardian is concerned that scientists are OVERplaying the dangers. Right… that’s how we get environment ministers banning ads about climate change.
• Honestly, I say this about once a month, but Keith Rizzardi’s coverage of the Endangered Species Act is a phenomenal effort and product. Here he goes through a bunch of recent news (homeless man jailed for eating steelhead trout!), and here he posts recent ESA findings. It’s kind of a one-stop place to stay up-to-date on endangered species in the USA.
• I can’t quite explain how excited I am to see CJB posting stuff that didn’t quite find the right place to be published. BLOGSCIENCE!
• Your Lands, Your Wildlife has released a report on “Restoring Balance to the Management of Our Public Lands” (pdf).
• Since it’s all over the wires, I’d be remiss in mentioning this nice study of migrating songbirds. “Tiny backpacks” appears to be the buzz word. (Stutchbury et al., Science, 323:896, doi 10.1126/science.1166664).

I’ll leave you, without comment, Thoreau’s thoughts on the wood thrush song, which really is quite delightful (and claimed among its other fans Edwin Way Teale):

As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. It lifts and exhilerates me. It is inspiring. It is a meidcative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary. How can they be contemporary when only the latter is temporary at all? How can the infinite and eternal be contemporary with the finite and the temporal? So there is something in the music of the cow-bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink. This thrush’s song is a ranze des vaches to me. I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes. A New Hampshire everlasting and unfallen…All that was riped and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece.