Is this thing on?

Posted by Tim on December 16th, 2010 • • 2 comments

Friday Insantity 2.35

This one’s for all of us who never thought we’d live long enough to one day hear Oprah Winfrey describe a kimono dragon hunting a water buffalo.

Posted by Brian on October 1st, 2010 • • Add a comment

Start Spreading the News

This year's Central Park coyote, caught in TriBeCa March 25, 2010

from New York Magazine :

Nature is prospering in New York. Yes, the otters, minks, bears, and mountain lions have long since disappeared. But nature as a whole—the ecosystem that is the harbor—never went away. In fact—and this may seem implausible—nature is in many ways more plentiful in New York City than it is in the surrounding suburbs and rural counties. New York is again a capital of nature; we are an ecological hot spot.

[Edit: and a Brashares lab member, Laura Prugh, interviewed by the Science Times about Coyotes today. /TB]

Posted by Brian on September 25th, 2010 • • Add a comment

A Dose of Leopold

I like all my metaphors for bureaucracy to be in the language of game hunting.

Aldo Leopold with dog

I had a bird dog named Gus. When Gus couldn’t find pheasants he worked up an enthusiasm for Sora rails and meadowlarks. This whipped-up zeal for unsatisfactory substitutes masked his failure to find the real thing. It assuaged his inner frustration.
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We conservationists are like that. We set out a generation ago to convince the American landowner to control fire, to grow forests, to manage wildlife. He did not respond very well. We have virtually no forestry, and mighty little range management, game management, wildflower management, pollution control, or erosion control being practiced voluntarily by private landowners. In many instances the abuse of private land is worse than it was before we started. If you don’t believe that, watch the strawstacks burn on the Canadian prairies; watch the fertile mud flowing down the Rio Grande; watch the gullies climb the hillsides in the Palouse, in the Ozarks, in the riverbreaks of southern Iowa and western Wisconsin.
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To assuage our inner frustration over this failure, we have found us a meadowlark. I don’t know which dog first caught the scent; I do know that every dog on the field whipped into an enthusiastic backingpoint. I did myself. The meadowlark was the idea that if the private landowner won’t practice conservation, let’s build a bureau to do it for him.
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Like the meadowlark, this substitute has its good points. It smells like success. It is satisfactory on poor land which bureaus can buy. The trouble is that it contains no device for preventing good private land from becoming poor public land. There is danger in the assuagement of honest frustration; it helps us forget we have not yet found a pheasant.
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I’m afraid the meadowlark is not going to remind us. He is flattered by his sudden importance.
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Aldo Leopold, “The Round River”
Posted by Brian on September 20th, 2010 • • 1 comment

Seriously?

No naming names, but I just read a paper that used Wikipedia as a reference.

Posted by Tim on September 20th, 2010 • • 1 comment

Wrong in a good way

The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2000) predicted that the carbon market, then worth about $300 million annually, would be worth approximately $10 – $44 billion in 2010. By 2008, it was worth $126 billion.

Posted by Tim on September 17th, 2010 • • Add a comment

A Question for You

In the mid- to late-90s, there were a slew of papers (e.g. Costanza et al. 1997; Pimentel et al. 1997) estimating the economic value of global biodiversity. Estimates ranged from about $16 to $54 trillion. At that time, world GDP was about $30 trillion. So, a question: has human economic output finally exceeded natural economic production? When? Did anyone even notice that it happened?

p.s. A mountain lion was shot and killed near Chez Panisse earlier this week [thanks Clare].

Posted by Tim on September 2nd, 2010 • • Add a comment

Gone fishin’

In case you hadn’t noticed, consblog has been on hiatus due to field work outside of the deathly grip of the internet. See you in the fall.

Posted by Tim on August 6th, 2010 • • Add a comment

More photographs

Some beautiful photographs of endangered species of the United States.

Posted by Tim on June 1st, 2010 • • Add a comment

Real Talk

Wow, some fantastic, earnest conversation about the current state of conservation going on at the GECP (live here), it will also be archived for later viewing if you missed it. Paraphrase: we need to stop worrying about individual species going extinct; nature is more resilient than we are; etc. Lively debate. “The intrinsic argument for conservation doesn’t work.” Biodiversity is a subdiscipline in the long history of conservation.

Edit: the video is, indeed, now archived for viewing here. Definitely worth watching!

Posted by Tim on May 17th, 2010 • • Add a comment