• Argentina, Paraguay join Brazil in pledging to preserve the Atlantic Forest (the “most endangered” tropical forest, down from an estimated 500,000 sq. kms to about 35,000 sq. kms. today).
• Columbia University will not be accepting applications for its 2 year program in environmental journalism, due to falling employment in the field, rising costs of education and lack of financial aid for students.
• This one’s being picked up all over the place: forests in the NW might increase in the next century due to climate change. Although the net effects will be positive (in a value neutral sort of way), there will be a decline in growth at lower elevations, and an increase in growth at higher elevations (= more difficult to log). At, least, that’s what the model says.
• This is kind of awesome. Communities in the Andes are using large nets to collect fog drip to use for irrigation. Although it only rains about 1.5 inches / year in the area, it’s foggy for almost 9 months.

After a dreadful PR year for both privatization and government intervention, perhaps we should have expected a renewed enthusiasm for the commons. And that’s just what we got yesterday morning, straight out of Oslo. It’s too bad that University of Indiana political science Professor Elinor Ostrom had to win both the first Nobel Prize in Economics ever awarded to a woman as well as the first pendant the committee handed out after sullying its credibility by awarding President Obama the Peace Prize before he even pardons his first turkey. But no matter! If we can spin Obama’s win as a “call to action,” why not do the same with Ostrom’s? Pessimism (fatalism) aside, I’m all for the twenty-teens being the decade of disappearing nuclear warheads and retreating neoliberal resource management.

Let’s hear from the Laureate herself!

An excerpt form the introduction to her 1990 book, (more…)

Interesting ecosystem service.

Here’s a good one: WWF is claiming that deforestation is behind increased levels of tiger attacks on Sumatra. So then, by the clear logic of ecosystem services, this is a great reason to keep the forest in tact. You approach the government, show them a chart based on the health care costs associated with all the tiger attacks, and blam – a monetary value on the forest. The Minister of Environment then gives you a funny look, picks up the phone, and instructs the local forest manager to (1) go ahead with the oil palm plantation, but (2) make sure any tigers remaining in the area are killed first. Oooooops.

• Chris Bodle has a public art project called Watermarks, projecting onto buildings throughout Bristol the projected high-tide level should Greenland melt.
• Two of the more heavy-handed conservation techniques are transplantation and cloning. Looks like the former is promising (though still expensive), but Corey really doesn’t like the latter (“I’m appalled that this continues to be taken seriously!”). Setting aside the problems laid out (cost, inefficiency, low likelihood of success, etc.), I love the idea of cloning something like a T-Rex or a woolly mammoth. But is it so much of a stretch, then, to argue for the re-introduction of the passenger pigeon or the Carolina parakeet? It’s true it might not (okay, probably won’t) work, at least not yet. But I can imagine a technology that would be able to increase genetic diversity of cloned individuals. And, most importantly, I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game: money that would go to bringing back the mammoth will not necessarily be put to, say, protection of land. One major drawback to the potential for cloning is that it relieves the burden of extinction. What happens when extinction is no longer forever? I don’t think that captive breeding / cloning / transportation is a great solution to the biodiversity crisis, but I do think it’s an exciting technology for bringing back charismatic species we’ve already lost.
• Who says fortress conservation is dead? They’re putting up a fence in Hawaii.
• Chu says that California might lose all of its agriculture AND ITS CITIES due to climate change by the end of the century. Now that’s the kind of hyperbole that we need.
• There’s a special issue of FREE on ecosystem services (funded partially by TNC). Here’s a brief run down in Science Daily.
• There was a great article published last week in Science by Ana Carnaval et al. on modeling biodiversity hot spots. One of those classic “I wanted to do that!” ideas. (doi: 10.1126/science.1166955). It’s part of a special issue on Darwin and biodiversity that deserves more attention than just a bullet point. Fortunately, GEF blog is on the case!
• Louis Ducos du Hauron created the first color photograph; Ulysses S. Grant defeated a soon-to-be-deceased Horace Greeley; Brigham Young was arrested for polygamy. And, in a remote corner of the Wyoming Territory, the world’s first National Park was born. That’s right, PBS nuts, cue up Ashokan Farewell — Ken Burns is directing a 6 part documentary on National Parks (“The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” is the official title, though I hear the working title appended “… or BESTEST idea, amirite???”) (Fine Ken Burns skewering available here.)
• Newsflash: protected areas not so protected.
• The Pentagon is buying land credits by paying landowners around military lands to conserve endangered species, which allows them to continue training on their own lands and bombing the crap out of cute things. This is explicitly being done around Ft Hood with the golden-cheeked warbler, but probably elsewhere, too. Honestly, I don’t think I have any problem with this (as long as it works).

• Great roundup from ESABlawg on changes coming in environmental policy, including these amazing articles from the Oregonian and Seattle P.I. that the Bush administration’s shoddy governance has actually resulted in the timber industry and environmentalists to join forces against proposed rule changes. (“But the timber folks can see going in that, given what the Bush administration has done, the enviros would just waltz into court themselves and slap down the plan revisions the industry has worked so hard to procure.”) Delicious.
• South Africa is putting the finishing touches on the world’s first protected area specifically designed to mitigate impacts from climate change.
• Countries are kicking around the idea of creating a UN panel to address global biodiversity loss, in the mold of the IPCC. The way this article is written, it appears that the ecosystem services argument is convincing a lot of governments — hard to say if that’s just the perspective of the author or not. You know, this obviously deserves a much deeper dialogue, but if money is what ends up convincing the world’s governing bodies to engage with the current biodiversity CRISIS, maybe it really is worth it. It is slowly dawning on me how subtle arguments in favor of protecting biodiversity/natural habitat can be. You have to play to a person’s core values, and money has just never resonated with me the way it obviously does for so many people. If framing the debate in terms of financial opportunity raises the profile of conservation, so be it? Seems to be working for climate change. Of course, like most global capital enterprises, when climate change becomes a financial argument (as opposed to a moral one), it’s usually the poorest nations that suffer the negative consequences.
• The Big Picture strikes again, this time from Antarctica. BTW, Big Picture has a great feature that lets you navigate to each picture using the j/k keys to go forward and back. [enjoy your trip, Dad]

• A new species of bird has been discovered in Gabon.
• Toyota has joined the UNEP-based Climate Change neural network.
• More on the economizing of nature: a piece on Gretchen Daily’s work and an interview with Andrew Mitchell, founder of the Global Canopy Program.
• and more from the ESA Blawg on the proposed rule changes to the Endangered Species Act that have now officially been released.