• Corey’s got a couple of interesting posts, one on a paper about conservation prioritization based on ecosystem services, and another about succesful conservation in Indonesia (via a TED talk by Willie Smits).
• Salazar has released maps of potential BLM lands fast-tracked for solar energy development.
• 9th Circuit strikes down Bush administration rules relaxing wildlife protections.
• Revkin asks, in a well-linked article, can roads and rain forests coexist? Sure. In the same way that prison inmates coexist.
• Ganges River Dolphins not doing so hot.
• A run down of Sen. Jon Tester’s (D- MT) new wilderness bill.
• Nature-based tourism is both increasing and decreasing, says Balmford.
• How a municipal strike in Windsor, OT changed peoples’ minds about “overgrown” grass.

• The new president of Madagascar has scrapped that sweet land deal given to Daewoo last year (99-year lease, no rent though with infrastructure paid for by the company). Meanwhile, a bunch of parks appear to be “under attack” (or, heavily logged) during this period of unrest. Obviously, Consblog’s thoughts are with both the people and biodiversity of Madagascar.
• Four new species (a mouse, a plant and two beetles) have been described in Peru.
• Check out this awesome piece of propaganda from the Soviet past: planting trees with communist slogans! “Yet, by using trees which would take decades to mature in order to write messages that could only be read from the sky, the foresters who planted these messages were clearly thinking of a glorious jet- and space-age future, when their comrades would read their messages from Intourist space station hotels…Instead, we read these slogans thanks to a capitalist internet company based in California. The medium has outlived the messages.”
• This is an excellent article from the NY Times on the trade-offs between environmentalists who want to install solar panels in the desert and environmentalists who want to preserve the “wilderness.” There is an obvious solution: more nuclear!

• “NIMBY? Really? That’s all that means? Why is that bad? Loving your backyard sounds like a good thing to me. I think this would be a much better world if everybody loved their back yard. My back yard has a lot of open space and wetlands. It supports a diversity of plant and animal species. This is my backyard.” A personal consideration of what we would/will give up in promoting solar and wind in “barren” areas of the U.S.
• A piece from the L.A. Times on Tim DeChristopher (now on Facebook), the young man who bid on all those public lands up for auction in Utah without any money to pay for them. Kind of a brilliant act of civil disobedience — the BLM will have to re-offer a lot of the parcels at a new auction, under a new president. In other words, they may not go back up for sale. Also amazing to see some of the quotes from gas companies about how they paid way more than what the parcels were worth. ORLY? Why’d you pay for them, then? The public leasing system is so fucked, but it’s not exactly top 10 priorities these days. Well, fear not. Those lands that were succfesully leased at DeChristopher’s auction have been temporarily blocked.
• D.R.C. is set to block 60% of its logging operations.

Five physics lessons for Obama. Including: “If the [nuclear] waste is stored underground in such a way that there’s only a 10 percent chance that 10 percent of it will leak—which should be more than doable—the risk will be no worse than if we had never mined the uranium in the first place.”

Or how about: “What about high-quality batteries—the kind used in cellphones and laptops? These batteries contain only 1 percent of the energy of their equal weight in gasoline. You can recharge them cheaply, but current batteries typically die after 1,000 charges. If you include the cost of replacement, then they are far more expensive to use than gasoline, though a bit less harmful to our atmosphere.”

Worth a quick read.