• Help conserve the boreal forest in Canada; sign a letter of support for sustainable land-use planning. Scientists only.
• The Pakistan Supreme Court shut down a potential tourist development in a sensitive area of forest in the Punjab. It sounds like (at least from the WWF press release) they were particularly responsive to the argument that the forest was providing an important ecosystem service that guaranteed better water quality. Ecosystem services for the win?
• A quick review of what’s happening in the Endangered Species Office at USFWS. The good news: they’re actually reviewing petitions for listing, something Bush pretty much never did.
• A long essay on the problems with strict protected areas (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4). It’s well-written and nuanced, but as with most critiques of protected areas approach to conservation, it fails to value the importance that some people have for “human-less” landscapes. That is, the inability to distinguish between Manhattan and Yellowstone. They both have humans in them, after all, right? Nevertheless, it does highlight the problems of a PA approach for conservation, which tends to be lacking when criticizing it from a sociological / historical philosophy.
• And yet, here’s an interview with E.O. Wilson: “It sounds immodest but I call it Wilson’s law. It says that if you save the living environment, you will automatically save the physical environment. But if you only try to save the physical environment, you will lose them both…when we talk about the world going green, the media and the public think of pollution or fresh-water shortage. They understand, and want to do something. But that is the physical world; concern for the living environment has been slow to take off.”
• Good article on assisted migration, though it could’ve been better with a recognition that species might be considered, biogoegraphically, more or less native to a continent. Migrating them to the next mountain top is really different from moving them across an ocean.

• WCS launches the Mannahatta Project website, to be accompanied by awesome book and museum exhibit, eventually city-wide conquest.
• Coral reef in Australia makes a spectacular comeback in just a few years after bleaching incident. Meanwhile, “Super Reef” off of Tanzania makes a spectacular comeback after bleaching events in 1998. What a spectacular coincidence.
• Interesting article on the Great Himalayan National Park, and its effects on locals.
• Little behind, but Obama did repeal those ESA rules, but did not change the ruling on the Polar Bear.
• Europe’s not going to meet its 2010 Biodiversity goals. Sad trombone.
• Somebody got a photo of a jaguar in Barro Colorado.
• The wolverine spotted in the Sierras appears to be from Idaho, probably.

• Papua New Guinea is getting its first national conservation area.
• WCS is getting some money from the World Bank and GEF to protect tigers. Weird, since pretty much the entire WCS tiger team moved to Panthera a couple years ago..
• Patagonia employee gets paid time off to bike over 2,000 miles to promote Yukon2Yellowstone project. Blogs about it, with pictures.
• Andy Revkin finally pushes back against George Will. I have to say, the fact that this is such a big deal — that a major columnist is trying to deny climate change — is actually pretty encouraging. I think in years past, Will just would’ve gotten away with it.
• Dave Connell, associate director of marketing at TNC, wants you to know how important marketing is to conservation.
• Obama’s restoring the old ESA rules.

• DotEarth on “Macromyopia” in the global environment: a lot of people saw the current financial meltdown coming, but nobody did anything to stop it. Will the same be true for the coming ecopocalypse??
• The Western Ghats are losing their endemic diversity.
• “If you’ve been on a Cape Cod beach this winter, you may have encountered an extraordinary animal comeback: Seals.” Wait, Seals? You mean that couple-years-old hipster obsession with Yacht rock and, in particular, Jim Seals of Seals and Crofts? That comeback? … oh, seals. Uncapitalized. Sorry. Cool, I wish I’d been on the Cape this winter.
• FWS has revised its lynx ruling, expanding its critical habitat from the original 1,841 square miles (…that had already been designated) to 39,000. Now that’s science! Thanks, Julie Macdonald. What is the German word for something being more satisfying having gone through a stupid process before being done correctly?
• TNC is taking a trip to Palmyra atoll, part of the new Marine Reserve designated by Bush. Follow along here.
• This kind of conservation story warms my heart: “Rare bird coud save nudist beach.”
• This fish with the translucent head looks like it was painted by Christian Reese Lassen (“The world’s greatest living marine fantasy painter of his generation” /Trapper Keeper) after eating too much seafood.

• 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.

• Salazar is canceling all those last-minute oil and gas leases in Utah.
• A thoughtful piece on the status of the Endangered Species Act, by Verlyn Klinkenborg in Nat Geo.
• Fascinating article in Seed on using ecological principles to re-think or economic ideology. Please read it thoroughly. Perhaps my favorite line comes from Alan Greenspan: “Everyone has [an ideology] … to exist, you need an ideology.”
• Ecosystem services: still sexy.
• A mysterious disease known as “White Nose Syndrome” is wiping out bat populations in the northeast. One potential problem may be amatuer cavers (aka spelunkers) spreading the disease. If you want a truly bracing look into the misunderstandings of conservation, look no further than this conversation taking place at Metafilter, a supposedly well-educated and well-informed group blog site (e.g. “Such a weird form of conceit…. Bats are dying, clearly we humans are killing them. Only humanity is capable of killing animals.”)
• At least the Santa Catalina Island foxes are doing well — up from 103 to 784 in just 8 years. I love this: “‘In 2007, we had an extreme drought with less than 3 inches of rain,’ she said. ‘As a result, mule deer were dying in great numbers, and the foxes were able to scavenge off the carcasses. By the time breeding season arrived in 2008, we literally had obese foxes, and females in such good condition that they were having larger-than-normal litters.’ … In addition, 2008 was ‘a good rain year, so the rodent population exploded,’ she said. ‘The mice were convenient to-go packages of protein for females to retrieve and feed to their pups.’” Tails foxes win, heads their prey loses. Now that’s stability.

Let’s get everyone back up to speed. Here’s part 1, through December 15.

• Bush did, indeed, change some rules in the ESA, but it’s probably not as bad as it could’ve been.
• It’s time to re-read the Lorax.
• Otters are moving back into towns and cities in England.
• Snow geese eggs may become a larger part of polar bears’ diet. Do you smell a Red List upgrade (downgrade)?
• Remember the Laotian rock rat that was discovered in a market in Laos? WWF has released a report (PDF) on its findings in the Mekong, with more than 1,000 new species described.
• An Inspector General report of the Bush-era Interior Department was released. It’s not pretty.

• A coalition of 29 environmental groups have released a 391-page policy document for the incoming administration, focusing on green jobs and clean energy and highlighting the need for science-based policy and transparency, but covering a wide range of topics. You can read it here (pdf). NRDC, one of the co-signers of the document, has some of their folks blogging about various aspects of the proposals.
• FWS has decided that the Northern Mexican Garter Snake should be listed as endangered, but it doesn’t have the funds to do so. Plenty and ESA Blawg consider that fact.
• In honor of Thanksgiving, the NY Times offers a charming editorial on wild foods. “We have a great deal to learn from Twain’s instinctive premise: that losing a wild food means losing part of the landscape of our lives.”
• The Vigorous North, one of my new favorites, shares some links on inner-city wilderness areas, including a proposal to turn Fresh Kills from a dump into a preserve. (Preserve of nature, not trash. Well, the trash is still there. &c.)
• An update on what the American Bison Society’s been up to, including a public survey that shows that Americans care about bison but don’t realize that there are only a few thousand “pure” bison left in the wild.

• ESA Blawg goes deep on how the Bush administration is handling re-writing the rules on ESA. “Bottom line: It remains to be seen whether President Bush and Secretary Kempthorne choose to spend their final days, and reputation, pushing through a set of doomed Endangered Species Act regulations that are opposed by the people, and probably the Courts and Congress as well.”
• Let me just say that $10 million is a perfectly acceptable price for a woolly mammoth, and that, frankly, the NY Times’ editorial board is just engaging in that time-honored tradition of lily-livered liberal hand-wringing by even considering it a bad idea. Talk about a bail-out for biodiversity! Let’s see… $700 billion for the Trouble Species Recovery Program, $10 million / extinct species… that’s 70,000 organisms brought back to life! The passenger pigeon, the dodo, the Lord God bird, tiny horses, saber-toothed tigers, neanderthals, the hobbit. Oh, to be king.

The Washington Post reports that Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) is a “leading contender” for Interior Secretary. He’s the chair of the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands. The article points out that Grijalva has a 95% rating from the League of Conservation Voters. He’s also the newly-elected co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Congress. If you really want to get into it, he just released a 23 page report (PDF) on the Bush administration’s failure to protect our public lands. Or you can browse through his legislative record, which is impressive. In particular, he appears to have a dedicated interest in American Indians, who fall under the purview of Interior, and who were consistently ignored and abused under both the Bush and Clinton administrations. Okay, not to mention back to ~1492, but there has been a bi-partisan disinterest in Indian rights, so Grajilva is a potentially re-assuring pick for both them and those interested in parks / endangered species conservation.

He also seems to be getting universal approval from various and sundried bloggers, so… cool. (Lots of positive response / comments at Dos Centavos, Screechowl at Daily Kos, and Ralph Maughan’s Wildlife News)