• Remember how David Hayes might’ve once could’ve been Interior Secretary? He’s going to be Deputy Interior Secretary instead.
• Native plants in your backyard really do increase native diversity of wildlife.
• $93 million has been spent conserving the Mojave desert tortoise. Meanwhile, the Barneby reed-mustard (of the Utah Reed-Mustards) received $6. I know we’ve put a value on a human life. Has anybody estimated the value of a species? Whatever it was, it was too high for the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, which is now genetically extinct.
• It’s fun pretending to read this interview with David Attenborough in his voice. To wit: “I can find you a new species without any problem at all. Take you to the rainforest and spend three or four days just scooping up insects. The difficulty is not finding the species, it’s finding the one man who specialises in thrips or whatever, who can tell you that it’s a different thing. Taxonomy is unfashionable.”
• “Mythical glorification of trees first reached its zenith in the songs, prose and paintings of the Romantic period. The Nazis were likewise obsessed with the concept of the forest.” Uh, Brian? Little help?
• Foreigners appear to be driving demand for snow leopard pelts in Afghanistan.
• From Minnesota Birdnerd, here is a picture of a real live bilateral gynandromorph cardinal: half-male, half-female, down the center:

Some immediate thinking on the effect of an Obama administration on the environment. Rumors that he’ll nominate Robert Kennedy for EPA are welcome news.

• UK Guardian: “Obama victory signals rebirth of US environmental policy.”
• New Scientist: “Obama promises new era of of scientific innovation.” [Here's hoping the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship budget triples by this March. Deadline's tomorrow...]
• Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “optimistic” about Obama win.
• Andrew Revkin and his readers offer their thoughts on how Obama should approach the environment.

Here’s how I view it. For any politician (/human being), there are always going to be a handful of issues that drive them. That core set of issues will inform their other positions, but it’s the things that moved them to become a leader in the first place that will drive their policies. I think the Clinton/Gore administration displayed this very well: Gore is the prototypical environmental “evangelical,” whereas Clinton was merely pragmatic about it. In some ways, I think the same could be said about the Bush administration. I don’t think Bush really cares one way or the other about the natural world, but Cheney seems to actually revel in sticking it to the dirty hippies. Kerry and his wife also seemed, to me, as people who not only cared about the environment but in fact drew energy from it.

So, when you think of Obama, do you see “environment” as one of those core issues that drives him? I think about things like poverty and education. He has spoken very well and reassuringly on how our dependence on oil effects us in all sorts of unhelpful ways (see below re: food policy). But he’s also been clear that he will be willing to compromise to get things done. In essence, I expect that he will be less willing to budge on the issues that really matter to him, while compromising on the peripheral issues in order to get something legislated. The tell came this summer when he admitted that, if it were necessary to get real, good, energy reform, we might need to compromise and allow off-shore drilling. I wouldn’t be surprised if ANWR were on the table, too.

My Hope is this. Obama appears to be the sort of person who takes great effort to learn about issues he doesn’t know about. In that regard, I expect he will be pragmatic, but open-minded, on environmental policy. The real key will be the environmental leaders in his cabinet. They will be the ones crafting policy and informing Obama’s understanding. So let’s wait to see whom he nominates. If we get Gore for Climate Czar, Change will have come. Especially if they decided to leave that inane imperialistic title to out of it. Any thoughts on EPA & Interior? Share ‘em in the comments.

• The (invasive) Frankenfish will not be listed as an endangered species. A group of westerners, opposed to the ESA, applied for the listing to show easterners the kind of damage a listing can have: protecting the northern snakehead fish would’ve covered all of the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding watersheds. I’m guessing the judge wasn’t amused.
• WWF has found at least 9 polar bears swimming in open ocean. Despite resistance from global warming “skeptics” that Arctic sea ice was actually growing this year (oh really? Up from its smallest extent ever?), it looks like the extent of ice this year will be as bad or worse than last year’s. Professor Richard Steiner: “While these bears are swimming around in an ice-free coastal Arctic Ocean, the only thing the State of Alaska is doing is suing the federal government trying to overturn the listing of polar bears.”
• Poachers in Virunga National Park in the DRC have killed 1/5 of elephants for ivory to export to China this year.
• In other news, Barack Obama has called the folks on his short list who will not receive the nomination. News organizations have failed to discover whom he’s called, but no doubt the FBI, the CIA, the White House, Department of Justice, Joe Lieberman, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and everybody else now not covered under the non-existent FISA act is selling furiously on InTrade.

The Swedes are getting uppity. There’s a new letter in Conservation Biology that exposes the Convention on Biological Diversity as too heavily influenced by government bureaucrats while simultaneously not enough informed by scientists. I believe this was a True/False question on my undergrad conservation biology class final exam (as in “Government bureaucrats have too much influence on conservation policy: T/F”), but it’s nice when people are willing to speak out about it. The French are trying to create a new panel [last paragraph], modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a replacement for the CBD.