• Sorry I missed it on the 12th, but Revkin wrote an elegant piece on Darwin and conservation.
• Shifting baselines are a real problem.
• The stimulus bill has lots of money for protected areas.
• Erik Meijaard writes about what it’s like being a conservationist for TNC in Indonesia: “much of our time is spent in offices and meeting rooms.” One sentence in particular stands out: “…nature conservation has little to do with nature, but a lot to do with people.”
• At least 235 species occur at both the north and south poles.
• The editor of Conservation Letters looks back on its first year (and a succesful year it’s been!).

Watch as Alaska’s coastline gets gobbled up in 2 hour chunks [from Revkin]:

• TNC, WCS and WWF have signed an agreement to collaborate on preserving the world’s largest in tact grassland — Mongolia’s Eastern Steppe. Although I’ve never been there, I have a great affection for this place. One of the many threats facing the grassland is the (legal!) exportation of Saker falcons to Middle Eastern sheikhs for falconing (falknering?). Welcome to the weird world of globalism.
• Chris Darimont and collaborators at UBC have discovered the wolves in western Canada prefer salmon to deer when it’s in season.
• Here’s a roundup of current news in the endangered species world from Plenty Magazine’s Extinction Blog. Did you know bottlenose dolphins near the British Isles kill other dolphins and porpoises in competition for food?
• Revkin pushes back against the news that the Arctic is now an island.