In early April, a young grizzly bear swam through the chilly waters off the western coast of Canada in search of food.
He came ashore on Hanson Island, one of more than 200 rocky outcrops in British Columbia’s Broughton archipelago, and quickly started eating garbage from a cabin.
It was a dangerous move: bears that get too comfortable eating food waste and start to lose their fear of humans are quickly shot.
But this bear’s death was averted through an unlikely partnership between local Indigenous groups and conservation officers, raising hopes of a more holistic approach to wildlife management with greater Indigenous input.
I guess we should call that progress. Though perhaps we should think a bit more about the garbage.
…could result in a 5% global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. That would be the largest fossil fuel reduction on record. Pretty amazing.
Unfortunately, the annual reduction required to meet the 1.5 degree C Paris Climate Accord target is 7.6%.
That even putting the global economy in a virtual coma is not enough to meet the Paris targets is mindblowing. And makes you realize that instead of waking the old carbon economy from this coma once the pandemic passes, this is the time to awaken a new non-carbon economy. We are already borrowing trillions at near-zero interest to cushion the economic blow to workers. Why not borrow a few trillion more to make the rapid transition away from the carbon economy, giving life to a new economy based on renewable energy?
This is the opportunity for revolutionary change. If it passes, the revolution will never come in time.
If you don’t believe me, believe climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who explains it all in crystal clear fashion.
As the economic slow-down due to the coronavirus pandemic shutters industry, air pollution and carbon emissions are dropping. A lot of people have asked what this means for carbon emissions and climate change. Here is a short explainer. (thread)
Continuing to archive documents and reports related to the tragic death of trainer Alexis Martinez at Loro Parque in December, 2009, this upload includes (in Spanish): Preliminary Pathology; Police Interviews; Hospital Summaries; Autopsy Report; Excerpts From Alexis’ Diary Of Work At Loro Parque; Timeline Summary of Loro Parque video of incident; Labor Dept. Investigation.
Much of the world is locked down and turning to cycling. An excellent reminder that it is a superior (carbon-free) mode of transport. And that smart planning would mean making it safer and more accessible everywhere.
In December 2009, killer whale trainer Alexis Martinez was killed at Loro Parque in the Canary Islands by Keto, an orca that had been transferred there by SeaWorld. At the time, Martinez’s tragic death got little attention. But when SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau was killed just over two months later at Sea World in Orlando, Martinez’s death became the warning that no one listened to.
I wrote a story investigating how and why Martinez was killed, how it was handled, and why it was relevant to Brancheau’s subsequent death. In the course of my reporting, I collected a lot of documentation. As part of my ongoing effort to post documents and materials collected during my reporting on killer whale captivity to a publicly accessible Blackfish Archives, I am posting Keto’s SeaWorld profile as the initial document which helps tell the story of Keto and Alexis Martinez (at the time my story was published I also posted a detailed and troubling review of the many problems at Loro Parque written by Suzanne Allee, who worked at Loro Parque). .
The farmers and ranchers who supply the nation with hamburgers, pork chops, T-bone steaks and chicken fingers now confront several crises at once: Large processing plants are shutting down as workers fall ill, many producers were already strained by the trade war with China, and the sudden rise of plant-based “fake” meat alternatives had been starting to capture Americans’ imaginations.
On top of that, the meat business had been attracting growing scrutiny for its climate change consequences in recent years, with scientists and environmentalists urging Americans to eat less meat, particularly beef.
So bad for the climate and bad for workers. Like coal, it also bad for global health (pandemic potential). Though meat is distinctive in one category: the incalculable suffering it inflicts on billions of animals every year.
Elephants with tusks are being decimated by ivory poachers. Elephants with “super-tusks” which reach the ground are the poacher Holy Grail. Film-maker Goh Iromoto tells the story of how the Tsavo Trust tries to protect them.
“This action, which is a gift to the coal industry at the expense of all Americans, is an attack on public health justified by a phony cost-benefit analysis that purposely inflates the cost of MATS and ignores the value of the human health benefits,” Ellen Kurlansky, a former air policy analyst at the EPA who helped to develop the MATS rule, told Reuters.
“Ugh, Another fu*cking Instagrammer. Can I get on with my life now?”
This is a very thoughtful analysis of both the good that responsible wildlife photographers can do, and the negative impacts on wildlife that irresponsible photographers can have:
When the details of Ramsey’s daring encounter came to light, scientists were quick to raise these issues.
Take, for example, Instagram influencer and shark conservation advocate Ocean Ramsey. In January 2019, Ramsey made international headlines after publishing photos of herself getting up close and personal with a six-meter great white shark that experts suspect was pregnant.
Ramsey and her husband, Juan Oliphant, owners of the Hawai‘i-based dive charter company One Ocean Diving, were freediving off the coast of O‘ahu when a massive great white shark approached their boat. The shark had come to feed on a whale carcass floating nearby. As the barrel-bodied creature approached the carcass, Ramsey dove down and ran her hand along its back. When the shark moved out of reach, Ramsey swam after it and stroked it a second time. As the encounter unfolded, Oliphant and three other freedivers moved in to capture photos and videos…[snip]
…According to Domeier, the shark Ramsey touched appeared pregnant and by forcing it to interact with her, she risked scaring it away from the whale carcass.
“A pregnant female white shark spends almost 18 months in the open ocean where prey is few and far between, so you don’t want to risk scaring one away from a meal that it needs to take care of the 500 or 600 pounds [225 or 275 kilograms] of babies it’s carrying,” says Domeier.
It is hard not to feel that humans–photographers, tourists, developers, hunters, researchers, it’s a long list–are relentlessly and increasingly intruding on the lives of wild animals. We definitely need many more, and much stricter, protected zones in both the ocean and on land. But what we really need, more than anything, is a different guiding ethic, in which our own needs and desires are no longer the only needs and desires considered, or dominant.
Call it Globalism 2.0, and if climate change hadn’t already made clear that humanity needs to start acting more like a family than a chaotic (and violent) gaggle of competing clans, then the prospect of future pandemics certainly does:
But that doesn’t have to be. Pandemics are preventable, and the world can do three things to prevent them.
A pandemic, because it affects individuals much more directly than climate change, may be just the sort of wake-up humanity needs to start transcending nationalism and competitive capitalism and start finding our way towards an era of global cooperation and common purpose. Emphasis on “may be”…
The Earthist Chronicles 