Skyrocketing Gun Sales Have Helped Conserve Butterflies→

Christie Aschwanden, reporting for FiveThirtyEight:

TexasEagle / Flickr.com

“The Nature Conservancy has a project in the works near Saratoga, New York, that will preserve an area that’s already home to these lupines and butterflies, and much of the program’s funding comes from the sales of guns and ammunition. For that, Karner conservationists can thank the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act.

Passed by Congress in 1937 and commonly referred to as the Pittman-Robertson Act, it sets an excise tax of 10 to 11 percent on the sale of guns and ammunition, paid by manufacturers at the wholesale level. Prior to the law’s passage, guns and ammunition were already subject to taxes, but the Act ensured that the money was set aside to protect game species and their habitats. The law has helped bring deer and elk back from the brink in areas in the East, but it’s also given refuge to many non-game species, like the Karner blue butterfly. At another project in New York, Pittman-Robertson money is helping to protect 5,000 acres of grouse, turkey and deer habitat, and all the snowy owls and other birds of prey that come with it. Troy Weldy, senior conservation manager at the Nature Conservancy’s New York chapter, said the project “could create a premier birding destination.”

Environmentalists who don’t hunt might not think they have much in common with the guy tromping off into the woods with a gun. Yet hunters and anglers have a long history of land stewardship, said John Gale, national sportsmen campaigns manager at the National Wildlife Federation. At the time the Pittman-Robertson Act was passed, widespread hunting had cleared deer and other big game from large areas along the Eastern Seaboard. Realizing that the sustainability of their pastime was at risk, hunters banded together to urge legislative action. “Hunters are the original conservationists — we’ve been carrying wildlife and fish on our back for a long time,” Gale said.”

Hmm. In the end, hunters are those who saved shards of nature.

A City is an Ecosystem→

Courtney Humphries, reporting for the Boston Globe:

“Cities may strike us as the opposite of “the environment”: As we pave streets and erect buildings, nature comes to feel like the thing you find somewhere else. But scientists working in the growing field of urban ecology argue that we’re missing something. A city’s soil collects pollutants, but it also supports a vast system of microscopic life. Water courses beneath roads and buildings, often in long-buried streams and constructed pipes. And city ecosystems aren’t static; they change over time as populations grow, infrastructure ages, and different political structures and social values shape them.

Seen this way, the city is a distinct form of “environment,” and an important one. Truly understanding how it works—and how it affects the millions of people who may live and work there—will mean studying the whole city as a living system, both its organisms and its pipes, roads, and landfills. As cities grow, maintaining clean air and water in a place like Boston may depend on how well urban areas support trees, plants, and microbes.”

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view. Truly wonderful the ecology of a city is.”

Rewilding: Feral→

Brandom Keim reviews George Monbiot’s Feral, for Conservation Magazine:

“Monbiot’s rewilding encompasses these, but with differences. He emphasizes the richness of ecological interactions, the flow of energy and nutrients across time and form, and also—crucially—the essence of wildness itself. “Rewilding, to me, is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way,” Monbiot writes. “The ecosystems that result are best described not as wilderness, but self-willed.”

Add a few species, pull down the fences, step back: this is not a fussy sort of conservation, then, bearing lists of favored species and blacklists of invasives, struggling to produce a historical snapshot. The past is inspiration, not blueprint. Neither is it a domineering conservation, managing nature to meet our demands. Services might result, but they’re not the point. The ethos is not of human primacy, but a muscular, can-do humility. Things will fix themselves if we let them.”

Looking? Found nature you have, eh? It needs not us.

Waterfront Development→

Gracy Olmstead, reporting for the American Conservative:

Jonas Jensen / Shutterstock

“Changes, even good changes, have consequences. Waterfront projects—be they in wealthy, well-kept communities or in run-down spaces—need a sense of scale and structure in order to foster beneficial growth.

When I wrote about Alexandria’s waterfront project, New Urbanists Peter Katz and Philip Bess both offered a wealth of ideas and tips for excellent, human-scale waterfront development. There were a lot of things we discussed that I simply didn’t have room for in my story—so here are a few “bonus” comments from the two men. They explained five specific ways to help make a waterfront a good New Urbanist space...”

Blind we are, if the benefits of waterfront places we could not see.

Power Line Rights of Way: Opportunities for Cost Savings and Habitat→

Richard Conniff, writing for Yale360 Environment:

dalioPhoto, Flickr

“The open, scrubby habitat under some transmission lines is already the best place to hunt for wild bees, says Sam Droege of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, and that potential habitat will inevitably become more important as the United States becomes more urbanized. He thinks utility rights-of-way — currently adding up in the U.S. to about nine million acres for power transmission lines, and another 12 million for pipelines — could eventually serve as a network of conservation reserves roughly one third the area of the national park system.

Remarkably, some power companies agree. Three utilities — New York Power Authority, Arizona Public Service, and Vermont Electric Power Company — have already completed a certification program from the Right of Way Stewardship Council, a new group established to set standards for right-of-way management, with the aim of encouraging low-growth vegetation and thus, incidentally, promoting native wildlife. Three more utilities, all from Western states, are currently seeking certification.”

Many of our solutions depend on changing our point of view.

Nature Makes Better Students→

Dave Levitan, Conservation This Week:

“It shouldn’t be surprising anymore that green spaces make us happier, healthier, and just generally better, but every time a hard finding on the topic pops up it seems incredible once again. Just being near nature is enough to bump up kids’ grades—though we’ll need more data to back this up, it probably can’t hurt to head out and look at some trees any chance you and your kids can get.”

We must unlearn what we have learned. Nature makes us great, factory schools not.

Human-Assisted Migration→

Greg Breining, writing for Ensia:

iStockphoto.com/jimkruger

“During the last two springs, contract planters for The Nature Conservancy have spread out through the pine, spruce and aspen forest of northeastern Minnesota. Wielding steel hoedads, they have planted almost 110,000 tree seedlings on public land.

What’s noteworthy about planting trees in a forest? Usually foresters plant seedlings grown from seeds harvested nearby, on the assumption that local genotypes are best suited to local conditions. But these TNC workers were planting red and bur oak (which are uncommon in northern Minnesota) from seed sources more than 200 miles to the southwest, and white pine from as far away as the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, 400 miles to the southeast.

TNC is anticipating a day soon — within the lifespan of a tree — when a changing climate may make the forest unsuitable for some tree species and varieties that now live there. Projections for northeastern Minnesota predict warmer and possibly drier conditions — bad news for the boreal species such as white spruce, balsam fir and paper birch that have defined the forest here for centuries. But a warmer, drier climate would likely make the area better suited for species such as oaks.”

Helping trees move with change, patience you must have my young padawan.

Monarch Migration and Genetics→

IFLScience:

Jaap De Roode, Emory University

“To understand the evolutionary origin and genetic basis of these two hallmark monarch traits, a team led by Marcus Kronforst from the University of Chicago and Shuai Zhan from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences sequenced 92 Danaus plexippus genomes from around the world — including non-migratory and white varieties — as well as nine closely related species.

They found that monarchs are ancestrally migratory. These butterflies are predominantly a North American species, though their broad distribution now includes South and Central America and Western Europe. The team traced the lineage back to a migratory population that likely originated in the southern U.S. or northern Mexico. The butterflies then dispersed out of North America in three separate events: to Central and South America, across the Atlantic, and across the Pacific. In all three cases, the butterfly lost its migratory behavior; only North American monarchs migrate. ”

Much to learn you still have…my old padawan. This is just the beginning to better understand our Monarch friends.

Monarchs on Radar→

John Metcalfe, writing for CityLab:

Michael Warwick; Shutterstock

“Meteorologists in St. Louis noticed a cloud acting peculiarly: It was beating a path toward Mexico while changing into a variety of odd shapes. Was it a radar glitch? The debris signature of a south-moving tornado?

The answer was more heartening—and bizarre. After analyzing the reflections, the National Weather Service concluded they showed an immense swarm of Monarch butterflies migrating to their winter home in the Mexican mountains.”

NWS St. Louis

May the Force be with you.

Trout Like Mice →

Matt Miller, writing for The Nature Conservancy:

“Rainbow trout and grayling actually key in on shrews every two to three years when the mammals may be at peak abundance, much as trout will focus on mayflies or caddis flies when these insects hatch. The small mammals could provide important nutritional value to fish. In peak years, about 25 percent of rainbow trout and grayling larger than 12 inches had eaten the small mammals.

Peter Lisi, lead author of the study, was working on other fish research while completing his doctorate under Daniel Schindler at the University of Washington (Lisi is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). The researchers kept finding trout and grayling with shrews in their stomachs. They wondered how often this actually occurred.”

No! Try not. Eat, or eat not. There is no try.

The Health Benefit of Trees→

James Hamblin, writing for The Atlantic:

“It is becoming increasingly clear that trees help people live longer, healthier, happier lives—to the tune of $6.8 billion in averted health costs annually in the U.S., according to research published this week. And we’re only beginning to understand the nature and magnitude of their tree-benevolence.

In the current journal Environmental Pollution, forester Dave Nowak and colleagues found that trees prevented 850 human deaths and 670,000 cases of acute respiratory symptoms in 2010 alone. That was related to 17 tonnes of air pollution removed by trees and forests, which physically intercept particulate matter and absorb gasses through their leaves.

In terms of impacts on human health, trees in urban areas are substantially more important than rural trees due to their proximity to people,” the researchers wrote. “The greatest monetary values are derived in areas with the greatest population density.””

Mr. Moment - Flicker

 For our own health we need more wildness in the urban areas. You will know when you are calm, at peace.

Rewilding Europe: reconstructing ecosystems by looking mostly forward→

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker:

“The newest land in Europe could be used to create a Paleolithic landscape. The biologists set about stocking the Oostvaardersplassen with the sorts of animals that would have inhabited the region in prehistoric times—had it not at that point been underwater. In many cases, the animals had been exterminated, so they had to settle for the next best thing. For example, in place of the aurochs, a large and now extinct bovine, they brought in Heck cattle...

Perhaps it’s true that genuine wildernesses can only be destroyed, but new “wilderness,” what the Dutch call “new nature,” can be created. Every year, tens of thousands of acres of economically marginal farmland in Europe are taken out of production. Why not use this land to produce “new nature” to replace what’s been lost? The same basic idea could, of course, be applied outside of Europe—it’s been proposed, for example, that depopulated expanses of the American Midwest are also candidates for rewinding....

As more aurochs remains have been unearthed and more sophisticated research has been done on them, it’s become clear that the Heck brothers’ creation is a far cry from the original—Heck cattle are too small, their horns have the wrong shape, and the proportions of their bodies are off. All of which has led to a new, de-Nazified effort to back-breed the aurochs. This project is based in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, about fifty miles southeast of Amsterdam, and is entirely independent of the Oostvaardersplassen. Still, it reflects much the same can-do, “what is lost is not lost forever” approach to conservation. ”

We should increase the biodiversity of our domesticated places and conserve species diversity in our wild places. With regard to 'New Nature', we can admire the beauty of organisms regardless how they arrived in the dynamic, very changing world we also live in.

May you be with Nature. May Nature be with you.

Mass Extinction

Arthur Chapman

Several recent articles on EXTINCTION and Population Declines

John Timmer, writing for ArsTechnia:

“At various times in its past, the Earth has succeeded in killing off most of its inhabitants. Although the impact that killed the non-avian dinosaurs and many other species gets most of the attention, the majority of the mass extinctions we’re aware of were driven by geological processes and the changes in climate that they triggered.

Unfortunately, based on the current rate at which animals are vanishing for good, we’re currently in the midst of another mass extinction, this one driven by a single species: humans. (And many of the extinctions occurred before we started getting serious about messing with the climate.) This week’s edition of Science contains a series of articles tracking the pace of the extinction and examining our initial efforts to contain it.”

Janet Fang, writing for IFLScience!:

“A comprehensive review of birds has identified hundreds of new species that have previously been lumped with known ones — and a quarter of the newly discovered birds are already being listed as threatened.

BirdLife International assessed the 361 newly recognized bird species on behalf of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). More than 25 percent of them were instantly placed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. About 13 percent of all birds are already listed. ”

Justine Alford, writing for IFLScience!:

“The decline of various animal populations and species loss are occurring at alarming rates on Earth, contributing to the world’s sixth mass extinction. While these deadly events may ultimately pave way for the emergence of new species, Stanford scientists have warned that if this “defaunation” that we are currently experiencing continues, it will likely have serious downstream impacts on human health. The study has been published in Science.

Biodiversity on Earth is extremely rich at present; it’s estimated to be the highest in the history of life on our planet. But scientists have been recording species abundance and population numbers for some time now and it is evident that we are experiencing a sharp downward trend. While the extinction of a species is normal and occurs at a natural “background” rate of around 1-5 per year, species loss is currently occurring at over 1,000 times the background rate.”

Reference: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Extinct is less. It cannot be fully described with words. You must feel the loss to understand it. To feel the loss is what you will learn.

Let 'Em Eat Dirt→

Timothy Egan, writing for the New York Times:

“Today, serendipity is something that’s penciled on a kid’s busy, busy, busy calendar. But let that kid wander outside the parental orbit, or explore beyond the bounds of controlled play — God forbid. Twenty-first century Huck doesn’t light out for the country. He plugs into it. And a frog, or a snake, or a spider — ewwww! You’ll never understand what robin’s-egg blue is until you see the color, in a nest in a tree.

What’s wrong with our boys? So goes the lament. They’re insecure, falling behind, unsure of their role. Maybe letting them have a day without a GPS would help.

When you push parents about being too wussy, they bring up a couple of things. Safety, of course. Seatbelts, life jackets, sun screen and bike helmets are great leaps forward. No argument there. But beyond the common-sensical, how long should the leash be?”

Alba Soler

Nature is part of life. Rejoice for those around you who immerse into the full Force of Nature. Mourn those that do not. 

Define “Beneficial”, Define "Harmful"→

Dave Levitan, writing for Conservation:

grafvision - shutterstock.com

“When we discuss invasive Asian carp, we’re usually just talking about a few specific species of carp, the silver, black, and the bighead. This is with good reason—in some parts of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers those fish now make up 97 percent of the total biomass, with no predators around to hold them back. The grass carp, meanwhile, though found in all of the Great Lakes and plenty of other places, was actually introduced—theoretically, this was done quite carefully—and has not been considered a nuisance species at all. But new research suggests that even those invasives we think of as beneficial, often aren’t.”

You will find only what values you bring in.

Forests are Good for Fish→

Jason G. Goldman, writing for Conservation:

“Fish rely on forests for their very survival. That’s because, in a way, they eat them. Debris from forests finds their way into rivers, lakes, and streams. The bacteria in the water break down the leaves and bits of tree bark and dead animals. Then the zooplankton eat those bacteria, and the fish eat the zooplankton.”

Matt Tillett

One can eat only what is brought in.

Decline of Monarch Butterflies Linked to Agriculture→

Kate Prengaman, writing for Ars Technica:

“The massive migration of monarch butterflies is amazing—the insects go from grazing on milkweed plants as caterpillars in the midwest to spending winters in Mexico. But Monarch populations have been on the decline for some time, with a variety of factors being considered: lost habitat in Mexico, damage from pesticides, or climate change.

Conservation strategy for a species that traverses thousands of miles is complicated business, so a team of scientists from the University of Guelph decided to sort out which factors were the most responsible for the monarch’s population declines—changes at the breeding grounds, the wintering sites, or climate changes.

Their conclusions suggest that we can’t blame deforestation in Mexico for this environmental problem. The monarchs are suffering from a lack of milkweed, the only plant the caterpillars eat. In fact, a model built by the researchers suggested that monarch populations were four times more sensitive to the loss of milkweed on their breeding grounds than the loss of the forested habitat in which they spend the winters.”

William Warby

When you look at the dark side, careful you must be. For the dark side looks back. Nature surrounds us and binds us. Help it we must. Neglect and indifference to nature leads to the dark side.

Green Up Cities→

Henry Grabar, reporting for Salon:

“When Bill Drayton looks at New York, he sees a tremendous missed opportunity. The structural skeleton of this metropolis, as in other American cities of its age, is the hollow block: a group of homes, row houses or low multi-family buildings grouped around an open middle space. Former New York City Mayor Robert Wagner once estimated that 60 percent of the city’s 3,000+ blocks were “hollow.”

Drayton would like to see every one of those hollows transformed into a private park for surrounding residents. Each core is nearly an acre and a half — twice the size of a playground at an NYC primary school; one-and-a-half times the size of the median NYC park. As an open expanse of grass beneath great trees, a shared backyard would be large enough for soccer games, picnics and barbecues, but secured from the surrounding city by the walls of neighbors. A checkerboard of private backyards is, he believes, a squandered resource.

In cities where large parks are few and far between, the future of parkland is right in front of us (or behind us, as it were): thousands of shared parks, playgrounds for the city’s children, meeting places for its adults, and crucibles for building community ties.”

You will know the good from the bad when you are calm, at peace. Passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and green redevelopment, never for destruction.

Predator Conservation→

From Conservation This Week:

Jan nijendik

“The world’s predators – mammals such as gray wolves, jaguars, tigers, African lions, European lynx, wolverines, and black and brown bears, along with sharks – are declining at an alarming rate. While those species are suffering for a variety of reasons, one of the main sources of mortality is human in origin. It’s a bit counterintuitive, since predators are some of the more charismatic of species. And charismatic critters are the easiest ones about which to convince people to care.

...since hunters at one time helped to conserve game species (like deer and ducks), then hunters would also help conserve predators who are designated as legal game. One program in Wisconsin was designed explicitly to increase tolerance for wolves by allowing 43 of the endangered canids to be killed each year. And yet while the program was in place, researchers found a decrease in tolerance and in increase in the desire to kill wolves. Legalizing the hunting of predators, even in a restricted way, didn’t have the intended outcome.”

In a dark place we find ourselves with regard to sharing the world with predators, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

Moving Beyond Total Annihilation→

Kate Shaw Yoshida, reporting for  Ars Technica:

“Invasive species take a toll on their surroundings. But that doesn’t mean that invaders are universally destructive. Ecosystems are dynamic, and once an invasive species arrives, it can develop intricate relationships with other organisms. Sometimes, an invader becomes an integral link in a delicate ecological web, complicating efforts to eradicate it...

In most cases, the overarching goal of conservation efforts should be a healthy and well-functioning ecosystem, rather than the complete and immediate eradication of an invader.”

Clapper Rail - USFWS

To answer power with power, the Jedi way this is not. In war, a danger there is, of losing who we are. War with new arriving species, win you will not. A different game you should play.