Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , The Media and the Environment
I'm a big fan of George Will. He's easily one of the most entertaining and articulate pundits on ABC's This Week and he's a damn fine writer. Besides, my Dad loved the guy. Which is why it was so...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Well, I don't know what they expected but NRDC and our allies at the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace certainly weren't going let the Bush Administration get away with trying to avoid dealing with greenhouse gas pollution and destructive...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Just to expand a bit on David's very smart post about the White House's phony "regulatory train wreck" scaremongering over efforts to fight global warming with existing environmental laws, it's worth noting that one of the other laws that the...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
The dramatic signs of global warming's impact on the Arctic are everywhere these days, but an event last fall in a small Canadian town 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle has to rate as one of the most...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Just a quick note to report that NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Greenpeace filed a lawsuit this morning to compel the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to make a final decision about whether to protect the polar bear...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Curbing Pollution , Health and the Environment , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
For years, scientists have been concerned about the substantial increase of mercury concentrations in Arctic marine mammals such as polar bears, beluga whales, and seals. In some places in Canada, for example, levels of mercury in the tissue of...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Reviving the World's Oceans , Solving Global Warming
Scientists, gathered at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Annual Meeting in Boston, are expressing increased concern over the growing threat to some of the smallest seas creatures in the world, including tiny snails sometimes called pteropods...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
I normally don't respond to every argument by folks who oppose protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act because, well, it's just not worth the bother. But this bit of idiocy in the Miami Herald just cries out...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Reviving the World's Oceans , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Today the National Marine Fisheries Service formally proposed listing black abalone as an endangered species. Black abalone's historic range extends from Baja California to Del Norte county, well north of San Francisco. Once a dominant feature of the southern...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Today the protection of polar bears under the U.S. Endangered Species Act suffered yet another delay at the hands of the Bush Administration. The Administration--which formally proposed adding the polar bears to the List of Threatened and Endangered Species in...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has an op-ed in today's New York Times that's pretty breathtaking (and I mean that in a Seinfeld kinda way). I won't go into a line-by-line rebuttal of her piece, but I just can't let...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Canada's Globe and Mail features a story today on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's upcoming decision about weather to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. Hugh Vickery, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior says:"I...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Yesterday, Thomas Friedman published a column in the New York Times inspired by a recent article about the last two giant Yangtze soft-shell turtles. "It struck me as I read about that story" Friedman writes "that our generation has...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
On Wednesday, Andrew Revkin, a reporter with the New York Times for whom I have great respect, noted in his blog that scientists in Norway's Svelbard archipelago have unearthed a polar bear jawbone they believe to be 110,000 to 130,000...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
As I've written about here at Switchboard on several occasions, far and away the biggest threat to polar bears is from climate change and its effect on the Arctic sea-ice on which they depend. But whenever a species is threatened...
