Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , The Media and the Environment
Trying to engage with climate skeptics is kind of like being thrown into a cafeteria food fight: lots of noise, frenetic activity, and juvenile behavior. Today’s National Review Online serves up a classic example. Citing a Washington Post article about...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Curbing Pollution , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Sitting in bed last night and watching the Vancouver Olympics' opening ceremonies, I couldn’t help but feel a bit exasperated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sucker for the Olympics' opening act, and it was a great show. The stagecraft was...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods John Platt has a terrific piece up at Extinction Countdown about...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Yesterday, President Obama sent his fiscal year 2011 budget to Congress. From the point of view of environmental policy there’s a lot to like, particularly when it comes to promoting clean energy. (For a good roundup of some of the...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
This month’s Men’s Journal has a nice profile by Jacques Leslie of Richard Nelson, a naturalist and radio personality, and a recent trip Nelson took to Kaktovik, Alaska, to narrate a monologue about the polar bear. Seeing an animal...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Over at environment360, Ed Struzik has an excellent roundup of the very thin evidence behind the arguments of those who doubt the impact that climate change is having on the polar bear. I’ve touched on these issues here, here, and...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Jonathan Zasloff, an environmental law professor at UCLA, has an interesting post up at Legal Planet about the role of environmentalism and religion, a topic I’ve touched on here at Switchboard before. Zasloff is taking a course on Jewish...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Yesterday’s NOAA Report on the impact of global warming is a humdinger. What especially caught my eye was a graphic in the regional report on the impact a warming world will have on Illinois and Michigan. As you can see,...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Green Enterprise , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
I saw an interesting article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune about an Endangered Species Act lawsuit challenging the construction of a wind farm in West Virginia. The suit alleges that the project has violated the Act by failing to get a...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
In another disappointing turn of events, today Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar effectively endorsed the Bush Administration's policy of excluding the effects of global warming pollution on polar bears from consideration under the Endangered Species Act. The Secretary decided...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Andrew Revkin just posted a nice link to a recent response by one of the world's foremost polar bear experts to an attack on global-warming based predictions of polar bear declines. The original critique was written by J. Scott Armstrong,...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Ralph Maughan links to a very important article by the AP's Matthew Brown in today’s Casper-Star Tribune on the connection between increasing human-bear conflicts (guess what, the bear loses) and the decline of high alpine whitebark pine trees. As...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
When I was in law school, it was very common for professors to begin a classroom discussion of some theoretical topic or another by saying: “The conventional wisdom is….” This was always a sure sign that, whatever the conventional wisdom,...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Photo: Closed Door by jeco, Creative Commons 2.0 license One of the biggest frustrations about working in the international arena on environmental issues is the limited role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like NRDC are often able to play in the...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Bettina Boxall has a great post in LA Times's Greenspace about a new study in the journal Science that finds the background mortality rate from unmanaged old forests in the United States has doubled in the last thirty years. The...
