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...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Today the National Marine Fisheries Service officially classified black abalone as an "endangered species." (I discussed the proposed listing last year.) Rising sea levels and ocean acidification, both caused by global warming, are among the threats to black abalone....
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Curbing Pollution , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) recently made an interesting, and little noted, move that speaks volumes about this Administration's attitude towards climate change legislation. Last year the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned to list the ribbon seal, which like...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
When the Bush Administration decided that it absolutely positively was not going to use the Endangered Species Act to address global warming--and it damned sure wasn't going to let anyone else use it that way--someone in the bowels of...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
One thing I wanted to emphasize about NRDC’s Petition to protect whitebark pine under the Endangered Species Act is that, even putting aside the problems of blister rust, mountain pine beetles, and destructive fire management regimes, global warming itself will...
