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Law & Order … in the ocean

Playing hard-nosed Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, actor Sam Waterston has thrown the book at the bad guys for years on TV's Law & Order.

Bad guys on boats and beaches better watch out now, too, because Waterston recently joined Oceana's Ocean Council, a panel of academic, business, and philanthropic leaders who represent and support Oceana's efforts on the global stage. Also on the Ocean Council are actors Pierce Brosnan and Kelsey Grammar.

Declining production and what comes next

This week the Durango Herald discussed the steadily declining production of methane gas from wells in southern Colorado's La Plata County and what impacts there will be when the wells go dry.

Unfortunately, the article focuses only on the economic implications and goes nowhere on the topic of what the landscape will look like when those companies pull up stakes for new pastures. Even if all the well pads are reclaimed, which would be a miracle, what kind of rangeland and habitat will these parts of the West be left with when the boom is over?

Make Our Green Day

Spare a little cash for your favorite eco-news site? Bravo on making it through another week. But have you made it through without succumbing to our sweet pleas for financial […]

Sea Vous Plait

Study says Europe’s seas in trouble from fishing, farming, other threats In case you think Europe does everything right, a study shows that the continent’s seas are in sea-rious trouble. […]

A Jury Of Your Pyrrhus

G8 climate deal is failure or triumph, depending whom you ask Welcome to another installment of “Days of Our G8 Lives.” Yesterday, the G8 agreed to a climate deal it’s […]

Gore wins!

Spain’s Prince of Asturias award for international cooperation, that is. Can the Nobel be far behind?

Beak Squad

Bird biologists are increasingly like hospice workers The sorry state of many of the world’s bird species — like vultures in Southeast Asia and northern spotted owls in the Pacific […]

How wildlife biologists are becoming hospice workers

This guest essay comes from Meera Subramanian, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and writes about culture and the environment for The New York Times, Salon, Audubon, and other publications.

A year ago, I was sitting in New York City's Bryant Park interviewing a wildlife biologist about vultures, three species of which are well on their way to extinction in South Asia. Munir Virani, who oversees the South Asian Vulture Crisis project for the Peregrine Fund, dropped a phrase that sank like lead. "We are monitoring to extinction," he said, his dark eyes instinctually looking up, scanning the stretch of sky among the trees for life, maybe even a peregrine falcon that nests on the nearby MetLife Building in midtown.

He is a biologist, the name of his field spawning from the Greek root word for life. And yet he and many others in his field have become the equivalent of hospice workers. They come to know and care for their ward, but they are working in defense mode, backs pressed up against a wall of looming threats to all forms of life on earth -- terrestrial and aquatic; mammalian, avian, and amphibian.

Whether or not Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson is right when he estimates that we are losing 30,000 species per year -- that's three species per hour -- there is no denying that this is a time of loss. "We are monitoring everywhere in a rapidly changing landscape. It's incredibly frustrating," Virani told me. "There is no feel-good effect in this work."

By all reckoning, it's too late for the vultures. By the time scientists isolated a livestock drug as the cause of the deaths, 95 percent of the population had crashed in less than a decade, and there weren't enough left in the wild to begin a captive breeding program.

Tim Lambert …

… dismantles NYT columnist John Tierney’s latest attack on Rachel Carson.

They may not all be bad.

Two recent news stories from the Chesapeake illustrate well the opposite poles in the debate on invasive species. The first details the appearance of the cuddly-sounding mitten crab in Chesapeake waters, an Asian species that has also hitchhiked in ships to California, Germany and Great Britain. Articles about it use terms like alien and exotic for the little fellas, often pitting them against the beleaguered native blue crabs.

So the news that a foreign species of aquatic vegetation, once considered a major nuisance when it began rapidly colonizing the nearby Potomac River, has instead benefited the watershed's ecosystem interested me. Hydrilla first appeared in 1983 and created dense vegetation masses and even impeded boat traffic in some areas. It was feared that it would interfere with the native vegetation, itself an important food source for waterfowl and fish.

This 17-year study of hydrilla, though, found that not only did it not crowd out native species, but the natives actually increased. Hydrilla also became an important winter food source for waterfowl communities, which increased over this period. All of which makes me wonder about the hype and hyperbole used to describe each new "invasion."