For decades, conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy has repeatedly warned - sometimes in dire terms - about the loss of biodiversity. But Lovejoy, who this week was awarded the prestigious Blue Planet Prize, remains an optimist.

"There is no point in being unduly pessimistic, because that just guarantees all the bad things will happen," says Lovejoy, who received the international environmental prize at the Rio+20 summit. Currently a professor at George Mason University, Lovejoy has worked since 1965 in the Brazilian Amazon, where he has helped lead one of the world's largest and longest-running field experiments, studying the impacts of habitat fragmentation. Credited with introducing the term "biological diversity" to the scientific community, Lovejoy has spent his career promoting it, with stints at the Smithsonian Institution and the World Wildlife Fund.

Before heading to Brazil for Rio+20, Lovejoy sat down with Yale Environment 360 editor Roger Cohn and talked about the multi-pronged threats to biodiversity, from habitat loss to climate change; the potential impact of major dam projects and other planned development on the Amazon; and why he supports market-based conservation schemes that provide benefits to local residents.

On the need for a global effort to promote biodiversity, Lovejoy says, "I go to sleep at night almost praying that there will be a bolt of awareness, and then we can move forward."

Yale Environment 360: It has been 20 years since the first Rio summit, and now you're heading back for another international environmental conference, Rio+20. How do you feel about the progress, or lack of progress, on the issue of biodiversity loss in the last 20 years?

Thomas Lovejoy: Anybody who just looks at the facts will know that basically the entire global effort combined has failed to reach the scale it should have. There were some initial goals set out at Rio+10 and at the last meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Japan [in 2010]. But not a single nation has met their goal, and global extinction rates are probably a thousand times the norm. And we are beginning to see some really major things, like what climate change is doing to coral reefs...

Hopefully, the countries can really make a much bigger effort coming along. But it is not pretty.

e360: The U.S. was one of the few developed countries to not ratify that [1992 Rio] convention on biodiversity, right?

Lovejoy: This is correct. The United States signed, but did not ratify. And there were some strange politics that went on influencing the Senate in the first two years of the Clinton administration, which by the time it was sorted out, the control of the Congress had changed, and the U.S. has never found a way to go back to looking at formally ratifying. However, it does have to be said that U.S. policy is to behave as if the country had ratified [the convention]. So we are not a totally bad actor.

e360: But why isn't the issue of biodiversity more front and center when it comes to talking about environmental issues in this country? It doesn't seem to be. Do you agree that's true?

Lovejoy: I think it is true. I think actually most environmental awareness has subsided in this country. And biodiversity is mostly seen as an endangered species issue, even though that is really just the tip of the iceberg, or the eco-iceberg [laughs]. And I think it also relates to a complacence in this country about the state of the environment and the de-validation of science as being important in the public debate and discourse. And so things like biodiversity just get shunted to the sidelines.

e360: You are actually credited with coining the word "biodiversity," and now we find there are numerous threats to biodiversity from climate change to deforestation to habitat loss and more. What do you see, currently, as the greatest threat to biodiversity - if you had to pick one issue, one concern?

Lovejoy: That is a very hard question to answer because I don't think we have great metrics on all of these things. Globally, habitat destruction is probably still number one. Invasive species is edging it out. Unknown is the impact of the tens of thousands of man-made chemicals that basically have created this chemical soup we are all living in whether we are a whale or a human being.

And climate change is coming up fast on the outside, as it were. I was out in Yosemite for Earth Day and it no longer snows down to 3,000 feet above sea level - it only goes to 4,500 - and the Ponderosa pine, which depends on that winter snow, is dying out in that belt. So the fingerprints of climate change can be seen biologically essentially all over the planet - and it is just the beginning.

e360: There are protected areas that were set aside for certain species, plant or animal, and now as the climate changes, in many cases recent research is showing that these places are no longer hospitable habitat for the species they were set aside for. Do you see this as a real, growing problem, and if so, how do we address it?

Lovejoy: Well, certainly we are going to have to think about protected areas differently. It doesn't mean they don't have value, but basically nature is on the move wherever we look. You know, the Joshua trees are moving outside of Joshua Tree National Park because of climate change - they are just tracking their conditions. And that is just the beginning.

So we are going to have to think very differently about protected areas in the biologically dynamic landscape. We need to think about how to put natural connections back in the landscape and move more toward a matrix in which human aspiration is pursued within a natural matrix, as opposed to the other way around, and thereby make it easier for plants and animals and microorganisms to actually adjust to the changing natural conditions. Hopefully, most of them can make it through.

e360: The bulk of your work, back to your doctorate days, has been in the Amazon. I believe you have a long-running project down there on fragmented forests in the Amazon. Can you explain what the goal of that project was and is, and what you have learned from it?

Lovejoy: The initial purpose of this project was to generate data to answer and resolve a huge controversy in the ecological literature of the '70s, which was: What was better, a single large reserve, or several small reserves adding up to the same total area? I was asked, with Brazilian colleagues, to set up this giant experiment, I think it is the largest in landscape ecology, looking at habitat fragmentation. And now we are in year 33, and in 2003 we published the paper that makes it very clear that large is the answer. But we have learned a whole lot of other things in the process, including important things about secondary succession, which can play into the plants that are reforesting the Amazon and things of that sort.

e360: There now are a series of major dam projects either underway or planned in the Amazon, along with other major development. Are you concerned about the impacts of these projects, both individually and cumulatively?

Lovejoy: The plans for hydroelectric in the Amazon are both impressive and frightening. And it is not just within the Brazilian Amazon - the Brazilian energy authority has made these plans to build dams in other countries, like Peru, and then transmit the energy back to Brazil. And all of those kinds of plans are being developed independently of the plans looking at roads and other infrastructure, which is planned independently of agricultural policy, which is planned independently of conservation policy.

What really needs to be done is to develop an integrated plan to manage the entire Amazon as a system. If you don't do that, it will eventually undercut its hydrological cycle, which is what keeps the Amazon in rainforest but also provides rainfall south of Brazil for agroindustry. So it is actually hugely important in the continental climate system.

e360: I've read articles that you've written in the past that have proposed looking at market-based conservation schemes, and one of the ones that has been most talked about and tried to move along in the last decade has been REDD [Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation], and yet it has had its problems and has not really gotten as far along as people hoped it would at this point. What do you see as the advantages and values of a market-based approach to conservation versus a government or NGO-based approach to conservation? And, in the case of REDD, why do you think it has been so long and such a hard road to really get it moving?

Lovejoy: The advantage to having some globally-blessed market scheme like REDD, is that it can operate at a global scale. It will also provide some return, some recognition of the value of what forests are contributing to how the world works and bring, if it is done right, some income to the landholders. It actually advanced quite well in climate change talks, but failing an overall agreement about climate, it is just sitting there waiting to get started. Some nations want to resist it - they see it as an invasion of sovereignty. But you don't have to do anything unless you want to, so there is much less reason for concern there. And what is particularly interesting is if you talk to the governors of a lot of these states in the Amazon and even some in Indonesia, they are quite interested in moving that forward.

e360: Why? What benefits beyond conservation do they see for their regions?

Lovejoy: Enough of the Amazon governors recognized the importance of the forest to the future of their states. They saw that if you could find a way to reward people who were living in the Amazon for pursuing their aspirations in ways that did not destroy the forest that you could actually move toward this whole idea of managing the Amazon as a system.

e360: And the Brazilian government supported that going into [the 2009 international climate talks in] Copenhagen?

Lovejoy: The Brazilian government supported the Amazon governors. Almost all the Amazon governors went there and had a memorable afternoon event, in which even some of the less environmentally oriented ones spoke in favor of this.

e360: Were you surprised by the lack of action on REDD at Copenhagen and do you see the chance of anything like that really emerging now?

Lovejoy: At the moment, the conventional wisdom about the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change is that getting something going globally is unlikely in the near future because of the absence of the United States playing an important role in the entire process, and that we will probably have to, in the interim, try and build a mosaic which can approximate but not achieve what a global agreement would.

e360: And do you see the U.S. position ever changing?

Lovejoy: Well, I see the U.S. position as possibly changing. But it will require much better public awareness and concern to create the political space to make it happen.

e360: If you had five minutes with Barack Obama to talk to him about an environmental issue, what would you say to him?

Lovejoy: I would make the point, one, that the planet works as a linked biological and physical system. Second, that two degrees of global warming is too much for ecosystems. Three, that planetary-scale restoration of ecosystems could actually pull a significant amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere. And four, that if we fail to do those kinds of things, it will just create environmental havoc for the U.S. as well as the rest of the world.

e360: Have you had those five minutes?

Lovejoy: I have not, as yet, had those five minutes.

e360: You have had some pretty, I don't want to say dire, but uncomfortable, predictions over the years about biodiversity loss and, regrettably, I think many - if not most of them - have come true. Are you at all optimistic that we can stem the tide of biodiversity loss in a meaningful way, or can we just do the best we can against the tide?

Lovejoy: There are two ways I look at that. One is, that the fuse is very, very short, that we could see just a lot of environmental havoc and a growing inability of society to cope with it as the various problems erupt. On the other hand, I could also see a moment of awareness where globally countries will recognize that this is in fact the greatest challenge to society in its entire history and that we have a choice before us of entering into what, in a sense, could be the real dark ages. Or we could get our act together and rise to really deal with the problem... I go to sleep at night almost praying that there will suddenly be a bolt of awareness and then we can move forward.

e360: But when you wake up in the morning?

Lovejoy: When I wake up in the morning, you know, you have just got to try and make it all happen. There is no point in being unduly pessimistic, because that just guarantees all the bad things will happen.

Photo by Fernando Silva/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Among the Japanese tsunami debris that has washed up onshore is a sixty-six foot dock, still intact.

The dock washed ashore on Tuesday morning on Agate Beach, near Newport, Oregon. It measures sixty-six feet long, seven feet high, and nineteen feet wide. A small metal plaque with Japanese writing on it is still attached.

The Japanese consulate confirmed that the dock was from a northeast area of Japan. Scientists took samples of the marine life attached to the dock and said some were unique to Japan.

The dock was also tested for radiation, because of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster caused by the tsunami, but no radiation was found.

The Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation is deciding how to remove the dock without disrupting the shore.

Japanese dock photo courtesy of Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation

Even small doses of a flame retardant commonly used in furniture and baby products has been linked to harmful health effects, including obesity and developmental and reproductive problems, according to a new study. Speaking at a conference in Canada, Duke University chemist Heather Stapleton said baby rats whose mothers ate small amounts of the flame-retardant chemical, Firemaster 550, gained more weight than those that weren't exposed. Female offspring exposed to the chemical were more anxious, reached puberty earlier, and were shown to have abnormal reproductive cycles. While earlier studies found that harmful effects were evident only at doses of 50 milligrams per kilogram of weight, the new study assessed exposure to doses as low as 3 milligrams per kilogram. "This raises red flags about a widely used chemical that we know little about," said Stapleton, co-author of the study. "What we do know is, it's common in house dust and that people, especially kids, are being exposed to it." According to the Chicago Tribune, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency next year will conduct a risk assessment of two brominated compounds found in Firemaster 550.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

DNA testing has shown that the creation of marine reserves where no fishing is allowed helps to replenish fish stocks outside the reserve boundaries. In a study conducted at Australia's Great Barrier Reef, researchers collected tissue samples from two species of commercially popular fish - including 466 samples of adult coral trout and 1,154 samples from stripey snapper - located within three reserve areas. After collecting juveniles of both species in protected and unprotected areas over the next 15 months, the researchers found that about half of the juveniles were offspring of fish found in the reserve areas, even though the reserves accounted for just 28 percent of the study area. In other words, fish found in the reserves "punch above their weight in replenishing fishery stocks," said Garry Russ, a researcher from James Cook University and one of the authors of the study, published online in the journal Current Biology.

Photo by 88rabbit/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

]]> Wed, 30 May 2012 22:34:00 -0700 http://featured.matternetwork.com/2012/5/marine-reserves-replenish-commercial-fisheries.cfm Yale Environment 360 http://featured.matternetwork.com/2012/5/clean-water-act-40-theres.cfm

By Paul Greenberg

The Clean Water Act of 1972, one of the boldest environmental laws ever enacted, turns 40 this year, with an impressive record of cleaning up America's waterways. But from New York Harbor to Alaska's Bristol Bay, key challenges remain.

When you turn 40, three questions inevitably arise:
- Who am I?
- What have I done?
- What else can I do?

Forty years ago, the U.S. Congress, in an uncharacteristically uncowardly move, overwhelmingly overrode President Nixon's veto and passed the most powerful law for the protection of water in American (and perhaps world) history. Yes, this year the Clean Water Act officially enters its midlife crisis years.

Since it is a law, and not a person, we won't expect it to buy a red sports car and hook up with another law half its age. But having aged and weathered and yet oftentimes stood firm against its adversaries even if its knees became not quite what they used to be, it is worth asking this much buffeted piece of legislation in its 40th year, the three essential questions of mid-life.

So, to begin with, Clean Water Act, who are you?

The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, known as The Clean Water Act was not the first piece of federal legislation to protect water. But it was the first time that real power was invested with the federal government to make sure that water got clean and stayed clean. Its essential demand, that all waterways in the United States be "fishable and swimmable" by 1985 was remarkable in its forthrightness. It invested the Environmental Protection Agency with the power to prosecute "point source polluters," i.e. commercial enterprises directly responsible for fouling the water. No longer was the onus on citizens to prove the value of clean water. Rather the burden was switched to industry. Industry had to prove that its actions did not impinge upon what became codified as an American right to fish and swim, safely, in public waterways.

Next, Clean Water Act, what have you done?

Are all public American waterways fishable and swimmable as they were mandated to be by 1985? They most assuredly are not. But the most egregious aspects of the abuse of water have stopped. Cleveland's Cuyahoga River no longer catches fire, as it did regularly, throughout the 1950s and 60s. A corporation can no longer spill oil into the sea and expect to escape without a fine. Indeed, the billions of dollars British Petroleum will undoubtedly have to pay in the coming years as a result of the 2010 Gulf Spill are made possible by the instruments of the Clean Water Act.

And these gains extend from the broadly national to the intimately local. Because of the Clean Water Act, New York City now has more than a half-dozen public swimming events in New York Harbor, including a 28.5-mile loop of Manhattan that will take place this June. Because of the Clean Water Act, oysters placed on six test reefs in an experiment coordinated by the Hudson River Foundation in 2010 found enough dissolved oxygen to survive, raising the possibility that oysters could once again become an integral part of the Hudson River estuary. But there is still a lot of work to be done.

Which leads us to, Clean Water Act, what else can you do?

It is a remarkable achievement that point-source polluters can now be monitored and often controlled. But there still remain two vital areas of clean water protection that have yet to be brought in line. The first is the control of "nonpoint source" polluters - the diffuse negative impacts of humanity in general. While it is fairly straightforward to identify a pesticide manufacturer that is dumping its effluent into a waterway and sue it because of that violation, it is considerably more difficult to mitigate the effects of private citizens whose brazen acts of clean water abuse often consist simply of flushing their own toilets. Because of outdated and overloaded wastewater treatment plants, for example, raw sewage still pours into New York Harbor through "combined sewage overflows" whenever it rains more than a tenth of an inch. We need to figure this piece of the puzzle out, not only through large-scale modernization and expansion of sewer systems but also by establishing tax incentives for the implementation of innovative storm water sequestering technologies like green roofs.

The other trick the old dog might pull off in its middle years is to let its bite finally exceed its bark on a critical area of its jurisdiction. Section 404c of the Act allows the EPA to protect waterways that support shellfish beds, fish spawning grounds, wildlife zones, and recreational areas. As I write these words, proponents for the development of the gargantuan "Pebble Mine" copper and gold prospect in Alaska's Bristol Bay are already denouncing a recently completed EPA "watershed assessment" of the region even before the public has gotten a chance to look at it. This assessment will almost certainly provide the scientific justification for a 404c action that will protect Bristol Bay - home to the largest concentration of wild salmon left on earth. EPA could effectively protect the area - and its half-billion dollar a year fishing industry - as a vast, commercially productive wild salmon reserve. The Clean Water Act might just have the teeth to do that; but this old guard dog must be loosed for the attack for the law to become all that it was meant to be.

A bold promise. A lot, but not enough, accomplished. Many interesting and important things still left to do. If I were turning 40 this year, I would find that summing up of my life-to-date cause for pride, anxiety and hope. Such a summing up might even make me feel a little bit young. There are many out there for whom 40 is just the start of the most meaningful part of their lives. As they say nowadays, 40 is the new 30.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

What do trees and manta rays have in common? In today's issue of the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists offer evidence that ecological links join them across the barrier between sea and land.

The new study is a particularly striking illustration of a pattern that scientists are finding around the world. Life on land and life in the ocean are bonded in unexpectedly powerful ways. While they may seem like separate realms, the well being of one depends on the other.

To figure out why native forests help manta rays thrive, McCauley and his colleagues made careful measurements of Palmyra's marine and terrestrial ecosystems. They started with sea birds such as red-footed boobies, which fly over the ocean to catch fish. The birds then return to the islands to make nests in the trees. When the scientists surveyed Palmyra's birds, they found that the native forests had five times more birds than the palm forests.

The difference lies in the architecture of the trees. Palm trees are essentially pillars, with tufts of leaves on top that whip back and forth in the wind. Palmyra's native trees, by contrast, form dense, thick canopies where birds can find stability and protection.

Nesting in the trees, the birds drop lots of guano on the ground. The guano is rich in nitrogen; the scientists found that the soils of the native forests have nitrogen levels five times higher than those found in palm forests. The guano thus fertilizes the trees, which build up a greater concentration of nitrogen in their leaves. The leaves then fall to the ground and create a deep, rich soil.

To track the fate of the nitrogen, McCauley and his colleagues took advantage of a quirk of guano. Nitrogen atoms come in different isotopes (with different number of neutrons in their nucleus). Guano happens to be rich in one isotope known as nitrogen-15. "We used the chemistry to link each one of these interactions one to the other," said McCauley.

The soil and leaves in native forests are high in nitrogen-15 as well. When the rain comes to Palmyra, it washes that guano-derived nitrogen - along with other nutrients from the rich soil - out into the ocean. The runoff from the native forests had 18 times more nitrogen than that of palm forests, the scientists report.

That nitrogen influences life on the way from the land to the sea. Clams living in the intertidal zones on the coasts of native forests have elevated levels of nitrogen-15. So do sponges in the reefs further out at sea. The nitrogen and other nutrients flowing out from the native forests fertilize phytoplankton - the sun-harnessing algae in the ocean - much as it does the trees on land.

McCauley and his colleagues also found that the zooplankton - the tiny animals that graze on the phytoplankton - was three times more abundant off the coast of native Palmyra forests than off the coasts of palm forests.

McCauley's study highlights why ecosystems on land and at sea can become linked. Nitrogen and other nutrients are often in scarce supply, and living things are very good at concentrating them and moving them from one place to another. Palmyra's birds draw out the nitrogen from the ocean and concentrate it in the forests, which then deliver a rich supply of nitrogen and other nutrients back to the ocean, ultimately providing manta rays with food.

A similar process takes place in the northwestern United States, where streams are starved for nitrogen. Each year, vast numbers of salmon swim from the Pacific into those streams, where they mate, lay eggs, and die. We're all familiar with footage of bears feasting on salmon, but they're not the only ones to benefit from the migration of the fish. After the salmon die, the nitrogen in their bodies fertilizes the streams and enriches the soil. Plants that grow around salmon-choked streams have high levels of nitrogen 15 in their tissues.

These links between land and sea are particularly vulnerable, and when we damage them, we can have some surprisingly big effects on ecosystems. When people in the Pacific cut down native trees to plant coconut palms, they doubtless have no idea that they are affecting the lives of manta rays. And yet McCauley's research suggests that this is precisely what is happening. As the native forests shrink, so too does the prime ocean habitat for the manta rays.

The disruptions can also flow the other way, from sea to land. On the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, for example, people introduced foxes in the early 1900s to harvest their fur. The foxes proceeded to attack the sea birds that nested on the islands, driving down their numbers. Since the birds ingested nitrogen-rich fish and deposited the nitrogen on land, the smaller population of birds delivered a smaller supply of nitrogen to the islands. The soil became less fertile, and the island ecosystems shifted from grasslands to shrubs.

Humans are also good at pumping nutrients between ecosystems. Farmers, for example, spread fertilizers on their fields, and the nitrogen and phosphates get washed into rivers and into the oceans. But this type of runoff is no cure for damaged land-to-sea links. It delivers too many nutrients in too little time. Instead of stimulating healthy ecosystems, it can instead create so-called "dead zones" in places like the mouth of the Mississippi River.

"Leave it to us to overdo things," says McCauley.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled yesterday that United States' "Dolphin Safe" tuna-labeling regulations unfairly discriminates against Mexico and probably needs to be modified to make an exception for Mexican fishermen, or dropped. It's not totally clear what the economic implications of the ruling are, but this is definitely a big setback in efforts to protect marine mammals.

The new ruling is a reversal of a September 2011 one on the same case where WTO arbitrators had decided that the labeling, while "more trade restrictive than necessary," wasn't actually discriminatory. Both the US and Mexico had appealed the decision in January, resulting in yesterday's decision by the WTO appellate panel. Trade analysts say it's possible that if the US fails to comply it could mean sanctions against American products in the global market.

The decision was condemned by Earth Island Institute's International Marine Mammal Project, which established the Dolphin Safe Tuna labeling program and monitors tuna companies around the world for compliance. "The WTO decision ... is an outrageous attack that would ensure thousands of dolphins horrible deaths in tuna nets while lying to consumers about the Dolphin Safe status of such tuna," said IMMP director David Phillips. "Earth Island will urge the Obama Administration and the US Congress to refuse to weaken the standards for Dolphin Safe tuna despite this noxious WTO decision," he said.

The ruling is the latest development in a long-standing trade dispute between the US and Mexico that dates back to the establishment of the Dolphin Safe tuna label in 1990.

Here's why the label is important: Schools of tuna often swim around with dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean (ETPO), a large area running from Southern California to Peru and extending out into the Pacific Ocean almost to Hawai'i. Mexico and several other countries allow their tuna industry to deliberately target, chase and surround the dolphins with nets in order to get to the tuna. More than 7 million dolphins have been killed since this fishing method was introduced in 1957.

In 1990, after years of campaigning by IMMP, the Dolphin Safe tuna label was established in the US. The label can only be used for tuna that is not caught by chasing and netting dolphins. Nor can it be used if dolphins are killed or seriously injured during a tuna fishing expedition. Dolphin deaths from tuna fishing have declined 98 percent since the label was established, says IMMP, with virtually only Mexican, Venezuelan, and Colombian tuna vessels still chasing and netting dolphins.

Mexico has objected to this labeling for years, claiming these restrictions to protect dolphins discriminate against the Mexican tuna industry. In 2008 it took its complaint to the WTO. However all other nations involved in tuna fishing in the ETPO region, except Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia, follow the US standards for Dolphin Safe tuna. "There is no reason why Mexico should not also comply with these standards," said IMMP associate director Mark Palmer.

Palmer also pointed out that despite the US label being voluntary, the WTO dispute panel claimed the label was "mandatory" and therefore open for WTO review and restrictions. "In fact, Mexico can sell tuna in the US with a Dolphin Safe label if they follow the same standards as US tuna fishermen and everyone else," he said. "I suspect the issue is going to boil down to whether we allow Mexcio to kill dolphins and then say their tuna is dolphin safe," Palmer said.

Meanwhile, Nkenge Harmon, a spokesperson for US Trade Representative Ron Kirk told reporters that the US remained "committed to ensuring that consumers receive accurate information concerning whether the tuna in a product labeled 'dolphin safe' was caught in a manner that caused harm to dolphins."

Reprinted with permission from Earth Island Journal

"They're Angolan refugees returning home," biologist Mike Chase tells reporters. He's not talking about people. He's talking about elephants, moving out of his native Botswana, step by ponderous step. On their backs are riding the hopes of one of the most ambitious ecological experiments on the planet, the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or KAZA.

The largest such project in the world, at more than 170,000 square miles, KAZA is the size of Sweden and involves five countries - Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe - boasting the biggest population of elephants on earth, a quarter of a million.

During Angola's prolonged civil war, an estimated 100,000 elephants were slaughtered, their ivory sold to buy arms. In 2001, a year before the war ended, fewer than 40 were left in the country's Luiana reserve. Six years later, after Namibia and Botswana agreed to open a strategic 22-mile gap in a maze of border and veterinary fencing (keeping wild buffalo or infected cattle from contaminating Botswana's herds), Chase counted 8,000. Bull elephants had scouted Angola's thinly-populated southern reserves, found conditions to their liking, and returned to northern Botswana to lead herds home to Angola. Once there, they skirted landmines, having perhaps learned through bitter experience how to sniff them out. Their message was clear: Give us a way back, and we will come.

Launched in March after a treaty signing last August, with $26 million pledged by Germany's development bank, KAZA requires five sovereign nations to tiptoe through similarly explosive territory, setting aside old grievances and compelling national interests. If they succeed, KAZA may help lift people out of poverty and protect one of the last functional large-scale ecosystems left on the continent: the Okavango Delta, a massive wetland that waxes and wanes annually as rivers pour off the Angolan highlands, fanning out into the baking Kalahari and drawing some of the region's most threatened wildlife - black rhino, African wild dog, and hundreds of species of birds.

In just one of KAZA's parks, Zambia's Kafue, tourism could grow from less than $5 million annually to almost $50 million in little more than a decade, according to a consultant's report. That could be multiplied across the conservation area, which contains more than 40 protected areas: national parks, forest and game reserves, and community conservancies.

But the project faces daunting obstacles: insufficient funding, conflict between people and wildlife, fear of disease outbreaks among cattle, and a recently reported steep decline in wildlife numbers. Critics are also concerned that the project may end up enriching foreign tourism companies rather than local communities.

Westerners think of parks as pristine, but as one expert puts it, "Wilderness areas with no human impacts do not exist in Africa." Only well-established national parks, such as Bostwana's Chobe, have no human inhabitants; fewer still thrive on the traditional model of armed guards and fences. KAZA - not a park but a "transfrontier conservation area"- has a human population perhaps as high as 2.5 million. Over half its land is communally managed, used for subsistence farming or grazing. While the idea of linking parks across borders has been around since 1932, recent developments in southern Africa have created urgency around transfrontier plans, particularly bottlenecks wrought by fencing (required by the EU's subsidized beef export market), which effectively trapped tens of thousands of elephants in northern Botswana.

"An Africa without fences" is the vision of the Peace Parks Foundation. Founded in 1997, it has enrolled every country in southern Africa in the effort, raising millions from donor countries, encouraging private investment, and supporting colleges to train wildlife rangers and tourism staff. Progress has not been without pitfalls: The group was vilified for its high-handed, top-down approach as it expanded South Africa's Kruger National Park into Mozambique. While peace parks are dismissed by one Cape Town academic as another "grandiose scheme... foisted upon Africa," there are now 10 in the region, with four more in the planning stage, ranging north to Tanzania.

An idea kicking around international circles since the early 1990s, KAZA was self-consciously designed to be a grassroots affair. Early supporters - including Conservation International, the WWF, and the Wildlife Conservation Society - looked to Namibia's home-grown and highly successful conservancy movement, which had presided over a resurgence in the country's wildlife, decimated during the long struggle against occupation. At independence, in 1990, Namibians wrote conservation into their constitution, and the fledgling republic soon backed community-based conservation groups - called conservancies - to create jobs.

At the news that a single elephant hunt might be worth $10,000, "word went through communities almost overnight," says Chris Weaver, director of WWF in Namibia. "Poaching stopped very, very quickly." Communities eagerly registered to guard, monitor, and manage their wildlife and have reaped benefits from ecotourism, controlled hunting, and sustainable harvesting of wild plants. Popular and effective, 71 conservancies have been registered so far, creating 1,700 full time and 8,000 seasonal jobs and earning roughly $6 million in 2010, with communities investing the money in health clinics and schools. As conservancies build corridors across the country, Namibia has protected almost 40 percent of its land and earned a reputation as a spectacular place to see rhino, cheetah, desert lions, and other wildlife.

KAZA hopes to capitalize on that model, using conservancies to reestablish wildlife corridors between existing parks and reserves. Of the five KAZA partners, only Angola, one of the poorest countries in the world, has no community-based program. Zimbabwe, grandfather of such management schemes in the 1980s, is also lagging in the final years of Robert Mugabe's rule, blocked from receiving foreign funding. Botswana presents a mixed picture. Known for high-end ecotourism in the Okavango, it launched a network of trusts in 1993, eventually involving some 10 percent of the population, but its heavily-bureaucratized system has been less successful than Namibia's.

More densely populated Zambia (with 14 million people, compared to Botswana and Namibia, with two million each) last year launched its first community conservancy, Simalaha, on its southern border with Namibia, right in the heart of KAZA. Funded by $2.8 million from the Swedish Postcode Lottery, Simalaha is designed to link Botswana's Chobe and Zambia's Kafue across a critical floodplain, providing safe passage for elephants between the two parks. Namibia and Zambia are already running joint anti-poaching patrols in the area.

Announcing plans to initiate a temporary sanctuary for wildlife, senior chief Inyambo Yeta, a traditional leader who sits on the board of the Peace Parks Foundation, spoke wistfully of the lost richness of local forests. "We want Simalaha to teem with wildlife once again," he said.

KAZA program manager Victor Siamudaala has praised the "overwhelming" support from communities and governments. But, as Weaver emphasized, future success may be KAZA's worst enemy, judging by the experiences of the conservancies. Escalating human-elephant conflict has become so prevalent it has acquired its own acronym: "HEC." In 2010, wild elephants rampaged through a southern Angolan settlement, trampling houses and farms and sending some 4,000 people over the border into Namibia, which had 11 people killed by elephants that same year. Throughout KAZA, farmers are learning to exploit every imaginable elephant deterrent, from vuvuzelas (plastic horns) to chile bombs, a mixture of dried elephant dung and peppers that is burned to create a stinging, smoke haze. Namibia has initiated payments for crop damage and funeral costs, while emphasizing that conflict cannot always be avoided.

Serious questions about KAZA's viability remain. Mike Chase, an elephant ecologist who founded Elephants Without Borders in 2004, has documented the species' return to Angola and radio-collared a number of pachyderms, mapping elephant corridors throughout the region, as well as barriers - fences, roads, crops, settlements - that block them. His recent aerial survey showing that elephants have stabilized at around 128,000 in northern Botswana is considered the most accurate to date.

Chase was recently employed by the Botswana government to fly additional surveys over the country's vast northern stretches, once a wildlife stronghold, to census other large mammals. "We were completely blown out of the water," he says of tallying steep declines in wildlife outside of Chobe National Park. Results showed a 90-percent reduction in wildebeest - from more than 23,000 in 1999 to fewer than 2,000 in 2010 - and similar declines in warthog, zebra, kudu, lechwe, tsessebe, sable, and roan. Chase attributes the losses not only to a 20-year drought but also to increased human use, fencing, and grazing of cattle, used in Botswana to calculate "lobola," or bride price. In Chobe itself, however, many species are increasing.

Chase is still optimistic about KAZA, pointing out that "ten years ago, you couldn't get the governments to sit around a table together." David Cumming, a transfrontier expert in Harare, Zimbabwe, is less sure. His 2011 review of "constraints" faced by peace parks is sobering, noting that KAZA's planning documents focus heavily on development and fail to set clear objectives regarding conservation. Financing is inadequate, with even established national parks "grossly underfunded."

He asks a critical question: Can the creation of larger landscapes devoted simultaneously to development and conservation - not strictly protected as parks - reverse wildlife declines while benefiting communities? Unless people get "real benefits," Cumming told me, "connectivity is probably not going to be maintained."

It remains to be seen whether conservation corridors roughed out on maps will materialize. Elephants cannot wait forever, fenced in by wire, crops, and settlements. Nor can local people, who are, as Cumming dryly calls them, "the de facto resource managers."

Correction. May 16, 2012: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that Namibia's 71 conservancies earned $700,000 last year. The article should have stated that Namibian conservancies earned roughly $6 million in 2010.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The Awa's forest is facing one of the highest rates of deforestation of all Indigenous areas in the Amazon, says Survival International, which launched a massive campaign to save the Awa last month. Satellite images show over 30 percent of rainforests in one of the four territories inhabited by the Awa has already been destroyed.

Legal efforts to save the forest have had little impact so far. In 2009 a federal court ordered illegal settlers to leave Awa territories within 180 days, but an appeal by a cattle rancher delayed the ruling. Now there's a second ruling, from another federal judge, ordering the settlers to leave by December 2012. But many fear that, like before, this order too will get stuck in legal wrangling in the courts for years to come. And in the mean time, the Awa's will continue to be at grave risk.

Several experts, including officials at Brazil's National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) - the government body responsible for protecting Indigenous lands, have warned that the Awa face extinction unless more is done to protect their land from outsiders who not only clash with the tribespeople, but also bring in common diseases like the flu, that uncontacted people are often immune too .

A Brazilian judge, who visited the region to investigate the situation said they were "dealing with a real genocide," as did anthropologist and Awa expert Dr Eliane Cantarino O'Dwyer. Survival International estimates there are only about 360 contacted Awa remaining, and about another 70 to 90 uncontacted tribespeople hiding in the rapidly vanishing forest.

We've seen, again and again, in forests and wilderness areas across the world, that the Indigenous people are some of the best stewards of our environment. Yet world over, they are losing out in the rush for resources to feed our ever-expanding economies. But there's a chance the Awa can be saved. That is if enough pressure is put on Brazil to honor the Awa's right to their land and protect it from illegal encroachment. International pressure helps. Survival International's campaign, that hopes to persuade Brazilian Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo to clear out loggers, ranchers, and settlers who are threatening the safety of the Awa tribe, is already starting to make a difference. has already generated over 20,000 protest emails to the Brazilian government. "The sense of urgency is being felt around the world, especially as this is a cause that can be won - a people who can be saved," says Survival's campaign head, Fiona Watson,who has worked with Brazil's Indians for more than 25 years. "Brazil's government must take firm action on illegal logging and uphold it's own demarcation laws, if the Awa are to be saved from extinction." Learn more about the Awa and what you can do to help them at http://www.survivalinternational.org/awa

Reprinted with permission from Earth Island Journal

The Australian government has added the koala to the list of threatened species in parts of the country for the first time, saying the iconic species is under threat from habitat loss, urban expansion, disease, and climate change. Following a three-year study, Environment Minister Tony Burke announced that koalas will be listed as vulnerable in Queensland, where populations have declined by 40 percent in two decades; New South Wales, where numbers have dropped by one-third; and the Australian Capital Territory. In addition to the listing, which will impose restrictions on development in areas where the species is threatened, the government committed $300,000 for koala monitoring and habitat research. Not only are koalas facing declining food sources as eucalypt plants are aggressively cleared for development, but scientists say the nutritional value of remaining eucalypts has diminished as a result of climate change. While the government says there are about 200,000 remaining koalas nationwide, the Australian Koala Foundation estimates there are likely fewer than 100,000.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

]]> Tue, 01 May 2012 01:59:00 -0700 http://www.matternetwork.com/2012/5/e360-digest.cfm Yale Environment 360 http://www.matternetwork.com/2012/4/kenyan-woman-stands-up-against.cfm

By christina m. russo

Ikal Angelei is helping lead a campaign to stop construction of a major dam in Ethiopia that threatens the water supply and way of life of tens of thousands of indigenous people. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she explains what she believes is at stake in the fight against the Gibe III dam.

It wasn't until two years after construction began on the controversial Gibe III dam on the Omo River in Ethiopia that Ikal Angelei learned about the project. She soon realized, however, what the massive project would mean for hundreds of thousands of indigenous Ethiopians and Kenyans who rely on the waters of Lake Turkana, the world's largest permanent desert lake, which is located downstream.

While the Ethiopian government claims the Gibe III will provide badly needed electricity to one of Africa's poorest regions, Angelei, a 31-year-old Kenyan who grew up in the Lake Turkana Basin, says it would come at a steep price. The dam - which would be the world's fourth-largest - is expected to cause the lake's water level to drop by as much as 33 feet, a shift that would not only devastate fish stocks but trigger increased conflict in a region already troubled by violence over dwindling water resources.

Outraged that the massive dam project was being planned without any input from local communities - and without a comprehensive study into the long-term ecological and social costs - Angelei founded the Friends of Lake Turkana in 2009. In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Christina M. Russo, Angelei describes why the Gibe III project threatens the very survival of the region's indigenous tribes, what it will take it to stop it, and how she has used public pressure and social media to galvanize local and international opposition to the dam

"If we let go and say, 'Build the dam,' it means we are saying that accountability doesn't account for anything in this world, and [that] governments can destroy environments and destroy ecosystems in the name of development," said Angelei, who this month received a 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Yale Environment 360: I wanted to ask you first about Lake Turkana. As the largest desert lake in the world, the area around it is quite harsh - and yet the lake appears to be very soft and beckoning.

Ikal Angelei: The region itself is very harsh. But when you go to the lake and you hear the waves, and you just see the moving of the water... it is unimaginable. In this very harsh area, you get this cold, nice water. It is just amazing. As you are driving - from the eastern shores or from the western shores - the lake is almost like a mirage. And as you come nearer and nearer, you just see a mass of water. For me, years later, despite being brought up there, that moment is still a magical feeling.

e360: You've written that, "more than a quarter million residents from at least ten tribes have become masters at wresting sustenance from the harsh landscape."

What communities live in the Lake Turkana area?

Angelei: The indigenous communities around the lake include Samburu, El Molo, Turkana, Rendille, Gabra and Dassanach - they are in Kenya. When you go into Ethiopia you have the Dassanach of Ethiopia, the Mursi, Nyangatom, Bodi, Hamar...

e360: Before the founding of Friends of Lake Turkana did the communities interact?

Angelei: Actually before the project they were isolated, but it was seasonally based. If you understand the conflicts around the region, we are in conflict about resources... The identity of the people is the lake. Even if you are trying to look geographically at where they are located, one will say "western shores" or "eastern shores" of the lake.

Economically, because of the changes in climate coupled with the harsh, extreme nature of the climate, people are looking at fishing - not to substitute but to complement pastoralism. So communities who are naturally not fishermen are now going into fishing.

In terms of the water table in the region - it is a dry area. So we really depend on groundwater, because we can't depend on the rainfall... With the lake receding, the water table of the lake goes down. It dramatically affects the groundwater across the basin. So even people who are not naturally fishermen or directly depend on the lake, they depend on the groundwater for survival.

The very basic [threat] is that the ecosystem of the lake will change because of the dam project. If you have a reduced inflow from the river you will change the chemical balance of the lake. One, it is going to make the water more saline, so you cannot use it for human or animal consumption. The fish may not be able to sustain themselves in that water, because it becomes too acidic for them. And with the flow downstream of the Omo River, that's what determines the spawning and the breeding of fish.

e360: Why will the absence of the natural flooding process have such devastating affects on the communities?

Angelei: People always say, "Oh, we are controlling the flooding." But you cannot alter nature; you cannot fight nature... Lake Turkana doesn't have an outlet; it is a closed lake. So it depends on that balance of inflow versus evaporation. If you reduce that inflow, the level of evaporation increases. Once you have altered the balance of the lake, you have damaged the ecosystem completely.

They want to let the water flow in the minimum amount downstream. But that totally destroys the way people are living. When we leave the natural flow of the river, it spreads across into areas that are within the Turkana basin. That allows for pasture to grow where various communities are grazing. When you alter that, and water doesn't flood the region, then communities start to move to where these resources are available, which puts more pressure not only on the environment, it creates more conflict over the scarce resources that are available.

The same [threat] exists in Ethiopia - we cannot ignore that this is an area where communities are also struggling for resources. The communities live a way of life that is like a typical African three-legged stool. They depend on subsistence farming; they depend on fishing; and they depend on pastoralism. If you reduce the floods, it damages their subsistence farming, which is very key to their normal way of life... If you remove one leg, the stool really cannot balance.

e360: The dam construction began in 2006. But you didn't hear about it immediately. How did you come to understand the project had begun?

Angelei: In late 2008, that is when I met [anthropologist] Richard Leakey. And while interacting with him and starting to work with him at the Turkana Basin Institute, he came up to me one time and gave me a document that he had just received. The document indicated there was a dam being constructed, and a group of scientists and researchers had looked at what was said to be an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) that had just been released - and those scientists and researchers were questioning the facts [about the report].

e360: You had no idea about it until then?

Angelei: No idea about it. And Leakey said, "Yes, even I have just been informed about it." So I quickly started to talk to my members of parliament to find out if they knew about it. That is when we realized that neither the parliamentarians that represent the region nor the local communities knew about the project.

e360: Did you think this was intentional?

Angelei: We believed it was intentional. Later on, we read in the newspapers that some government officials knew about it. And that's when we knew that, for them, it was a matter of energy versus the life of people.

e360: How is Kenya supposed to benefit from this dam?

Angelei: The main reason behind the construction of the Gibe III dam is for hydroelectric power. But not for domestic use within Ethiopia. It's mainly for export to Kenya, Sudan, and Djibouti...

e360: After your discovery about the dam, you launched Friends of Lake Turkana.

Angelei: We officially formed the Friends of Lake Turkana in 2009 because we realized we needed to have a legal body. At first, the other citizens of Kenya - who had very little information about Lake Turkana - just thought we were making noise. Most of them were looking at it as, "We need energy; we are tired of blackouts." Which was reasonable. And we recognize the efforts of both the Kenyan and Ethiopian governments to source for energy development. But for us, it has always been: At what expense? And what alternatives do we have?

It seemed that originally more people did not know about the project than did. In Kenya, when there is a lot of hiding, we start to suspect something. So people started to question: Why is the government hiding something?

e360: So now what is Kenya's position on the project?

Angelei: It is quite divided. Half the ministers believe that this project should be stopped. The parliament has passed a motion asking the government to ask for a halt in the project unless a comprehensive and independent Environmental Impact Assessment is done - and an environmental social impact is undertaken. Not only on the dam but also the greater Omo basin.

But our president, our prime minister, and the minister of energy keep insisting that the project should go on. So, then we started to wonder what politics is being played here.

e360: If Kenya decided to halt support for it, would the project stop altogether?

Angelei: I don't think it could go on without Kenya's support because the viability of this project is based on Kenya's purchase [of electricity]. Ethiopia has already enough domestic energy - it has the Gibe I and Gibe II dams, which are sufficient for Ethiopia.

e360: Now the project has been criticized by your organization for not abiding by appropriate international and domestic protocol, including criticisms of the bidding process What has transpired that has made some major organizations back away from supporting the project?

Angelei: For a project this big that seeks international funding - which is basically taxpayer money from all these countries - you have to go through an open, public bidding process. This project did not go through that.

Salini [the Italy-based contractor] approached Ethiopia - and the company was given a direct bid. So the fact is that one company was given a contract of such large magnitude, without advertising and without letting others bid for the project.

e360: You think of this project as a human rights abuse as well as an environmental abuse?

Angelei: Yes, I think it is a human rights abuse and an environmental abuse.You cannot say "development" is telling people that your way of life doesn't work anymore. People have to develop in the way they see fit. If I don't want to drive, it doesn't mean I'm not developed. It means I am living my life in the way I see fit, as long as I am able to achieve my spiritual and basic needs.

e360: Do you think all of Kenya wants to fight to protect Lake Turkana, or do you feel this battle is very isolated?

Angelei: A greater part of Kenya appreciates the importance of environments, and how people live. But there are always the ignorant few who you meet along with way - who for them, having the electricity to play their music, and having lights and not having blackouts is more of a priority than communities and the way of life.

e360: Are you getting more support since your campaign began?

Angelei: Yes. Most people just didn't understand what the issue was. But with a lot of media coverage and a lot of open discussions and with a lot of information on the website and using social media, there is a lot more interest. And especially after a couple of raids in the region, where we lost about 124 people, Turkana especially... it brought a clear picture of conflict over resources and conflict over water.

e360: Who is mainly in conflict with each other in the area?

Angelei: There's conflict between the Turkana and Dassanach in Kenya, and the Turkana and the Dassanach across the border... People used to talk about traditional raids. It's no longer that. People are now well armed and it depends on who has more bullets than the other.

e360: Are the communities in the Lower Omo Valley facing similar issues as you are at Lake Turkana?

Angelei: More or less, they have similar issues. But I think they are more pressured now. They have more pressure on their resources because land is being grabbed for sugarcane plantations and cotton plantations.

e360: I read a report by Survival International that says Ethiopia plans to resettle tribes which "stand in the way" of development plans related to the Gibe III dam. Is this really happening?

Angelei: Yes it is happening. Communities are being forced out of their lands... The government of Ethiopia is coming into the region and forcing communities out, because they have vast land - that's what allows them to have these lives, to be pastoralists, fish, subsistence farming. So they are being pushed into something like concentration camps - where they are told they will be given education, schools, health care. And then their land is being taken and in turn given to international companies from India, Malaysia, and more developing countries to produce sugar cane, cotton, etc.

e360: What is the Friends of Lake Turkana's ultimate goal?

Angelei: For us, this campaign will set a precedent. If we let go and say, "Build the dam," it means we are saying that accountability doesn't account for anything in this world, and [that] governments can destroy environments and destroy ecosystems in the name of development.

So our big goal is to push for a comprehensive, independent environmental and social impact assessments of the entire basin, which would allow us to understand what opportunities we have; what challenges we have, how fragile this ecosystem is; and what sort of development can be done there. And it would allow the communities to be part of this discussion.

e360: To be clear: If this dam project continues, you feel very strongly that people are going to die.

Angelei: Definitely. It's water. The other day, in Turkana, they discovered oil. The only thing that the local people were saying is: Why can't you ever discover water?

There's absolutely no way that dam can go on and the people in Turkana will survive. If it's not directly, then they'll kill each other, one by one. People will be fighting every day because it is the only way of survival now. We have very scarce resources. We have very little water. So who will control the water? It will be the strongest person.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that has destroyed millions of ash trees from the U.S. Midwest to western New York over the last decade, has been found east of the Hudson River for the first time, the closest the pest has comes to the forests of New England. New York environmental officials, who have undertaken an aggressive research and control campaign across 225 square miles since the pest was first found in New York state in 2009, say they found small infestations of the beetle in three "trap" trees east of the Hudson last month. Fortunately, they say, the colony was discovered less than a year after it was established, making it easier to curb the beetles' spread. Typically, the beetle larvae tunnel under the bark and are able to kill trees before foresters know the trees have been infested. "It's rare that infestations are found this early," Nate Siegert, a U.S. Forest Service entomologist, told the Associated Press. While the main population of the beetle, which originated in China, has been moving toward the mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. at a pace of about 2 to 3 miles per year since the beetle was first found near Detroit in 2002, smaller colonies have been able to leapfrog ahead, most likely within truckloads of logs or firewood.

Photo by U.S. Department of Agriculture/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

A new animation developed by researchers at the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) illustrates the likely path of the spreading field of debris caused by retreating waves from last year's gigantic tsunami in Japan. The model - based on satellite data and a network of scientific buoys showing sea surface height, ocean surface winds, and ocean currents - shows that debris swept into the Pacific by the event now likely stretches across an area covering 5,000 kilometers by 2,000 kilometers. Much of the debris was initially pulled by the strong Kuroshio Current, which travels in a northeasterly direction past eastern Japan before shifting east in the Kuroshio Extension and then into the North Pacific Current. The Japanese government has estimated that about 5 million tons of debris was pulled into the ocean; about 70 percent sank to the seafloor, with about 1.5 million tons still floating. Some of that debris is expected to reach North America within the next two years. A separate computer animation depicting the Earth's ocean patterns over a two-year period has been unveiled by NASA.

Watch the video

Photo by Official U.S. Navy Imagery/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360