News Roundup

  • Help conserve the boreal forest in Canada; sign a letter of support for sustainable land-use planning. Scientists only.
  • The Pakistan Supreme Court shut down a potential tourist development in a sensitive area of forest in the Punjab. It sounds like (at least from the WWF press release) they were particularly responsive to the argument that the forest was providing an important ecosystem service that guaranteed better water quality. Ecosystem services for the win?
  • A quick review of what’s happening in the Endangered Species Office at USFWS. The good news: they’re actually reviewing petitions for listing, something Bush pretty much never did.
  • A long essay on the problems with strict protected areas (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4). It’s well-written and nuanced, but as with most critiques of protected areas approach to conservation, it fails to value the importance that some people have for “human-less” landscapes. That is, the inability to distinguish between Manhattan and Yellowstone. They both have humans in them, after all, right? Nevertheless, it does highlight the problems of a PA approach for conservation, which tends to be lacking when criticizing it from a sociological / historical philosophy.
  • And yet, here’s an interview with E.O. Wilson: “It sounds immodest but I call it Wilson’s law. It says that if you save the living environment, you will automatically save the physical environment. But if you only try to save the physical environment, you will lose them both…when we talk about the world going green, the media and the public think of pollution or fresh-water shortage. They understand, and want to do something. But that is the physical world; concern for the living environment has been slow to take off.”
  • Good article on assisted migration, though it could’ve been better with a recognition that species might be considered, biogoegraphically, more or less native to a continent. Migrating them to the next mountain top is really different from moving them across an ocean.
Posted by Tim on August 26th, 2009 • • Add a comment
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