• 17 new invert species being described in South Africa.
• “In the future, giant, autonomous fish farms may whir through the open ocean, mimicking the movements of wild schools or even allowing fish to forage “free range” before capturing them once again. Already scientists have constructed working remote control cages.” I try not to get too much into semiotics/the simulacrum, but seriously. We have to build robots to simulate what once worked just fine? How about just not over-harvesting? “In the future, the ocean will be teeming with fish, an astounding return to a once-extraordinary abundance.” WTF SCIENCE.

• Nice and morbid article on the work of a fellow Berkeleyan Steve Bellan on anthrax in Etosha NP, with pictures.
• The Carteret Islands are being inundated by rising sea levels, forcing migration of about 800 of the 1,300 inhabitants. This spring, Dan Box traveled to the islands to report on the evacuation.
• Carol Kaesuk Yoon on “Naming Nature.”
• National Red Lists is a new website spearheaded by ZSL to consolidate national-level information on species declines.
• An interview with Erik Patel on the ecological ramifications of the political unrest in Madagascar, though take with a grain of salt because his solution to the poverty/conservation problem is birth control and tourism…
• It’s been a slightly environmental few days for the Obama administration, with Tom Vilsack (Sec of Ag) releasing a new vision for the Forest Service (Defenders of Wildlife seems to like it), and the Obama family taking a trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

• Himalayas proving to be a hotspot for describing new species.
• A roundup of the recent SCB conference in China, from CI.
• The amazing impact of a city abandoned 900 years ago on crops grown in drought conditions, today. So, the next time somebody tells you there’s no such thing as wilderness, that human’s impact on the land lasts longer than you could imagine, BELIEVE IT.It’s true in America, too, where old American Indian middens still have higher levels of non-native plants.
• Extinctions can be correlated with genetic history. Not surprising, but interesting.

Climate refugees.

So says the NY Times. It could very well be that, in the United States, the last coal-fired power plant has already been built. That’s quite a thought.

The story of the kids who made the weather balloon that took shots from space has been making the rounds (thanks, Amanda!) has been picked up by the Big Picture, thank God. Here they are in large format glory. Really shows how important using a good atmospheric model to remove haze can be…

In case you missed this article from the Times on Obama’s environmental policy, and are curious what the plan is for Interior, here’s all you need: “‘We are putting together an inventory of all of those actions,’ Mr. Salazar said. ‘Some we will reverse, some we will change and some we may keep.’”

All clear? It’s that kind of in-depth coverage that has brought the newspaper industry to such great heights.

Guano Mining, Navassa Island

The George W. Bush presidency was airlifted away on Tuesday, letting historians get to work making claims about just what it all meant. These scholars were, if we are to believe cable-news talking heads and the former president himself, his target audience during his lame-duck months—the “legacy building” interregnum.  Following in the footsteps of his predecessor (Clinton signed his Roadless Area Conservation Rule, keeping 58.5 million acres of national forest land away from extractive industries, just over a week before moving out of the White House), Bush looks to etch a place for himself in the exalted narrative of the history of conservation in the United States.  Harnessing the power of the dubiously applicable 1906 American Antiquities Act, he created by executive decree marine reserves throughout the Pacific—in the Northern Mariana Island, the equatorial Line Islands, and the Rose Atoll, a tiny ring of coral making up a portion of American Samoa.

The story told in the media is one strictly about conservation, sparing few superlatives. White House Chairman on Environmental Quality James L. Connaughton (a former energy lobbyist, Superfund opponent, and author of a 1993 article entitled “Defending Charges of Environmental Crime—Growth Industry of the ‘90s”) raved that “These locations are truly among the last pristine environments on Earth.” Agence France-Presse’s account announced these three reserves will “nudge out the Phoenix Island Protected Area, established in 2008 by the South Pacific nation of Kiribati as the world’s largest protected area,” the latter’s measly 164,200 square miles trumped by Bush’s 195,280. The Pew Group’s Joshua Reichert went on Living on Earth last week and admitted, “Frankly, it’s more of the surface of the Earth that George W. Bush has protected than any other person in history.”

So we can tell this story with the former president our modern equivalent of by-gone macho conversationalists Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But what other story could be told? What happens when we try to put these reserves not into the history of conservation but into the history of these watery parts of the world?

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The NY Times today has an article on the rangers, gorillas and rebels in and around Virunga. Honestly, it should probably be about 3-5 times longer, though that’s almost certainly the fault of the editor. Now, if you want some nice world-view shift, go ahead and read this article from the LA Times on cell phones in national parks in the U.S. Reading the two back to back is stunning.

Virunga: “We figured if the gorillas can eat leaves, so can we.”

Yellowstone: “I’d love to get my pictures on Facebook tonight.”

Virunga: “I put her in my arms and just ran… I thought she was dead.”

Yellowstone: “One of the things that makes it [the most special times in their lives] is the ability to hear the splash of a geyser . . . and not having that sound drowned out by somebody having a conversation with their family back in New Jersey.”

Oh, America. Despite the whole cell phone / WiFi thing being unmeasurably unimportant as compared to the problems in Virunga these days, it’s another worthwhile thought exercise. Should hotels in our protected areas carry wireless internet? Keep in mind there is a specific policy against televisions…

Two great ways to get your science written up in the New York Times: link it to climate change or to Thoreau. Boston University’s Richard Primack and Harvard’s Charles Davis hedged their bets and got lucky yesterday. It seems lots of flowers present in Thoreau’s journals are nowhere to be found by industrious grad students these days, and those that remain are blooming earlier in the year. It’s just more bad news for proud Yankees already wringing their hands over their sugar maples turning Canadian.

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