All of you out there with consblog.org as your homepage will be dispirited to learn that, in biodiversity battle, the forces of darkness have brought the fight to the Web. The BBC, reporting from CITES in Doha, uncovers online lion cub auctions. Lovely.

Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall passed away over the weekend. He did as much as Muir and Roosevelt to create the Myth of Wilderness that inspired so many Americans, helping to enact the Wilderness Act in 1964 and helping to create Redwood National Park, Cape Cod National Seashore, and Point Reyes National Seashore. He fought in WWII. He led a lawsuit in the late 1970s against the government on behalf of Navajo uranium miners. The Udalls are one of the great (perhaps unsung) political clans of the country. He was a Great American, and one of my heroes: “Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.”

The University of Arizona houses his manuscript collection.

Bob Edwards remembers Steward Udall: “I have lived in Washington, DC far too long to have political heroes, but Stewart Udall was the model of what a public servant should be.”

The entirety of “Our Vanishing Wilderness” is now available online.

• I don’t know how long it’s been up, but the University of Wisconsin has a huge collection of digital archives relating to Aldo Leopold. You can see his original Forest Service working papers and things.
• The likely extinct Yangtze River dolphin is becoming extinct in our minds, as well.
• An eloquent call for evolutionary biologists to be included in conservation. A lot of the points are accurate, but it’s frustrating to work with paleontologists who work on the time scale of “everything goes extinct. You need to worry about lineages.” But what about THE PANDAS???
• File under: Only Joel Berger. He and Jon Beckmann published a piece recently in Conservation Biology showing that towns focusing on energy extraction around Yellowstone had a disproportionate rise in human sexual predators. Ladies and gentleman, your newest ecosystem service.
• The Interior Department recently listed 48 species in Hawaii as endangered and is trying to put in place a landscape-scale plan for their recovery, rather than a species-by-species plan. That raised the number of listed species under Obama from 2 to 50.
• A longish article on the black market in bushmeat trade in the United States with a shout out to a certain JB.
• Beware the pizzly bear.
• Edward Tufte’s epic book on multiple regression, now on-line.

There’s been a lot of news about sea lions in California recently. It started when the famous sea lions at Pier 39 in San Francisco went missing (don’t worry, they’re coming back). Then Oregon wildlife officials started euthanizing sea lions for eating the endangered chinook salmon. Now this from the LA Times, where “starving sea lion pups” are showing up on beaches in Orange County. Many of these stories present the phenomenon as something of a mystery: something unusual is going on with sea lions. A suggestion that it might have something to do with El Niño.

Thanks to the internet (and a proxy to Cal’s library), that can easily be checked. A search for California sea lions from 1998-1999 on LexisNexis reveals:

CONSERVATION officials have found at least 700 pups of the rare New Zealand sea lion dead on a sub-Antarctic island, adding to reports of sea lion deaths in California, Chile and Peru. (The Scotsman, Jan 30 1998)

BABY seals and sea lions, deprived of food by the oceanic warming of El Nino, the weather phenomenon, are dying by the thousand on the islands off southern California. (Times of London, Dec 9 1997)

Note also that, perhaps not coincidentally, this was the year that orcas were first spotted hunting sea otters.

Yes, I’m still here. No, I’m not sure if this is a repeat.

Huh. Okay…

Something interesting going on with the California State Parks Foundation:

In the last several years, California’s state park system has been proposed to be shut down to the public – first in January 2008 and again in May 2009.  These proposals have been eye-opening to all Californians who support their state parks.  Yet often in times of crisis, opportunities and new ideas emerge.   In this moment, we believe it is critical to begin a public dialogue about what excellence in California’s state park system should look like.

They’re opening up an online survey to solicit views on how the state park system should be run.