• An okay article (“Why Africa’s National Parks are Failing to Save Wildlife”) with some terrific and nuanced comments folllowing.
• A British otter has been spotted climbing a tree. I have failed to come up with a sufficiently dry comment about the non-news-worthiness of this story. But then, why am I linking to it?
• Yasuni NP has been getting some attention as one of the most biodiverse areas in the world, after a new paper in PLoS ONE pretty much confirmed that. You may recall Yasuni as the unfortunate hostage of Ecuador’s President Raphael Correa.
• Conservation biologists are kind of lazy when it comes to publishing.
• Java’s increasingly empty forests are dwindling to just 10,000 hectares (about the size of San Francisco County).
• The world’s ‘most miserable looking creature‘ (click through, seriously. You do not take animals that evolved in pressures many times our atmosphere and put them in a lab. Of course it’s miserable) is maybe going extinct.
• New sighting of ivory billed woodpecker probably not an ivory billed woodpecker.

• 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.

• Sorry I missed it on the 12th, but Revkin wrote an elegant piece on Darwin and conservation.
• Shifting baselines are a real problem.
• The stimulus bill has lots of money for protected areas.
• Erik Meijaard writes about what it’s like being a conservationist for TNC in Indonesia: “much of our time is spent in offices and meeting rooms.” One sentence in particular stands out: “…nature conservation has little to do with nature, but a lot to do with people.”
• At least 235 species occur at both the north and south poles.
• The editor of Conservation Letters looks back on its first year (and a succesful year it’s been!).

• The UNEP-WCMC has released their first annual report (pdf, French+Spanish also available) on the state of the world’s protected areas. They’re also conducting a survey from users to improve future reports.
• Andy Revkin wonders if satellites and supercomputers fit in a stimulus bill. I’m not sure what the problem is. It’s a stimulus bill, which means we’re trying to spend money. Lots of it. And funding things that are useful is a great way to spend money. Meanwhile, the Defenders of Wildlife run down some of the other green jobs that’ll be funded in the bill (habitat restoration, visitor center restoration, etc.)
• And speaking of Andy Revkin, he, too, is wondering about science advocacy. But I think we are on opposite sides of the issue. As one commenter notes: “In short, we all have the right to be people or citizens even if we are “scientists”, as long as we make it clear when we are being what.” In fact, I believe that scientists are held to a much higher standard for advocacy than any other class of citizens. As though science were the only field in which The Truth can be known, so while fudging numbers in other policy arenas may be acceptable, in the scientific world it’s verboten. We should have the same standard as everybody else — ideally, that would raise the burden of proof for everybody else, but in the short term, I think it’s imperative that we actually lower the standard for scientist “pundits.” Anyway, the comments section on the Dot Earth blog is (uniquely) insightful and worthwhile reading.
• President Correa of Ecuador still hasn’t decided whether to offer oil leases in Yasuni National Park. Yasuni is a biodiversity and oil hotspot, and as discussed previously, Correa is looking to make up some of the money that his government would’ve earned from the leases.
• Buck Denton reviews the recent news that a species, extinct since 2000, has been cloned. The first cloned individual died shortly after birth.

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…

• Up in Nunavut, the Canadian Government will be protecting an additional 450,000 hectares of Arctic Wilderness, including an Important Bird Area.
• BLDGBLOG contemplates the re-wilding of foreclosed U.S. neighborhoods.