• 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.

• 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.

There’s a letter in this week’s Nature that describes the ongoing funding situation in Yasuni NP in Ecuador. Yasuni is incredibly biodiverse, one of the most intact portions of the Amazon. It’s also loaded with oil. Last summer, the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa let the international community know he would be willing to deny the oil lease applications if global funders could pony up some cash to make up for the lost revenue.

If this is how Ecuador wants to go about business, I guess that’s fine. Hopefully more countries will cough up enough money before it’s too late and the forest will be, once again, protected. I am no stranger to the fact that developing countries are being forced by the world at large to limit their development through extractive resources in the name of conservation. It’s a totally legitimate moral dilemma. It’s also nice of Correa to be offering a discount — 50% of projected revenues — but it’s still $350 million for 10 years. Were I in charge of some global bank or monetary fund or what have you, I’d gladly give him the money. That doesn’t make what he’s doing right. It’s blackmail. Correa’s behaving no differently from the guerilla gorilla hunters in Virunga.

Protecting places like Yasuni is a goal that we, as a world should — and do! — have. We need to work out a way to make it economically feasible for struggling countries to protect their natural diversity. But threatening to destroy something in order to achieve your own economic goals is not a legitimate approach. What happens when the Pope decides he could get a little more cash by putting in a football stadium where the Sistine Chapel sits?