WILD

Fish Digestive Systems, Bony Fish Excrement and Why You Really Need to Care

We can now add yet another item to the long list of creative ways in which we are undermining our planet and ourselves: creating a serious problem by over-extracting a natural resource, and then compounding that problem in unintended and unanticipated ways... We've known for a long time that we are drastically overfishing our oceans, and we've known for a long time that many fisheries are now crashing, or on the verge of collapse. We know that lower fish stocks will have consequences for global food supplies, and in particular that poor coastal communities in developing countries will be among ... Read More

A “New Wave” of Protection for Marine Wilderness Areas

In 2006 the Government of Kiribati established the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, a marine protected area covering almost 160,000 square miles (an area the size of California) - almost 12% of the Micronesian country's waters - and safeguarding an area of immense biological richness. Also in 2006, the Bush Administration established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, protecting the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands: at almost 140,000 square miles, this area is larger than all of the United States' national parks combined. Finally, this year, one of the final acts of the Bush Administration was to add the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, ... Read More

US Senate Shows Initiative on Wilderness Preservation

The U.S. Senate didn't take long to address some unfinished business from last year, passing an omnibus lands bill with a resounding majority of 66-12 in an unusual Sunday session on January 11th. The bill, S.22 sponsored by Senator Bingaman, D-N.Y., is entitled "A bill to designate certain land components of the National Wilderness Preservation System, to authorize certain programs and activities in the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and for other purposes". It consists of an amalgam of 160 different bills, including many new or expanded wilderness areas. In fact, the bill provides protections to ... Read More

REDD ALERT

The Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recognizes that forests and wilderness are vital in the fight against global warming, so it allows developed countries to get emissions reductions credits for planting trees in developing countries. But the Kyoto Protocol has a major shortcoming – it doesn’t provide credits for protecting existing forests from getting cleared, even though logging or burning forests releases millions of tons of carbon. About 20% of global annual carbon emissions come from deforestation. Many people don’t realize that the third and fourth largest emitters of global greenhouse gases are Indonesia ... Read More

Letting Nature Do the Job

Wetlands have long been viewed by human societies as unproductive lands, and as a result huge expanses of wetlands have been dredged and filled all over the world – converted to agriculture or put to other uses. In the last few decades however, the importance of wetlands has gradually become clearer, and as a result, many countries have undertaken a number of measures to try to mitigate or offset the continuing loss of these important freshwater systems. We came to realize that wetlands provide a valuable flood control function, so we tried to replace natural flood controls by building levees. We ... Read More

Backpedaling on Biofuels

As concern over global warming intensified over the past few years, biofuels derived from food crops quickly emerged as a practical answer to the energy crisis. Adding corn ethanol to gasoline or using palm oil for biodiesel makes the fuel burn more cleanly, stretches oil supplies, and perhaps most attractive to some politicians, provides a nice boost to big agribusiness. In Europe and in the US, increasing biofuels was mandated by law. Fortunately the rush to biofuels production has slowed because of a number of well-documented negative side effects. Biofuels production contributed to a global food shortage and a rise in ... Read More