It would be nice for ONCE to hear about a mining company that acted responsibly, minimized its pollution (and captured it for responsible destruction later) and didn’t go out of its way to cause social unrest and antagonize EVERYONE around it!!!

this is a horrible story – but nothing new for the mining industry, that’s for sure… From The International Examiner:
Investigating Corporate Mining in Mindanao

There is a petition here to stop the killings and more information here on how you can help.

More on the increasingly irresponsible and corrupt mining industry generally: Environmental murders

E. Fudd

E. Fudd

How does YOUR Rep/Senator stack up? And how can you change that positively if they don’t?

LCV Congressional Environment Scorecard 2012

E. Fudd

Yet another example of man saying one thing, and doing another. Hopefully we can pull back before we kill yet another species off forever….
🙁

From Care2:
Poor Porbeagle Sharks in Desperate Need of Your Attention

Whenever someone says the word “shark,” the great white from Jaws usually swims to mind. Unfortunately, many shark species, the majority of which are harmless to humans, have paid the ultimate price for their more famous movie brethren. The porbeagle shark, an inhabitant of the colder waters of the Atlantic Ocean and a cousin of the great white, is one of those species in desperate need of assistance before it disappears from our planet’s oceans forever.

What is a Porbeagle?

Lamna nasus, also known as the porbeagle, is a relatively common shark found in the waters between Great Britain and Canada, ranging from shorelines to depths of up to 4,462 feet. The porbeagle is a stout-bodied shark with a pointed nose and a unique white spot on the rear of the dorsal fin. Like its larger cousin the great white, the porbeagle has a dual-shaded body to help it hunt fish from below and above. These sharks are also one of the only species of shark in the world that like to play — they have been found off of the Cornish coast rolling in kelp and pushing buoys around for no reason other than entertainment.

What’s the Problem?
Porbeagle sharks breed slowly and only give birth to one or two pups a year, so any significant damage done to the population takes a long time to fix. It has been estimated that it takes close to 14 years for a population to recover from excessive fishing. Porbeagles were a favorite target for fishing vessels from the 1950s to the 1990s for shark steaks until strict fishing laws were implemented during the late 1990s in order to save the species. Although fishing for porbeagles still occurs in the northwestern Atlantic, studies have shown that the number of porbeagles landed in Europe has declined in the past 20 years.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the porbeagle is listed as globally vulnerable, critically endangered in the northwest Atlantic, endangered in the northeast, and near threatened in the southern Atlantic. In both 2007 and 2010, proposals to regulate the trade of the species were presented by the European Union at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), but fishing interests successfully blocked the proposals each time.

You Can Help!
For the past couple CITES meetings, Defenders of Wildlife has been helping garner support for a new chance at getting additional international regulations for porbeagles and other shark species to better protect them against overharvesting. Brazil, Comoros, Croatia, the European Union and Egypt will all be sponsoring the porbeagle proposal, and we’ll be at the upcoming CITES conference meeting with the delegates and advocating for the proposal.

We are hoping that this time, the Parties to the Convention will recognize the dire need for international cooperation to protect porbeagle sharks. Last time, at the 2010 meeting, the porbeagle proposal lost by just a single vote! We are turning now to Panama, who could cast the decisive vote on this proposal and others like it designed to gain new protections for hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks. Click here to send a letter asking the President of Panama to support shark conservation at this year’s CITES conference!

E. Fudd

Especially when it means threatening their energy company pocket-liners!

E. Fudd

When you buy beans, remember the birds! – E. Fudd

Bird-Friendly Coffee Supports Critical Winter Habitat

It’s winter, do you know where your birds are?

For many bands of the summer songbird rainbow—Baltimore Orioles (at right), Scarlet Tanagers, and 17 species of warblers—the answer could be Central and South American coffee farms. Forty-two migratory songbird species commonly overwinter in heavily shaded coffee plantations.

And 22 of those species have significantly declining populations. Shaded coffee farms beneath forest canopy provide critical strongholds of quality habitat for Neotropical migrants, says Bridget Stutchbury, a veteran migratory bird researcher at Toronto’s York University. Birders need to use their coffee money to support this coffee habitat, she says, because tropical forest continues to be cut down at a time when songbirds can least afford to cede more ground.

Case in point, Nicaragua’s forest cover shrunk from more than 11 million acres in 1990 to 7.7 million in 2010—a 30 percent decline in just two decades. But Nicaragua still has some of the best forested habitat in Central America, because most coffee is still grown there in the same rustic way it has been since the Dutch introduced it to the New World in the 1700s.

Traditionally, coffee has been a forest-floor crop grown under a dense overhead canopy. Artificial fertilizers aren’t needed, because decaying leaf litter recycles nutrients to feed the coffee plants. Pesticides aren’t needed to control insects, because birds eat bugs like the coffee farmer’s archenemy—the coffee borer.

Rustic coffee has been grown this way on the Selva Negra coffee plantation in Nicaragua for more than 100 years. Amid Selva Negra’s verdant, lush rainforest—where vines and epiphytes crawl up the tree trunks and hang from the canopy—Resplendent Quetzals alight on branches alongside Baltimore Orioles. Howler monkeys bellow at dawn. Some mornings plantation owner Mausi Kuhl sets out slices of fresh papaya to feed Scarlet Tanagers making a migratory pit stop on her farm.

Kuhl says the vast majority of coffee in Nicaragua is still grown under forest cover, because it’s the only way many coffee farmers know. But that might be changing.

“In the north, there are a lot of rich people investing in coffee,” Kuhl said. “They’re buying up small farms and converting them into one giant sun-grown coffee operation.”

Sun-grown coffee farming is a slash-and-burn affair: forest is cut down, and pesticides and fertilizers are used to stimulate higher yields.

Money changes landscapes, as any Midwesterner in America’s Corn Belt knows. What’s needed is an economic counterbalance, a price premium paid to coffee growers who preserve standing forest and bird habitat, says Stutchbury. “We can’t demand that they don’t cut down their forests and give up money unless we’re willing to give them something as compensation,” she says.

That’s the idea behind Bird-Friendly coffee—the real deal certification from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, not just any coffee labeled shade-grown. Some coffee on the market claims to be shade-grown, but it’s grown among sparse trees. Some shade-grown coffee is even grown under the flimsy cover of banana trees fed artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

“The marketers wanted to take advantage of it,” said Robert Rice, a Smithsonian research scientist. “But just slapping a label on the coffee package and calling it ‘shade-grown’ doesn’t do anything if there’s no independent certification process.”

The Bird-Friendly certification is the gold standard, a super certification that combines organic and fair-trade standards with eco-requirements for forest shade cover, multilayered canopy, and the presence of epiphytes (havens for insects, and thereby feeding stations for birds).

“We call it shade coffee, but Bird-Friendly coffee should more appropriately be called ‘forest coffee,’” said Stutchbury.

The problem is, Bird-Friendly coffee is hard to find in stores. It currently constitutes less than 1 percent of the American coffee market. But, it’s readily available from online coffee sellers.

And considering that heavily shaded coffee farms hold seven times greater bird species diversity than sun-grown coffee, Stutchbury says it’s worth the extra effort for coffee drinkers who care about birds.

“Buying Bird-Friendly coffee is one of the best ways you can do your part to preserve wintering habitat for our migratory songbirds,” she says.

From the Seattle Times:

Once extinct here, wolverines on the rebound

“…Once shot on sight, trapped and poisoned as vermin, wolverines were extinct in Washington by the 1930s. But they are making a comeback, repopulating portions of their historic home range for the first time in decades. On Friday, they were proposed for listing as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Wolverines used to range along the Cascade Crest from the Canadian border all the way to Mount Rainier, but now remain exceedingly rare, with perhaps just 25 animals in Washington, and only about 250 to 300 in the Lower 48.

The wolverine’s return to Washington is amazing scientists. “We are witnessing what we think is the expansion of wolverine into their former range,” said Keith Aubry, research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station in Olympia. Aubry for eight winters had led the first-ever radio-tracking study of wolverines in Washington.

Genetic testing shows the animals they are finding can be traced to populations in Canada that recolonized here once the persecution stopped. Now, those animals, once just visitors, have established resident populations — and they are spreading. “We have growing evidence of them using larger and larger areas over time,” Aubry said.

So far, scientists have confirmed resident wolverine populations from the North Cascades to as far south as this bait lure south of Highway 2 west of Leavenworth. …”

E. Fudd

What’s coolest about this to me is how the answers to our problems are often staring us right in the face – look at nature and how it solved the problem, instead of always thinking we are ‘smarter’ or can ‘improve’ nature…..Kudos to the Bullitts!

E. Fudd

From The Seattle Times:

The Bullitt building follows nature’s lead in elegant efficiency

From Newsvine:

Wayward dolphin dies in polluted New York canal

NEW YORK — A wayward dolphin that meandered into a polluted urban canal, riveting onlookers as it splashed around in the filthy water and shook black gunk from its snout, died Friday evening, marine experts said.

The deep-freeze weather hadn’t seemed to faze the dolphin as it swam in the Gowanus Canal, which runs 1.5 miles through a narrow industrial zone near some of Brooklyn’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Marine experts had hoped high tide, beginning around 7:10 p.m., would help the dolphin leave the canal safely. But the dolphin was confirmed dead shortly before then, said the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, which didn’t immediately know how it died.

Earlier, with the dolphin swimming about and surfacing periodically, bundled-up onlookers took cellphone photos, and a news helicopter hovered overhead.

The New York Police Department said the marine foundation’s experts had planned to help the dolphin on Saturday morning if it didn’t get out of the canal during high tide. The foundation, based in Riverhead, on eastern Long Island, specializes in cases involving whales, dolphins, seals and sea turtles.

The filthy canal was named a Superfund site in 2010, meaning the government can force polluters to pay for its restoration. For more than a century before, coal yards, chemical factories and fuel refineries on the canal’s banks discharged everything from tar to purple ink into the water, earning it the local nickname The Lavender Lake for its unnatural hue.

The dolphin, which appeared to be about 7 feet long, likely entered the canal from the Atlantic Ocean through the Lower and Upper New York Bays and then the Gowanus Bay, which leads to the canal. It’s about 20 miles from the canal to open ocean.

It may seem strange, but it’s not uncommon for sea creatures to stray into city waters, though they don’t often swim away alive.

A dolphin was found dead last August near Long Island, south of the canal. Another washed up in June in the Hudson River near Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers sports complex.

In 2007, a baby minke whale that briefly captivated the city wandered into the Gowanus Bay and swam aimlessly before dying.

Two years later, a humpback whale took a tour of the city’s waters before leaving New York Harbor safely. The 20-foot whale was first seen in Queens before it headed for Brooklyn, took a swing through the harbor and headed toward open waters near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

E. Fudd