I’ve seen so much stuff I’d love to write about that it’s actually overwhelming. This happens from time to time, and the result is ironic in that I end up writing nothing. I’ve been tempted to just post a shitload of links to all of the things I’ve found interesting lately, but for a couple of the articles in question, the shotgun effect just won’t do them justice. I’ve been tempted to write about zoos before, and indeed I wondered whether or not I had, but the search function suggests that I have not. This cannot stand.

Like most kids, I loved going to the zoo. What isn’t cool about lions, tigers, and bears? It wasn’t until I was about thirteen or fourteen that I became aware that the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo were noticeably less excited about the cross-species experience than I was. They seemed bored at best, maybe even depressed. I’m sure anyone who’s made it to this particular corner of the Internet has noticed this about confined animals. And as we all know, teenagers aren’t very well attuned to moral ambiguity – I was no different – so I decided that zoos were bad, mmmkay? Undebatably, absolutely, unequivocally, evil.

Obviously my understanding of what zoos can and do accomplish has developed since then, and while I’m still a little uncomfortable visiting them (which is why I’m unable to illustrate this post with a photo of some captive exotic species), I appreciate that they work to conserve threatened species, and introduce the public to majestic, charismatic creatures.

Obviously, the zoo news of the day is the escape of Tatiana, one of the San Francisco zoo’s Siberian tigers (Panthera tigris altaica). Her escape and subsequent killing suggests that for some species, the good work done by zoos may not always outweigh the harm.

Life in a zoo isn't necessarily oppressive for all animals. Most animals didn't evolve to explore as much space as tigers. But tigers in most zoos are like people spending their lives locked in an empty living room. They are confined to tiny spaces, with nothing to do. Life is intensely boring, year after year. Some animal observers say zoo life may also be stressful. Tigers, who like to lurk, skulk and hide, are on display, with groups of strangers staring at them. Freedom is absent, and so are choice and control.

[…]

Roberts […] has no patience with the defense of zoos, either for their genetic storage programs or their ambassador roles. "The tiger is a perfect example of the way that zoos are missing the point about conservation," he says. Money spent on zoo tigers should be spent on protecting habitat for wild tigers. "There's an expenditure of millions if not tens of millions of dollars on captive tigers. If we really want tigers and not just a shell of the beast we call the tiger, the real emphasis needs to be first and foremost in the field."

Of course, with tigers more than perhaps any other animal, protecting habitat is more complicated than simply throwing money at the problem. Like many other exotic species, tigers are sought for specific parts of their anatomy, including their bones, organs, eyes, and even their penises, all of which are thought by some medicinal traditions to have curative properties. But cultural relativism is a sensitive issue, and not at all what I sat down to write about. What actually spurred me to write about zoos was an article from Time about a different species that is raising questions about how animals live in captivity:

Earlier this week [Germany]'s tabloid press agonized over the deaths of two tiny Eisbär cubs in a Nuremberg zoo, who were presumably eaten by their inexperienced mother, Vilma, after zookeepers decided not to intervene. Then on Wednesday, a fresh round of photographs and videos revealed that a third cub at the same zoo had been "rescued" by zookeepers after another mother, Vera, showed signs of rejecting her offspring.

Much in the same way that tigers can’t behave instinctively in captivity, captive polar bears seem to have trouble properly raising cubs. And if the ‘rescued’ cub is raised by zoo employees it is deprived of the change to learn the behaviors of its species from the mother. Still, alive is better than dead, right? Or does practice make perfect’ for mother bears that need to learn how to care for their young in captivity? Is the purpose of the zoo to keep these animals alive at any cost, or is there a point at which we’ve only saved an empty husk of the beast that once was?

In other news, tomorrow is my first day at my new job. Wish me luck.

This story was initially of only local interest to me, as the California tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense) is one of the more well-known endangered species in Santa Barbara County. The fact that the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to cut (by almost half) the proposed critical habitat designation for the species could actually impact some of the work that I’ve been doing this summer. Even so, I wasn’t thinking about posting the article until I reached the money quote:

"Reserving acreage as critical habitat just makes it more daunting to build housing that's affordable," said Joseph Perkins, CEO of the Home Builders Association of Northern California. "Setting aside habitat is just the least efficient way to protect species."

The emphasis is mine, and highlights what I think to be an alarming bit of rhetoric. What Perkins is actually saying is that setting aside habitat is not efficient for developing housing, but what his quote means to the average layperson is that setting aside habitat is not an effective way to protect species. He manages to avoid outright lying while at the same time spreading misinformation since setting aside habitat is the single most effective way to protect species.

Whether this twisting of the truth is a careful calculation on the part of the development lobby or merely circumstantial diction, I don’t know. What I do know is that the biggest failing of the Endangered Species Act after its inception in 1973 was that it only conferred legal protection on endangered organisms, failing to recognize that habitat modification has as much or more potential to eradicate a species as clearer forms of “take.” This oversight was fixed in the amendments of 1978, which included a provision stating that critical habitat must be designated for a species when it is listed. Faulty as it is (the EPA may consider non-biological factors, such as economic considerations and other impacts when designating critical habitat – exactly what seems to have happened in the case of the tiger salamander), this measure is the only existing U.S. law that allows for the protection of habitat and thus the protection of biodiversity.

I think it’s extremely important that we be able to put a human face on environmentalism – the public at large cannot be expected to care about environmental issues unless they’re framed so people understand that bad environmental policy hurts humans. I’ve become pretty well-versed in the human consequences of problems from climate change to biological invasion to the loss of global biodiversity. This, however, is a consequence that had never before occurred to me:

[Marlene] Braun had come to the Carrizo Plain three years earlier, after the U.S. Bureau of Land Management placed her in charge of the new national monument — 250,000 acres of native grasses and Native American sacred sites, embraced by low mountains, traversed by the San Andreas Fault and home to more threatened and endangered animals than any other spot in California.

About 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles, Carrizo Plain National Monument is largely unknown to the outside world. But in Braun's short tenure as monument manager, the plain had become a battleground between conservationists and the Bush administration over the fate of Western public lands.

[...]

Braun's suicide is the latest chapter in a century of conflict between cowboys and conservationists in the drought-plagued Southwest, where livestock compete with wildlife for sparse vegetation, and hungry animals can turn grassland into desert.

The full article is a long read, but one that manages to be fascinating, terrible, and beautiful at the same time. It’s a fitting eulogy for an all-too dedicated environmentalist if ever I read one.

I’ve taken at least at least one cheap shot at animal rights activists on this blog, since I believe that they often come down on the wrong side of issues for failing to look at the bigger ecological picture, but I wanted to draw attention to an issue on which we agree wholeheartedly:

An International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) probe found 9,000 live animals or products for sale in one week on trading sites like eBay.

[...]

During a three month investigation, Ifaw found some of the world's most endangered species for sale online – almost all being traded illegally.

The article goes on to explain ways that governments are already trying to deal with the problem, which makes the problem seem all the worse to me – if we’re already doing all we’re willing to in order to stem the trade of threatened and endangered species and there are 9,000 violations in a single week, then what hope is there that we can actually bring the trade to a halt?

Also of note: Britain has a Biodiversity minister?!? Why don't we Americans get us one of those?

One of the astronauts on the shuttle Discovery has commented that the environmental damage humans have left in their wake is visible from orbit. This isn’t breaking research or a peer-reviewed journal article; it’s just one woman’s observations, albeit from a perspective that none of us is likely to ever have first hand. But it’s very upsetting.

"Sometimes you can see how there is erosion, and you can see how there is deforestation. It's very widespread in some parts of the world," [Commander] Collins said in a conversation from space with Japanese officials in Tokyo, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

[...]

"The atmosphere almost looks like an eggshell on an egg, it's so very thin," she said. "We know that we don't have much air, we need to protect what we have."

Speaking of Dubya and flawed environmental policy (see previous post), a federal judge has ruled that changes made last year to Forest Service regulations were altered illegally. The specific change removed the requirement that forest managers survey for endangered or threatened species prior permitting timber extraction.

The administration said the surveys were expensive and time-consuming and had made it impossible for the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to conduct the volume of logging permitted under the Northwest plan.

Judge Pechman disagreed, but not in what I think would have been the most effective manner with respect to existing environmental law. The article is short on details, but seems to indicate that Pechman’s ruling was based on the Federal Government’s failure to properly examine the impact of changing the survey requirement, which they would be required to do by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA mandates that an Environmental Impact Report be conducted for “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” Usually this implies development activities, but policy changes certainly aren’t excluded by the text of the statute.

My inclination would be to suggest that the rule change violated the Endangered Species Act by creating a situation in which listed species might be harmed by logging activities in areas where they were not properly identified (i.e. significant risk of harm to a listed species is tantamount to actual harm to the species). I expect though, that a ruling based on the ESA would be more likely to be appealed since it involves a liberal approach to the takings clause:

ESA §3(18) The term "take" means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct

In light of this loose interpretation, perhaps Judge Pechman’s ruling was the most effective that could be made; it doesn’t sound like the Forest Service is planning on appealing the decision, but rather that they intend to wait for a final order from the court and then search it for loopholes.

I’m gonna try to keep my eye on this one, but it’s not exactly front page news, so if anyone out there sees a relevant item that I fail to comment on, don’t hesitate to forward it to me or just register and blog it in the user blogs section of the site.

There’s a fun set of posts up at the Environmental Economics blog that I highly recommend checking out. In the first post John Whitehead constructs a fantastic little model for relating trigger price (the price of oil at which it becomes economically viable to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) to household willingness to pay (or existence value) for lost profits due to environmental concerns. In the second post he builds in a ten year gap between the decision to drill and the commencement of drilling and explores the effect of different discount rates. At the very end John also offers a link to the spreadsheet that he used to make his calculations, so if you’re inclined to tinker, you can play with the model yourself.

Happy drilling!

A few days ago I mentioned a recent challenge to the claim by a Cornell-led team of ornithologists that the ivory-billed woodpecker was not, as previously thought, extinct. These doubts were upsetting not because they were necessarily illegitimate or unfounded, but rather because they suggested that the celebration surrounding the return of the ivory-billed woodpecker might have been for naught. Hence my happiness at discovering that the Cornell team provided the doubters with heretofore undisclosed audio recordings made in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Arkansas, where the bird was thought to have been sighted.

The recordings come from over 17,000 hours of audio recorded by the Cornell team, which are being scoured for signs of the ivory-billed woodpecker with computer assistance. Nuthatch has the inside scoop for those of you who are ornithologically inclined, but what the computer is searching for is a distinctive double rap, which is characteristic of the ivory-billed woodpecker, genus Campephilus, and dissimilar from that of the visually similar pileated woodpecker, genus Dryocopus.

"We were very skeptical of the first published reports, and thought that the previous data were not sufficient to support this startling conclusion," Prum said. "But the thrilling new sound recordings provide clear and convincing evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct."

Remember the hubbub about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, and the rash of subsequent postings about other rediscovered species? A few biologists seem to think that the announcement was a bit hasty, and will be publishing a paper critiquing the evidence of the ivory-billed’s return. The New York Times article has a dearth of helpful information on the nature of the critique, and seems a bit biased toward the doubters (most notable is that the image they chose to feature with the article looks like it was drawn by a detail-oriented five-year-old). This is in kind with the traditional journalistic fallacy of assuming the most recent science news is also the most accurate.

Nuthatch at Bootstrap Analysis picks up the slack, discussing all of the evidence of the ivory-billed’s return that we’ve seen, possible problems with it, and aspects of the current scientific and political climate that might influence one side or the other. Her belief is that the ivory-billed woodpecker is out there, but I think that her most important reminder is the following:

...most of all we need to respect that the model for the scientific method relies not on taking matters at face value, but examining facts critically by offering challenges and counter-challenges.

Update: Another post from Nuthatch regarding the particular journal in which the critique will be published.

There are some excellent predictions in the Onion’s recent issue circa 2056. The first of two environmentally-relevant future-article deals with overcrowding at Yellowstone National Parking Lot, and as for the second, well, you’ve already heard about peak oil, but have you wondered about the possibility of peak solar?

Last (but certainly not least) a piece that a friend stumbled across while doing some Internet research on threatened beach birds: F*** Snowy Plovers and Their Hippie Protectors.

I promise to go back to real science blogging soon.