(A Beautiful Diary, and you make quote me on that – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Not sure if there’s really a “Foghorn Leghorn” coral, but the other two appear to have just paved a path for the few remaining penguins and the polar bears. The Christian Science Monitor reports: New tool to fight global warming: Endangered Species Act? A recent deal to protect the habitat of endangered coral may offer US environmentalists new leverage.
The elkhorn and staghorn coral won protected status under the ESA in May 2006. But it took a second legal battle to win a preservation of the corals’ “critical habitat,” part of last week’s settlement between environmentalists and the US fisheries service.
The act’s leverage will grow, environmentalists say, as climate change becomes recognized as a factor in species’ decline. The number of species-recovery plans that cite global warming as a damaging factor has gone from zero as recently as 1990 to 141 today – with most of the growth since 2000.
While that’s still just 9 percent of the 1,494 species listed at one time or another, the increase suggests that a large group of species still awaiting listing will have global warming cited as a major cause in their decline. The polar bear, 12 species of penguins, and the Kittlitz’s Murrelet, an Alaskan bird that nests on the edges of glaciers, are all candidates, Mr. Suckling says.
Note: You may recall Mr. Suckling’s work from melvin’s writing recently about a mother of a lawsuit v. Interior ahead. Rest up Mr. Suckling!
Those of us who care can certainly use all of the tools made available, however blunt, as our tool box has been robbed blind over the past seven years. No doubt, we can all certainly use a little good news now and then too. But what drove me to blog this article is the punchline at the end:
“It’s pretty exciting to find that a lowly marine invertebrate might actually someday be the legal catalyst for rulings against greenhouse-gas emissions,” says Andrew Baker, a University of Miami marine biologist specializing on climate change impact on coral. “It’s like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.”
Have you hugged a lowly marine invertebrate today?
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Real life is way to scary. Now if we could just speed this legal action up a few frames…
Thanks.
I seem to have a slot at 9 pm.
Would you object to being front paged?
No tending beyond what you desire.
T&P representin’!
lowly marine invertebrate… sometimes it happens that the least among us can make the most impact
thanks for your hope-inspiring diary!!!
being dragged by the tail feathers by that teeny little ‘chickenhawk’. a much needed giggle tonight, thanks.
beautiful diary, too. though it sucks to have to think of legislation as part of the ‘circle of life’ and interconnectedness…when it works to ‘our’ favor, ill take it!!!
That’s what first put me onto the problem of global warming, some 20 years ago. Because of the teaching of Roger Revelle (same guy who planted the bee in Al Gore’s bonnet).
Though in reality, an awful lot of the damage to elkhorn and staghorn comes from good ol’ fashioned anchors. Then again, hurricanes are hard on ’em too, since they’re very shallow water species – the damage is both mechanical and because so much rain can reduce salinity enough to bother them, too.
Some people have wondered if corals might be – in some ways – more sensitive than arctic species to global warming. Because they’re adapted to a very temperature range. There were some studies in Hawaii back in the 1980s of effluent from a power plant. Elevated T of less than 2 degrees C over a modestly extended period was enough to cause a lot of mortality.
Isn’t a foghorn leghorn some kind of chicken?