Tag: extinction

Oil Booms & Bird Habitat – NWF visits important bird rookery

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

Americans acknowledge there is a problem.  Petroleum pours out from a broken pipe.  Thousands of barrels of fuel flow freely through the Gulf of Mexico, just as they have for more than a month.  Plants, animals, and people are affected.  People express distress.  Millions are dismayed. What can BP do. Indeed what can any company or citizens do? Most call upon the President. Mister Obama, the electorate pleads, please, protect us.  These same citizens ignore that the protection we need is from ourselves.  Our present circumstances are a reflection of our past.  Many Americans have forgotten an earlier time, when another of this country’s Chief Executives attempted to avoid the nightmare we experience today.

— Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases.

— Nearly half of the world’s species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

— Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

— One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries.

http://www.rain-tree.com/facts…

Cross-posted at DailyKos and was at Progressive Blue.

PBS will be celebrating Earth Day with a special edition of American Experience called “Earth Days” that tracks the American ecological movement and also by showing “Food Inc” on April 21th.

On most PBS stations at 8 PM tonight “Nature” will show “The Thin Green Line” for a second time. It is an indictment of the human race, the fact that we are wiping out the frogs and amphibians and the we will also be sure to follow, has to be the most motivating hour of television I’ve ever seen.

I’ll update my original review below the fold but it would be wonderful if we can get others to watch the devastation so more people will take action. Perhaps you’ve already seen this “greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs.” and you know that discussing the nature photography alone will get friends to watch. Whatever it takes, people need to get involved and tonight’s PBS line up can make a difference.

Tigers are on the brink of extinction.  This fact brought me initially surprise, and then immediately grief, despair, rage, anger and sadness.  So, I’ve written about it– this is the fourth essay in a week — in an effort to alert others to this catastrophe.  I consider the extinction of tigers and other big cats an environmental emergency, an impending disaster.

Tiger in Captivity

The Tiger is almost extinct.  This situation is beyond disquieting. It’s a very scary, dire one for our small planet.  As Meteor Blades wrote yesterday

“Sometimes fury and despair are the only responses that one can come up with. It seems as if nothing anybody does – laws, scoldings, appeals to people’s better nature – will stop this needless, heedless destruction.

Please join me in the jungle in Asia.

Cross posted from DailyKos.

This is a very disturbing “canary in the coal mine” environmental diary. I’m sure the twenty-seven year old PBS series Nature needs no introduction but this week’s episode The Thin Green Line was by far the most devastating to watch. We are wiping out the frogs and amphibians.

The thirty second preview offers a quick look and some amazing photography;

But the entire program points out that we have created the perfect storm against our amphibians.  

On this Halloween, who needs ghosts and goblins? The real spooky stuff is in the science.

First, from Science Daily:

The greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history also may have been one of the slowest, according to a study that casts further doubt on the extinction-by-meteor theory.

Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying 250 million years ago, said USC doctoral student Catherine Powers.

Writing in the November issue of the journal Geology, Powers and her adviser David Bottjer, professor of earth sciences at USC, describe a slow decline in the diversity of some common marine organisms.

Obviously, this wasn’t a human-caused event, but it demonstrates just how catastrophic such a catastrophe can be. As this NASA article explains, in the Great Dying, up to 90% of marine species and up to 70% of land species were wiped out. All life on Earth almost ended, even as it was still beginning, and global warming seems to have been one of the reasons why.

There is such a steady stream of stories on the current era of global warming, but here are just two new examples…

It’s more than global warming and climate change.

From the Guardian:

The future of humanity has been put at risk by a failure to address environmental problems including climate change, species extinction and a growing human population, according to a new UN report.

In a sweeping audit of the world’s environmental wellbeing, the study by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that governments are still failing to recognise the seriousness of major environmental issues.

It doesn’t get much more blunt, although don’t expect to hear much about it from the corporate media.

The study, involving more than 1,400 scientists, found that human consumption had far outstripped available resources. Each person on Earth now requires a third more land to supply his or her needs than the planet can supply, it finds.

Meanwhile, biodiversity is seriously threatened by the impact of human activities: 30% of amphibians, 23% of mammals and 12% of birds are under threat of extinction, while one in 10 of the world’s large rivers runs dry every year before it reaches the sea.

This is a follow-up to a similar study, made in 1987. It’s a progress report.

As the UNEP press release explains:

GEO-4, the latest in UNEP’s series of flagship reports, assesses the current state of the global atmosphere, land, water and biodiversity, describes the changes since 1987, and identifies priorities for action. GEO-4 is the most comprehensive UN report on the environment, prepared by about 390 experts and reviewed by more than 1 000 others across the world.

It salutes the world’s progress in tackling some relatively straightforward problems, with the environment now much closer to mainstream politics everywhere. But despite these advances, there remain the harder-to-manage issues, the “persistent” problems. Here, GEO-4 says: “There are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable.”