Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts
Saturday, February 05, 2011
Polar Bear Cub Starves to Death in the Arctic
This is actually one of the most heartbreaking videos I have seen. It shows a mother polar bear with two of her cubs in Wapusk National Park in northern Manitoba. The mother is malnourished and two of her cubs are starving. This video shows the final moments in a polar bear cub's life as it dies of starvation.
The mother and cubs have been driven onto dry land due to melting sea ice, but there is little food for them there, so many of them are starving. The first cub died shortly after the video was shot. The second cub died two days later. Both probably died of starvation.
In the video, the temperature is below 0 degree F. The mother bear is malnourished, with little to no fat reserves, and she is having a hard time getting comfortable. Another bear, possibly a male, approached the mother and her cubs. He may be trying to pray on the cubs! The mother chases him off, but she doesn't have much energy to do so.
Afterward, one of the cubs, shaking and cold, begins to go into convulsions, possibly from hunger. He rests for about 10 minutes, then goes into a second set of convulsions. This set of shakes lasts longer than the first one. You are basically watching this poor bear die right in front of your eyes!
This video is actually sickening!
The Western Hudson Bay population of polar bears is being forced ashore each summer due to diminishing sea ice. They are now spending up to eight months on shore, where there is little food. During this time, they are normally utilizing sea ice to access their main food, seals. This polar bear population is expected to go extinct in 25-30 years if things continue as they are.
Polar bears are completely dependent upon large expanses of sea ice to hunt, feed and survive. They use the sea ice as a platform to capture seals and other prey.
Global warming is rapidly melting their ice and lengthening the ice-free season, forcing bears to spend ever-longer periods of time on land, where there is little for them to eat. The longer bears like the ones in this video are stranded on land, the more likely they are to starve.
Polar bears were listed as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 2008 due to sea-ice declines and dwindling populations. The U.S. population is projected to go extinct by 2050 if climate change is not reined in soon; the entire species may disappear by the end of the century.
The polar bears of western Hudson Bay are on the front line of global warming impacts: their population declined by 22 percent between 1987 and 2004 and may be the first driven extinct by climate change.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Air Pollution Kills 300-700,000 Per Year
In the world, that is. Pretty amazing figure, but it's apparently solid, and if anything, it is conservative. Not only that, but 50 million kids cough chronically due to smog too. It's from a book called The Natural Wealth Of Nations: Harnessing The Market For The Environment by David Roodman.
Roodman's book is not bad, but he does advocate for "a market for the right to pollute." The problem is that if we accept his figures that air pollution kills 500,000 people a year, then a market for the right to pollute boils down to a buying and selling disease and murder. How can that possibly be justified?
A steady theme in this book is one of environmental taxes. If we taxed pollution, we could cut back on taxes on individuals and business by up to 15% and still be revenue neutral.
Furthermore, experiments with pollution taxation in Europe have shown that when the taxes are high enough (for instance, taxing companies for the discharge they put into waterways) the result is typically a rapid decline in pollution. The very notion of taxing pollution has been ferociously opposed by business here in the US and it has never gotten off the ground.
It is little discussed in the debate over trading pollution credits, but under such a regime, it is quite possible for a business to invent new sources of pollution and then go to the government to set up a market for that pollution and then to profit from selling the rights to that pollution. This is about as perverse as things can get, but it shows you just how nuts capitalism can be.
Roodman's book is not bad, but he does advocate for "a market for the right to pollute." The problem is that if we accept his figures that air pollution kills 500,000 people a year, then a market for the right to pollute boils down to a buying and selling disease and murder. How can that possibly be justified?
A steady theme in this book is one of environmental taxes. If we taxed pollution, we could cut back on taxes on individuals and business by up to 15% and still be revenue neutral.
Furthermore, experiments with pollution taxation in Europe have shown that when the taxes are high enough (for instance, taxing companies for the discharge they put into waterways) the result is typically a rapid decline in pollution. The very notion of taxing pollution has been ferociously opposed by business here in the US and it has never gotten off the ground.
It is little discussed in the debate over trading pollution credits, but under such a regime, it is quite possible for a business to invent new sources of pollution and then go to the government to set up a market for that pollution and then to profit from selling the rights to that pollution. This is about as perverse as things can get, but it shows you just how nuts capitalism can be.
References
- Roodman, David Malin. 1998. The Natural Wealth Of Nations: Harnessing The Market For The Environment. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
On Spotted Owls
There are three subspecies of spotted owls in the US. The Northern Spotted Owl (NSO) ranged from Oregon and Washington down into the California coast ranges and over into the Siskiyous and Cascades. The California Spotted Owl (CASPO) lives in the Sierra Nevada, down into the Tehachapis and and into the mountain ranges of Southern California.
The Southern California population is isolated in mountain ranges that are not connected and is projected to go extinct over at most 100-200 years. Before mass settlement of Southern California, CASPO may have moved from range to range via river corridors, but now that is not possible. The Techachapi CASPO is probably not sustainable either. CASPO also lives in the Coast Ranges south of San Fransisco.
The Mexican Spotted Owl lives in the Southwest, mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. It was listed as threatened recently and recently had a huge amount of critical habitat set aside. It seems to be threatened by cattle grazing, but I forget how. Serious overgrazing in the Southwest seems to be devastating the grass and forb understory of the old growth pine forests.
This overgrazing has promoted heavy stands of small trees that are susceptible to drought and fire. The truth is that the Southwest should not even be grazed in the first place; it's too dry and cows just devastate arid regions.
Cows evolved in cold, moist England and they are not well suited to arid regions. During the hot, dry months, they congregate in riparian areas, which they utterly devastate. The Eastern US is much moister, and cattle grazing causes few problems there.
The NSO was declared a threatened species in 1990, setting off the timber wars in the Pacific Northwest. Clinton pushed through a crappy Northwest Forest Plan, which sold out way more to industry than was necessary. Logging in the region declined by 80%, but they had been horribly overcutting for decades.
As one might expect, the new regulations did not save the NSO, and it has continued to decline at 3.5% per year. The continuing decline of the NSO means that it may soon have to be uplisted from Threatened to Endangered.
In the far north, in northern Washington and British Colombia, the NSO is declining at about 7% per year. In southwestern B.C., there are only about 50 owls left and they are going to go extinct in the past few years unless something is done.
All spotted owls have selected for old growth forests. A new threat is the Barred Owl, which is a relative of the Spotted Owl, coming down from the north. The Barred Owl is much more tolerant of the open conditions created by massive clearcutting, and is displacing Spotted Owls in many places. In particular, it is interbreeding with them, creating a new hybrid type.
Loggers claim that the Barred Owl invasion is the true cause of the NSO decline, but they are lying as usual. The Barred Owl invasion is due to the more open conditions created by out of control clearcutting for decades in the Northwest.
The CASPO was petitioned twice for listing, in 2000 and 2004. I haven't read the petitions, but I have read hundreds of pages of studies on the CASPO. The CASPO, last I heard, was declining at a greater rate than even the NSO. In 2006, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declined to list the CASPO as an endangered species.
That strikes me as a wrong decision, but Bush is listing species at a rate even 85% lower than his rightwing father, George Bush. Bring back George Bush Sr.! As we can see, with the years, the US Republican Party, and consequently the US Whites they represent, have gotten increasingly virulent in the attitude of hatred and destruction towards our precious environment.
Next to the immigrant hordes flooding our shores, our precious slice of American Gaia has no greater enemy than White Americans.
What is curious about this is that White nationalists insist that only Whites are altruistic enough to care enough to be environmentalists in any way. It's an interesting argument, but it's sure not true in the US, and almost everyone making this odd argument is voting for the party of Nuke Gaia. Go figure.
The Southern California population is isolated in mountain ranges that are not connected and is projected to go extinct over at most 100-200 years. Before mass settlement of Southern California, CASPO may have moved from range to range via river corridors, but now that is not possible. The Techachapi CASPO is probably not sustainable either. CASPO also lives in the Coast Ranges south of San Fransisco.
The Mexican Spotted Owl lives in the Southwest, mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. It was listed as threatened recently and recently had a huge amount of critical habitat set aside. It seems to be threatened by cattle grazing, but I forget how. Serious overgrazing in the Southwest seems to be devastating the grass and forb understory of the old growth pine forests.
This overgrazing has promoted heavy stands of small trees that are susceptible to drought and fire. The truth is that the Southwest should not even be grazed in the first place; it's too dry and cows just devastate arid regions.
Cows evolved in cold, moist England and they are not well suited to arid regions. During the hot, dry months, they congregate in riparian areas, which they utterly devastate. The Eastern US is much moister, and cattle grazing causes few problems there.
The NSO was declared a threatened species in 1990, setting off the timber wars in the Pacific Northwest. Clinton pushed through a crappy Northwest Forest Plan, which sold out way more to industry than was necessary. Logging in the region declined by 80%, but they had been horribly overcutting for decades.
As one might expect, the new regulations did not save the NSO, and it has continued to decline at 3.5% per year. The continuing decline of the NSO means that it may soon have to be uplisted from Threatened to Endangered.
In the far north, in northern Washington and British Colombia, the NSO is declining at about 7% per year. In southwestern B.C., there are only about 50 owls left and they are going to go extinct in the past few years unless something is done.
All spotted owls have selected for old growth forests. A new threat is the Barred Owl, which is a relative of the Spotted Owl, coming down from the north. The Barred Owl is much more tolerant of the open conditions created by massive clearcutting, and is displacing Spotted Owls in many places. In particular, it is interbreeding with them, creating a new hybrid type.
Loggers claim that the Barred Owl invasion is the true cause of the NSO decline, but they are lying as usual. The Barred Owl invasion is due to the more open conditions created by out of control clearcutting for decades in the Northwest.
The CASPO was petitioned twice for listing, in 2000 and 2004. I haven't read the petitions, but I have read hundreds of pages of studies on the CASPO. The CASPO, last I heard, was declining at a greater rate than even the NSO. In 2006, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declined to list the CASPO as an endangered species.
That strikes me as a wrong decision, but Bush is listing species at a rate even 85% lower than his rightwing father, George Bush. Bring back George Bush Sr.! As we can see, with the years, the US Republican Party, and consequently the US Whites they represent, have gotten increasingly virulent in the attitude of hatred and destruction towards our precious environment.
Next to the immigrant hordes flooding our shores, our precious slice of American Gaia has no greater enemy than White Americans.
What is curious about this is that White nationalists insist that only Whites are altruistic enough to care enough to be environmentalists in any way. It's an interesting argument, but it's sure not true in the US, and almost everyone making this odd argument is voting for the party of Nuke Gaia. Go figure.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Northern Leopard Frog Needs Listing
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated September 9:
This long pdf, available for download on this blog, is a copy of the petition filed to list the Western population of the Northern Leopard Frog (NLF) as an endangered species in the US. Genetically, the Western population is genetically distinct from the eastern population, and may merit splitting into a subspecies or even a separate species.
The Center for Native Ecosystems, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Defenders of Black Hills, Forest Guardians, Center for Biological Diversity, The Ark Initiative, Native Ecosystems Council, Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action and Jeremy Nichols filed the petition in June 2006.
I guess there hasn't been any action on it yet, and they will probably have to sue to get any action at all.
I never even knew the Leopard Frog was in danger. They are very rare and probably extirpated here in California. They are most common in the Midwest.
The document is quite long at 200 pages, but I read through most of it easily.
Reasons for the decline are uncertain, but pesticides, herbicides, strange diseases, viral, bacterial and fungal, along with global warming in the more arid portion of its range, seems to be playing a role. Global warming is expected to cause general drying across the frog's range in the West (see Table 21). In one high elevation region of Colorado, leopard frogs were extirpated due to disappearance of breeding ponds, probably due to global warming.
Water pollution seems to be one of the main reasons for the decline. The leopard frog's main range is in the Midwest, and farming is big there. Herbicides, pesticides and water pollution from various things, in particular chemical fertilizers which cause algal blooms, seems to be hurting the frog.
In general, this frog seems to need clean, healthy wetlands and watercourses, and these are definitely declining.
This species is not going to get listed. The Bush Administration has by far the worst listing record of any US administration in history. Even his Bush's father was vastly better than his son. This shows how far to the Right the Republican Party, and the US Whites who give it support, have moved only in the last 14 years.
Even under the Clintons, the devastation of the environment was well underway. Nixon and Ford were much better for the environment than Clinton was.
Under Clinton, all of our nation's landmark environmental laws, mostly enacted under Republican Richard Nixon, went by the wayside in favor of "market solutions" that, as would be expected, failed the environment. This shows how both parties have been colonized by market ideology these days to where a Nixonian Republican was more progressive than a Clintonian Democrat.
Environmental groups have gone to great lengths to show us that environmental laws are actually cost-effective in market terms. I don't buy it. Wrecking the environment is profitable; saving it is bad for business. That's all there is to it. There's a reason why every business group in the US hates every environmental law we ever passed. It's not because they are stupid. They know the bottom line.
Environmental laws show the flaws of the market-based approach to life. There is more to life than the market and making a buck. The market will probably never effectively with any environmental issues, as it is just not cost-effective.
Environmental laws, especially the Endangered Species Act, are in direct contradiction with the Open Borders policy of most environmentalists and environmental groups. Logically, this makes no sense at all.
I hate to coddle White nationalists, but I am wondering. Is there any ethnic group other than White Europeans in the West who would actually set up an Endangered Species Act and thwart capitalism in order to protect rats, bugs, weeds, and minnows, as the detractors of the Act would have it?
I'm wondering. I guess Amerindians might. Who else? Surely not Arabs, South Asians, Africans (!) and SE and NE Asians.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Updated September 9:
This long pdf, available for download on this blog, is a copy of the petition filed to list the Western population of the Northern Leopard Frog (NLF) as an endangered species in the US. Genetically, the Western population is genetically distinct from the eastern population, and may merit splitting into a subspecies or even a separate species.
The Center for Native Ecosystems, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Defenders of Black Hills, Forest Guardians, Center for Biological Diversity, The Ark Initiative, Native Ecosystems Council, Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action and Jeremy Nichols filed the petition in June 2006.
I guess there hasn't been any action on it yet, and they will probably have to sue to get any action at all.
I never even knew the Leopard Frog was in danger. They are very rare and probably extirpated here in California. They are most common in the Midwest.
The document is quite long at 200 pages, but I read through most of it easily.
Reasons for the decline are uncertain, but pesticides, herbicides, strange diseases, viral, bacterial and fungal, along with global warming in the more arid portion of its range, seems to be playing a role. Global warming is expected to cause general drying across the frog's range in the West (see Table 21). In one high elevation region of Colorado, leopard frogs were extirpated due to disappearance of breeding ponds, probably due to global warming.
Water pollution seems to be one of the main reasons for the decline. The leopard frog's main range is in the Midwest, and farming is big there. Herbicides, pesticides and water pollution from various things, in particular chemical fertilizers which cause algal blooms, seems to be hurting the frog.
In general, this frog seems to need clean, healthy wetlands and watercourses, and these are definitely declining.
This species is not going to get listed. The Bush Administration has by far the worst listing record of any US administration in history. Even his Bush's father was vastly better than his son. This shows how far to the Right the Republican Party, and the US Whites who give it support, have moved only in the last 14 years.
Even under the Clintons, the devastation of the environment was well underway. Nixon and Ford were much better for the environment than Clinton was.
Under Clinton, all of our nation's landmark environmental laws, mostly enacted under Republican Richard Nixon, went by the wayside in favor of "market solutions" that, as would be expected, failed the environment. This shows how both parties have been colonized by market ideology these days to where a Nixonian Republican was more progressive than a Clintonian Democrat.
Environmental groups have gone to great lengths to show us that environmental laws are actually cost-effective in market terms. I don't buy it. Wrecking the environment is profitable; saving it is bad for business. That's all there is to it. There's a reason why every business group in the US hates every environmental law we ever passed. It's not because they are stupid. They know the bottom line.
Environmental laws show the flaws of the market-based approach to life. There is more to life than the market and making a buck. The market will probably never effectively with any environmental issues, as it is just not cost-effective.
Environmental laws, especially the Endangered Species Act, are in direct contradiction with the Open Borders policy of most environmentalists and environmental groups. Logically, this makes no sense at all.
I hate to coddle White nationalists, but I am wondering. Is there any ethnic group other than White Europeans in the West who would actually set up an Endangered Species Act and thwart capitalism in order to protect rats, bugs, weeds, and minnows, as the detractors of the Act would have it?
I'm wondering. I guess Amerindians might. Who else? Surely not Arabs, South Asians, Africans (!) and SE and NE Asians.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Revealed Unemployment Versus Revealed Death
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Our very smart Leftist Brit commenter Lafayette Sennacherib notes in the comments section:
Above, LS compares the revealed (hidden) unemployment in Communism to the revealed (hidden) death in capitalism. He also notes that conditions in the capitalist world are getting observably crappier and crappier for workers in recent years. The capitalists don't even deny it, but they say that things have to get worse due to globalization.
At the same time, capitalism is the best system on Earth and is making us better all the time. Except that we're getting worse. Or something. Or whatever.
LS notes the idiocy of a Leftist like George Galloway singing the praises of US super-capitalism, while attributing it's success to the very immigrant flood that has devastated US workers. This Leftist offers more of the same tidal wave for British workers.
"The US success model".
But the US is a rich country (not nearly the richest on Earth - check Luxembourg - kicking our ass for years now) on paper only. The bottom 80% has been getting screwed off and on for the last 30 years, just like everywhere on Earth radical neoliberalism has been implemented.
The immigrant hurricane surge will devastate British workers the same way it did America's.
Failure is success. Getting worse is getting better. The cognitive dissonance is Earth-shattering.
LS also notes that terrible corruption is always going to be a problem in any capitalist society due to wealth accumulation. In the 3rd World, it's nearly set in stone. Note the horrible corruption and mass theft that accompanied the moves from socialism to capitalism in Russia and China.
If capitalism is the greatest engine on Earth for making money - and maybe it is - it's also the greatest engine on Earth for theft from petty to grand. Wherever you find capitalism, you will find an orgy of thievery. It's nearly built into the system.
LS' last paragraph has some good points. Huy is a British social democrat who is much enamored of whatever snake oil New Labour is pushing these days. He thinks that the market can definitely fix global warming.
Clearly, the market alone is incapable of resolving the global warming problem. By standard market economics, it's economically rational to devastate the planet with global warming (with unknown consequences) and it's economically irrational to try to stop global warming with mass government intervention.
There's tons of money in global warming and tons of red ink in stopping it. Knowing that, the market is going to take the biggest write-off in history and fix this problem? Get real!
Yet the last 30 years of the rap song blasting, "Market! Market!" in our ears nonstop has mutated Americans. There can be no solutions to anything outside of the market.
The government, or state, is dead, except for blowing shit up, conquering tinpot dictators, putting cuffs on every other American and throwing millions in the hole. The state's for killing people and busting your ass. Soldiers and cops, and there's little else. No wonder Americans hate the government so much.
Even Mother Jones, a "liberal" US magazine, stated in a recent issue on global warming that any solution would have to be a market solution. Why? Because that's just the way it is nowadays. The state is dead, the market rules. The libertarians won the Culture of Economics War.
Yet the market is incapable of fixing global warming because there's no money it and it involves massive losses. So the magic hand is essentially on track to blow up the fucking planet, using weather and Mother Nature as the thermonuclear device.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Our very smart Leftist Brit commenter Lafayette Sennacherib notes in the comments section:
Among the buzzwords on the collapse of the Soviet bloc was 'revealed unemployment', meaning that communist industries were employing people to do nothing useful apart from living and breeding. The capitalists are bit by bit feeling their way to getting us to accept the idea of 'revealed death' i.e. the idea that it's ok for lots of people to starve to death because there wasn't really a place in the economy for them.This was an excellent comment by LS, a very smart guy. Let me translate a bit:
We already accept that the 3rd world are used to starving to death, and so it's no big deal for them; and I've even seen the starvation in Korea in the 90s (though there's some doubt about whether that actually happened - see Bruce Cummings) described as a 'leveling of the population to what is its natural optimum level (loosely)'; the next thing is to get Europeans and N. Americans to accept that 'we can't carry passengers, if we show too much compassion for the weak then they'll drag us down with them...etc'.
America has always been pretty close to that anyway, but Europe's heading that way with ample help from the capitalist propaganda machine - we can't afford welfare anymore etc. You know - capitalism works because we're all much better off than they used to be, but we'll all have to work harder and longer with fewer benefits because of globalisation... So are we better off or worse off?
Even supposed leftists like George Galloway come out with this stuff - " immigration is a good thing; that's why the US is the richest country in the world..." He really says that, while also arguing that the capitalists are screwing us harder and harder.
But I think there's room for hope; I get the feeling that even the most indoctrinated and unreflective among our poor are now finding the contradictions in the media bullshit just too blatant, and the hard realities just too hard to ignore.
It really is 'socialism or barbarism'; just because it hasn't worked perfectly so far is no reason to give up.
There just isn't enough discussion of this, anywhere; there is obviously the problem that under capitalism private accumulation of wealth makes excluding corruption impossible...Discussions of how an effective democracy could work should take up about 50% of the discourse on 'the left', but they take up effectively zero, though there are isolated academics and think-tanks, I occasionally hear of, who do some interesting work.
" I think the free market if galvanized by the government and the media, can solve problems like global warming far better than a soviet style socialist economy." huy
Come on, huy! What's the solution likely to be - the 'revealed deaths' of 4 to 5 billion people. The 'free market' will starve them, and the media will put a positive spin on it.
Anyway, there is no 'free market'; capitalism operates like a vacuum cleaner, sucking all wealth and power to the top - it is a mechanism, which is effectively self-perpetuating - mammon, money reified and deified, which can only create despots, slaves, death and destruction of the environment.
Above, LS compares the revealed (hidden) unemployment in Communism to the revealed (hidden) death in capitalism. He also notes that conditions in the capitalist world are getting observably crappier and crappier for workers in recent years. The capitalists don't even deny it, but they say that things have to get worse due to globalization.
At the same time, capitalism is the best system on Earth and is making us better all the time. Except that we're getting worse. Or something. Or whatever.
LS notes the idiocy of a Leftist like George Galloway singing the praises of US super-capitalism, while attributing it's success to the very immigrant flood that has devastated US workers. This Leftist offers more of the same tidal wave for British workers.
"The US success model".
But the US is a rich country (not nearly the richest on Earth - check Luxembourg - kicking our ass for years now) on paper only. The bottom 80% has been getting screwed off and on for the last 30 years, just like everywhere on Earth radical neoliberalism has been implemented.
The immigrant hurricane surge will devastate British workers the same way it did America's.
Failure is success. Getting worse is getting better. The cognitive dissonance is Earth-shattering.
LS also notes that terrible corruption is always going to be a problem in any capitalist society due to wealth accumulation. In the 3rd World, it's nearly set in stone. Note the horrible corruption and mass theft that accompanied the moves from socialism to capitalism in Russia and China.
If capitalism is the greatest engine on Earth for making money - and maybe it is - it's also the greatest engine on Earth for theft from petty to grand. Wherever you find capitalism, you will find an orgy of thievery. It's nearly built into the system.
LS' last paragraph has some good points. Huy is a British social democrat who is much enamored of whatever snake oil New Labour is pushing these days. He thinks that the market can definitely fix global warming.
Clearly, the market alone is incapable of resolving the global warming problem. By standard market economics, it's economically rational to devastate the planet with global warming (with unknown consequences) and it's economically irrational to try to stop global warming with mass government intervention.
There's tons of money in global warming and tons of red ink in stopping it. Knowing that, the market is going to take the biggest write-off in history and fix this problem? Get real!
Yet the last 30 years of the rap song blasting, "Market! Market!" in our ears nonstop has mutated Americans. There can be no solutions to anything outside of the market.
The government, or state, is dead, except for blowing shit up, conquering tinpot dictators, putting cuffs on every other American and throwing millions in the hole. The state's for killing people and busting your ass. Soldiers and cops, and there's little else. No wonder Americans hate the government so much.
Even Mother Jones, a "liberal" US magazine, stated in a recent issue on global warming that any solution would have to be a market solution. Why? Because that's just the way it is nowadays. The state is dead, the market rules. The libertarians won the Culture of Economics War.
Yet the market is incapable of fixing global warming because there's no money it and it involves massive losses. So the magic hand is essentially on track to blow up the fucking planet, using weather and Mother Nature as the thermonuclear device.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Black Bear Seen in Ripperdan, California
Incredibly, a California Black Bear (Ursus americanus californiensis)was spotted on the floor of the San Joaquin Valley at Ripperdan on June 23 around 7:30-9:30 PM. That's very unusual. I looked on the Internet and could not find any other reports of bears roaming around on the Valley floor.
Even historically, it was not common. Back in the old days, Black Bears tended to reside in the foothills at the lowest. Sometimes they would come down from the foothills in times of scarce food to feed on carcasses of some of the vast herds of ungulates that roamed in the Valley.
At that time, the California Grizzly Bear was the most common bear in the Valley, and it roamed all up and down this great Valley. They were also very common in the foothills. With the coming of the White man, conflicts were inevitable between settlers and Grizzlies.
They were shot all up and down California for over 100 years. By the late 1800's, they had become quite rare. The last California Grizzlies were seen and shot in the Sierra foothills around Sequoia National Park in the early 1920's.
I drove down to the Ripperdan area where the bear was sighted. There are farms - mostly vineyards and orchards - as far as the eye can see. But the San Joaquin River is only about 1-2 miles away. I drove down to the river, but it was hard to get to it due to private property signs.
At Scaggs Bridge Park, you could access the river. There was still a fair amount of water in it for this far downstream. Keep in mind that agriculture sucks so much water out of this great river that it actually goes dry at a place called Gravelly Ford.
It became clear to me that the bear had been roaming up and down the San Joaquin River, using it as a corridor to move down from the foothills into the Valley. Down near Ripperdan, it moved out of the river area and into the agricultural fields, possibly to feed on crops.
Much of the river from Friant to Fresno is now part of a great thing called the San Joaquin River Parkway, and it looks like they have preserved enough land that bears are actually using it.
A visit to the parkway site showed no records of bears using the parkway.
On the other hand though, bobcats, deer, foxes, coyotes and mountain lions do. This excellent map of the parkway shows that much of the river is now being preserved.
Even with our increasing population growth, we are setting aside so much land for preserves that to some extent animals are able to use the preserves despite the ever-expanding population. This may be why we are seeing so many large mammals making comebacks and recolonizing old territories.
There are probably about 40,000 Black bears in California, and the population has been growing lately. They are not in any kind of danger at all.
I have seen these animals up close quite a few times, and I must tell you that they are actually in general timid creatures. On rare occasions, they can become aggressive, attack or even kill. But considering the number of human-bear interactions in the US every year and the number of bear attacks, the likelihood of this occurring is vanishingly small. But I still carry a big long stick when I hike in the woods.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Even historically, it was not common. Back in the old days, Black Bears tended to reside in the foothills at the lowest. Sometimes they would come down from the foothills in times of scarce food to feed on carcasses of some of the vast herds of ungulates that roamed in the Valley.
At that time, the California Grizzly Bear was the most common bear in the Valley, and it roamed all up and down this great Valley. They were also very common in the foothills. With the coming of the White man, conflicts were inevitable between settlers and Grizzlies.
They were shot all up and down California for over 100 years. By the late 1800's, they had become quite rare. The last California Grizzlies were seen and shot in the Sierra foothills around Sequoia National Park in the early 1920's.
I drove down to the Ripperdan area where the bear was sighted. There are farms - mostly vineyards and orchards - as far as the eye can see. But the San Joaquin River is only about 1-2 miles away. I drove down to the river, but it was hard to get to it due to private property signs.
At Scaggs Bridge Park, you could access the river. There was still a fair amount of water in it for this far downstream. Keep in mind that agriculture sucks so much water out of this great river that it actually goes dry at a place called Gravelly Ford.
It became clear to me that the bear had been roaming up and down the San Joaquin River, using it as a corridor to move down from the foothills into the Valley. Down near Ripperdan, it moved out of the river area and into the agricultural fields, possibly to feed on crops.
Much of the river from Friant to Fresno is now part of a great thing called the San Joaquin River Parkway, and it looks like they have preserved enough land that bears are actually using it.
A visit to the parkway site showed no records of bears using the parkway.
On the other hand though, bobcats, deer, foxes, coyotes and mountain lions do. This excellent map of the parkway shows that much of the river is now being preserved.
Even with our increasing population growth, we are setting aside so much land for preserves that to some extent animals are able to use the preserves despite the ever-expanding population. This may be why we are seeing so many large mammals making comebacks and recolonizing old territories.
There are probably about 40,000 Black bears in California, and the population has been growing lately. They are not in any kind of danger at all.
I have seen these animals up close quite a few times, and I must tell you that they are actually in general timid creatures. On rare occasions, they can become aggressive, attack or even kill. But considering the number of human-bear interactions in the US every year and the number of bear attacks, the likelihood of this occurring is vanishingly small. But I still carry a big long stick when I hike in the woods.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Deep Ecology - An Overview
One thing people ought to know about this blog is that one of my philosophies is Deep Ecology. Click that link and you so you can try to figure out what it means. It was part of a debate in the environmentalist (especially radical environmental) movement that probably really got going in the 1990's.
It had several rivals, including Social Ecology, promoted by a fellow named Murray Bookchin . Deep Ecology was promoted by a guy named Arne Naess. There's also Ecofeminism, which I'm not really up on, because I can't stand most kinds of feminism, although pro-porn feminists sounds like they are after my heart.
To me, Deep Ecology means something like, "Up with the animals, down with the people." I'm not saying kill the people or anything like that, but I think in general, most species have a right to survive just like people. And no, White nationalists may not give me a debate in the comments section of this post about why their race is an endangered species.
Notable Deep Ecologists and influences include Edward Abbey of The Monkeywrench Gang fame, Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! (many EF'ers are Deep Ecologists), Mike Roselle, also of EF!, Judi Bari (probably framed by the FBI), Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roszak, John Zerzan (anarchist intellectual from Oregon) and Gary Snyder (Buddhist beatnik poet).
An overview of the Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology dust-up is here. In general, Deep Ecologists were more anarchists and Social Ecologists were more traditional socialists. I recall a Social Ecologist saying that if an animal had to be driven extinct to keep poor humans from suffering, than so be it.
They also opposed the idea of protecting animals like tigers that kill humans. If a tiger protection plan deepened the poverty of already poor humans, they would oppose that. This is pretty much the mentality of socialist states in the past 100 years, which in general have cared a lot more about the needs of humans than animals.
Deep Ecologists had major roots in the Green Party and the worldwide Green Movement as a whole. They tend to support not just reduced population growth, but actual negative population growth and population declines within nations.
This puts Deep Ecology on an oppositional status with almost all nationalists, especially ethnic nationalists. Ethnic nationalists in particular have always championed high birth rates. White nationalists are extremely pro-natalist for Whites only, and they go nuts over articles about White women having 18 kids. That would keep me out of such a movement right off the bat.
Ominously, all fascists have also always been fiercely pro-natalist.
Capitalism also, dependent on ever-increasing population for the insanity of ever-increasing economic growth, is very much pro-natalist. Capitalist theory holds that population declines will destroy the capitalist economy. That's a great reason to reject neoliberal capitalism, or possibly capitalism itself, right there.
One of Deep Ecology's critiques of standard environmentalism is why we should preserve habitats and species.
The standard line is that we must do this because these things can or may provide great benefit for human beings. Wilderness areas are preserved so humans can run around in them, birds are preserved so humans can look at them with binoculars, and rainforests and species are preserved because science can study them and figure out new medical or technological applications to benefit humans.
Deep Ecologists say that this is anthropocentrism. Species and places should be preserved for their inherent value, regardless of whether or not humans can use them or exploit them for human benefit. That's a major philosophical position that you might want to ponder.
We had a big to-do over the California spotted owl (CASPO) in this part of the Sierra Nevada about 15 years ago. Bottom line is some mills closed, people lost their jobs, homes went into foreclosure, etc. About 100% of the population up here was in favor of the loggers who were wrecking the forest and against the owls.
As it turns out, the restrictions that the Forest Service put in are not even working to preserve the CASPO, and it surely needs to be listed at least as federally threatened. The crooked Fish and Wildlife Service won't do so because that would mean further logging restrictions.
At the time, I used to delight in infuriating people by saying that 1 spotted owl was worth about 20 humans. Hardly anyone seemed to go along with that.
The species accounts on this blog are in the spirit of Deep Ecology. I'm an animal lover. I wish I could love human animals just as much, but it seems like non-human animals are in general nicer and more reliable.
By the way, Dave Foreman's Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (1991) is highly recommended as a primer in deep ecology.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
It had several rivals, including Social Ecology, promoted by a fellow named Murray Bookchin . Deep Ecology was promoted by a guy named Arne Naess. There's also Ecofeminism, which I'm not really up on, because I can't stand most kinds of feminism, although pro-porn feminists sounds like they are after my heart.
To me, Deep Ecology means something like, "Up with the animals, down with the people." I'm not saying kill the people or anything like that, but I think in general, most species have a right to survive just like people. And no, White nationalists may not give me a debate in the comments section of this post about why their race is an endangered species.
Notable Deep Ecologists and influences include Edward Abbey of The Monkeywrench Gang fame, Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! (many EF'ers are Deep Ecologists), Mike Roselle, also of EF!, Judi Bari (probably framed by the FBI), Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roszak, John Zerzan (anarchist intellectual from Oregon) and Gary Snyder (Buddhist beatnik poet).
An overview of the Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology dust-up is here. In general, Deep Ecologists were more anarchists and Social Ecologists were more traditional socialists. I recall a Social Ecologist saying that if an animal had to be driven extinct to keep poor humans from suffering, than so be it.
They also opposed the idea of protecting animals like tigers that kill humans. If a tiger protection plan deepened the poverty of already poor humans, they would oppose that. This is pretty much the mentality of socialist states in the past 100 years, which in general have cared a lot more about the needs of humans than animals.
Deep Ecologists had major roots in the Green Party and the worldwide Green Movement as a whole. They tend to support not just reduced population growth, but actual negative population growth and population declines within nations.
This puts Deep Ecology on an oppositional status with almost all nationalists, especially ethnic nationalists. Ethnic nationalists in particular have always championed high birth rates. White nationalists are extremely pro-natalist for Whites only, and they go nuts over articles about White women having 18 kids. That would keep me out of such a movement right off the bat.
Ominously, all fascists have also always been fiercely pro-natalist.
Capitalism also, dependent on ever-increasing population for the insanity of ever-increasing economic growth, is very much pro-natalist. Capitalist theory holds that population declines will destroy the capitalist economy. That's a great reason to reject neoliberal capitalism, or possibly capitalism itself, right there.
One of Deep Ecology's critiques of standard environmentalism is why we should preserve habitats and species.
The standard line is that we must do this because these things can or may provide great benefit for human beings. Wilderness areas are preserved so humans can run around in them, birds are preserved so humans can look at them with binoculars, and rainforests and species are preserved because science can study them and figure out new medical or technological applications to benefit humans.
Deep Ecologists say that this is anthropocentrism. Species and places should be preserved for their inherent value, regardless of whether or not humans can use them or exploit them for human benefit. That's a major philosophical position that you might want to ponder.
We had a big to-do over the California spotted owl (CASPO) in this part of the Sierra Nevada about 15 years ago. Bottom line is some mills closed, people lost their jobs, homes went into foreclosure, etc. About 100% of the population up here was in favor of the loggers who were wrecking the forest and against the owls.
As it turns out, the restrictions that the Forest Service put in are not even working to preserve the CASPO, and it surely needs to be listed at least as federally threatened. The crooked Fish and Wildlife Service won't do so because that would mean further logging restrictions.
At the time, I used to delight in infuriating people by saying that 1 spotted owl was worth about 20 humans. Hardly anyone seemed to go along with that.
The species accounts on this blog are in the spirit of Deep Ecology. I'm an animal lover. I wish I could love human animals just as much, but it seems like non-human animals are in general nicer and more reliable.
By the way, Dave Foreman's Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (1991) is highly recommended as a primer in deep ecology.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Monday, June 16, 2008
The Sierra Nevada Red Fox
This was formerly part of another post, More California Wolverine Photos in the Sierra, that I decided to cut up into two posts in order to focus this one on the Sierra Nevada Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes necator). This fox is very rare in the areas and it seems to qualify as endangered on the basis of the Endangered Species Act. I think it needs an emergency listing.
The only confirmed population is a tiny population of only 10-15 foxes in and around Lassen National Park where the Northern Sierra meets the Southern Cascades.
This area has historically seen more sightings than any other part of California (sighting map for Northern California). This concentration is focused in Lassen, Tehama and Shasta Counties in and around Lassen Park. There have also been a few sightings in Modoc, Siskiyou and Trinity Counties.
The existence of the Sierra Nevada red fox has recently been confirmed by a team led by John Perrine of UC Berkeley. The team has located a small population of 10-15 Sierra Nevada red foxes existing in and around Lassen National Park in the Cascades Range. A later study proved that these were Sierra Nevada Red Foxes and not Eastern Red Foxes, which are abundant at the lower elevations in California.
A good description of the Lassen study, along with several rare photos of the foxes, can be found here. In the Sierras, the Sierra Nevada red fox was typically found at about 9,000 feet, with one record at 4,000, another at 5,500 and another at 7,000 feet. In the Cascades, they are usually found at around 6,000 feet, dropping down to 4,000 feet in the winter and moving up to 8,000 feet in the summer.
A report by the DFG in 1987 said the Sierra Nevada red fox was endangered, but noted that sightings continue in the rest of the Sierra Nevada outside the Cascades within the traditional range of the species. I believe that they probably still exist in the Sierras. I am aware of some recent sightings on the East side near Mammoth Mountain at high elevations.
They reportedly still exist in Mineral King south of Sequoia National Park.
I am also aware of sightings of the Sierra Nevada Red Fox in the past 30 years on the Sierra National Forest. In 1971, a Sierra Nevada red fox was sighted at Florence Lake at about 9,000 feet. In 1973, there was a sighting at Soda Springs near Mammoth Pool Reservoir at 4,500 feet.
In 1987, there was a sighting along Highway 168 between Auberry and Shaver Lake at about 4,300 feet, a very low elevation. In 1991, there was a sighting at Papoose Lake north of Lake Edison at about 10,390 feet.
There have also been a few sightings in Yosemite Valley in the past decade or so.
On the Stanislaus, there have been a number of sightings in the area of the Emigrant Wilderness, in particular something called the Waterhouse Wilderness Study Area on the northwest edge of the Emigrant Wilderness.
In Mono County, Sierra Nevada red foxes have been reported from Bridgeport Valley.
In Nevada County near Lake Tahoe, there is a sighting from 1994 along Highway 89 north of Truckee.
This cool paper by C. Hart Merriam shows that Sierra Nevada Red Foxes were formerly common at high elevations in the Mount Shasta area, and that tracks were seen almost every day (!) but they were very wary and never entered the traps that they had set. It is interesting that fishers were also present in this area. V. v. necator is probably very rare to absent in the Shasta area now.
This report makes one wonder just what it is that has driven V.v. necator to near-extinction. I strongly suspect grazing.
One of the best historical sources on the Sierra Nevada Red Fox is this chapter from Joseph Grinnell's hard-to-find Furbearers of California from 1937. Since continued attempts to open the file in a browser with Opera and Firefox kept crashing my system, I finally opened it online with Internet Explorer and was able to save it to my drive.
I'm making it available on this site for download so you can view it in Adobe Reader without crashing your browser. It was even hard to upload the file, so there is something wrong with it, but you should be able to view it ok. One thing it makes clear is that the Sierra Nevada red fox was much more common in the first four decades of the century than it is now.
It has declined drastically and desperately needs Endangered Species listing. If you want to risk crashing your browser, you can try it with Internet Explorer here.
At the time of Grinnell's writing, this fox was preying heavily on Sierra Nevada Snowshoe Hares and White-Tailed Hares, both of which are now pretty rare in the Sierras. I wonder if that is related to their decline? The decline of the white-tailed hare in the Sierra, formerly common on the East Side, is related exclusively to grazing.
All high-elevation needs to be banned from the Sierra anyway, as it is simply a catastrophe. Cows do not belong in high elevation meadows, and there is no place for them up there. We can start by getting rid of grazing in wilderness areas. Allowing grazing in wilderness areas was the only way that the Wilderness Act of 1964 could be passed.
I am not impressed at all with the ability of the US Forest Service to preserve wildlife in general, not to mention sensitive or endangered species. I spent years monitoring the Sierra National Forest and the workers I met with were some of the most corrupt and dishonest people I have ever dealt with.
The entire mentality was devoted to resource extraction, and even wildlife biologists, botanists and fisheries specialists routinely issued "no significant harm" on virtually every single Environmental Assessment Report I ever saw.
Even less impressive is the California Department of Fish and Game, though at least their heads are in the right direction. Individuals working with the DFG are good people, but the Commission is run by political clowns.
There are all sorts of species that need to be listed as threatened or endangered, but the DFG has hardly made even one such listing in the last decade. The DFG has been routinely denying petitions to list any species at all as threatened or endangered for a decade or so now.
Further, there are questions about how much a CA T & E designation even helps a species, as the DFG seldom intervenes in any way to help even the species they have listed as T & E.
In the early 1990's, the CA DFG produced some excellent volumes - Reptiles and Amphibians of Special Concern in California by Mark Jennings, Fish of Special Concern in California by Peter Moyne and Threatened and Endangered Species of California.
The reports by Jennings and Moyne listed numerous species that should be listed as species of special concern, threatened or endangered. To my knowledge, 15 years later, not a single one of these has been listed. A prime example is that the Sierra Nevada Red Fox, which the DFG even admitted in 2004 was critically endangered, is still listed as "threatened" instead of "endangered".
Even a petition to uplist it will surely be denied. The game here has been to devastate the DFG with budget cuts, even during times when the state is flush with cash. Then the DFG gets to say that they don't have any money to list any new species. Cool game, huh?
It seems every year, the DFG gets hammered with new budget cuts, and in lush years, the money never gets reinstated. Any environmentalist who is a fiscal conservative needs to have their head examined.
The FS complains of budget cuts too, but in contrast they are actively hostile to the environment. Their whole agenda was to let grazing and logging go on to the greatest extent possible and to deny all negative impacts on the environment of such.
Go into a local FS office and the whole place, even the wildlife biologists, are avidly listening to Rush Limbaugh! Most of them, including once again wildlife biologists who supposedly believe in evolution, are members of fundamentalist churches! Go figure.
Such is the state of things in the supposedly pro-environment US. Large majorities support the environmentalist agenda, but of course the Republicans and incredibly even the Clintonista triangulating Democrats are both very hostile to the environment. There is no logical reason for either party, especially the Democrats, to take this stance.
The only explanation is that both parties are completely dedicated to the corporate and pro-business agenda, and the entire rest of the population, even if that means 55-98% of the population depending on the issue, can just go to Hell.
Click the wolverines label at the end of the post to see other posts on wolverines in the US, including many sighting reports and photos.
The only confirmed population is a tiny population of only 10-15 foxes in and around Lassen National Park where the Northern Sierra meets the Southern Cascades.
This area has historically seen more sightings than any other part of California (sighting map for Northern California). This concentration is focused in Lassen, Tehama and Shasta Counties in and around Lassen Park. There have also been a few sightings in Modoc, Siskiyou and Trinity Counties.
The existence of the Sierra Nevada red fox has recently been confirmed by a team led by John Perrine of UC Berkeley. The team has located a small population of 10-15 Sierra Nevada red foxes existing in and around Lassen National Park in the Cascades Range. A later study proved that these were Sierra Nevada Red Foxes and not Eastern Red Foxes, which are abundant at the lower elevations in California.
A good description of the Lassen study, along with several rare photos of the foxes, can be found here. In the Sierras, the Sierra Nevada red fox was typically found at about 9,000 feet, with one record at 4,000, another at 5,500 and another at 7,000 feet. In the Cascades, they are usually found at around 6,000 feet, dropping down to 4,000 feet in the winter and moving up to 8,000 feet in the summer.
A report by the DFG in 1987 said the Sierra Nevada red fox was endangered, but noted that sightings continue in the rest of the Sierra Nevada outside the Cascades within the traditional range of the species. I believe that they probably still exist in the Sierras. I am aware of some recent sightings on the East side near Mammoth Mountain at high elevations.
They reportedly still exist in Mineral King south of Sequoia National Park.
I am also aware of sightings of the Sierra Nevada Red Fox in the past 30 years on the Sierra National Forest. In 1971, a Sierra Nevada red fox was sighted at Florence Lake at about 9,000 feet. In 1973, there was a sighting at Soda Springs near Mammoth Pool Reservoir at 4,500 feet.
In 1987, there was a sighting along Highway 168 between Auberry and Shaver Lake at about 4,300 feet, a very low elevation. In 1991, there was a sighting at Papoose Lake north of Lake Edison at about 10,390 feet.
There have also been a few sightings in Yosemite Valley in the past decade or so.
On the Stanislaus, there have been a number of sightings in the area of the Emigrant Wilderness, in particular something called the Waterhouse Wilderness Study Area on the northwest edge of the Emigrant Wilderness.
In Mono County, Sierra Nevada red foxes have been reported from Bridgeport Valley.
In Nevada County near Lake Tahoe, there is a sighting from 1994 along Highway 89 north of Truckee.
This cool paper by C. Hart Merriam shows that Sierra Nevada Red Foxes were formerly common at high elevations in the Mount Shasta area, and that tracks were seen almost every day (!) but they were very wary and never entered the traps that they had set. It is interesting that fishers were also present in this area. V. v. necator is probably very rare to absent in the Shasta area now.
This report makes one wonder just what it is that has driven V.v. necator to near-extinction. I strongly suspect grazing.
One of the best historical sources on the Sierra Nevada Red Fox is this chapter from Joseph Grinnell's hard-to-find Furbearers of California from 1937. Since continued attempts to open the file in a browser with Opera and Firefox kept crashing my system, I finally opened it online with Internet Explorer and was able to save it to my drive.
I'm making it available on this site for download so you can view it in Adobe Reader without crashing your browser. It was even hard to upload the file, so there is something wrong with it, but you should be able to view it ok. One thing it makes clear is that the Sierra Nevada red fox was much more common in the first four decades of the century than it is now.
It has declined drastically and desperately needs Endangered Species listing. If you want to risk crashing your browser, you can try it with Internet Explorer here.
At the time of Grinnell's writing, this fox was preying heavily on Sierra Nevada Snowshoe Hares and White-Tailed Hares, both of which are now pretty rare in the Sierras. I wonder if that is related to their decline? The decline of the white-tailed hare in the Sierra, formerly common on the East Side, is related exclusively to grazing.
All high-elevation needs to be banned from the Sierra anyway, as it is simply a catastrophe. Cows do not belong in high elevation meadows, and there is no place for them up there. We can start by getting rid of grazing in wilderness areas. Allowing grazing in wilderness areas was the only way that the Wilderness Act of 1964 could be passed.
I am not impressed at all with the ability of the US Forest Service to preserve wildlife in general, not to mention sensitive or endangered species. I spent years monitoring the Sierra National Forest and the workers I met with were some of the most corrupt and dishonest people I have ever dealt with.
The entire mentality was devoted to resource extraction, and even wildlife biologists, botanists and fisheries specialists routinely issued "no significant harm" on virtually every single Environmental Assessment Report I ever saw.
Even less impressive is the California Department of Fish and Game, though at least their heads are in the right direction. Individuals working with the DFG are good people, but the Commission is run by political clowns.
There are all sorts of species that need to be listed as threatened or endangered, but the DFG has hardly made even one such listing in the last decade. The DFG has been routinely denying petitions to list any species at all as threatened or endangered for a decade or so now.
Further, there are questions about how much a CA T & E designation even helps a species, as the DFG seldom intervenes in any way to help even the species they have listed as T & E.
In the early 1990's, the CA DFG produced some excellent volumes - Reptiles and Amphibians of Special Concern in California by Mark Jennings, Fish of Special Concern in California by Peter Moyne and Threatened and Endangered Species of California.
The reports by Jennings and Moyne listed numerous species that should be listed as species of special concern, threatened or endangered. To my knowledge, 15 years later, not a single one of these has been listed. A prime example is that the Sierra Nevada Red Fox, which the DFG even admitted in 2004 was critically endangered, is still listed as "threatened" instead of "endangered".
Even a petition to uplist it will surely be denied. The game here has been to devastate the DFG with budget cuts, even during times when the state is flush with cash. Then the DFG gets to say that they don't have any money to list any new species. Cool game, huh?
It seems every year, the DFG gets hammered with new budget cuts, and in lush years, the money never gets reinstated. Any environmentalist who is a fiscal conservative needs to have their head examined.
The FS complains of budget cuts too, but in contrast they are actively hostile to the environment. Their whole agenda was to let grazing and logging go on to the greatest extent possible and to deny all negative impacts on the environment of such.
Go into a local FS office and the whole place, even the wildlife biologists, are avidly listening to Rush Limbaugh! Most of them, including once again wildlife biologists who supposedly believe in evolution, are members of fundamentalist churches! Go figure.
Such is the state of things in the supposedly pro-environment US. Large majorities support the environmentalist agenda, but of course the Republicans and incredibly even the Clintonista triangulating Democrats are both very hostile to the environment. There is no logical reason for either party, especially the Democrats, to take this stance.
The only explanation is that both parties are completely dedicated to the corporate and pro-business agenda, and the entire rest of the population, even if that means 55-98% of the population depending on the issue, can just go to Hell.
Click the wolverines label at the end of the post to see other posts on wolverines in the US, including many sighting reports and photos.
References
- CDFG. 1987. Sierra Nevada Red Fox: Five-year Status Report. California Department of Fish and Game, Sacramento, California, USA.
Grinnell, Joseph. 1924. Animal Life in the Yosemite. Berkeley: University of California Press, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
Kucera, T. E. 1995. Recent Photograph of a Sierra Nevada Red Fox. California Fish and Game 81:43-44.
Merriam, Clinton Hart. 1899. Results of a Biological Survey of Mount Shasta, California. Washington D.C.: U. S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Biological Survey.
Perrine, J. D., J. P. Pollinger, B. N. Sacks, R. H. Barrett, and R. K. Wayne. 2007. Genetic Evidence For the Persistence of the Critically Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox in Northern California. Conservation Genetics 8:1083-1095.
Southern California Edison Company. 2001. Final Technical Study Plan Package (FTSPP) for the Big Creek Hydroelectric Projects (FERC Project Nos. 67, 120, 2085, and 2175). Terrestrial Resources - Chapter 13 - Mesocarnivores. Rosemead, CA.
Wildlife Conservation Board. 2002. Report to the Legislature on the Wildlife Protection Act of 1990. Annual Report - Fiscal Year 2002-2003. Sacramento: State of California.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Immigration - A Question of Quality
It is quite common in the US for the debate on immigration to be split into polar opposites. On the pro-immigrant side is an utterly insane Open Borders group that seems to more or less argue for unfettered immigration into the US. The overwhelming majority of the US business class supports this for the sole reason of cheap and easily intimidated labor.
On the liberal side of the spectrum, many liberals simply feel it is cruel to keep anyone out of the US who wants to come here. Many others have swallowed the pro-diversity propaganda whole. There is a whole industry out there that is promoting diversity and multiculturalism.
These things are human norms, and human societies have been diverse and multicultural since the beginning of time, so it is insane to argue that these things are unnatural, which is a typical White nationalist argument.
The problem is that diversity, while normal, is not necessarily such a great thing per se. For one thing, various immigrant groups can be poor quality and create many problems for a society. Hispanic immigrants and their offspring are vastly more criminal and problematic that other immigrant groups, or than, say, White Americans.
Long-term resident Hispanics often cause few problems, but the recent immigrants and their children have been a total nightmare. New evidence shows that diversity reduces trust at the neighborhood level. It is common sense that high-diversity societies are often more unstable that monocultural societies.
I am not saying any of this to be a xenophobe. I am just pointing out that it makes little sense to shill for diversity as if it were automatically a good thing in and of itself.
We also have minority groups, in particular Hispanics, who are now pro-immigrant simply out of ethnocentrism and for no other reason. On this, the Left is utterly bonkers. Black and Hispanic ethnocentrism is cheered on wildly, while Whites are forbidden to be ethnocentric themselves.
This Identity Politics has been the curse of the Left since the 1960's. It is now backfiring as a new White nationalist movement comes into being. This movement is nothing but the logical result of Whites creating their own Identity Politics movement after the Left fertilized society with this nonsense cult.
Also, now that the Open Borders crowd has, in the past 15 years, cleverly conned society into thinking that anti-immigrant sentiment (even anti-illegal immigrant sentiment!) is de facto racist, you have many guilt-ridden folks, especially liberals and Centrists, who support even illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist.
Nearly the entire US environmental movement has gone over to Open Borders, including Earth First and the Center for Biological Diversity. Sierra Club lost its anti-immigrant battle long ago. Since CBD is focussed on endangered species, their position seems particularly insane.
Habitat loss by overpopulation is obviously one of the major causes of environmental damage and the extinction crisis. Anyone who cannot see this is blind. The environmental movement has come out for Open Borders simply out of terror of being labeled racist and for no other reason.
On the opposite side, we have a lot of sensible folks, especially those who want to limit illegal immigration. Even 14 years ago, the debate was much more sensible. In 1994, 40% of California Hispanics voted for Proposition 187 to limit social services to illegals. Now, things have gotten so polarized that I think many of those Hispanics are probably Open Borders folks.
We also have lots of nasty racists, especially White nationalists, on the anti-immigrant side. These people simply do not want any non-White immigration whatsoever, though they are not opposed to the immigration of European Whites (However arbitrarily they may define that group!).
Most of these folks actively dislike everyone who is not White; there are others who do not, but just want to "preserve the declining White race" as if it were an animal subspecies on the Endangered Species List.
There are also the xenophobes. Vdare is a good example of these folks. They just don't like any furriners period. Most people here are not White nationalists at all - they just oppose non-Americans coming to our land.
In general, most of the hardcore anti-immigrant crowd is on the political Right. The Left has granted this entire field to the Right, even on illegal immigration, which, incredibly, almost the entire liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to support.
There may be less ulterior motives for this. Democrats need Hispanics votes to win, and the only way to get those these days is to support amnesty for 12 million illegals. More cynically, Democrats are supporting illegals as a way to get 12 million new Democratic voters into the US, since 80% of Mesoamerican immigrants are voting Democratic.
Hence it is nice to see someone step out of the box on immigration, like this progressive, Randall Burns, on Vdare actually coming out against illegal immigrants, but focusing his anger on the businesses who hire them. He also makes an argument similar to the one I have made - that mass illegal immigration has been a major factor in both the screwing of the US worker and in the wild inequality gap of the past 35 years .
We need some sense on the immigration debate. In particular, we on the Left and in the environmental movement need to open up some space for the progressives and environmentalists to take sane positions on immigration without fear of being called racists.
First of all, not all immigrants are bad news. It is hard to make a case that legal immigration has been a terrible problem for this country, though we need to drop the numbers way down. The "limit" is now something like 1.1 million legal immigrants.
There is not a lot of evidence that even this level of legal immigration has harmed wages, created crime waves, or done much of anything other than harmed the environment. It is dubious whether legal immigrants take jobs for less wages than US citizens. Most legal immigrants come here and want to work for US wages.
H-1B and the gamut of other "temporary worker" visas are often simply outrageous. Businesses do indeed bring in foreign workers for just about every position imaginable generally for the sole reason of cheap labor. These visas are "non-immigrant temporary worker" visas and last for up to six years!
The whole temporary worker visa BS game needs to be pretty much scrapped. There is little evidence of any labor shortage in any field anywhere in this nation. Most stories about such shortages are simply lies.
Illegal immigration is a catastrophe because the immigrants are unscreened.
With legal immigration, we have a very strict process that winnows out a large number of prospective candidates. The process is so long and drawn out that only those determined to assimilate make it through the program. Once in, they need to be on very good behavior and can be deported for the slightest thing. Legal immigrants in general are not a serious problem in our nation.
With illegal immigration, you are simply importing entire slices of foreign countries wholesale. It's madness. We have no idea who these folks are, and many of them are criminals and bad folks indeed. Their whole time they are in the US they are breaking the law every day in myriad ways. Their employer is breaking the law. They are using fake ID.
When you import an illegal, you've just imported a criminal.
Refugees are another problematic group of immigrants, also because they are unscreened.
I do love SE Asians, but we have had quite a few problems here in California with Vietnamese, Lao, Khmu, Khmer and Hmong gangs. These groups also have huge rates of welfare use, even many years on. It's clear that they are hardly paying for themselves. I think most of these folks will eventually work out.
Yet even where SE Asian gangs are a problem, SE Asians have a low crime rate. Fresno is near here, and the city's crime statistics are interesting.
In Fresno, Blacks have a wildly elevated crime rate, the Hispanic rate is about 3 X the White rate, and the "Asian" rate is much lower than the White rate. But most Asians in Fresno are SE Asians. This implies that even with their gangs, SE Asians have a much lower crime rate than Whites.
Nevertheless, there are reports of Liberian and Somali refugees in the US committing a lot of crime and using a lot of welfare. In Australia, Sudanese refugees have been a nightmare.
In one town where many were settled, their crime rate is eight times the normal rate. At a meeting called by a bunch of liberal do-gooders to whitewash the problem of the Sudanese, a Sudanese refugee stole the briefcase of one of the top liberal presenters!
It seems to me that African refugees can be adequately resettled in other African lands. I do not think that many of these people are going to fit in well with our modern society.
It is interesting that other than some Caribbean and Mesoamerican immigrants, Hispanic immigrants have caused few problems.
We have sizable numbers of Brazilians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans and Bolivians in the US. Other than some Colombian drug dealers, most of these groups are causing few to no problems.
The reason is that they are not flooding in here as refugees or illegals. They are coming in as legal immigrants, and we are probably doing a good job of screening them.
On the other hand, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans have been a nightmare. Vast numbers of all of these groups came here illegally, in the case of the Central Americans, as war refugees. So vast numbers of this group were simply unscreened immigrants. Unscreened means low quality, de facto.
Cubans are a problem in that this is an example of an ingrate immigrant. Since we outrageously automatically let them in as soon as they set foot on land since they are fleeing evil Communism, they have little motivation to assimilate.
Hence they have recreated 1958 Havana in Miami, complete with outrageous corruption, and insane gap between the rich and poor, a corrupt government serves only the rich and spits on everyone else, and a city where English is not necessary. One can go into nice stores and hotels in Miami and you will not find anyone who speaks English. The English language has for all intents and purposes disappeared from this vast city.
One gets the impression that almost no other country on Earth would put up with this sort of insane bullshit.
Unfortunately, Puerto Ricans and Samoans have been problem ethnic groups. This is because they are unscreened! Puerto Rico and American Samoa are colonies of the United States in a world that has decolonized. Because they are US colonies, just about any Puerto Rican and American Samoan gets to come to the US as easily as I can move to New York.
Both groups have a high crime rate and have fallen into Underclass gang culture. The solution is to completely decolonize the US. American Samoa and Puerto Rico need to be set free and cut off the welfare gravy train and Puerto Ricans and American Samoans need to get into the normal immigration line like everyone else.
After 1965, huge numbers of Dominicans from the Dominican Republic flooded into the US as legal immigrants. Now, I like Dominicans just fine and have known a couple of them, but the available information indicates that they have caused a lot of crime, ghettoization and an Underclass in Upper Manhattan - Washington Heights and Inwood - and in much of the Bronx, though legal immigrants.
This is a case where mass immigration of a national group, in this case Dominicans, has not worked out well. The only solution is to get a lot stricter about which Dominicans we allow to immigrate to the US.
It's also true that mass legal immigration of Mexicans to the US has not worked out well. The available data show that even in the 4th and 5th generation, Chicanos have very high rates of high school dropout and gang involvement. They have very low rates of college graduation. We obviously are not doing a very good job of selecting legal Mexican immigrants to the US and we need to be a lot more selective.
For Mexicans and Dominicans, studies should be undertaken to determine which ones are likely to work out well and which are likely to join the Underclass. Perhaps even IQ tests could be used to screen. This is a difficult area and I do not have all the answers.
Immigrants to your country are like visitors to your house. If an immigrant group is causing problems, it's time to evaluate our criteria for letting them in, the same way you deal with troublemakers in your home. By definition, legal immigrants should be a benefit to our nation. Groups are likely to create more problems than benefits are not good for America and need to be subject to a more selective immigration process.
There are some Jamaican gangs, but in general, we do not have a Jamaican Underclass seething in our cities. I do not know much about Haitian immigrants. I am not aware that a teeming Haitian Underclass is a threat to the republic.
White nationalist racists like to say that the problem with some immigrant groups is that they are a genetically low quality group. There is nothing to this. Perhaps if we let whole populations flood in unscreened, we could have this discussion.
East Indians, Filipinos and Black Africans are three groups that do not have extremely high IQ's. All of these places are steaming Third World wrecks. Yet Filipino, Black African and East Indian immigrants have been some of the most wildly successful immigrants of them all. The reason is simple - screening.
No ethnic group is "low quality" per se. Certainly, properly screened, one can find immigrant gold in any race or ethnic group. This ought to be a principle of a sane immigration policy.
On the other hand, letting Black Africans and East Indians flood in here unscreened would probably be a nightmare. They would simply tend to recreate Calcutta or Lagos in the US.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
On the liberal side of the spectrum, many liberals simply feel it is cruel to keep anyone out of the US who wants to come here. Many others have swallowed the pro-diversity propaganda whole. There is a whole industry out there that is promoting diversity and multiculturalism.
These things are human norms, and human societies have been diverse and multicultural since the beginning of time, so it is insane to argue that these things are unnatural, which is a typical White nationalist argument.
The problem is that diversity, while normal, is not necessarily such a great thing per se. For one thing, various immigrant groups can be poor quality and create many problems for a society. Hispanic immigrants and their offspring are vastly more criminal and problematic that other immigrant groups, or than, say, White Americans.
Long-term resident Hispanics often cause few problems, but the recent immigrants and their children have been a total nightmare. New evidence shows that diversity reduces trust at the neighborhood level. It is common sense that high-diversity societies are often more unstable that monocultural societies.
I am not saying any of this to be a xenophobe. I am just pointing out that it makes little sense to shill for diversity as if it were automatically a good thing in and of itself.
We also have minority groups, in particular Hispanics, who are now pro-immigrant simply out of ethnocentrism and for no other reason. On this, the Left is utterly bonkers. Black and Hispanic ethnocentrism is cheered on wildly, while Whites are forbidden to be ethnocentric themselves.
This Identity Politics has been the curse of the Left since the 1960's. It is now backfiring as a new White nationalist movement comes into being. This movement is nothing but the logical result of Whites creating their own Identity Politics movement after the Left fertilized society with this nonsense cult.
Also, now that the Open Borders crowd has, in the past 15 years, cleverly conned society into thinking that anti-immigrant sentiment (even anti-illegal immigrant sentiment!) is de facto racist, you have many guilt-ridden folks, especially liberals and Centrists, who support even illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist.
Nearly the entire US environmental movement has gone over to Open Borders, including Earth First and the Center for Biological Diversity. Sierra Club lost its anti-immigrant battle long ago. Since CBD is focussed on endangered species, their position seems particularly insane.
Habitat loss by overpopulation is obviously one of the major causes of environmental damage and the extinction crisis. Anyone who cannot see this is blind. The environmental movement has come out for Open Borders simply out of terror of being labeled racist and for no other reason.
On the opposite side, we have a lot of sensible folks, especially those who want to limit illegal immigration. Even 14 years ago, the debate was much more sensible. In 1994, 40% of California Hispanics voted for Proposition 187 to limit social services to illegals. Now, things have gotten so polarized that I think many of those Hispanics are probably Open Borders folks.
We also have lots of nasty racists, especially White nationalists, on the anti-immigrant side. These people simply do not want any non-White immigration whatsoever, though they are not opposed to the immigration of European Whites (However arbitrarily they may define that group!).
Most of these folks actively dislike everyone who is not White; there are others who do not, but just want to "preserve the declining White race" as if it were an animal subspecies on the Endangered Species List.
There are also the xenophobes. Vdare is a good example of these folks. They just don't like any furriners period. Most people here are not White nationalists at all - they just oppose non-Americans coming to our land.
In general, most of the hardcore anti-immigrant crowd is on the political Right. The Left has granted this entire field to the Right, even on illegal immigration, which, incredibly, almost the entire liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to support.
There may be less ulterior motives for this. Democrats need Hispanics votes to win, and the only way to get those these days is to support amnesty for 12 million illegals. More cynically, Democrats are supporting illegals as a way to get 12 million new Democratic voters into the US, since 80% of Mesoamerican immigrants are voting Democratic.
Hence it is nice to see someone step out of the box on immigration, like this progressive, Randall Burns, on Vdare actually coming out against illegal immigrants, but focusing his anger on the businesses who hire them. He also makes an argument similar to the one I have made - that mass illegal immigration has been a major factor in both the screwing of the US worker and in the wild inequality gap of the past 35 years .
We need some sense on the immigration debate. In particular, we on the Left and in the environmental movement need to open up some space for the progressives and environmentalists to take sane positions on immigration without fear of being called racists.
First of all, not all immigrants are bad news. It is hard to make a case that legal immigration has been a terrible problem for this country, though we need to drop the numbers way down. The "limit" is now something like 1.1 million legal immigrants.
There is not a lot of evidence that even this level of legal immigration has harmed wages, created crime waves, or done much of anything other than harmed the environment. It is dubious whether legal immigrants take jobs for less wages than US citizens. Most legal immigrants come here and want to work for US wages.
H-1B and the gamut of other "temporary worker" visas are often simply outrageous. Businesses do indeed bring in foreign workers for just about every position imaginable generally for the sole reason of cheap labor. These visas are "non-immigrant temporary worker" visas and last for up to six years!
The whole temporary worker visa BS game needs to be pretty much scrapped. There is little evidence of any labor shortage in any field anywhere in this nation. Most stories about such shortages are simply lies.
Illegal immigration is a catastrophe because the immigrants are unscreened.
With legal immigration, we have a very strict process that winnows out a large number of prospective candidates. The process is so long and drawn out that only those determined to assimilate make it through the program. Once in, they need to be on very good behavior and can be deported for the slightest thing. Legal immigrants in general are not a serious problem in our nation.
With illegal immigration, you are simply importing entire slices of foreign countries wholesale. It's madness. We have no idea who these folks are, and many of them are criminals and bad folks indeed. Their whole time they are in the US they are breaking the law every day in myriad ways. Their employer is breaking the law. They are using fake ID.
When you import an illegal, you've just imported a criminal.
Refugees are another problematic group of immigrants, also because they are unscreened.
I do love SE Asians, but we have had quite a few problems here in California with Vietnamese, Lao, Khmu, Khmer and Hmong gangs. These groups also have huge rates of welfare use, even many years on. It's clear that they are hardly paying for themselves. I think most of these folks will eventually work out.
Yet even where SE Asian gangs are a problem, SE Asians have a low crime rate. Fresno is near here, and the city's crime statistics are interesting.
In Fresno, Blacks have a wildly elevated crime rate, the Hispanic rate is about 3 X the White rate, and the "Asian" rate is much lower than the White rate. But most Asians in Fresno are SE Asians. This implies that even with their gangs, SE Asians have a much lower crime rate than Whites.
Nevertheless, there are reports of Liberian and Somali refugees in the US committing a lot of crime and using a lot of welfare. In Australia, Sudanese refugees have been a nightmare.
In one town where many were settled, their crime rate is eight times the normal rate. At a meeting called by a bunch of liberal do-gooders to whitewash the problem of the Sudanese, a Sudanese refugee stole the briefcase of one of the top liberal presenters!
It seems to me that African refugees can be adequately resettled in other African lands. I do not think that many of these people are going to fit in well with our modern society.
It is interesting that other than some Caribbean and Mesoamerican immigrants, Hispanic immigrants have caused few problems.
We have sizable numbers of Brazilians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans and Bolivians in the US. Other than some Colombian drug dealers, most of these groups are causing few to no problems.
The reason is that they are not flooding in here as refugees or illegals. They are coming in as legal immigrants, and we are probably doing a good job of screening them.
On the other hand, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans have been a nightmare. Vast numbers of all of these groups came here illegally, in the case of the Central Americans, as war refugees. So vast numbers of this group were simply unscreened immigrants. Unscreened means low quality, de facto.
Cubans are a problem in that this is an example of an ingrate immigrant. Since we outrageously automatically let them in as soon as they set foot on land since they are fleeing evil Communism, they have little motivation to assimilate.
Hence they have recreated 1958 Havana in Miami, complete with outrageous corruption, and insane gap between the rich and poor, a corrupt government serves only the rich and spits on everyone else, and a city where English is not necessary. One can go into nice stores and hotels in Miami and you will not find anyone who speaks English. The English language has for all intents and purposes disappeared from this vast city.
One gets the impression that almost no other country on Earth would put up with this sort of insane bullshit.
Unfortunately, Puerto Ricans and Samoans have been problem ethnic groups. This is because they are unscreened! Puerto Rico and American Samoa are colonies of the United States in a world that has decolonized. Because they are US colonies, just about any Puerto Rican and American Samoan gets to come to the US as easily as I can move to New York.
Both groups have a high crime rate and have fallen into Underclass gang culture. The solution is to completely decolonize the US. American Samoa and Puerto Rico need to be set free and cut off the welfare gravy train and Puerto Ricans and American Samoans need to get into the normal immigration line like everyone else.
After 1965, huge numbers of Dominicans from the Dominican Republic flooded into the US as legal immigrants. Now, I like Dominicans just fine and have known a couple of them, but the available information indicates that they have caused a lot of crime, ghettoization and an Underclass in Upper Manhattan - Washington Heights and Inwood - and in much of the Bronx, though legal immigrants.
This is a case where mass immigration of a national group, in this case Dominicans, has not worked out well. The only solution is to get a lot stricter about which Dominicans we allow to immigrate to the US.
It's also true that mass legal immigration of Mexicans to the US has not worked out well. The available data show that even in the 4th and 5th generation, Chicanos have very high rates of high school dropout and gang involvement. They have very low rates of college graduation. We obviously are not doing a very good job of selecting legal Mexican immigrants to the US and we need to be a lot more selective.
For Mexicans and Dominicans, studies should be undertaken to determine which ones are likely to work out well and which are likely to join the Underclass. Perhaps even IQ tests could be used to screen. This is a difficult area and I do not have all the answers.
Immigrants to your country are like visitors to your house. If an immigrant group is causing problems, it's time to evaluate our criteria for letting them in, the same way you deal with troublemakers in your home. By definition, legal immigrants should be a benefit to our nation. Groups are likely to create more problems than benefits are not good for America and need to be subject to a more selective immigration process.
There are some Jamaican gangs, but in general, we do not have a Jamaican Underclass seething in our cities. I do not know much about Haitian immigrants. I am not aware that a teeming Haitian Underclass is a threat to the republic.
White nationalist racists like to say that the problem with some immigrant groups is that they are a genetically low quality group. There is nothing to this. Perhaps if we let whole populations flood in unscreened, we could have this discussion.
East Indians, Filipinos and Black Africans are three groups that do not have extremely high IQ's. All of these places are steaming Third World wrecks. Yet Filipino, Black African and East Indian immigrants have been some of the most wildly successful immigrants of them all. The reason is simple - screening.
No ethnic group is "low quality" per se. Certainly, properly screened, one can find immigrant gold in any race or ethnic group. This ought to be a principle of a sane immigration policy.
On the other hand, letting Black Africans and East Indians flood in here unscreened would probably be a nightmare. They would simply tend to recreate Calcutta or Lagos in the US.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Cow Farts Cause More Global Warming Than Humans?
The latest rightwing crap.
I was on a rightwing blog a couple of years ago and decided to ask how many believed in global warming. The vast majority did not. A few said it was happening, but it was natural. One or two said it was happening, but no one knew what was causing it, and we needed to study it more.
This blog has unfortunately become infested lately with some young White male 20-something reactionary-to-libertarian trolls who are lurking in the comments section.
It's quite simple to be a libertarian when you are young, dumb and full of cum. I voted Libertarian at age 22. I'd never do it again, but that's how you learn. People that age just haven't been fucked hard enough and enough times by life yet. By the time we are 40, most of us have had about a million horrible things happen to us, and narcissism is on sharp decline. That's why age and wisdom are traditionally synonymous.
They're causing a lot of dissension, but echo chambers are boring. Comments rules forbid me from banning folks based on ideology, so for the moment, they are sticking around.
It's kind of interesting to have some pet rightwingers to play with, because like a lot of pets, they do a lot of stupid shit. Since rightwingers can talk unlike all other pets, rightwingers also say stupid shit.
Debating rightwingers is like debating ultranationalist Jewish Zionists. Most of their arguments are absolute crap. The reason is because what they are arguing for is perfectly horrible to most folks.
Hence I really admire Zionists like Samson Blinded who just tell it like it is. I admire libertarians like Entitled to an Opinion who just lay it out in all of libertarianism's heartless nastiness. Plus TGGP and Obaidah Shoher and really bright guys, and I have to admire that, if they are pushing something pretty awful.
Since conservatism and Zionism are unpalatable to most folks as they actually exist, conservatives and Zionists always have to lie to try to get decent people to go along with their programs, which most folks find repellent.
Anyway, it looks like the rightwing has moved on on global warming. Only 6% of the US says it doesn't exist, but about 50% of Republican Congresscritters say so.
But the new line is that global warming exists, but it's not caused by people, it's caused by cow farts!
Well, if that were so, as a totalitarian, I would just say fine, so kill all the cows, serve the whole world steak for a month and be done with it. If that's too radical, make a beef hamburger at McDonald's cost twice what a chicken or turkey hamburger does. Soon every fast food joint has beef and non-beef options and profits are blasting right along.
This rightwing argument, like most of them, is ultimately devious. The rightwingers know that this hamburger-munching Americans will never tax their beloved burgers even one penny.
So they throw up their hands and say nothing can be done, especially about reducing auto emissions, which is really what they have their butts smoking about anyway. How dare you order me to ride a bike!
Cow farts cause global warming, so what business do we have trying to reduce car emissions? Let global warming continue apace.
Problem is that they are playing games with figures.
It is true that the cattle industry, in the totality of its effects, does account for 18% of global warming. However, cow burps and farts only account for 12% of that 18%, and that 12% is 98% burps and only 2% farts. So cow farts actually account for .04% of global warming. That is something like 1% of all transportation (mostly vehicle) emissions. Cow farts and burps in total account for 2.1% of global warming.
If cow burping and farting is only 12% of cow global warming, what's all the rest? All the land, especially tropical forest land, that is cleared for cattle. All of the fossil fuel burning that goes into the production of fertilizer, feed and growing cattle. All of the transportation costs involved in the cattle industry. And on and on.
One would think that any livestock or animal husbandry is as capable of producing this problem as any other. Not so. Cattle cause the overwhelming majority of the global warming from animal husbandry.
Therefore, we could continue to eat meat, but just switch from beef to lamb, turkey, chicken, pork, goat, etc. I'd love to turn a lot of the cattle lands on the Great Plains back to buffalo and then harvest them for food. We had great herds of buffalo roaming our Midwest for thousands of years with no problems for the ecosystem and no global warming issues. I am told that rabbits are an excellent food.
A great way to do this would just be to tax beef and probably even milk based on the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem. My brother (I won't go near the place) informs that hamburgers at McDonald's cost from $1-4. Double the price. Make them cost $2-8 instead of $1-4, as I mentioned above. It's probably politically impossible, but that's why I have totalitarian tendencies.
Cattle also cause a tremendous amount of other damage above and beyond global warming. I will just let the article summarize:
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
I was on a rightwing blog a couple of years ago and decided to ask how many believed in global warming. The vast majority did not. A few said it was happening, but it was natural. One or two said it was happening, but no one knew what was causing it, and we needed to study it more.
This blog has unfortunately become infested lately with some young White male 20-something reactionary-to-libertarian trolls who are lurking in the comments section.
It's quite simple to be a libertarian when you are young, dumb and full of cum. I voted Libertarian at age 22. I'd never do it again, but that's how you learn. People that age just haven't been fucked hard enough and enough times by life yet. By the time we are 40, most of us have had about a million horrible things happen to us, and narcissism is on sharp decline. That's why age and wisdom are traditionally synonymous.
They're causing a lot of dissension, but echo chambers are boring. Comments rules forbid me from banning folks based on ideology, so for the moment, they are sticking around.
It's kind of interesting to have some pet rightwingers to play with, because like a lot of pets, they do a lot of stupid shit. Since rightwingers can talk unlike all other pets, rightwingers also say stupid shit.
Debating rightwingers is like debating ultranationalist Jewish Zionists. Most of their arguments are absolute crap. The reason is because what they are arguing for is perfectly horrible to most folks.
Hence I really admire Zionists like Samson Blinded who just tell it like it is. I admire libertarians like Entitled to an Opinion who just lay it out in all of libertarianism's heartless nastiness. Plus TGGP and Obaidah Shoher and really bright guys, and I have to admire that, if they are pushing something pretty awful.
Since conservatism and Zionism are unpalatable to most folks as they actually exist, conservatives and Zionists always have to lie to try to get decent people to go along with their programs, which most folks find repellent.
Anyway, it looks like the rightwing has moved on on global warming. Only 6% of the US says it doesn't exist, but about 50% of Republican Congresscritters say so.
But the new line is that global warming exists, but it's not caused by people, it's caused by cow farts!
Well, if that were so, as a totalitarian, I would just say fine, so kill all the cows, serve the whole world steak for a month and be done with it. If that's too radical, make a beef hamburger at McDonald's cost twice what a chicken or turkey hamburger does. Soon every fast food joint has beef and non-beef options and profits are blasting right along.
This rightwing argument, like most of them, is ultimately devious. The rightwingers know that this hamburger-munching Americans will never tax their beloved burgers even one penny.
So they throw up their hands and say nothing can be done, especially about reducing auto emissions, which is really what they have their butts smoking about anyway. How dare you order me to ride a bike!
Cow farts cause global warming, so what business do we have trying to reduce car emissions? Let global warming continue apace.
Problem is that they are playing games with figures.
It is true that the cattle industry, in the totality of its effects, does account for 18% of global warming. However, cow burps and farts only account for 12% of that 18%, and that 12% is 98% burps and only 2% farts. So cow farts actually account for .04% of global warming. That is something like 1% of all transportation (mostly vehicle) emissions. Cow farts and burps in total account for 2.1% of global warming.
If cow burping and farting is only 12% of cow global warming, what's all the rest? All the land, especially tropical forest land, that is cleared for cattle. All of the fossil fuel burning that goes into the production of fertilizer, feed and growing cattle. All of the transportation costs involved in the cattle industry. And on and on.
One would think that any livestock or animal husbandry is as capable of producing this problem as any other. Not so. Cattle cause the overwhelming majority of the global warming from animal husbandry.
Therefore, we could continue to eat meat, but just switch from beef to lamb, turkey, chicken, pork, goat, etc. I'd love to turn a lot of the cattle lands on the Great Plains back to buffalo and then harvest them for food. We had great herds of buffalo roaming our Midwest for thousands of years with no problems for the ecosystem and no global warming issues. I am told that rabbits are an excellent food.
A great way to do this would just be to tax beef and probably even milk based on the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem. My brother (I won't go near the place) informs that hamburgers at McDonald's cost from $1-4. Double the price. Make them cost $2-8 instead of $1-4, as I mentioned above. It's probably politically impossible, but that's why I have totalitarian tendencies.
Cattle also cause a tremendous amount of other damage above and beyond global warming. I will just let the article summarize:
Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world's emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain.
Ranching, the report adds, is "the major driver of deforestation" worldwide, and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert. Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk.
Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and endanger human health.
The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating "dead zones" devoid of life. One is up to 21,000 sq km, in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi.
The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat increases.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Ecosystem Collapse Mysteries
To bend your mind around a few things, try these baffling examples of what looks like instances of total ecosystem collapse in the US:
White-nose syndrome in bats. Also here.
Bee colony collapse disorder.
Try to figure out why these two environmental syndromes are occurring. For the life of me, I cannot. But I am thinking maybe global warming?
Plus, some think that they are related.
My mind is spinning. What's next, anyway? Scary stuff.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
White-nose syndrome in bats. Also here.
Bee colony collapse disorder.
Try to figure out why these two environmental syndromes are occurring. For the life of me, I cannot. But I am thinking maybe global warming?
Plus, some think that they are related.
My mind is spinning. What's next, anyway? Scary stuff.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Wolverines Extinct in Sequoia - Kings Canyon?
A new study using baited trap stations, done during winter, failed to find any California wolverines in either Sequoia or Kings Canyon National Parks in the southern Sierra Nevada. However, in 1980, definite wolverine tracks were seen at two locales in Kings Canyon National Park by trained wildlife biologists. However, tracks always count as "unverified". But not to me.
I say that at least 28 years ago, wolverines were present in Kings Canyon National Park. Wolverine sightings in California do tend to be concentrated in Kings Canyon and Sequoia Parks. This area was long held to be the last stronghold of the wolverine in California. Many detailed sightings were made from 1900-1930 in Sequoia National Park. In one, a wolverine chased two adult bears away from a horse carcass.
A map of historical wolverine sightings in Kings Canyon - Sequoia Parks. As you can see, sightings were much more common from 1920-1955 or so and have dropped off quite a bit ever since. Click to view.
The survey utilized many trap stations set in winter for a couple of months. It was designed to test for wolverines persisting at very low densities.
A map of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks showing the locations of the bait stations used in this survey. It also includes sightings since 1980. In the past 28 years, there have been nine wolverine sightings. That is about one sighting every three years, not a very good record. I am also aware of tracks spotted at Courtright Reservoir in 1990.
Courtright is located at the far west end of of rectangle 5a on the map, outside far northern Kings Canyon in the Sierra National Forest. These tracks were verified by Sierra National Forest wildlife biologists. I conclude therefore that wolverines were present near northern Kings Canyon at least 18 years ago.
I am also aware of another sighting out of Bishop, California on the Sierra crest in 1980. This sighting was by a wildlife biologist. The location of this sighting was just off this map to the north of the station labeled EV, north of Kings Canyon National Park. From 18-28 years ago, wolverines were present in and around Kings Canyon. Whether the have been extirpated since 1990 is yet an open question in my mind. Click to view.
It failed to find any wolverines and the researchers concluded that the California wolverine is likely extirpated from the Southern Sierra Nevada. Many other recent studies have also failed to find any wolverines.
However, this winter, a wolverine was photographed north of Lake Tahoe by researchers studying pine martens. DNA analysis has subsequently shown that this animal is from the Rocky Mountains and not a California wolverine. It is not known how this male wolverine got to the northern Sierra Nevada, since the nearest population is in the Snake River Valley in Idaho far to the north.
The researchers advocate that wolverines be reintroduced to the Sierras, since they seem to be absent from most of the range.
I believe that California wolverines may continue to persist at very low levels in the Sierras.
Historical wolverine sightings in Yosemite National Park. Once again, sightings were much more common from 1920-1955 or so. But there were still quite a few sightings in the 1990's.However, I am aware of some recent sightings in Yosemite in the 2000's that were not included in this map. I believe that the wolverine may continue to persist at low levels in Yosemite. Click to view.
In August 2006, there was an unverified sighting of a California wolverine in the Soda Creek drainage northeast of Rainbow Mountain in the Mineral King area of Sequoia National Park.
The Soda Creek Drainage in Mineral King, where there was an unverified sighting of a wolverine on the northeast slope of Rainbow Mountain in August 2006. This is at the confluence of Soda Creek, Lost Canyon Creek and Big Arroyo Creek in the Kern River Watershed. I have been to Mineral King once backpacking in 1973. It's a pretty amazing place. If you can handle difficult hiking, it is worth the trip.
This part of the Sierra Nevada is a lot drier than the northern part where the wolverine photo was taken. According to a topo map I just found, the part of the Soda Creek drainage on the northeast slope of Mt. Rainbow would be very high, at about 10,826 feet. This shows that wolverines definitely range above 10,000 feet in the Southern Sierras.
Fishing is banned here to preserve a population of endangered Little Kern Golden Trout. There are also endangered Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep in the area. I have seen these sheep in the mountains just outside Los Angeles. A once in a lifetime experience!
In addition, this webpage states that wolverines continue to exist in Mineral King. A backcountry ranger for Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park said that he was 99% sure that there had been good wolverine sightings in Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon NP's as recently as 2003, despite these negative findings.
There have also been sightings on the Sequoia National Forest adjacent to these two national parks and the Sequoia National Monument. The last sighting was in 1988. Wolverines have been sighted as far south as Monache Meadows in the Dome Land Wilderness on the Sequoia NF, but the last sighting was in the 1950's.
The suggestion to reintroduce wolverines to the Sierra is probably the correct one.
The California wolverine as a proven subspecies is still controversial, and it seems to persist at either very low numbers in California or is extirpated altogether. California wolverines continue to exist in Oregon and Washington.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
I say that at least 28 years ago, wolverines were present in Kings Canyon National Park. Wolverine sightings in California do tend to be concentrated in Kings Canyon and Sequoia Parks. This area was long held to be the last stronghold of the wolverine in California. Many detailed sightings were made from 1900-1930 in Sequoia National Park. In one, a wolverine chased two adult bears away from a horse carcass.
A map of historical wolverine sightings in Kings Canyon - Sequoia Parks. As you can see, sightings were much more common from 1920-1955 or so and have dropped off quite a bit ever since. Click to view.The survey utilized many trap stations set in winter for a couple of months. It was designed to test for wolverines persisting at very low densities.
A map of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks showing the locations of the bait stations used in this survey. It also includes sightings since 1980. In the past 28 years, there have been nine wolverine sightings. That is about one sighting every three years, not a very good record. I am also aware of tracks spotted at Courtright Reservoir in 1990.Courtright is located at the far west end of of rectangle 5a on the map, outside far northern Kings Canyon in the Sierra National Forest. These tracks were verified by Sierra National Forest wildlife biologists. I conclude therefore that wolverines were present near northern Kings Canyon at least 18 years ago.
I am also aware of another sighting out of Bishop, California on the Sierra crest in 1980. This sighting was by a wildlife biologist. The location of this sighting was just off this map to the north of the station labeled EV, north of Kings Canyon National Park. From 18-28 years ago, wolverines were present in and around Kings Canyon. Whether the have been extirpated since 1990 is yet an open question in my mind. Click to view.
It failed to find any wolverines and the researchers concluded that the California wolverine is likely extirpated from the Southern Sierra Nevada. Many other recent studies have also failed to find any wolverines.
However, this winter, a wolverine was photographed north of Lake Tahoe by researchers studying pine martens. DNA analysis has subsequently shown that this animal is from the Rocky Mountains and not a California wolverine. It is not known how this male wolverine got to the northern Sierra Nevada, since the nearest population is in the Snake River Valley in Idaho far to the north.
The researchers advocate that wolverines be reintroduced to the Sierras, since they seem to be absent from most of the range.
I believe that California wolverines may continue to persist at very low levels in the Sierras.
Historical wolverine sightings in Yosemite National Park. Once again, sightings were much more common from 1920-1955 or so. But there were still quite a few sightings in the 1990's.However, I am aware of some recent sightings in Yosemite in the 2000's that were not included in this map. I believe that the wolverine may continue to persist at low levels in Yosemite. Click to view.In August 2006, there was an unverified sighting of a California wolverine in the Soda Creek drainage northeast of Rainbow Mountain in the Mineral King area of Sequoia National Park.
The Soda Creek Drainage in Mineral King, where there was an unverified sighting of a wolverine on the northeast slope of Rainbow Mountain in August 2006. This is at the confluence of Soda Creek, Lost Canyon Creek and Big Arroyo Creek in the Kern River Watershed. I have been to Mineral King once backpacking in 1973. It's a pretty amazing place. If you can handle difficult hiking, it is worth the trip.This part of the Sierra Nevada is a lot drier than the northern part where the wolverine photo was taken. According to a topo map I just found, the part of the Soda Creek drainage on the northeast slope of Mt. Rainbow would be very high, at about 10,826 feet. This shows that wolverines definitely range above 10,000 feet in the Southern Sierras.
Fishing is banned here to preserve a population of endangered Little Kern Golden Trout. There are also endangered Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep in the area. I have seen these sheep in the mountains just outside Los Angeles. A once in a lifetime experience!
In addition, this webpage states that wolverines continue to exist in Mineral King. A backcountry ranger for Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park said that he was 99% sure that there had been good wolverine sightings in Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon NP's as recently as 2003, despite these negative findings.
There have also been sightings on the Sequoia National Forest adjacent to these two national parks and the Sequoia National Monument. The last sighting was in 1988. Wolverines have been sighted as far south as Monache Meadows in the Dome Land Wilderness on the Sequoia NF, but the last sighting was in the 1950's.
The suggestion to reintroduce wolverines to the Sierra is probably the correct one.
The California wolverine as a proven subspecies is still controversial, and it seems to persist at either very low numbers in California or is extirpated altogether. California wolverines continue to exist in Oregon and Washington.
References
- Graber D.M. 1996. Status of Terrestrial Vertebrates. SNEP Science Team and Special Consultants. Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project Report 25:709-734.
Graber, D.M. 2006. Disturbing Yosemite. California 117:4.
Hudgens, Brian R., Garcelon, David K. 2008. Winter Carnivore Survey Finds that Wolverines (Gulo gulo) are Likely Extirpated from Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks. Arcata: Institute for Wildlife Studies.
Sequoia National Forest. 2003. Giant Sequoia National Monument Management Plan Final Environmental Impact Statement. United States Forest Service, USDA.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
An Examination of the Frog Extinction Epidemic
Although many factors are involved in this epidemic, one of the worst is the Chytrid fungus epidemic. It is being spread by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which causes chytridiomycosis. This fungal disease is devastating frog populations all over the world, but particularly in Australia, and North, Central and South America.
The devastation in Central America has been particularly acute, with many species simply vanishing from the face of the Earth. Bd is just now spreading here in the US, with serious devastation of Sierra Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog populations in the Sierra Nevada. However, some populations are apparently surviving the epidemic with some some survivors intact and thereupon rebuilding their populations.
A paper in Nature (Pounds 2006) made the case that the chytrid epidemic was being driven by global warming. They suggested that Bd had always been there but had only become pathogenic in the face of global warming.
A new paper (Lips 2008) in the journal PLoS Biology challenged that theory with some interesting data. I did not read the Pounds paper, but the Lips paper was quite convincing.
Their argument is rather simple. If Bd had always been there, it would not show a spread rate typical of a spreading disease epidemic. Instead, it would tend to erupt in all places at once.
Lips' team showed first of all that Bd had not always been in the environment, that is, it was not an endemic. It appears to have escaped from an Australian lab around 1970 and from there spread through Australia. From Australia, it made its way to the Americas.
We can see several places where it seems to have been introduced, and we can plot the years of introduction on a map. So Bd is acting like an invasive alien species.
Bd appears in Costa Rica in 1987 and then heads south to Panama. It seems to be following mountain ranges there too. The number of species lost in Costa Rica is very large.
Bd spread in South America following two introductions, one in 1977 and one in 1980. The 1980 Ecuadorian introduction heads both north and south along the Andes. The 1977 Venezuelan introduction heads south along the Andes. For some reason, Bd in South America is sticking to the Andes.
This is precisely how we would expect an epidemic following an introduction by an alien species to operate - a geographical spread from a point of introduction with a rate of spread in miles per year. Furthermore, the testing of many specimens in museums failed to find Bd in any of them prior to 1977. This suggests strongly that Bd is an invasive alien fungus that was not present in the environment before.
An alternative hypothesis was not tested but did occur to me: That even though Bd was an alien exotic invasive fungus spreading after accidental introduction, global warming had somehow made Bd much more lethal to frogs. I can't figure out a way to test that hypothesis, and I guess none of the researchers are considering it. The Pounds team is sticking to their guns on this one, but I think that they are wrong.
It's a good mind exercise to read academic science journal articles that test scientific hypotheses against competing hypotheses. It's hard to read that stuff, but if you can get through it somehow, personally I find these brain puzzles to be a lot of fun. If you see learning as virtually a sensual activity as I do, this kind of stuff is almost as fun as a vacation, sports, sex or any other other purely sensual activity.
Learning and thinking is actually a blast, to me anyway. Try it sometime!
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
The devastation in Central America has been particularly acute, with many species simply vanishing from the face of the Earth. Bd is just now spreading here in the US, with serious devastation of Sierra Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog populations in the Sierra Nevada. However, some populations are apparently surviving the epidemic with some some survivors intact and thereupon rebuilding their populations.
A paper in Nature (Pounds 2006) made the case that the chytrid epidemic was being driven by global warming. They suggested that Bd had always been there but had only become pathogenic in the face of global warming.
A new paper (Lips 2008) in the journal PLoS Biology challenged that theory with some interesting data. I did not read the Pounds paper, but the Lips paper was quite convincing.
Their argument is rather simple. If Bd had always been there, it would not show a spread rate typical of a spreading disease epidemic. Instead, it would tend to erupt in all places at once.
Lips' team showed first of all that Bd had not always been in the environment, that is, it was not an endemic. It appears to have escaped from an Australian lab around 1970 and from there spread through Australia. From Australia, it made its way to the Americas.
We can see several places where it seems to have been introduced, and we can plot the years of introduction on a map. So Bd is acting like an invasive alien species.
Bd appears in Costa Rica in 1987 and then heads south to Panama. It seems to be following mountain ranges there too. The number of species lost in Costa Rica is very large.
Bd spread in South America following two introductions, one in 1977 and one in 1980. The 1980 Ecuadorian introduction heads both north and south along the Andes. The 1977 Venezuelan introduction heads south along the Andes. For some reason, Bd in South America is sticking to the Andes.An alternative hypothesis was not tested but did occur to me: That even though Bd was an alien exotic invasive fungus spreading after accidental introduction, global warming had somehow made Bd much more lethal to frogs. I can't figure out a way to test that hypothesis, and I guess none of the researchers are considering it. The Pounds team is sticking to their guns on this one, but I think that they are wrong.
It's a good mind exercise to read academic science journal articles that test scientific hypotheses against competing hypotheses. It's hard to read that stuff, but if you can get through it somehow, personally I find these brain puzzles to be a lot of fun. If you see learning as virtually a sensual activity as I do, this kind of stuff is almost as fun as a vacation, sports, sex or any other other purely sensual activity.
Learning and thinking is actually a blast, to me anyway. Try it sometime!
References
- Lips, Karen R., Diffendorfer, Jay, Mendelson III, Joseph R., Sears, Michael W. 2008. Riding the Wave: Reconciling the Roles of Disease and Climate Change in Amphibian Declines. PLoS Biology 6:3.
Pounds JA, Bustamante MR, Coloma LA, Consuegra JA, Fogden MPL, et al. 2006. Widespread amphibian extinctions from epidemic disease driven by global warming. Nature 39: 161–167.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Additions to the Wolverine's Range in Idaho
The wolverine in Idaho is generally considered inhabit three main areas:
The first in the Sawtooth National Forest (northern part), Challis National Forest, Payette National Forest and Sawtooth National Recreation Area in central Idaho.
Yet another population is in the Lochsa River Drainage in the Clearwater and Bitterroot Mountains in Clearwater National Forest.
A third population is to the north in the Selkirks along the Canadian border.
The three populations are considered to be separated from each other, although at least the first population is thought to be healthy.
Nevertheless, we continue to get reports of wolverines in other parts of Idaho. A previous post noted a wolverine on a telephone pole along the Snake River Valley in King Hill, Idaho, earlier this year.
A radio-collared wolverine recently traveled from the Grand Tetons in Wyoming across the Blackfoot and Caribou Mountains in the Targhee and Caribou National Forests in Southeastern Idaho, across private lands to the Portneuf Range west of the Portneuf River. This range is about 20 miles east of Pocatello, Idaho, and encompasses part of the Caribou National Forest and the Fort Hall Shoshone-Bannock Indian Reservation.
The breathtaking Portneuf Range east of Pocatello, Idaho, where the radio-collared wolverine ended up. It promptly turned right around and went back to the Tetons. In the Basin and Range Region.
A grazing allotment on the Blackfoot Mountains in southeastern Idaho. Lance Armstrong, the peripatetic wolverine, crossed this range on his way from the Grand Tetons to the Portneuf Range opposite Pocatello, Idaho. Grazing is thoroughly devastating BLM and Forest Service land in this region. The problem is particularly acute in Southern Idaho, as it is more arid. All livestock grazing pretty much needs to be banned in at least these areas.
Incredibly, livestock grazing is allowed in National Forest wilderness areas. This was one of the only ways that the 1964 Wilderness Act could get passed was to grandfather in these grazing allotments. It's insane that grazing is allowed in wilderness areas. Grazing is particularly devastating in high-elevation forests of the Sierra Nevada and anywhere in the arid West.
The cow evolved in England and prefers a cool climate with lots of water. In the arid West, cows congregate during the summer in the riparian areas, which they completely devastate. A grand total of 2% of all US beef comes from public lands in the West - most beef comes from feedlots in the Midwest. Public lands grazing is welfare - the allotments are rented out to the ranchers at far below market value, so the taxpayer gets totally screwed.
Not only do we get ripped off on the rental of our lands, but we also get our lands devastated in the process. The whole thing is completely insane. If ranchers can't make it ranching on private land, they need to get out of the business.
Furthermore, increasingly, public lands ranchers, like everything else in US capitalism, is going corporate. Mom and Pop ranchers are going out and ranching corporations are in. A large number of public lands grazing allotments are now being run by corporations as investment vehicles.
The long-ranging wolverine above was finally killed by a trapper just over the Montana border in the Centennial Range. Since the Centennials range into Idaho, we ought to add the Centennial Range in the Targhee National Forest to the wolverine's range in Idaho.
The spectacular Centennial Range on the border between Idaho and Montana. This is where the long-ranging wolverine named Lance Armstrong was finally killed by a trapper over the border into Montana.
Montana still allows trapping of wolverines, which takes about a dozen a year. Studies are showing that even that small take may be too much for wolverines to sustain. However, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission recently voted to set limits on wolverine trapping for the very first time.
Additional searching around the net noted that a wolverine had been shot dead by some boys in the Snake River Canyon in Idaho a few years back. They were worried and they brought it in to the Department of Fish and Game office, but the wardens let them go because they were kids and did not know what they were doing, although the wolverine is protected in Idaho.
The Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho. Some teenage boys shot dead a wolverine here about three years ago, but were not charged. Clearly, wolverines do exist in this part of the Colombian Plateau. This is where Evil Knievel tried his ill-fated motorcycle jump across this canyon decades ago.
There are various definitions about what constitutes the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. The most parsimonious definition says that it starts at the spectacular Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls, Idaho. It seems to continue west about 30 miles to 1000 Springs (great pics on that page) at Hagerman, where Wikipedia implies that it ends.
So this wolverine was apparently killed in the canyon between Twin Falls and Hagerman. That's only about 47 miles north of the Nevada border.
Way further afield, in the Seven Devils Mountains of far western Idaho in the Hell's River Canyon of the Snake River, wolverines exist As you can see in various places in this large document (page 6 for instance) they are actually doing surveys for their dens.
Included in the appendices is a report called Survey of Wolverine Dens in the Seven Devils Mountains of Hells Canyon.
The gorgeous Seven Devils Range in the Payette National Forest in Idaho. This range borders on Hell's Canyon and may serve as a steppingstone for wolverines to travel from Idaho across the Snake River to the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon.
There are also reports of wolverines in the Wood River Valley area. Part of the Wood River runs about 30 miles north of Twin Falls, but the Wood River Valley refers to private land about 60-70 miles north of Twin Falls. It includes the towns of Ketchum, Sun Valley, Hailey and Bellevue. We should extend wolverine habitat down from the Sawtooths into the Wood River Valley. There have been recent sightings in the Sun Valley area.
On the webpage for Power County, a county in southeastern Idaho west and southwest of Pocatello, the county claims that wolverines occur there. There are various ranges there, including the Bannock Range, the Sublette Range and the Deep Creek Range.
The spectacular Deep Creek Range in southeastern Idaho. It is about 40 miles long, and is bounded by Arbon Valley on the East and Rockland Valley on the West as it ranges through Power County. Wolverines may well exist here. Another Basin and Range mountain range.
The Bannock Range in southeastern Idaho. Both the Bannock and the Deep Creek Ranges are southwest of Pocatello. The Bannocks extend from Pocatello 85 miles south into northern Utah through the Caribou National Forest. Wolverines may well exist in this range. Also located in the Basin and Range region.
Photos of all of these beautiful ranges can be seen on Ralph Maughan's excellent blog. Maughan is a professor of political science at Idaho State University in Pocatello. He's also really big on wolves.
Incredibly, the Bush Administration has removed all protections for all wolves in the United States! The Rocky Mountains population is doing fairly well, but they just completely removed the wolves from the endangered species list and handed management of them over to the states, who are proceeding to slaughter them as fast as they can!
Web page on myths about wolves. Wolves are hardly dangerous at all to humans. Predators killed 12,100 sheep in Idaho last year. Of those, a little more than 2% were killed by wolves. Domestic dogs killed far more and coyotes killed the most of all. There is nothing to do with coyotes, and no way to get rid of them. The more you do predator control against them, the more sheep they kill.
Ranchers claim that wolves are devastating Idaho's cattle industry. Wolves killed 24 cows in Idaho last year, .03 of all losses. All predators accounted for only 3% of all losses, and wolves accounted for less than 1% of all predator losses. Ranchers are reimbursed for all of their losses to wolves anyway.
This is a clear consequence of White Rule in America. White Rule has meant a total corporate takeover of every nook and cranny in this nation, along with utter devastation of our environment and every non-utilitarian form of non-human life in it.
What's odd is that surveys of Americans, including most Whites, show that they are strong environmentalists. But environmentalism is way down on the list. What's high on the list? Although most US Whites will tell you that they are not racist, the movement of US Whites towards the Republican Party from 1980-present has been pretty much predicated on race.
It's coincided with a dramatic decrease in the White % in this country. You tell me that is a coincidence? Forget it! When I was coming of age in the late 1970's, this was probably an 82% White country. The vast majority of people that I grew up with, went to high school, junior college and even college with, were White. The people I met at my jobs and on college trips were almost all White. It was just a White World.
Since 1980, our White World has gotten darker and darker. Whites have dropped from 82% of the US to about 64% and it's dropping all the time. This has amazingly coincided with Whites leaving liberalism en masse and voting hard rightwing Republican. The White Republican politics has gotten harder and harder rightwing with time.
During the 1990's and into the Bush Administration, we are now dealing with quite possibly the most rightwing President this country has ever seen - and it's all the fault of White people. Why are Whites voting more and more reactionary with time? Because their rule is coming to an end.
This is a predictable political trend for any ruling group which is desperately trying to hold onto power in the face of rising opposition. In truth, ruling groups often opt for dictatorship and often fascism as they desperately try to cling to power.
In summary, occupied wolverine habitat in Idaho should be extended beyond the description at the beginning to the post to Power County, Elmore County, the Snake River Valley, the Blackfoot Mountains, the Centennial Range, the Caribou Range, the Snake River Range, the Big Hole Mountains, the Targhee and Caribou National Forests, the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, the Portneuf Range, the Seven Devils Mountains , the Snake River Canyon and possibly the Bannock and Deep Creek Ranges.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
The first in the Sawtooth National Forest (northern part), Challis National Forest, Payette National Forest and Sawtooth National Recreation Area in central Idaho.
Yet another population is in the Lochsa River Drainage in the Clearwater and Bitterroot Mountains in Clearwater National Forest.
A third population is to the north in the Selkirks along the Canadian border.
The three populations are considered to be separated from each other, although at least the first population is thought to be healthy.
Nevertheless, we continue to get reports of wolverines in other parts of Idaho. A previous post noted a wolverine on a telephone pole along the Snake River Valley in King Hill, Idaho, earlier this year.
A radio-collared wolverine recently traveled from the Grand Tetons in Wyoming across the Blackfoot and Caribou Mountains in the Targhee and Caribou National Forests in Southeastern Idaho, across private lands to the Portneuf Range west of the Portneuf River. This range is about 20 miles east of Pocatello, Idaho, and encompasses part of the Caribou National Forest and the Fort Hall Shoshone-Bannock Indian Reservation.
The breathtaking Portneuf Range east of Pocatello, Idaho, where the radio-collared wolverine ended up. It promptly turned right around and went back to the Tetons. In the Basin and Range Region.
A grazing allotment on the Blackfoot Mountains in southeastern Idaho. Lance Armstrong, the peripatetic wolverine, crossed this range on his way from the Grand Tetons to the Portneuf Range opposite Pocatello, Idaho. Grazing is thoroughly devastating BLM and Forest Service land in this region. The problem is particularly acute in Southern Idaho, as it is more arid. All livestock grazing pretty much needs to be banned in at least these areas.Incredibly, livestock grazing is allowed in National Forest wilderness areas. This was one of the only ways that the 1964 Wilderness Act could get passed was to grandfather in these grazing allotments. It's insane that grazing is allowed in wilderness areas. Grazing is particularly devastating in high-elevation forests of the Sierra Nevada and anywhere in the arid West.
The cow evolved in England and prefers a cool climate with lots of water. In the arid West, cows congregate during the summer in the riparian areas, which they completely devastate. A grand total of 2% of all US beef comes from public lands in the West - most beef comes from feedlots in the Midwest. Public lands grazing is welfare - the allotments are rented out to the ranchers at far below market value, so the taxpayer gets totally screwed.
Not only do we get ripped off on the rental of our lands, but we also get our lands devastated in the process. The whole thing is completely insane. If ranchers can't make it ranching on private land, they need to get out of the business.
Furthermore, increasingly, public lands ranchers, like everything else in US capitalism, is going corporate. Mom and Pop ranchers are going out and ranching corporations are in. A large number of public lands grazing allotments are now being run by corporations as investment vehicles.
The long-ranging wolverine above was finally killed by a trapper just over the Montana border in the Centennial Range. Since the Centennials range into Idaho, we ought to add the Centennial Range in the Targhee National Forest to the wolverine's range in Idaho.
The spectacular Centennial Range on the border between Idaho and Montana. This is where the long-ranging wolverine named Lance Armstrong was finally killed by a trapper over the border into Montana.Montana still allows trapping of wolverines, which takes about a dozen a year. Studies are showing that even that small take may be too much for wolverines to sustain. However, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission recently voted to set limits on wolverine trapping for the very first time.
Additional searching around the net noted that a wolverine had been shot dead by some boys in the Snake River Canyon in Idaho a few years back. They were worried and they brought it in to the Department of Fish and Game office, but the wardens let them go because they were kids and did not know what they were doing, although the wolverine is protected in Idaho.
The Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho. Some teenage boys shot dead a wolverine here about three years ago, but were not charged. Clearly, wolverines do exist in this part of the Colombian Plateau. This is where Evil Knievel tried his ill-fated motorcycle jump across this canyon decades ago.There are various definitions about what constitutes the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. The most parsimonious definition says that it starts at the spectacular Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls, Idaho. It seems to continue west about 30 miles to 1000 Springs (great pics on that page) at Hagerman, where Wikipedia implies that it ends.
So this wolverine was apparently killed in the canyon between Twin Falls and Hagerman. That's only about 47 miles north of the Nevada border.
Way further afield, in the Seven Devils Mountains of far western Idaho in the Hell's River Canyon of the Snake River, wolverines exist As you can see in various places in this large document (page 6 for instance) they are actually doing surveys for their dens.
Included in the appendices is a report called Survey of Wolverine Dens in the Seven Devils Mountains of Hells Canyon.
The gorgeous Seven Devils Range in the Payette National Forest in Idaho. This range borders on Hell's Canyon and may serve as a steppingstone for wolverines to travel from Idaho across the Snake River to the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon.There are also reports of wolverines in the Wood River Valley area. Part of the Wood River runs about 30 miles north of Twin Falls, but the Wood River Valley refers to private land about 60-70 miles north of Twin Falls. It includes the towns of Ketchum, Sun Valley, Hailey and Bellevue. We should extend wolverine habitat down from the Sawtooths into the Wood River Valley. There have been recent sightings in the Sun Valley area.
On the webpage for Power County, a county in southeastern Idaho west and southwest of Pocatello, the county claims that wolverines occur there. There are various ranges there, including the Bannock Range, the Sublette Range and the Deep Creek Range.
The spectacular Deep Creek Range in southeastern Idaho. It is about 40 miles long, and is bounded by Arbon Valley on the East and Rockland Valley on the West as it ranges through Power County. Wolverines may well exist here. Another Basin and Range mountain range.
The Bannock Range in southeastern Idaho. Both the Bannock and the Deep Creek Ranges are southwest of Pocatello. The Bannocks extend from Pocatello 85 miles south into northern Utah through the Caribou National Forest. Wolverines may well exist in this range. Also located in the Basin and Range region.Photos of all of these beautiful ranges can be seen on Ralph Maughan's excellent blog. Maughan is a professor of political science at Idaho State University in Pocatello. He's also really big on wolves.
Incredibly, the Bush Administration has removed all protections for all wolves in the United States! The Rocky Mountains population is doing fairly well, but they just completely removed the wolves from the endangered species list and handed management of them over to the states, who are proceeding to slaughter them as fast as they can!
Web page on myths about wolves. Wolves are hardly dangerous at all to humans. Predators killed 12,100 sheep in Idaho last year. Of those, a little more than 2% were killed by wolves. Domestic dogs killed far more and coyotes killed the most of all. There is nothing to do with coyotes, and no way to get rid of them. The more you do predator control against them, the more sheep they kill.
Ranchers claim that wolves are devastating Idaho's cattle industry. Wolves killed 24 cows in Idaho last year, .03 of all losses. All predators accounted for only 3% of all losses, and wolves accounted for less than 1% of all predator losses. Ranchers are reimbursed for all of their losses to wolves anyway.
This is a clear consequence of White Rule in America. White Rule has meant a total corporate takeover of every nook and cranny in this nation, along with utter devastation of our environment and every non-utilitarian form of non-human life in it.
What's odd is that surveys of Americans, including most Whites, show that they are strong environmentalists. But environmentalism is way down on the list. What's high on the list? Although most US Whites will tell you that they are not racist, the movement of US Whites towards the Republican Party from 1980-present has been pretty much predicated on race.
It's coincided with a dramatic decrease in the White % in this country. You tell me that is a coincidence? Forget it! When I was coming of age in the late 1970's, this was probably an 82% White country. The vast majority of people that I grew up with, went to high school, junior college and even college with, were White. The people I met at my jobs and on college trips were almost all White. It was just a White World.
Since 1980, our White World has gotten darker and darker. Whites have dropped from 82% of the US to about 64% and it's dropping all the time. This has amazingly coincided with Whites leaving liberalism en masse and voting hard rightwing Republican. The White Republican politics has gotten harder and harder rightwing with time.
During the 1990's and into the Bush Administration, we are now dealing with quite possibly the most rightwing President this country has ever seen - and it's all the fault of White people. Why are Whites voting more and more reactionary with time? Because their rule is coming to an end.
This is a predictable political trend for any ruling group which is desperately trying to hold onto power in the face of rising opposition. In truth, ruling groups often opt for dictatorship and often fascism as they desperately try to cling to power.
In summary, occupied wolverine habitat in Idaho should be extended beyond the description at the beginning to the post to Power County, Elmore County, the Snake River Valley, the Blackfoot Mountains, the Centennial Range, the Caribou Range, the Snake River Range, the Big Hole Mountains, the Targhee and Caribou National Forests, the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, the Portneuf Range, the Seven Devils Mountains , the Snake River Canyon and possibly the Bannock and Deep Creek Ranges.
References
- Biodiversity Legal Foundation, Predator Conservation Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife, Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, and Superior Wilderness Action Network. (2000). Petition for a rule to list the wolverine (Gulo gulo luscus) as Threatened or Endangered under the Endangered Species Act within the contiguous United States. Submitted to the U.S. Dept. of Interior Fish and Wildlife Service on July 11, 2000.
Edelman, Frank and Copeland, Jeff. 1999. Wolverine Distribution in the Northwestern United States and a Survey in the Seven Devils Mountains of Idaho. Northwest Science 62:181-185.
Groves, Craig R. 1988. Distribution of the wolverine in Idaho as determined by mail questionnaire. Northwest Science 62(4):181-5.
Predator Conservation Alliance. 2001. Predator Conservation Alliance's Literature Summary - Draft - January 24, 2001 - Draft Conservation Status and Needs of the Wolverine (Gulo gulo).
Wildlife Conservation Society 2004. Wolverine Takes A Road Trip: Scientists Track Male Animal Over A Three-state, 550-mile Walk-about. Science Daily.
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