This Indiegogo science campaign is wonderful. Desert kit foxes are in trouble. They’re shy, they’re faced with competition even when things are good from other carnivores such as coyotes, and they’re increasingly being displaced by human industry. One recent distressing example of that last: builders of the Genesis Solar Project were trying to evict a …
Category Archive: Ecology
Mar 30 2013
Caturday!
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff person happened to be in the right place this week to document a confrontation between two puma cubs and a band of five coyotes at the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyoming. There are more photos. (No sad kitty trigger warning needed.)
Mar 17 2013
Adam Merberg on grazing and Allan Savory and TED
I wish I’d seen Adam Merberg’s excellent takedown of Allan Savory’s TED talk on “greening the deserts” before I wrote my own. Merberg provides a history of Savory’s career that’s remarkably detailed for its relative brevity, with a couple of damning quotes by Savory, including this one: You’ll find the scientific method never discovers anything. …
Mar 15 2013
TED Talk: spreading bullshit about the desert
What? TED vectoring pseudoscience? Unpossible! In one recent particular instance, though, a TED talk firmly grounded in bullshit — literal and figurative — is gaining a mortifying amount of traction with people who really should know better. The lecturer is Allan Savory, who for the last couple decades has been pushing his own brand of …
Mar 12 2013
Good report on Federal wildlife torture from a surprising source
Sometimes, even Fox News gets one right [trigger warnings, as you might expect from the post title]: The brutal approach by Wildlife Services is part of a culture of animal cruelty that has long persisted within an agency that uses taxpayer money to wage an unnecessary war on wildlife, according to two U.S. congressmen who have …
Mar 10 2013
Bring back the Shasta ground sloth
Bringing extinct animals back to life is big news this week. Not because there’ve been any particular recent breakthroughs, but because the upcoming issue of National Geographic features the topic as a cover story, and is hosting a related TEDx meeting this Friday in Washington D.C. that’s also sponsored by Stewart Brand’s Long Now Foundation. …
Feb 22 2013
More boat than fish
How is it, living in the Anthropocene? Sea levels will likely rise a few feet by the year 2100. Current fish wet biomass is about 2 billion tons, so removing them won’t make a dent either. (Marine fish biomass dropped by 80% over the last century, which—taking into consideration the growth rate of the world’s …
Feb 05 2013
Nevada seems to have more than its share of idiots
Finally my lifelong lack of a college degree pays off! As it turns out, college degrees are bad for living things. At least that’s according to sterling citizen Cliff Gardner of Ruby Valley in Nevada, who said this to the New York Times: “I’m sure most of the people being considered for [the state’s Department of …
Nov 21 2012
What is a species, anyway?
Hilary Rosner has an interesting piece at Wired Science on the campaign to keep the critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish from going extinct. Background: during the Pluvial period there were a lot of occasionally interconnected lakes in the American southwest, and some of those lakes had little fish in them of what we’d later call …
Oct 30 2012
Humans versus wildlife
I figure we could use some less-than-apocalyptic news today. Over the last couple decades, the management of Tilden Regional Park in the hills above Berkeley, California has closed a main road artery through the park each year between November 1 and April 1 in order to protect a local amphibian. The road parallels a seasonal …
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