With climate change commanding the news spotlight, dominating environmental discourse, you don’t hear much anymore about biodiversity or endangered species, two interconnected issues which, until the last decade or so, had been a focus of many environmental campaigners and widespread media coverage. A case in point: In recent years, the conservation community has been at…Continue Reading…
Environmental journalism, by and large, reflects not just news of the day (and an underlying theme) but also the zeitgeist. For example, when I made ecology my beat in the late 1990s, stories about the biodiversity crisis were prevalent in mainstream media and in environmental magazines–one of which I worked at through most of the…Continue Reading…
In a brilliant essay (PDF), the American geographer D. W. Meinig writes: “Any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.” Meinig’s piece is in a classic 1979 book of essays called, “The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes.” This collection features scholars whose work touches on the human/environment relationship….Continue Reading…
A joint NASA/Library of Congress symposium held today in Washington DC asked: Will human civilization on Earth be imperiled, or enhanced, by our own world-changing technologies? Will our technological abilities threaten our survival as a species, or even threaten the Earth as a whole, or will we come to live comfortably with these new powers?…Continue Reading…
I’m tempted to cut to the chase and tell you at the outset that conservationists have come a long away from the sense of urgency that in the mid-1980s gave birth to the field of conservation biology, which Michael Soule defined as a “crisis discipline.” True, for foot soldiers carrying the biodiversity flag the core mission…Continue Reading…
Have you heard about the big event National Geographic is hosting with TEDx this week, the one about restoring species? No, not endangered species–but ones that are already extinct, like the woolly mammoth. I have mixed feelings about the idea. In the abstract, I think it’s pretty cool. The prospect of regaining lost pieces of…Continue Reading…
Nearly two decades ago, an environmental historian published a scholarly essay that enraged the environmental community. William Cronon, author of the seminal Changes in the Land (a book that deeply influenced me and many others) and the brilliant (equally influential) Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, began his provocative essay this way: The time has come…Continue Reading…
Here’s a story in the latest issue of Conservation magazine that should raise some hackles: Social Scientists have long understood that corruption has disastrous effects on struggling economies and people, with the poorest suffering the brunt of that impact. What is now becoming clearer is corruption’s devastating impact on ecosystems””and on the business of conservation…Continue Reading…
Several days ago, Andy Revkin wrote a Dot Earth post about what I would characterize as an ecotopia for conservationists: After three years of meetings and study, a broad array of conservation groups, government scientists and other experts on North American wildlife policy have produced a road map for restoring some large free-roaming populations of…Continue Reading…
It’s not easy being a conservation biologist. You have to fight on multiple fronts just to maintain and preserve viable wildlife populations. Habitat fragmentation often poses the biggest threat to imperiled species. But there is one battle that the media has all but ignored–that between animal rights proponents and conservationists. So this post from wildlife…Continue Reading…