Andy Revkin wrestles with Tim Flannery’s new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, in a NYT book review: An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that humans have upended hosts of ecosystems and are exerting a growing and potentially calamitous influence on the climate. Some, perhaps in response to public indifference, have…Continue Reading…
If you thought assigning attribution of individual weather disasters to global climate change was tricky business, imagine trying to establish a causal link between specific ecological problems and global warming. In this commentary in Nature Climate Change, ecologist Camille Parmesan and her co-authors suggest not going there. It’s not that they think global warming doesn’t adversely…Continue Reading…
Via Andy Revkin at Dot Earth, I see that Peter Gleick, living in an imaginary world where tradeoffs never occur, is outraged that some people in California are daring to consider that not all endangered species, because of their dire status, can be saved: In a desperate attempt to make it easier to solve California’s complex and contentious water…Continue Reading…
It’s a good day when forest ecology and the prevalence of movie sex scenes can be discussed in the same breath.
The issue of human-manufactured biodiversity is controversial. After all, if humans are overrunning nature and degrading the vital ecosystem services that we depend on, isn’t it rather beside the point if we also inadvertently boost biodiversity on some landscapes? I don’t think so. More environmentalists need to realize that the boundaries between pristine nature and…Continue Reading…
**UPDATE: Stuart Pimm, the highly respected conservation biologist at Duke University, emailed me his thoughts on the climate change/global land use dichotomy that is implied by my post. It’s an important perspective. Stuart has given me permission to publish his email in its entirety. You can find it below at this comment.** Perhaps the biggest…Continue Reading…
The social/ecological relationship is one that fascinates me. It seems to have been the theme of this year’s annual Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) symposium, which Piper Corp reports on at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) blog. For those unfamiliar with LTER’s, this gem of a program is in its third decade and is…Continue Reading…
Goes to this sci-fi sounding post. You just gotta read about how the baby cane toads are no match for the meat ants.
That’s the title of a fantastic piece by Chris Turner in the October issue of The Walrus, a Canadian magazine. He turns the typical environmental tale of crisis on its head, suggesting that, We need a new kind of story, a new template for our ecological philosophy “” one that acknowledges what we have lost…Continue Reading…
That’s the title of today’s column by John Fleck over at the Albuquerque Journal. What I really like about this piece is that the focus is on ecosystem services, which to me, seems firmer ground to build this concept on, rather than the climate security link. Via Fleck, we learn that a federal laboratory is…Continue Reading…