Curt Stager writes: Much more has been said and written about Thoreau’s philosopher-poet side than his naturalist side, but as a scientist I am more interested in the latter. The journals that he kept from 1837 to 1861 were so full of natural history observations that they might have become a major scientific work if he had not died of a lung ailment at age 44. He probably thought so, too. Two months before his death in 1862 he wrote…
Trevor Nace reports: As Australia experiences record-breaking drought and bushfires, koala populations have dwindled along with their habitat, leaving them “functionally extinct.” The chairman of the Australian Koala Foundation, Deborah Tabart, estimates that over 1,000 koalas have been killed from the fires and that 80 percent of their habitat has been destroyed. Recent bushfires, along with prolonged drought and deforestation has led to koalas becoming “functionally extinct” according to experts. Functional extinction is when a population becomes so limited that…
America magazine reports: Following through on a proposal made at the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon, Pope Francis said there are plans to include a definition of ecological sins in the church’s official teaching. “We should be introducing — we were thinking — in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the sin against ecology, ecological sin against the common home,” he told participants at a conference on criminal justice Nov. 15. Members of the International Association of Penal Law…
Tim Flannery writes: In January 1962, on my sixth birthday, I was taken to Melbourne Zoo, where I rode an elephant. We children climbed a scaffold and perched on rough wooden benches atop the elephant’s back, where my fingers furtively reached for a feel of its wrinkled skin. A few months later, elephant rides were discontinued, for safety reasons, at most zoos in Australia, Europe, and the US. I was dimly aware of the danger involved in mounting such an…
David P Barash writes: Once, while waiting for a wilderness permit at a ranger station in North Cascades National Park, Washington state, I overheard the following message, radioed into headquarters by a backcountry ranger: ‘Dead elk in upper Agnes Creek decomposing nicely. Over.’ This ranger was not only a practical and profound ecologist, she also possessed the wisdom of a Buddhist master. The ‘over’ in her communication seemed especially apt. For Buddhists, as for ecologists, all individual lives are eventually…
In an interview with Knowable Magazine, Floyd Dewhirst says: We don’t really know the number of bacteria in an average mouth. But there are something like 1011 [100 billion] organisms per gram of plaque — so we’re looking at a large number. What people usually talk about is how many species are in there. The Human Oral Microbiome Project identified a little over 700 different species of bacteria. (There are also fungi and viruses.) About 400 of the 700 bacterial…
The Guardian reports: Ocean acidification can cause the mass extinction of marine life, fossil evidence from 66m years ago has revealed. A key impact of today’s climate crisis is that seas are again getting more acidic, as they absorb carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas. Scientists said the latest research is a warning that humanity is risking potential “ecological collapse” in the oceans, which produce half the oxygen we breathe. The researchers analysed small seashells in…
Daniel Grossman writes: Apart from the experts, few people realize that climate change could be worse. Every year, trees, shrubs, and every other kind of plant absorb 9 billion tons of CO2—one quarter of what we let loose from our tailpipes and smokestacks—and help slow the gas’s accumulation in the atmosphere. If not for the world’s photosynthesizers, the concentration of CO2 in the air, along with Earth’s temperature, would be rising much faster than it already is. Our terrestrial plants…
Dalia Nassar and Margaret M Barbour write: Place yourself on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, near the Franz Josef Glacier. Officially, this forest is a temperate podocarp-hardwood rainforest, but these dry words belie the rich diversity of plant life around, encompassing every imaginable shade of green, brown and grey. They also do an injustice to the experience of standing dwarfed by the soaring trunks of the 400-year-old rimu trees draped in moss, with their beautifully…
Dance is a unique way of passing on cultural stories to a younger generation. Aaron Hawkins/Flickr.com, CC BY-ND By Rosalyn R. LaPier, The University of Montana Alaska has a “linguistic emergency,” according to the Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker. A report warned earlier this year that all of the state’s 20 Native American languages might cease to exist by the end of this century, if the state did not act. American policies, particularly in the six decades between the 1870s and…
The University of Copenhagen reports: New microbial research at the Department of Biology reveals that bacteria would rather unite against external threats, such as antibiotics, rather than fight against each other. The report has just been published in the scientific publication ISME Journal. For a number of years the researchers have studied how combinations of bacteria behave together when in a confined area. After investigating many thousands of combinations it has become clear that bacteria cooperate to survive and that…
National Geographic reports: As they soar through the sky, birds seem blissfully impervious to the stresses of Earth. Indeed, their ability to migrate makes them more resilient to habitat disruption than less dynamic creatures. That makes the most recent annual report produced by the National Audubon Society, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting birds and their habitat, particularly startling. Released this week, the report predicts that if Earth continues to warm according to current trends—rising 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit)…
One in seven British species is threatened with extinction, according to a new report by the country’s main wildlife and conservation charities. The study shows there have been strong or moderate declines in 41% of all species since 1970.
The Paraguayan Chaco, South America’s second largest forest, is rapidly disappearing as agriculture extends deeper into what was once forest. Here, isolated stands of trees remain amid the farms. Joel E. Correia, CC BY-NC-ND By Joel E. Correia, University of Florida The fires raging across the Brazilian Amazon have captured the world’s attention. Meanwhile, South America’s second-largest forest, the Gran Chaco, is disappearing in plain sight. The Gran Chaco, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is…
The Guardian reports: As presidents, prime ministers and corporate executives gathered at the UN climate action summit on Monday, for the first time, an indigenous representative joined the event in a formal capacity. Tuntiak Katan of the Ecuadorian Shuar people spoke on behalf of the International Indigenous People’s Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC), a caucus of indigenous rights advocates who, for years, has been working towards more robust participation and inclusion at the UN level in response to the climate…
Rebecca Boyle writes: Light is the basis for all life, but it is more than just a source of energy. It is also a source of information, telling organisms when to sleep, hunt, hide, migrate, metabolize, and reproduce. Since the advent of incandescent light bulbs, humans have been interfering with those messages. And the interference is worsening with the spread of LEDs, which consume less electricity and so are often brighter and stay on longer and later than their predecessors….