Urgency
Guerrillas could drive gorillas toward extinction in Congo, warns UN
Gorillas may disappear across much of the Congo Basin by the mid 2020s unless action is taken to protect against poaching and habitat destruction, warns a new report issued by United Nations and INTERPOL.
The Last Stand of the Gorilla - Environmental Crime and Conflict in the Congo Basin — released at the CITES meeting in Doha, Qatar — lists a multitude of threats to gorillas, including the bushmeat trade, outbreaks of the ebola virus, illegal logging, mining, and charcoal production. The report warns that that militias in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are exacerbating the gorilla crisis through trafficking and involvement in other illicit activities. Gorilla bushmeat moves through the same smuggling channels as illegally extracted timber, diamonds, gold and coltan (a mineral used in cell phones). Further, insecurity in the region has driven hundreds of thousands of people into refugee camps, which has increased pressure on natural resources, including forest habitat for gorillas and the apes themselves.
Forest epidemic is unprecedented phenomenon, still getting worse
The Swiss needle cast epidemic in Douglas-fir forests of the coastal Pacific Northwest is continuing to intensify, appears to be unprecedented over at least the past 100 years, and is probably linked to the extensive planting of Douglas-fir along the coast and a warmer climate, new research concludes.
Scientists in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University have also found that this disease, which is affecting hundreds of thousands of acres in Oregon and Washington and costing tens of millions of dollars a year in lost growth, can affect older trees as well as young stands - in some cases causing their growth to almost grind to a halt.
History repeats itself: the path to extinction is still paved with greed and waste
As a child I read about the near-extinction of the American bison. Once the dominant species on America's Great Plains, I remember books illustrating how train-travelers would set their guns on open windows and shoot down bison by the hundreds as the locomotive sped through what was left of the wild west. The American bison plunged from an estimated 30 million to a few hundred at the opening of the 20th century.
When I read about the bison's demise I remember thinking, with the characteristic superiority of a child, how such a thing could never happen today, that society has, in a word, 'progressed'.
Grown-up now, the world has made me wiser: last month the international organization CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) struck down a ban on the Critically Endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna. The story of the Atlantic bluefin tuna is a long and mostly irrational one—that is if one looks at the Atlantic bluefin from a scientific, ecologic, moral, or common-sense perspective.
How Amazongate blighted the rainforest harvest for WWF
Two weeks ago I reported on what is potentially the greatest global warming wheeze of all – a scheme to claim $60 billion in carbon credits for keeping intact a large chunk of the Amazon rainforest which is not under any threat, The architects of this imaginative project are the environmental campaigners of the WWF and their close ally the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.
New timber ban failing to stop illegal logging in Madagascar
Rainforest timber continues to be cut illegally from Madagascar's national parks despite a recently announced moratorium on precious wood exports and logging, reports a source from the Indian Ocean island nation.
On March 24, Madagascar's transitional authority unveiled decree (no. 2010-141) prohibiting all exports of rosewood and precious timber for two to five years during a council meeting held at Ambohitsorohitra Palace in Antananarivo, Madagascar's capital city. But with the revelation that logging is continuing within Masoala National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, questions are now being raised about the decree.
