Hear the latest speeches and interviews with leading environmental thinkers such as Amory Lovins, David Suzuki, George Monbiot along with environmental news and features at Radio Ecoshock. Vancouver’s Alex Smith trolls the media world to find the best enviro talk and puts it together in a slick, professional format. And Smith’s enviro newscasts serves up latest enviro news with a light touch and silly sound affects.
By Stephen Leahy
Nov 30, 2006 (IPS) – Ice-loving penguins have never been more popular, but few people realise they are threatened with extinction from climate change and industrial fishing.
The loveable stars of the Hollywood movie “Happy Feet” and the stoic and courageous creatures featured in the popular documentary “March of the Penguins” are in trouble.
Of the world’s 19 penguin species, 12 are now so threatened they need special protection, according to the Centre for Biological Diversity (CBD), a California environmental group focused on species extinction.
Popularity doesn’t guarantee survival. But it might increase protection and prompt action on climate change, says Brendan Cummings, director of the CBD’s Oceans Programme.
Cummings’ organisation filed a formal petition this week requesting that 12 species of penguins worldwide, including the well-known Emperor Penguin, be added to the list of threatened and endangered species under the United States Endangered Species Act. Continue reading
Quote of the Day:
“I am extremely frustrated by the double standards of industrialized nations. Canada criticizes other countries about their human rights policies or about the death penalty while they are playing with the lives of island people and the Inuit,” says Enele Sopoaga, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Tuvalu to the United Nations and vice-chair of the Alliance of Small Island States.
Tuvalu is a small island country in the South Pacific ocean that is experiencing flooding due to rising sea levels.
By Stephen Leahy
Nov 25 (IPS) – A prolonged drought in East Africa in the 1890s not only killed tens of thousands of the native Maasai people, it also reshaped the ecological and political landscape — this according to new research published in the current issue of the ‘African Journal of Ecology’.
Droughts and also disease outbreaks took place from 1883 to 1902, a series of events which the Maasai dubbed the “Emutai” (“to wipe out”). Rinderpest killed Maasai cattle in 1883-1884, then small pox devastated the people; this was followed by a drought, including two years with no rain. Not surprisingly a severe famine persisted for much of the 1890s.
“There were skeleton-like women with the madness of starvation in their sunken eyes, children looking more like frogs than human beings, ‘warriors’ who could hardly crawl on all fours, and apathetic, languishing elders…They were refugees from the Serengeti…” wrote Austrian geographer Oscar Baumann in 1894.
A period of severe erosion resulted from the combination of drought, fire and overgrazing, reports researcher Lindsey Gillson of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Gillson’s study was done in Tsavo National Park in south-eastern Kenya.
This is a surprising result because the region is semi-arid and plants are drought tolerant. However when the cattle died, the Maasai were forced to rely on goats and sheep which probably led to temporary overgrazing, Gillson writes.
By the time the rains finally came, erosion had changed the region’s capacity to support livestock and other grazing animals.
Kenya’s world-famous national parks — Serengeti, Tsavo, Amboseli and Mkomazi — were traditionally central to the Maasai tradition and economy, but were nearly depopulated when European colonists arrived, says Jon Lovett of the Center for Ecology, Law and Policy at the University of York in England.
Quote of the day:
“Predictions of future climate change only give a small part of the story. What history tells us is how ecological shocks are related and the catastrophic results this can have on social systems.“ — Jon Lovett, of the Center for Ecology, Law and Policy at the University of York in England.
How is climate change affecting the world’s forests today and in the future
By Stephen Leahy
TORONTO, Nov 20 (IPS/IFEJ) – Deforestation remains the greatest current threat to the world’s forests, claiming 10 to 15 million hectares of tree-covered areas every year, but climate change may represent a bigger challenge in the long term, scientists say.
“We’re like a two-year-old playing with fire… We’re messing around with something dangerous and don’t really understand what will happen,” says William Laurance, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, in reference to climate change and the Amazon rainforest.
Forests and other forms of life are now living on an “alien” planet where the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than they have been for a million years.
These unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases are creating a new, hotter planet with weather that is much more extreme than in the past.
What does this mean for the 20 percent of the Earth’s original forests that are still standing? Some scientists believe forests will grow faster in a warmer world. Others say they are more likely to burn, or suffer from disease or die from drought.
Part of a series on sustainable development for IPS and IFEJ (International Federation of Environmental Journalists)
By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 17 (IPS) – The iconic animal of the frozen north, the polar bear, is starving to death because climate change is melting the Arctic Ocean sea ice.
Polar bears hunt seals almost exclusively and do so from the sea ice. But in the past five years, summer sea ice coverage has declined by 20 percent due to warming temperatures. Although excellent swimmers, the bears are not very good at catching seals in the water, so changes in the ice are making it difficult for these giant bears to survive — several have recently been found drowned and to have died of starvation.
This week scientists announced new findings that the survival rate of polar bear cubs in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea has plummeted. In the late 1980s, 65 percent of polar bear cubs in the southern Beaufort Sea survived their first year. That has fallen to an average of 43 percent in the past five years, report scientists at the Canadian Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
“This an extremely ominous finding for polar bears,” said Kassie Siegel of the Centre for Biological Diversity, an environmental non-governmental organisation, based in Joshua Tree, California.
“We’ve observed massive melting of the sea ice in the Arctic in recent years, and they can’t survive without it,” Siegel told IPS.
And here are my most recent articles on the state of the Arctic: Arctic Ice Gone in 5 Years – First Time in One Million Years
Arctic Is the Canary in the Coalmine
Arctic Oil and Gas Rush Alarms Scientists
Arctic Meltdown Signals Long-Term Trend
Paraphrase of the Day:
Arctic sea ice is melting because of increasing temperatures.
Without taking serious and urgent action to stabilize the climate, there is no future for polar bears says Andrew Derocher, Chair of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), Polar Bear Specialist Group.
Paraphrase of the Day: We’re like a two year old playing with fire when it comes to deforestation of the Amazon and global climate change.
We’re messing around with something dangerous and don’t really understand what will happen. — William Laurence, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Panama.
By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Nov 10 (IPS) – Three hundred and eighty parts per million. That’s the current concentration of carbon dioxide going into your lungs with each breath. Our parents or grandparents’ first breaths at birth contained about 290 parts per million (ppm), as it was for everyone born before them.
What does it really mean when in the not so distant future our children or grandchildren will inhale 450, perhaps 500 ppm or more of carbon dioxide?
Evidently, breathing in a bit more carbon dioxide (CO2) isn’t bad for human health — oxygen at sea level is 200,000 ppm, after all — but the changing atmosphere is having profound impacts on the climate of the planet.
The changing climate has many consequences, among them the potential loss of ancient ruins in Thailand, coral reefs in Belize, 13th century mosques in the Sahara, the Cape Floral Kingdom in South Africa and other irreplaceable natural and historic sites around the world, experts reported this week.
“Climate changes are impacting on all aspects of human and natural systems, including both cultural and natural World Heritage properties, “said Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, which hosts the World Heritage Centre.
Stephen Leahy, International Environmental Journalist 
