Archive
of Past Articles for Chapter 8
2008 August 22. Vote
in Alaska Puts Question: Gold or Fish? By
WILLIAM YARDLEY, The New York Times. Excerpt:
DILLINGHAM, Alaska — Just up the fish-rich
rivers that surround this tiny bush town
on Bristol Bay is a discovery of copper
and gold so vast and valuable that no one
seems able to measure it all. Then again,
no one really knows the value of the rivers,
either. They are the priceless headwaters
of one of the world’s last great runs
of Pacific salmon.
...What people are doing is fighting as
Alaskans hardly have before. While experts
say the mine could yield more than $300
billion in metals and hundreds of jobs for
struggling rural Alaska, unearthing the
metals could mean releasing chemicals that
are toxic to the salmon that are central
to a fishing industry worth at least $300
million each year. And while the metals
are a finite discovery, the fish have replenished
themselves for millenniums.
“If they have one spill up there,
what’s going to happen?” said
Steve Shade, 50, an Alaska Native who has
fished on Bristol Bay all his life, for
dinner and for a living. “This is
our livelihood. They’re going to ruin
it for everybody.”
...On Tuesday, Alaskans will vote on Measure
4, an initiative intended to increase protections
for streams where salmon live. Over just
a few months, the measure has become one
of the most expensively fought campaigns
in state history, with the two sides expected
to spend a total of more than $10 million.
Opponents of the measure have outraised
supporters by more than two to one.
...Opponents of the Pebble Mine worry that
it will open the entire area to mining.
For now, the most likely possibility is
that Pebble Mine would be a combination
of open-pit and underground, because of
the way minerals are dispersed. Both methods
could require huge holding areas for toxic
mine waste with walls hundreds of feet high,
as well as a facility for processing ore,
pumps that remove millions of gallons of
water from the ground and an 80-mile road
in an area that is now accessible only by
helicopter....
2008 July 2. Species extinction threat underestimated
due to math glitch, says CU-Boulder study. Excerpt: Extinction
risks for natural populations of endangered
species are likely being underestimated by
as much as 100-fold because of a mathematical "misdiagnosis," according
to a new study led by a University of Colorado
at Boulder researcher.
Assistant Professor Brett Melbourne of CU-Boulder's
ecology and evolutionary biology department
said current mathematical models used to determine
extinction threat, or "red-listed" status,
of species worldwide overlook random differences
between individuals in a given population.
Such differences, which include variations
in male-to-female sex ratios as well as size
or behavioral variations between individuals
that can influence their survival rates and
reproductive success, have an unexpectedly
large effect on extinction risk calculations,
according to the study.
"When we apply our new mathematical model
to species extinction rates, it shows that
things are worse than we thought," said
Melbourne. "By accounting for random
differences between individuals, extinction
rates for endangered species can be orders
of magnitude higher than conservation biologists
have believed."...
"We suggest that extinction risk for
many populations of conservation concern need
to be urgently re-evaluated with full consideration
of all factors contributing to stochasticity," or
randomness, the authors wrote in Nature...
2008 April 30. An
Unlikely Way to Save a Species: Serve It
for Dinner. By Kim Severson.
The NY times. Excerpt: Some
people would just as soon ignore the culinary
potential of the Carolina flying squirrel
or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga. But
not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of
the past four years compiling a list of endangered
plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace
in American kitchens but are now threatened,
endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace.
He has set out to save them, which often involves
urging people to eat them. Mr. Nabhan's list,
1,080 items and growing, forms the basis of
his new book, an engaging journey through
the nooks and crannies of American culinary
history titled "Renewing America's
Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered
Foods".
…He organized his list into 13 culinary regions that he
calls nations, borrowing from Native American and other groups.
The Pacific Coast from California to northern Mexico is acorn
nation. Its counterpart on the mid-Atlantic coast is crab cake
nation. Moose nation covers most of Canada. New Yorkers, for
the record, live in clambake nation.
…Leading the way are members of the gastronomic group
Slow Food U.S.A., which assesses whether foods on Mr. Nabhan's
list are delicious and meaningful enough in the communities where
they originated to be worth reviving and promoting. Foods that
do become part of what the group calls its Ark of Taste. The
Chefs Collaborative, a group of more than 1,000 professional
cooks and others dedicated to sustainable cuisine, willingly
signed on, too. Several members incorporated traditional ingredients
into modern restaurant dishes, holding a series of picnics last
year to show off their work. And everyone in Mr. Nabhan's
alliance tried to encourage farmers and ranchers to grow the
seeds and the breeds, promising to deliver buyers if they did.
That is the most complicated part of reviving traditional food,
said Makalé Faber Cullen, a cultural anthropologist with
Slow Food U.S.A. who contributed to the book. Farmers are often
more concerned with innovating and crossbreeding than in preserving
cultural traditions or encouraging biological diversity.
...But Mr. Nabhan doesn't want people to eat everything on his
list. The idea of eater-based conservation, which holds that
to save something, one has to eat it, works well for agricultural
products and some wild foods like clams that benefit from regular
harvesting. For some wild species, however, like the foot-long,
pink-fleshed Carolina flying squirrel, a harvest would create
too much pressure on a tiny population. The squirrels used to
make regular appearances in Appalachian game-meat stews. But
as their forests declined, so did the squirrel population; they
are now on state and federal endangered species lists. Even if
catching them were legal, Mr. Nabhan says a trapper would be
hard-pressed to bag more than half a dozen a season. Because
the squirrel was once so important to the diets of North Carolina
and east Tennessee, Mr. Nabhan included it on his list, along
with a recipe for the thick vegetable stew called Kentucky burgoo. It
calls for corn, lima beans, spring water and two pounds of cubed
and fried squirrel meat. Just don't use flying squirrel. At least
not yet.
14 August 2007. Call
It a Comeback: Ferret Population Shows Big
Growth in Wyoming. By HENRY FOUNTAIN,
NY Times. Excerpt:
Black-footed ferrets in the Shirley Basin
in central Wyoming would seem to have had
everything going against them a decade ago.
A population of 228 was bred in captivity
and introduced into the wild in the early
1990s as part of a program to save the species,
but by 1997 most were wiped out by disease.
Only five ferrets were spotted, and the animal,
the most endangered mammal in North America,
was thought to be well on the road to extinction.
But Martin B. Grenier of the University of
Wyoming and colleagues report in Science that
the ferrets have made a remarkable comeback.
Starting in 2003, when more than 50 of the
animals were spotted, the population has grown
rapidly, and the observed population is now
close to the original number. ...The ferrets
also seem to have overcome the problems of
disease and low prey availability (their main
food source, a type of prairie dog, is not
very abundant and hibernates in the winter).
15 October 2006. Salmon
Find an Ally in the Far East of Russia.
New York Times. C.J. Chivers.
Excerpt: UTKHOLOK
RIVER BIOLOGICAL STATION, Russia - All
six native species of Pacific salmon
remain abundant on the Kamchatka
peninsula in Eastern Russia. One river
alone, the Kol, is reported to have as
many as five million returning salmon
each year. Each year, Russian and American
scientists say, a sixth to a quarter
of the North Pacific's salmon originate
in Kamchatka, a peninsula about the
size of California. Estimates of the
salmon fisheries' annual value in
this region reach $600 million, and
the fish are a crucial source of employment
for Russia and other nations.
Now, in a nation with a dreary environmental record that is engaged
in a rush to extract its resources, the peninsula's governments
are at work on proposals that would designate seven sprawling
tracts of wilderness as salmon-protected areas, a network of
refuges for highly valuable fish that would be the first of its
kind. Kamchatka is selecting protection zones not to create wildlife
reserves, Mr. Chistyakov said, but because fish runs are the
best foundation for the peninsula's economy. Oil, gas and mining
sectors will be developed, he said, but will provide a comparably
brief revenue stream. Sustainable fishing, he said, can last
generations.
Encompassing nine entire rivers and more than six million acres,
the protected watersheds would exceed the scale of many renowned
preserved areas in the United States. Together they would be
more than four times the size of the Everglades, nearly triple
that of Yellowstone National Park and slightly larger than the
Adirondack Park, which is often referred to as the largest protected
area in the lower United States.
These areas would be protected from most development. Their purpose
would be to produce wild salmon - for food, profit, recreation
and scientific study, and as a genetic reserve of one of the
world's most commercially and culturally important fish. "What
makes this special is that these rivers are being protected while
they are still amazing fish producers," Mr. Klimenko said. "To
preserve something that is not destroyed is much less expensive
than restoring an ecosystem that is already broken."
