Imagine this scenario: You are driving home from work one evening, and you notice a strange metallic taste in your mouth. That night on the evening news, you hear there’s been an accident at the nuclear plant in your community, but that everything is under control.
The next day, the metallic taste is stronger, and you see a rust-colored ring around the bathtub when you drain it. Public announcements continue to say everything is OK. Your eight-month-old daughter has been playing outside much of those two days.
The following day, the governor announces that pregnant women and women with preschool children within five miles of the plant should evacuate. You flee in terror…
A long-billed curlew and marbled godwits wade in Morro Bay, California. As bird populations dwindle, so do the chances of species survival.BOBBUSHPHOTO / GETTY IMAGES
America’s birds have taken wing. Ornithologists calculate that in the past 48 years, total U.S. bird numbers, reckoned together with Canada’s, have fallen drastically. There are now 2.9 billion birds fewer haunting North America’s marshes, forests, prairies, deserts and snows than there were in 1970. That is, more than one in four has flown away, perhaps forever.
Birds are one of the better observed species. Enthusiastic amateurs and trained professionals have been carefully keeping note of bird numbers and behaviour for a century or more.
A flock of avian scientists reports in the journal Science that they looked at numbers for 529 species of bird in the continental U.S. and Canada to find that while around 100 native species had shown a small increase, a total of 419 native migratory species had experienced dramatic losses.
Swallows, swifts, nightjars and other insectivores are in decline, almost certainly because insect populations are also in trouble.
Grassland birds are down 53%: more than 720 million fewer. Radar records of spring migrations suggest that these have dropped by 14% just in the last decade. More than a billion birds have deserted the American forests.
The 529 species studied were spread across 67 bird families, and of these 37 were less abundant than they had been. Where there had been concerted efforts at bird conservation, numbers were on the increase, especially for waterfowl and some of the raptors, such as the bald eagle, but while the gains are measured in millions, the losses are counted in billions.
“We expected to see continuing declines of threatened species. But for the first time, the results showed pervasive losses among common birds across all habitats, including backyard birds.”
Climate change creates unexpected hazards: as northern hemisphere springs get ever earlier, migrant birds may arrive too late to take full advantage of supplies of caterpillars, aphids or other foods. Birds have an important role in ecosystems: they control pests, they disperse seeds and they are themselves food for other predators.
The researchers argue that all is not lost: conservation action and legislation has been shown to work, but as ever more natural habitat is destroyed, as sea levels rise to damage coastal wetlands, as global temperature rises begin to change local climates, there needs to be much more urgency in response.
“These data are consistent with what we are seeing elsewhere with other taxa showing massive declines, including insects and amphibians,” said Peter Marra, one of the authors, once of the Smithsonian Museum and now at Georgetown University in the U.S.
“It’s imperative to address immediate and ongoing threats, both because the domino effect can lead to the decay of ecosystems that humans depend on for our own health and livelihoods – and because people all over the world cherish birds in their own right. Can you imagine a world without birdsong?”
Protesters in Washington urge lawmakers to fight climate change; Ellison Barber reports from Washington.
Climate activists demonstrating to coincide with the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit blocked intersections and snarled morning-commute traffic across Washington, D.C., Monday morning as they called on officials to take action on global warming.
The group, called “Shut Down D.C.,” has planned a week of activities to bring attention to climate change and convince national and international leaders to act. Monday’s continuation of the “Global Climate Strike” follows worldwide climate protests on Friday, including a demonstration in New York City led by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.
“Parents, workers, college students, and everyone who is concerned about the climate crisis will skip work and school and put off their other responsibilities to take action on the climate crisis,” the organization says on its website.
But the demonstrations across D.C. Monday morning also angered the city’s commuters as the scattered marches caused gridlock and detours. District of Columbia police reported making more than two-dozen arrests as of Monday afternoon.
A D.C. blogger posted one photo of a mass of cars halted behind a line of protesters a few blocks northwest of Mount Vernon Square. The same blogger also tweeted a picture of a literal dumpster fire on Massachusetts Ave.
At another protest site, police were using a saw to cut protesters out of chains attached to a painted boat.
Pat Ward
✔@WardDPatrick
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The scene at 16th & K NW as climate change protesters block the intersection
Another group of about 30 protesters blocked an intersection near Union Station, holding up a large mock pipeline that read “stop pipelines now.” Police stopped traffic about a block in each direction and were moving vehicles around the area demonstrators had occupied.
Police are using a saw to separate the links protesters have attached themselves to the boat with. They’ve given those people flame-resistant blankets for the sparks. And ear protection. #ShutDownDC
The “Shut Down D.C.” protesters read testimonials from anti-pipeline activists in Oregon before chanting, “Hey-hey! Ho-ho! LNG has got to go.” LNG is an acronym for liquified natural gas.
Protesters also adapted the famous song “When The Saints Go Marching In” for their purposes.
Sept. 23, 2019: Protesters hoist up a fake pipeline near Union Station in Washington, D.C. (Tyler Olson/Fox News)
“Oh how I’d love to live in that future — when the frackers go to jail,” they sang.
While some passersby seemed to back the “Shut Down D.C.” demonstrators, others were not so supportive. One woman walking by yelled at the demonstrators that there was a handicapped woman walking down the street because they’d blocked traffic. The protesters responded by saying people were dying because of the climate crisis.
Shut Down DC@ShutDown_DC
Still holding:
*Logan Circle
*Massachusetts Ave and Capitol North West
*Independence Ave and 12th Street
*Dupont Circle
*Maryland Ave and 12th Street
*Independence Ave and 7th Street
*K Street and 16th Street
*14th Street and Independence Ave#ShutDownDC
“You tell that to the woman walking with the cane up the street,” the woman shot back.
At approximately 9:45 a.m., the Twitter account purporting to represent the “Shut Down D.C.” group claimed they were still blocking traffic at eight locations across the city, including Logan Circle and Dupont Circle.
In this Sept. 11, 2019 photo, a green sea turtle swims near coral in a bay on the west coast of the Big Island near Captain Cook, Hawaii. Just four years after a major marine heat wave killed nearly half of this coastline’s coral, federal researchers are predicting another round of hot water will cause some of the worst coral bleaching the region has ever seen. (AP Photo/Brian Skoloff)
CAPTAIN COOK, Hawaii (AP) — At the edge of an ancient lava flow where jagged black rocks meet the Pacific, small off-the-grid homes overlook the calm blue waters of Papa Bay on Hawaii’s Big Island — no tourists or hotels in sight. Here, one of the islands’ most abundant and vibrant coral reefs thrives just below the surface.
Yet even this remote shoreline far from the impacts of chemical sunscreen, trampling…
Greta Thunberg has a message for world leaders at the United Nations this week: “We’ll be watching you.” Speaking at the Climate Action Summit in New York, Thunberg added, “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean.”
But instead, Thunberg, 16, is trying to convince politicians to take climate change seriously, and to do something to stop a global warming trend that will affect the world’s children more than it affects anyone who’s currently in power.
In an impassioned speech, Thunberg told those who hold office, “you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are…
Hunting wild boar is a popular past time in rural parts of ItalyCREDIT: AFP
Italy’s hunters have been accused of behaving like Wild West cowboys after a son mistook his father for a wild boar and shot him dead.
There are hunting accidents every year in Italy, with dozens of people injured, but it is rare for one family member to kill another.
The men were on a wild boar hunt near the village of Sicignano degli Aburni, in the southern region of Campania, when the accident happened at the weekend.
The 34-year-son heard his hunting dogs barking, saw some rustling in the bushes, and fired a shot.
But instead of taking down a boar, he had hit his 55-year-old father in the stomach. The man, named as Martino Gaudioso, died shortly afterwards.
“Frankly, I thought we would be a little more evolved as a species by now.” — Jim Robertson, author of “Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport”
In a Sept. 16 “Democracy Now” segment, Amy Goodman highlighted the Trump administration’s continuing assault on our public lands, opening the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) to drilling leases: “The plan calls for the creation of landing strips, drill pads, pipeline supports, a seawater treatment plant, 175 miles of roads and other infrastructure in Alaska’s north coast.”
Goodman’s guest, Subhankar Banerjee, a professor of art and ecology at thee University of New Mexico, referenced the United Nations’ frightening report on the annihilation of species on earth: “…as I see it, (it) is a bigger crisis than the climate crisis, that is unfolding before us — the media has miserably failed to inform the public — which is the crisis of extinction … the scientists call it ‘biological annihilation.’ Earlier this year, the United Nations IPBES released what is considered, for some of us, the grimmest warning of human history, that 1 million species on Earth, which is about more than 50% of the documented species on the planet, face extinction, many within decades … since 1970, globally, monitored populations of vertebrates, which includes birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles, have declined, on average, in population 60%.”
In spite of this, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources continues to run unlimited packs of dogs on our wildlife, torture them to death in unlimited traps and kill them in long seasons for fun.
The bear hunt continues into its third week of five, Sept. 4-Oct. 8. Most of the 3,835 bears (plus agricultural tags) have been killed either by the dogs, or the men, women and children who enjoy killing bears. At $49 per bear, it is a cheaper rug than from Walmart. It is likely to be a small rug since most of the bears killed are less than a year-and-a-half old, but there is that thrill, adrenaline rush, selfie with the carcass and trophy to take home. Little bear cubs hide in a tree watching their mother be killed. The mother bear may return from running killers away from her cubs to find her cubs killed or disappeared. Little bear orphans need their mothers to teach them how to den and need mother bear’s warmth in the first winter during the human-caused dip of polar vortexes.
The bear kill is a more than $1 million dollar business for the DNR’s recruitment and retention of more wildlife killers in hunting courses across our school systems and state. But if we had a democratic structure for governing our wildlife, each of the 5.7 million citizens of Wisconsin could throw in 50 cents each and come up with over $2.5 million to save our bears and wildlife killed in traps.
Structural revolution to democratic funding will not happen under Republican cruel rule. It has not been a priority for either party. It will require public awareness and intensive pressure, urgently needed and sadly lacking.
To add to the mayhem in the woods, out of sight, the bow hunting season on deer started Sept. 14. The nine-day “traditional” deer kill was an endurance test for those of us who live with wildlife in rural areas. Now archery and crossbow killing persist through Jan. 5, 2020. Extended bow hunting seasons continue in 22 counties through Jan. 31.
Overkill is an understatement.
Wisconsin legislators and the DNR promote unregistered, unlimited bear baiting and bear hounding in our public lands July 1-Aug. 31 continuing now throughout the five-week kill.
According to Wolf Patrol, which monitors the bear hounding: “In Wisconsin, 95% of legally killed black bears are taken with the aid of bait and/or dogs. An estimated 4 million gallons of bait and 15,000 bear hounds are dumped annually in Wisconsin to attract and chase bears. And it’s not just baiting that is allowed, but as many baits as a hunter wants to use, all with no requirement for any hunting license or registration, preventing conservation officers from assuring that bear baits in our national forests are in compliance with even the minimal requirements.”
Killers from other states, or in-state, do not have to be licensed to run packs of dogs — exhausting bears, running mothers away from cubs for hours or days — just when bears should be eating every day to put on weight for winter hibernation.
The bear killers continue to bait and run dogs in territory where dogs have been killed by wolves with DNR warnings to avoid those areas. Twenty-one hounds have been killed so far.
An Aug. 2017 Wisconsin Public Radio segment discussed that “new research shows bear bait makes up more than 40 percent of a black bear’s diet in northern Wisconsin, and bait could be playing a role in the high density of bears up north, researchers say.” Attempts to ban chocolate in bait, which has killed bears in neighboring states, were defeated by hunters at the annual DNR election and vote in April.
The Wolf Patrol is clamoring for restraint, having reported many non-compliant bait piles and hunters with not six dogs, but 30 dogs in 10 trucks, running bears day and night in unlimited abuse:
“It’s time for Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest officials to bring an end to bear baiting and hound training in Wisconsin, where it’s (wreaking) havoc on wildlife and causing conflicts with wolves and other forest users. Nowhere else in the country are bear hunters allowed to dump as much bear bait as they desire, and chase the bears it attracts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Please send the links to Madravenspeak bear columns to Gov. Evers and tell him that it is time for a first-time democracy in funding and fair, proportionate non-hunter participation in decisions to protect our wildlife.
Silence and inaction are complicity in this cruelty.
Attend the world premiere of “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch,” sponsored by the Nelson Institute. from 7-9 p.m. on Sept. 25 at the Marquee Theater in Union South on the UW-Madison campus.
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 17: Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate change activist from Sweden, casts a wary eye on Sen. Edward Markey during a Senate Climate Change Task Force meeting on Capitol Hill. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
GETTY IMAGES
Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of Congress last week took no prisoners and showed no favor to heroes of the left who have styled themselves friends of the environment.
Though Thunberg did not utter the words “Green New Deal,” she characterized partisan efforts that envision an idealized future as unhelpful dreams, and her criticism culminated in these words:
“No matter how political the background to this crisis may be, we must not allow this to continue to be a partisan political question. The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics. And our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy now is physics. And we can not make ‘deals’ with physics.”
The Achilles’ Heel of the Green New Deal is that it deploys the climate crisis as a liberal cause, which ensures conservative opposition.
The climate crisis is a universal cause.
Conservatives need a way to get on board. It’s difficult for them to support a policy that evokes the New Deal. And conservative opposition will relegate the Green New Deal to the realm of fantasy at least until a cataclysm arrives like the one that inspired the original New Deal.
To explain Greta’s sudden, global impact, people have begun speaking of her superpowers. One might be that at 16 she understands political reality better than some who have spent their lives in politics.
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Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey has been in Congress more than 40 years, often leading the climate charge there, if we can call it a charge. Markey is one of the good guys on climate, by all accounts, one of the best. I’ll long remember the night he and I walked out of the Copenhagen Climate Conference at the same moment and strolled together toward the bus stop. How nice, I thought, Markey is taking the bus. But halfway there a long black limousine sidled up to the curb and Markey climbed in. You see, he’s no Greta.
Maybe that mixture of partisan fantasy and convenient compromise explains why Markey, climate’s champion in Congress, hasn’t gotten the job done. It is perhaps why even in a Democratically-controlled Congress, with a Democratic president, the Waxman-Markey Bill failed. His Green New Deal may get us no closer.
Greta:
“Wherever I go I seem to be surrounded by fairytales. Business leaders, elected officials all across the political spectrum spending their time making up and telling bedtime stories that soothe us, that make us go back to sleep. These are ‘feel-good’ stories about how we are going to fix everything. How wonderful everything is going to be when we have ‘solved’ everything. But the problem we are facing is not that we lack the ability to dream, or to imagine a better world. The problem now is that we need to wake up. It’s time to face the reality, the facts, the science. And the science doesn’t mainly speak of ‘great opportunities to create the society we always wanted’. It tells of unspoken human sufferings, which will get worse and worse the longer we delay action – unless we start to act now. And yes, of course a sustainable transformed world will include lots of new benefits. But you have to understand. This is not primarily an opportunity to create new green jobs, new businesses or green economic growth. This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.”
Greta can’t remember the last time we learned this lesson about partisanship, because she hadn’t been born yet. But Markey must remember it.
The Republican Party used to support climate action. We owe our participation in the Paris Agreement not just to Barack Obama, who committed us to it, but to George H.W. Bush, who ratified the treaty that created the United Nations Framework on Climate Change.
But when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, climate change became a partisan issue, and the climate denialism that had been lurking in damp, self-interested corners of the culture went mainstream in the Republican Party. What better way to discredit the candidate they called “Ozone.”
Before long, Republicans could scarcely admit that science was true without being ousted from office by the Tea Party. And now denialism is personified in the Commander in Chief.
That’s what partisan politics gets you.
So Greta resists the temptation to side with the friendlies. It was Obama who told Greta, over a fistbump last week, “You and me, we’re a team.” And though Greta went along with that, she didn’t change her message.
Moments later, speaking to Obama’s Capitol Hill allies, including Markey, she said, “I know you’re trying, but just not hard enough.”
To me, Greta’s most important superpower is her integrity. She’s not going to take a limo back to the hotel. She’s not going to compromise for convenience. She’s not going to compromise for feel-good friends or would-be allies. She’s not going to seduce us with utopian palliatives. She’s going to keep telling the truth.
She sailed here just to insist that we read and heed the science.
Integrity secures her a place in the history of activism. For a quality so simple, so straightforward, she appears in the company of lions of non-violence, endurance and compassion—Gandhi and King, Mandela, Mother Theresa and Tenzin Gyatso—this prescient Swedish teen with an uncompromising call for us to hear the unvarnished truth.
But she doesn’t want our praise. She wants us to take real action. Let’s do.
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and US Senator Ed Markey (R), Democrat of Massachusetts, speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation to promote clean energy programs outside the US Capitol
The Earth is living, and also creates life. Over 4 billion years the Earth has evolved a rich biodiversity — an abundance of different living organisms and ecosystems — that can meet all our needs and sustain life.
Through biodiversity and the living functions of the biosphere, the Earth regulates temperature and climate, and has created the conditions for our species to evolve. This is what NASA scientist James Lovelock found in working with Lynn Margulis, who was studying the processes by which living organisms produce and remove gases from the atmosphere. The Earth is a self-regulating living organism, and life on Earth creates conditions for life to be maintained and evolve.
Karen Wood died hanging laundry in her backyard in November 1988. Megan Ripley died walking with her brother behind her family’s home in December 2006. Karen Wrentzel died digging for gemstones on her property in October 2017.
Each woman died without knowing a hunter was on her land because he never needed to ask to be there.
Each woman died because that hunter thought he saw a deer and shot her instead.
Karen Wrentzel
Maine has long allowed hunters to use private property without permission unless posted signs explicitly tell them to stay away. The deaths of the three women are flares in the simmering debate about whether that tradition needs to change. The issue came up again…
Exposing the Big Game 