The 82nd Rainforest Thread ~

Spring is definitely here, allergies and all. ahhhchoooooooooo

Oh, please don't forget our featherd friends who have a very difficult time of it during March finding food. Wild birdseed at the ready...

Happy Birthday, ul's friend.

Thankful the workweek's just about over. Hurray!






http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Well -

Finally, I get to say this is the last day of the work week - Hmmm Friday???? - that's a day that in the past used to mean something. - prior to retiring - I have no idea today what the phrase means.......

Today, I went to the local WalMart store and wanted a few items - not actually remembering the date. Oh, my God, and Goof. I had forgotted it was the weekend prior to Easter Sunday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I waited in line - and waited - and waited - etc.

Because - I had nothing better to do.

Brazil Pursues Crackdown on Loggers After Surge in Cutting

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2008; A01

TAILANDIA, Brazil -- The Brazilian government has launched an aggressive crackdown on logging in the Amazon, an operation that pits environmental regulators against people who say they depend on those protected resources to survive.

After three years of declining rates of deforestation, satellite images released in January showed that as much as 2,700 square miles of land in the Brazilian Amazon had been cleared in the final five months of 2007 -- a rate that would represent more than a 60 percent increase over the five-month average of the previous year.

The government quickly declared a moratorium on logging in the hardest-hit areas, including this town, which sits about four hours by car from the mouth of the Amazon River. Officials estimate that 70 percent of the population of about 65,000 here depends on the wood industry. Some work for big logging operations. Many more are like Ediline Natos, the wood industry's version of sustenance farmers.

Natos, 18, stood motionless in the door of her slat-board house here last week, watching a line of trucks rumble to a stop on the isolated dirt road out front. Dozens of federal police spilled out, protected by national guardsmen wearing bulletproof vests and bearing machine guns. Soon, environmental regulators armed with metal poles began destroying her livelihood: seven brick ovens used to bake wood into charcoal.

"These ovens are illegal, so we have to do it," Juner Caldeira Barbosa, a federal police commander, informed Natos.

About 35 percent of all logging here in the state of Para feeds charcoal ovens. That charcoal is purchased by companies that resell it for use in steel production. The two biggest importers of that charcoal are China and the United States, according to environmental officials here.

After Natos's ovens collapsed in shifting heaps of smoke and ash, police tried to comfort her. It didn't work.

She said her husband was away for the day in the city, her eyes welling up as she thought of his return. The ovens, she explained, cost $300 each to make. When the police searched the house, they found her husband's chain saw and confiscated it.

"This is going to be a problem," she said, wiping away a tear. "I have no idea what we are going to do. This is how we survive."

They live miles from their nearest neighbor, so they would likely have to move to find new work that is both legally sanctioned and economically viable. Or they could wait a few weeks until the police and regulators shift their focus elsewhere and rebuild the ovens. The companies that profit on their charcoal might finance the rebuilding.

Just before the police and inspectors drove away, one of the environmental agents told Natos that she would be fined about $600 for each oven she tried to rebuild. He also said that they found some cages behind the house. The birds inside were her pets.

"Those are illegal, too," he said. "So we opened the cages and set them free."

Her face was blank as they walked to their trucks. She might have been sad, or simply stunned.
Spotty Enforcement

About 25 sawmills operate near Tailandia, and inspectors in recent weeks have found that most -- in one way or another -- violate the law. Since Feb. 25, the inspectors have levied more than $2 million in fines here, confiscated more than 8,000 cubic meters of illegal timber and destroyed more than 800 unlicensed charcoal-producing ovens. Those destroyed ovens alone would have consumed about 23,000 young trees in one month, according to average production rates.

All of that represents a minuscule fraction of the deforestation in Brazil, where most of the Amazon forest is located. After three years of declining rates of deforestation, cutting has spiked sharply nationwide. The 2,700 square miles cut in the last five months of 2007 followed the clearing of 4,300 square miles during the previous 12 months, according to government figures.

Demand for the illegal wood and charcoal is only one factor contributing to the cutting. Brazil's Environment Ministry places more of the blame on farmers who clear forest plots to create soybean fields and cattle ranches. Officials say that ranching and farming are responsible for up to 80 percent of total deforestation nationwide. Brazil is the world's leading beef exporter, and a recent agricultural boom has it poised to surpass the United States as the world's top soy exporter.

The combination of factors has made illegal logging a consistent economic opportunity for the millions living below the poverty line. Enforcing the law is spotty at best for regulators, who can monitor only a small fraction of the Amazon region at a time. For years, their work has been further undermined by widespread allegations of bribery and corruption.

Since January, the government has banned all logging in 36 municipalities throughout the country. Fines for illegal cutting have been stiffened. Officials also have tried to expand the scope of potential violations. For example, slaughterhouses that process meat from illegally cleared ranches can be cited.

The Brazilian government is studying the economic potential of sustainable logging operations in the areas targeted by Operation Arc of Fire. But officials had no intention of waiting for those studies to be completed before going after violators.

"This is the most important challenge we have -- to transform an economy that's been based on a predatory process since, well, forever, and turn it into a sustainable one," said Joao Paulo Ribeiro Capobianco, the country's deputy minister of the environment. "To do that, we have to stop the illegal activities first. You can't stimulate sustainable logging if you have another business nearby operating in a different way and putting wood in the same market."

Many Brazilians will need some convincing if they're going to play along. Before the federal police and national guard arrived in Tailandia, thousands of residents had rioted.

Fabricio Fran¿a, one of the six environmental inspectors in the city at the time, said that the tension began when he and his colleagues began to confiscate wood from loggers. Residents started to gather in the streets, inviting confrontation.

"We got a call on the radio from a local police colonel who told us we should try to leave town," Fran¿a said. "The colonel told us, 'There are about 3,000 people in the street and we can't hold them anymore.' "
Expired Licenses

When environmental inspectors arrived at the gates of a large lumberyard outside Tailandia last week, they found a sign erected by their own agency claiming that the business adhered to sustainable logging practices.

It was an old sign. The sawmill was shrouded in smoke from charcoal ovens that burned near the line of the forest. Open fields were littered with scrap wood. Truck beds were piled high with cut logs.

The lumberyard's manager soon arrived to find dozens of police and inspectors eating lunch on the property. When they asked to review his permits, he appeared irked. The papers showed that the site had permission to operate 49 charcoal ovens -- not the 79 that were burning nearby.

"And these licenses have expired," explained one of the inspectors, pointing to a date written near the top.

In addition, the inspectors said they strongly suspected that the company had been exceeding its cutting limits. All around the grounds, vast stretches of forest had been recently cleared.

Police and inspectors have been assessing the area by helicopter, trying to spot such cutting. It's not difficult.

From the air, patches of light green can be seen among the darker patches of dense forest. As the aircraft descends closer to the tree cover, random stacks of hardwood come into view in the middle of the "virgin" forest. Narrow roads have been cut through the forest to reach those harder-to-spot areas. This type of specialized extraction is not included in Brazil's current deforestation statistics, which track only clear-cutting.

"The loggers are getting so good at this that they also fly over the areas, spot areas where a few expensive noble woods -- like mahogany and peroba -- grow, and then they mark the locations with GPS," said Bruno Versiani dos Anjos, the environmental protection agency's coordinator for Operation Arc of Fire. "They calculate whether or not it is financially sensible to cut a new road through the forest that exists solely for the purpose of getting to those few trees. And then they do it."

The inspectors drove the lumberyard manager to Tailandia to officially serve notice that the company would be investigated for possible criminal charges. The convoy of police trucks rolled through town, attracting suspicious stares from residents.

Later, they arrived at the police and environmental inspectors' temporary headquarters. A sign on the building used to label it as the town's Hall of Justice. Now that sign is unreadable. Residents had torn down most of the letters.

You and your 300 friends have supported 2,875,028.1 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 203,500.3 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (203,500.3)

American Prairie habitat supported: 64,399.9 square feet.
You have supported: (15,544.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (48,855.0)

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,607,127.9 square feet.
You have supported: (186,220.5)
Your 300 friends have supported: (2,420,907.3)


~~~~

Happy weekend all.

sumac, nice to the the Brazil Gov doing something. They can probably rely on the recently discovered oil to bring in money and lay off the timber along the Amazon. Great.

Just checking in to say, Happy Easter! All clicked, too!

Dan, grab a deli apron - yur hired!

sue, good news! Just a few years ago, Ashcroft attempted to prosecute Greenpeace for protesting illegal shipments of teak. Amazing.

Retirement sounds so good! Maybe next year.

Happy Holiday, wildclickers













http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

For the last three days, the care 2 site has insisted that I have already clicked for the day, but I had not?

Happy Easter all.

A black-tailed prairie dog feeds in Kansas's Logan County in this file photo from 2006. A Western conservation group is suing the federal government to force it to respond to a petition to list the animal as endangered. (By Steven Hausler -- Associated Press)


Since '01, Guarding Species Is Harder
Endangered Listings Drop Under Bush

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 23, 2008; A01

With little-noticed procedural and policy moves over several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Controversies have occasionally flared over Interior Department officials who regularly overruled rank-and-file agency scientists' recommendations to list new species, but internal documents also suggest that pervasive bureaucratic obstacles were erected to limit the number of species protected under one of the nation's best-known environmental laws.

The documents show that personnel were barred from using information in agency files that might support new listings, and that senior officials repeatedly dismissed the views of scientific advisers as President Bush's appointees either rejected putting imperiled plants and animals on the list or sought to remove this federal protection.

Officials also changed the way species are evaluated under the 35-year-old law -- by considering only where they live now, as opposed to where they used to exist -- and put decisions on other species in limbo by blocking citizen petitions that create legal deadlines.

As a result, listings plummeted. During Bush's more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago.

In a sign of how contentious the issue has become, the advocacy group WildEarth Guardians filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking a court order to protect 681 Western species all at once, on the grounds that further delay would violate the law. Among the species cited are tiny snails, vibrant butterflies, and a wide assortment of plants and other creatures.

"It's an urgent situation, and something has to be done," said Nicole Rosmarino, the group's conservation director. "This roadblock to listing under the Bush administration is criminal."

Developers, farmers and other business interests frequently resist decisions on listing because they require a complex regulatory process that can make it difficult to develop land that is home to protected species. Environmentalists have also sparred for years with federal officials over implementation of the law.

Nevertheless, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton added an average of 58 and 62 species to the list each year, respectively.

One consequence is that the current administration has the most emergency listings, which are issued when a species is on the very brink of extinction.

And some species have vanished. The Lake Sammamish kokanee, a landlocked sockeye salmon, went extinct in 2001 after being denied an emergency listing, and genetically pure Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits disappeared last year after Interior declined to protect critical habitat for the species.

Administration officials -- who estimate that more than 280 domestic species should be on the list but have been "precluded" because of more pressing priorities -- do not dispute that they have moved slowly, but they dispute the reasons.

Bush officials say they are struggling to cope with an onslaught of litigation, but internal documents and several court rulings have revealed steps the administration has taken to make it harder, and slower, to approve listings.

Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall said his agency, which decides on most proposed listings of endangered species and their critical habitat, has been hamstrung by a slew of lawsuits and has just begun to dig out. He told the House Appropriations interior subcommittee last month that his agency will make decisions about 71 species by Oct. 1 and an additional 21 species a year later.

"Lawsuits, starting in the early '90s, have really driven things," Hall said, adding that the administration has tried to keep species from declining to the point where they need to be listed. "I'm feeling pretty good we're back on track to do the job the way it's supposed to be done."

In court cases, however, a number of judges have rejected decisions made by Hall's agency and have criticized its slow pace. On March 5, a U.S. district judge in Phoenix ordered Interior to redesignate bald eagles in Arizona's Sonoran Desert as threatened after the agency delisted the entire species last summer.

Three weeks before Interior officials rejected a petition to keep the desert eagles listed, a scientific advisory panel it convened wrote that the population "appears to be less viable than populations in other parts of the country" because it had fewer than 50 nesting pairs. Survival usually requires 500 breeding pairs.

The Fish and Wildlife Service never released that report, along with internal agency documents showing "substantial" evidence that the Arizona eagles should be kept on the list: Both the report and the documents were unearthed under the Freedom of Information Act by the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group.

In another case, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in late January that Interior violated the law when it did not act on 55 endangered and threatened foreign species that the department had described as qualified to be listed. The department has listed six foreign species during Bush's term.

"If the Service were allowed to continue at its current rate, it is hard to imagine anytime in the near or distant future when these species will be entitled to listing," the judge wrote. "Such delay hardly qualifies as 'expeditious progress' and conflicts with the purpose of the ESA to provide 'prompt action' [if there is] substantial scientific evidence that the species is endangered or threatened."

At NatureServe, a private nonprofit that does independent scientific assessments that the government often uses in crafting conservation policy, Vice President and Chief Scientist Bruce Stein said the decline in listings has been "dramatic. . . . It shows a shift in both funding and policy priorities."

In one such shift, senior Interior officials revised a longstanding policy that rated the threat to various species based primarily on their populations within U.S. borders. They then argued that species such as the wolverine and the jaguar do not need protection because they also exist in Canada or Mexico.

In another policy reversal, Interior's solicitor declared in a memo dated March 16, 2007, that when officials consider whether a significant portion of a species' range is in peril, that "phrase refers to the range in which a species currently exists, not to the historical range of the species where it once existed." The memo added that the Interior secretary "has broad discretion" in defining what is "significant."

For a two-year period, Fish and Wildlife also said that if the agency identified a species as a candidate for the list, citizens could not file petitions for that species, effectively eliminating any legal deadlines. The result, said Kieran Suckling, head of the Center for Biological Diversity, was to create "endangered species purgatory." In 2003, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton overturned the policy on the grounds that it allowed the agency to "avoid their mandatory, non-discretionary duties to issue findings" under the act.

In addition, the agency limited the information it used in ruling on the 90-day citizens' petitions that lead to most listings. In May 2005, Fish and Wildlife decreed that its files on proposed listings should include only evidence from the petitions and any information in agency records that could undercut, rather than support, a decision to list a species.

Unsigned notes handwritten on May 16, 2005, by an agency official, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, attributed the policy to Douglas Krofta, who heads the Endangered Species Program's listing branch. The notes said employees "can use info from files that refutes petitions but not anything that supports, per Doug."

Hall said the agency abandoned that policy in late 2006, but he issued a memo in June 2006 that mirrors elements of it, stating, "The information within the Service's files is not to be used to augment a 'weak' petition."

As listings have slowed, lawsuits challenging the administration's practices have skyrocketed, according to the biodiversity center, which specializes in endangered-species issues. There have been 369 listing-related suits against Bush, compared with 184 against Clinton. "The Bush administration has effectively killed the listing program," said Suckling, whose group's petitions and suits have driven 92 percent of the listings under Bush.

The Justice Department would not release figures on how the government has fared defending endangered species suits or how much it has cost taxpayers. Officials acknowledge they have not done well in the courts: Hall said he is frustrated that judges demand a higher burden of scientific proof to deny a listing or to take a species off the list than to list a species.

Since 2001, Jay Tutchton, general counsel for WildEarth Guardians, has filed 25 suits seeking listings and critical habitat designations for 45 species for several clients. He has won every time.

All 10 clicks done for the day and
Happy Easter to all! :wink:

Happy Easter, wildclickers

Teeny, way ta go!


Another problem for conservation is that wildlife is considered common property. According to Robert J. Smith of the Center for Private Conservation, public ownership results in overexploitation of the land's natural resources, while private ownership results in sustainable use and preservation.

Government land use regulations in the United States discourage landowners from protecting wildlife. Gutting the ESA is what bushco's buddies are all about.

However, on this day of Easter, i'm' thankful for good judges, lovely weather, plus family and friends.

Have a wonderful day all ~

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Happy Easter Evening, all.

Last Friday, I went to Walmart to get a few things. I had forgotten it was Good Friday - and the place was unbelievably crowded. Anyway, being retired and not realizing what day of the year it was, I stood in line and waited my turn. Today, needing a few things from the grocery section at Walmart - I waited until about 1 pm and made my run on the market - Ha, as expected on Easter - most people were at home having Easter fun. Ahhh, the lines were short.

Stradee, I'm sure most if not all Wildclickers are in agreement with you.

sumac, thanks again for the great info.

A day early - but, HAPPY BIRTHDAY DIANE !!!

Stradee,
Hope you enjoyed your holiday! It barely got above 35, here, yesterday!
Glad too, that you're aware of how Bushco, has ravished this country and us! Well, I'm all clicked, for today!

Why does the care 2 site insist that I have already clicked today (4-5 days running now) when I have not?

Clicking or Not

For almost 3 weeks, I didn't get any responses, at all. I had to physically, come into the site and let this group know, that I clicked. Some days I forgot to come into the site and notify, but I've been clicking, every day! You can log into Care2.com, then to the far right of the page are all of the 10 clicks, I do daily, including the rainforest. http://www.care2.com. Try that!

Thanks, teeny. I can't remember my user name or password, it has been so long. I suppose I can rejoin though. I'll try.

This is interesting. Wonder what we will discover in our lifetime though. The methane discovery is tantalizing, and the improvement in technology is staggering.

An 'Astounding Time' for Planetary Discoveries

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 24, 2008; A05

It used to be that planets were familiar places such as Mars and Saturn that orbited our sun and were well known to all schoolchildren.

Since astronomers identified the first planet outside our solar system 13 years ago, however, that idea has become downright quaint. Because now, according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, there are 277 confirmed "extrasolar" planets, and quite a few more on the list of those suspected but not yet confirmed.

This explosion in planetary discoveries is taking place at such warp speed that even those most intimately involved are often amazed -- especially because their ultimate goal is nothing less than finding life elsewhere in the universe.

"This is an absolutely astounding time for this field," said Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who last week reported finding the first "exoplanet" to have organic methane in its atmosphere.

"We're not only finding them rapidly and in great variety, but we're starting to characterize them -- their mass and orbits, the properties of their atmospheres, measurements of day and night, dynamics of their winds," he said after the methane discovery was released last week.

So far, most of the faraway planets are large, super-hot gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, which are not expected to be able to support life. They are also so far away that humans are unlikely to ever directly observe them. The planet with methane is a very close one -- it would take a spaceship traveling at the speed of light 63 years to get there -- but most others are hundreds or thousands of light-years away.

But with astronomers regularly finding ingenious ways to locate and examine distant planets -- sometimes with new technologies, sometimes because of inventive new ways of analyzing data -- many in the field say it is just a matter of time before they detect Earth-size, rocky planets elsewhere in the cosmos.

"We've already been able to detect planets with only five or 10 times the mass of the Earth," said Sara Seager, a prominent extrasolar planet researcher and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The large gas giants typically are hundreds of times more massive than our planet. "If the technology improves a bit, with another push, we'll find Earths," she said.

This is not to say that scientists will necessarily find life on another distant planet -- although that is certainly the hope and, to some extent, the expectation. But with the now-proven ability to detect molecules of methane, a chemical often associated with life, researchers are becoming more confident that they will be able to detect signs of biological activity in faraway solar systems if it exists.

"Finding methane in the atmosphere of a particular exoplanet is very important, but demonstrating that we have the tools to identify molecules in these atmospheres is of even greater significance," said Seager, who was not involved in the study.

Carl B. Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the Ames Research Center in California, agrees that the big challenge now is to detect smaller, Earth-size planets, then to find more and better ways to learn about their atmospheres and other characteristics.

He said that just as the exoplanet search has become supercharged of late, so, too, has the search for life on other planets and in other solar systems, which is the primary focus of the institute.

"There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and probably a hundred billion other galaxies with as many stars as ours, so it seems highly unlikely that there are not Earth-like planets orbiting some of them out there, waiting to be discovered," he said. "With that in mind, we're working hard on techniques to answer the question of whether there's life on them to be found."

Some of the work of finding exoplanets and analyzing their orbits and atmospheres is being done with ground-based telescopes, and some from orbiting observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope, which provided the data used to discover exoplanet methane. In addition, astronomers and astrophysicists are developing ever more powerful ways to interpret data and to use spectroscopy, which splits light into its components to reveal the "fingerprints" of various chemicals.

Considerably more powerful hardware is also on the way. NASA's Kepler satellite, which is designed to find distant planets as they transit in front of their stars, is supposed to be launched next spring and is expected to locate hundreds or thousands of new planets. The James Webb Space Telescope, a high-powered Hubble successor that will be able to find atmospheric molecules in rocky exoplanets rather than only in gas giants, is scheduled for launch in 2013.

The recent discovery of methane in the atmosphere of exoplanet HD 189733b was the kind of breakthrough that the astrobiology institute and many others are looking for -- even though the methane almost certainly has chemical origins, as on Jupiter and Saturn, rather than biological ones. (The planet is punishingly close to its sun -- making a full orbit in two days -- and has an atmospheric temperature of about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit.) Nonetheless, methane can be a byproduct of biological processes, and so learning how to detect it is essential.

The observations were made as the planet passed in front of its parent star in what astronomers call a transit.

As the light from the star briefly pierced the atmosphere along the planet's edge, atmospheric gases imprinted their identifiable signatures on the starlight.

The astronomers expected to find signs of carbon monoxide on the spectrogram rather than methane, and they were surprised by what they found.

"This indicates we don't really understand exoplanet atmospheres yet," Swain said.

But considering that 15 years ago not a single planet had been discovered outside our solar system, Swain said, it is remarkable that scientists are now probing the makeup and dynamics of planets so far away.

"I think the more we look, the more evidence we'll find that the conditions are out there for life to exist," he said. "I don't see a good reason why our situation in our solar system should be unique. Perhaps uncommon, but not unique."

Teeny, the day was really nice, warm temps, perfect for yardwork and a bit of reading. Shopping yesterday also, {new finch feeder, wildbird seed, and cat food for the babies} no lines anywhere. A perscription at the pharmacy took less than 10 minutes! A record!

Teeny, the administrations done more harm than good, for certain.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23764861/

Dan, i believe when non human animals are considered sentient beings with rights for their needs respected, the world will be a better place for humans as well.

sue, interesting article, thanks.

ehBeth, how was your Easter weather? Hope your driving again.

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

We live in a country, that is corporation driven! The exact opposite of why we have GOVERNment! Government is supposed to act in its' peoples' best interest. All of the anti-trust, monopolies and uninsured banks, were outlawed after the depression and safeguards and laws were enacted and put in place, to protect the little guy. No more! Onstead, you have a trillion dollar war, that the money spent could have rebuilt every school, repaired and rebuilt every bridge, medicated every American that needed it, fed every hungry person in the US, provided shelter and on and on!

I purposefully come and inform this group, that I am clicking to save the planet, because collectively, we can! If God is with us this November and the Bushes go quietly, we can quietly reverse some of the damage done. For this I pray daily. I know I can make a difference, as all of you are doing! God Bless!