The 83rd Save Rain Forest Thread

A different version.

March 4, 2009
Bid to Undo Bush Memo on Threats to Species
By CORNELIA DEAN

A few weeks before he left office, President George W. Bush told federal officials that, in effect, they did not have to bother getting the advice of wildlife experts before taking actions that might harm plants or animals protected by the Endangered Species Act.

On Tuesday, President Obama said that, in effect, they did.

At a visit to the Interior Department marking its 150th anniversary, the president said he had signed a memorandum directing the Interior and Commerce Departments to review a regulation that the Bush administration issued Dec. 16.

The regulation lifted longstanding requirements that agencies contemplating actions that might affect endangered species consult with scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service and to take their guidance into account.

Until the review is complete, Mr. Obama’s memorandum says, agencies must return to the former practice of seeking and acting on scientific advice.

In brief remarks, the president said he had signed the memorandum to “help restore the scientific process to its rightful place” in the working of the Endangered Species Act.

“We should be looking for ways to improve it, not weaken it,” Mr. Obama said of the act, according to a pool report. The president said it was “false” to say people must choose between economic growth and environmental protection.

The announcement drew loud applause from the audience of about 500 who had gathered for the anniversary ceremony. Thousands of other employees watched by teleconference and video, the Interior Department said.

But in a statement, Bill Kovacs, the vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, condemned the action as an unreasonable interference with needed projects.

“While real Americans are looking for jobs, Washington bureaucrats are debating if, for instance, a bridge project in Florida contributed to the melting of Arctic ice,” Mr. Kovacs said.

Arctic ice entered this debate last year, when polar bears were listed as a threatened species under the act. Critics said that as a result, the Endangered Species Act could in theory be applied to stop anything that might contribute in even a small way to global warming.

Republicans in Congress said Mr. Obama’s action could lead to needless delays in projects financed by the stimulus package.

But Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Resources Committee, called Mr. Obama’s memorandum “a change for the better.”

Environmental groups agreed. Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, called the shift “welcome news.”

Janette Brimmer, a staff lawyer with Earthjustice, a nonprofit legal group that has challenged the Bush change in court, said the memorandum was “an important first step.”

Before the Bush administration’s action, Ms. Brimmer said, when agencies were told their proposals risked harming a listed species, they could ignore the advice but risked being fined for “an illegal take” if the species was harmed.

If the agencies acted on the scientific advice by, say, modifying their plans, they could obtain “an incidental take permit,” exempting them from penalties.

A rider undoing the Bush change has been attached to the budget bill, and if it passes, the change would be undone. But Ms. Brimmer said another bill had also been proposed that would reinforce the Bush change.

Because of this uncertainty, she said, Earthjustice will continue to press its lawsuit, which is being heard in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California.

Ms. Brimmer said four suits challenging the change were pending in the court, three by environmental groups and a fourth by several states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Very good news, sue!

Since taking office six weeks ago, Obama has directed his Cabinet to reverse or review four Bush-era environmental and energy rules.

Animal protections extend offshore as well.


Progression Wildclickers!!




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

Another good article here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29490531/

On the same page:
Enviornmental Slide Shows - a look at marine sanctuaries. Beautiful pics

The American public enmass is responding well to Obama - even the Republicans. I like it.

Certainly a positive change from the past eight years.

You and your 300 friends have supported 2,929,541.6 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 221,385.3 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (221,385.3)

American Prairie habitat supported: 68,854.1 square feet.
You have supported: (17,979.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (50,874.3)

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,639,302.1 square feet.
You have supported: (189,210.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (2,450,091.3)

I love you, We have together saved, all over the Earth, 67.253 ACRES of Rain Forest.............!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As I recall, when we began, there were approximately 3.5 million people clicking. NOW, there are over 10.5 million people signed up to click for Rain Forest.

We need to get as many of them as possible into our site - the Wildclickers!!!!!!!!

Does anyone want to begin a new thread and invite those people to join us??

This one needs a new start - with some UMPH!!!!!!!!!!!!

We need more clickers...

Let's go gettum, AkTeam!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I promise I'll not tell a bunch of war stories - I have soooo many tales from my Roughnecking in the oil fields when I was young and much more from Golden Gloves Champ to being so stupid when working in a brokerage house in Dallas, TX that I completely missed the fact I walked across Dallas, TX with THREE and a Half MILLION dollars in a briefcase and never once thought of running with it. WOW!!!!

You should hear the story about how I got the job.......... Nobody will believe it.

Dan

Dan, reminding also that we've saved not only 67.253 Acres of Rainforest, we've also with our advocacy work preserved millions of acres of land and habitat, and if we count the laws we've enacted with Congress, countless numbers of animals now have federal and state protections.

The WildClickers are super umphed n' amped!

We love Beth and all your stories too...

{you had how much money in a briefcase???} dang!

Glad you're not clicking from prison!






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

anyone gonna call dibs on starting a new thread?

if there's nothing new when I get home tomorrow, I'll tackle it

mebbe something to celebrate the beginning of spring?

I think we should probably go back to shorter threads with more defined starters for each one.

hmmmm, spring/danon's stories about wild-catting/? how to tie it all in together hmmmm

mebbe a bit later in the year, we could each do something about sleeping outside ... thinking ... something about what the season is like around our current homes ...

thinking
thinking

Plant some trees in your yard E to replace the ones they cut down to make room for you.

You and your 300 friends have supported 2,929,586.0 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 221,422.3 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (221,422.3)

American Prairie habitat supported: 68,854.1 square feet.
You have supported: (17,979.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (50,874.3)

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,639,309.5 square feet.
You have supported: (189,218.2)
Your 300 friends have supported: (2,450,091.3)

NIMBY.

Already done, spendy.

I started by ripping out the small lawns here and putting in native plants. I've been xeriscaping here for years. Made a point of planting several trees representing what was here 200 years ago. They've all done wonderfully. Put up a clothesline so that my carbon footprint would start to be decreased. If you'd been with the wildclickers over the years you'd already know about the real-life work done by the group.

As usual you're tooting out of your ass.

Oh well, going with your long suit can't always be a mistake.

Ah, I think spendius is OK. Glad to have another man clicking. He has his opinions and we have ours - That's the American way.

And, ehBeth, I recently said to my Patti, "Gosh, it really seems like Canada is another country.!!" We are soo much alike.

Yes, if you start a thread about roughnecks in the oilfields during the early '60's I'll tell you about being up in the derrick when the damn thing blew in just like you see in the movies - and I had to climb down the rigging with it blowing out around me. Not a fun time.

There are other tales from the time. I was only 19 yrs old at the time. And, really dumb.

Provocative article.

March 6, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Something Wild
By CHARLES SIEBERT

IT’S common to hear, in the wake of someone’s sudden lethal outburst, exclamations of shock along the lines of: “He seemed so pleasant and mild-mannered.” “She never bothered anyone.” But when those same sentiments are voiced in the aftermath of a chimpanzee attack like the one in Stamford, Conn., last month " in which a pet chimp named Travis mauled a woman, robbing her of her hands, eyesight and much of her face, and possibly causing brain damage " they raise serious questions about us, the primates with the so-called higher cognitive functions.

There is something about chimpanzees " their tantalizing closeness to us in both appearance and genetic detail " that has always driven human beings to behavioral extremes, actions that reflect a deep discomfort with our own animality, and invariably turn out bad for both us and them.

The first live chimpanzee to set foot on Europe’s shores arrived in The Hague in 1641, on board a Dutch merchant ship returning from Angola. The only known visual record of this unwitting pioneer’s existence is an engraving done that same year by the Dutch physician and anatomist Nicolaes Tulp. A leading figure of the Enlightenment with its emergent emphasis on objective observation and realistic representation, Tulp sat day after day in the private menagerie of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, and proceeded to compose one of the more surreal depictions of a chimpanzee imaginable. The creature " seated atop a boulder with its mostly hairless torso and limbs, tapered elfin hands and feet, and sweetly smiling face " looks like a potbellied forest nymph dreamily sleeping off a good drunk. Not a chimpanzee so much as an ape-human hybrid.

The fact that Tulp, a man of science, refused to let his hand depict what his eyes were seeing goes to the heart of the threat that the chimpanzee’s near-humanness has long posed to our consciousness. By depicting a nymphlike creature, he reinforced an age-old anthropocentric conception of humanlike apes as mythic beings, fearsome man-beasts, living cautionary tales against our own often beastly and rapacious tendencies.

Tulp’s willful distortion may seem laughable now, something that we modern-day humans have advanced beyond, but we need look no further than Travis to dispel that conceit. His tragic end is a sadly familiar occurrence within today’s equally distorting framework of trying to coerce evolution in a direction it didn’t quite go for chimps, by making them be us: living on our turf and terms, dressing in our clothes, acting in our films and commercials, suffering in our research labs.

While researching a book about my days living in a retirement home for former chimp actors (chimps work as actors only until about the age of 6, after which they become too strong and willful; they then spend the rest of their lives, often 40 to 50 more years, behind bars), I happened to visit Mike and Connie Casey, the breeders who originally sold the baby Travis to Sandra Herold and who raise and rent out their own chimps for commercials and children’s birthday parties.

Connie Casey saw Travis’s mother, Suzy, shot dead back in 2001 when this chimp, too, escaped and got into a tussle with a dog. In 2005, four former chimp actors undid the lock of a retirement home known as the Carson Center for Chimps (as in Johnny Carson) on the grounds of a roadside animal attraction called Zoo Nebraska. As patrons ran for cover, three chimps were killed. One, named Ripley, managed to return to the Carson Center and close himself back in.

Six months before that incident, two former chimp actors who had grown up and trained with Ripley escaped their enclosure at a retirement sanctuary in Southern California and badly mauled a visitor much in the same way that Travis did Ms. Herold’s friend.

Chimps are, like us, given to occasional violent outbursts, but they have exponentially greater strength. Chimps also have, like us, minds enough to lose and memories that can hasten the process. Wild chimps “recruited” by poachers for entertainment watch as their mothers are gunned down " the only way a chimp mother would ever relinquish a child. Chimps born in captivity are spared that experience, but they suffer the same premature separation from their mothers, isolation from their normal social groups and often mistreatment from trainers and keepers, all traumatic events that have been shown to cause deep psychological scarring and, as in human beings, can lead an animal to overreact to the slightest stimuli: the look in someone’s eye, the color of someone’s hair or, as with Ms. Herold’s friend that day, hair done up in an unaccustomed style. These are, in short, deeply conflicted beings, evolutionary anomalies that only we could have created: chimps with names and yet no recollection of trees.

The most tragic example of this is Lucy, who lived in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Raised from infancy to age 10 as a human child by the psychologist Maurice Temerlin and his wife, Jane, Lucy made her own meals, mixed her own cocktails, flipped through magazines, slept on soft mattresses, raised a pet cat, learned sign language " and had no contact whatsoever with other chimpanzees. By the time she reached sexual maturity, however, she became more and more difficult to handle, and the Temerlins decided they had to let Lucy go.

They chose to send her to a place that was the complete opposite of what she knew, a refuge that reintroduces captive chimps into the wild. Lucy, it will perhaps come as little surprise, struggled mightily. She refused to socialize with the other chimps, to climb trees, forage for food, make nests. She took to waiting beneath trees for the others’ crumbs to fall.

Eventually, Lucy adopted an orphan baby chimp and mothered him until he died three years later of a stomach parasite. She herself barely survived a bout of hookworm, then began to show enough positive signs of socializing with the others that they were all left for a time to their own devices. A year later, however, Lucy’s skeleton was found near the shores of the island refuge, without, some reports said, her hands or feet. The cause of her death isn’t known, but speculation is that Lucy, always the first to greet human visitors, one day unwittingly approached a group of poachers, who readily seized upon their overeager prey.

Lucy, Travis and all the others died for the same reason that Tulp couldn’t draw the actual being seated before him: our ongoing inability to see animals outside our own fraught frame of reference. The chimp that Tulp, in fear of science, preserved as a mythic human, Temerlin tried to make a human, in science’s name. Lost in the shuffle of either agenda were the animals themselves, creatures we still can’t regard and respect for what they are and just leave alone.

Happy weekend all.

Thank you sue

Good day to all WildClickers


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

You and your 300 friends have supported 2,929,719.3 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 221,459.4 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (221,459.4)

American Prairie habitat supported: 68,854.1 square feet.
You have supported: (17,979.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (50,874.3)

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,639,405.8 square feet.
You have supported: (189,225.6)
Your 300 friends have supported: (2,450,180.2)

~~~~

no new thread?

okey dokey artichokies, you've been warned

Stradee, we need you and the link here

http://able2know.org/topic/130117-1


C'mon wildclickers - the new thread is ready for you to start <sings> spreadin' the news </sings>