October 1, 2009
E.P.A. Moves to Curtail Greenhouse Gas Emissions
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON " Unwilling to wait for Congress to act, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it was moving forward on new rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and large industrial facilities.
President Obama has said that he prefers a comprehensive legislative approach to regulating emissions and stemming global warming, not a piecemeal application of rules, and that he is deeply committed to passage of a climate bill this year.
But he has authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to begin moving toward regulation, which could goad lawmakers into reaching an agreement. It could also provide evidence of the United States’ seriousness as negotiators prepare for United Nations
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sumac
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Thu 1 Oct, 2009 08:56 am
Good news for the salmon!
October 1, 2009
Plan Outlines Removal of Four Dams on Klamath River
By JESSE McKINLEY
SAN FRANCISCO " A draft plan to remove four aging dams along the Klamath River in Oregon and California was released Wednesday, a long-awaited step toward ending a protracted dispute over the waterway.
The Klamath dams, built from 1918 to 1961 along an upstream stretch of the river, are owned by PacifiCorp, which uses them to generate electricity. But they have angered Indian tribes along the river, as well as fishermen and environmentalists, who blamed them for a decline in salmon populations and subsequent economic hardships.
Last year, federal and other officials announced a nonbinding agreement to remove the dams, and Wednesday’s draft plan added a specific, nuts-and-bolts dimension to that agreement. In releasing the draft plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called the Klamath “one of the most challenging water issues of our time.”
Competing interests have long debated how to manage the Klamath, a river whose salmon populations once rivaled any in the world. Environmentalists argue that the fish populations have declined because of the dams preventing upstream spawning, while farmers have pleaded for more water for irrigation and others for more electric power.
The federal government has often played the unhappy role of referee. In 2002, environmentalists asserted that a significant die-off of fish had resulted from a diversion of water to farmers that was ordered by the Interior Department. Four years later, fishermen complained when low levels of salmon in the river led to government restrictions on commercial fishing.
The draft plan, which was developed by representatives from about two dozen federal, state and tribal agencies, environmental groups and irrigators in discussions with officials from PacifiCorp, will go to stakeholders and the public for review.
Kirk Miller, the deputy secretary and chief counsel of California Natural Resources Agency, which represented the state in negotiations, said he hoped for approval by year’s end.
Under the agreement, the Interior Department would study the cost and environmental impact of removing the dams, including the effect on fish populations and downstream river conditions, to help Mr. Salazar make what he called “a full informed decision.” In a nod to PacifiCorp, the company would continue to operate the dams until their removal and would not be liable for any effects of the demolition.
Greg Abel, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement that “this is a balanced and reasonable outcome that best protects the interests of our customers,” as well as “helping to peacefully resolve numerous conflicts in the Klamath basin.”
About $200 million of the estimated $450 million cost of removing the dams would be covered by a small surcharge on PacifiCorp’s customers, most of whom reside in Oregon. The rest of the money would come from the company’s customers in California and the sale of bonds there.
The federal government would be required to prepare timetables for the dams’ removal and plans to reduce cost overruns and dispose of sediment and debris.
“The agreement calls on each of us to do our part,” said Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski of Oregon, where lawmakers have approved the PacifiCorp surcharge.
Mr. Salazar has until March 2012 to decide whether to go forward with the plan. If approved, removal of the dams would begin in 2020.
“We haven’t seen salmon in our country for 90 years,” said Jeff Mitchell, a council member for the Klamath Tribes of Oregon. “This agreement represents our best chance of finally bringing the salmon home.”
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Stradee
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Thu 1 Oct, 2009 01:53 pm
@High Seas,
"@" = replied by...
Hoft, after you've clicked for the rainforest then after , (on the left of the page) notice where they've added a "wolf" click. Poor wolfies need our clicks. So sad what's happening. Defenders and other wildlife groups are still in court trying to stop the hunts. Although the federal judge admitted the hunt goes against the ESA, they are studying the challenge placed before the gov that wolves are no longer an endangered species. Politics
Thanks for checking in and happy C3S...
sue, isn't that good news! NPR did a news segment about the issue.
Also, CA Senator Barbara Boxer is presenting to Congress a emissions bill also! Good stuff happening.
Beth, did you see my new total at jewels? Movin' on up.
Dan, our temps are a tad warmer today, a beautiful Fall day.
Hey there Crickers... errrrrr (((((((clickers))))))))
How is everybody? Dan-Patti? Stradee-diddly-dee - you and yours? ((Bethie...hbg)), Sue, HS-C3SasperC3I.with6ft 5sec-tat-man-weighing s'much-as'nAPC < good golly Miss Molly>, dear sweet Alex et al
I've cricked, cracked and croaked.... ribbit!
Back from Eire - had the most beautiful time you can possibly imagine. I need to go back and spend some time there... ahhhhhh... when, if only... one day...
<win the lottery win the lottery... note to self... do the lottery>
It's brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr over here - leaves are all turning and are slowly carpeting the ground ... time to call the chimney sweep methinks and get a log fire going. Pulling out the fleeces and an extra tog or 6 on the doona! Nites are drawing in fast... Fall is falling.
Dan - your first poem - well, that's a bit happy a? Made I smile!
Have read up and reading along - hugging y'all big
Clickd and posting some interesting articles from today's NYT about animals in peril, from king salmon to walruses, to (can't remember).
October 3, 2009
Weak Levels of King Salmon Hurt Alaskan Fishermen
By STEFAN MILKOWSKI
MARSHALL, Alaska " Just a few years ago, king salmon played an outsize role in villages along the Yukon River. Fishing provided meaningful income, fed families throughout the year, and kept alive long-held traditions of Yup’ik Eskimos and Athabascan Indians.
But this year, a total ban on commercial fishing for king salmon on the river in Alaska has strained poor communities and stripped the prized Yukon fish off menus in the lower 48 states. Unprecedented restrictions on subsistence fishing have left freezers and smokehouses half-full and hastened a shift away from a tradition of spending summers at fish camps along the river.
“This year, fishing is not really worth it,” said Aloysius Coffee, a commercial fisherman in Marshall who used to support his family and pay for new boats and snow machines with fishing income.
At a kitchen table cluttered with cigarettes and store-bought food, Mr. Coffee said he fished for the less valuable chum salmon this summer but spent all his earnings on permits and gasoline. “You got to sit there and count your checkbook, how much you’re going to spend each day,” he said.
The cause of the weak runs, which began several years ago, remains unclear. But managers of the small king salmon fishery suspect changes in ocean conditions are mostly to blame, and they warn that it may be years before the salmon return to the Yukon River in large numbers.
Salmon are among the most determined of nature’s creatures. Born in fresh water, the fish spend much of their lives in the ocean before fighting their way upriver to spawn and die in the streams of their birth.
While most salmon populations in the lower 48 states have been in trouble for decades, thanks to dam-building and other habitat disruptions, populations in Alaska have generally remained healthy. The state supplies about 40 percent of the world’s wild salmon, and the Marine Stewardship Council has certified Alaska’s salmon fisheries as sustainable. (In the global market, sales of farmed salmon surpassed those of wild salmon in the late 1990s.)
For decades, runs of king, or chinook, salmon " the largest and most valuable of Alaska’s five salmon species " were generally strong and dependable on the Yukon River. But the run crashed in the late 1990s, and the annual migrations upriver have varied widely since then. “You can’t depend on it any more,” said Steve Hayes, who manages the fishery for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Officials with that department and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, which jointly manage the fishery, say variations in ocean conditions related to climate change or natural cycles are probably the main cause of the weak salmon runs. Certain runs of chinook salmon in California and Oregon have been weak as well in recent years, with ocean conditions also suspected.
In Alaska, fishermen also blame the Bering Sea pollock fishing fleet, which scoops up tens of thousands of king salmon each year as accidental by-catch. The first hard cap on salmon by-catch is supposed to take effect in 2011, but the cap is not tough enough to satisfy Yukon River fishermen.
The Yukon River fishery accounts for a small fraction of the state’s commercial salmon harvest. But the fish themselves are considered among the best in the world, prized for the extraordinary amount of fat they put on before migrating from the Bering Sea to spawning grounds in Alaska and Canada, a voyage of 2,000 miles in some cases.
Most commercial fishing is done on the Yukon River delta, where mountains disappear and the river branches into fingers on its way to the sea. Eskimos fish with aluminum skiffs and nets from villages inaccessible by road. Beaches serve as depots and gathering places.
Kwik’Pak Fisheries, in Emmonak, population 794, is one of the few industrial facilities in the region. Forklifts cross muddy streets separating storage buildings, processing facilities and a bunkhouse for employees from surrounding villages.
For decades, almost all commercially caught king salmon were sold to buyers in Japan. But in 2004, Kwik’Pak began marketing the fish domestically, and for a few years fish-lovers in the lower 48 could find Yukon River kings at upscale restaurants and stores.
This year, Kwik’Pak sent just six king salmon to a single buyer in Seattle, and only a trickle of other kings made it to market. Most of those fish were caught incidentally during an opening for fall chum salmon.
Kwik’Pak is promoting chum salmon, also known as keta, and experimenting with an oily whitefish called cisco. But harvests of those fish are limited, and the price paid to fishermen is much less than for kings.
The company, which was formed in 2002 in part to develop local economies, now runs a store selling fishing supplies and hauls gravel in trucks that once carried fish. This summer, employees spent their time repainting the Catholic church.
“We’re a one-resource economy down here,” said Jack Schultheis, the company’s general manager. “We don’t have the oil fields or timber or anything else to work on. This is all we’ve got.”
In the 1980s and early 1990s, commercial fishermen on the lower river made an average of $8,000 to $12,000 in gross earnings, sometimes more. Since 2000, that number has been closer to $4,000, and this year, it dropped to just over $2,000.
“You gotta try to find some other work,” said Paul Andrews, a commercial fisherman in Emmonak. “It’s really, really hard out here.”
Like many on the Yukon delta, Mr. Andrews relies on income from fishing to sustain a subsistence lifestyle that also includes hunting for moose, seals and migratory birds.
Arthur Heckman, who manages a small store in the village of Pilot Station, says more and more people are asking him for credit. “Some days I have people call me up and say, ‘I just want a box of crackers,’ or ‘I just want to buy some Pampers,’ ” he said.
The cost of living in remote villages along the river is high, and many residents rely on a mix of part-time work and government aid. Most also rely on fish.
Nets stretch from riverbanks, and fish wheels " large rotating traps built on driftwood rafts " turn in the current near eddies. Simple smokehouses rise from every village beach and fish camp.
King salmon, which can weigh 30 pounds or more, are cut into long strips and dried for weeks over smoking alder or poplar. The candylike strips are ubiquitous here, served always with a sturdy cracker called Pilot Bread. Salmon are also canned, frozen and salted.
This year, fishery managers for the first time closed all subsistence fishing on the first pulse of king salmon and cut fishing times in half on later pulses, leaving many residents with just two 18-hour periods a week to fish.
Zeta Cleaver, one of the only people fishing in the middle-river village of Ruby in late July, said people called her from as far away as Anchorage wanting to buy fish. She used to catch more than a dozen king salmon a day and fill her smokehouse with fish for her children and grandchildren, she said. This year she got only a few kings.
Until recently, many residents gathered with family to fish from remote camps along the river, a holdover from a migratory lifestyle that included summer camps for fishing and winter camps for hunting and trapping.
This year, restrictions on fishing, combined with the high cost of gas and continuing societal shifts, kept many camps empty. A reporter’s 900-mile canoe trip down the Yukon and Tanana Rivers showed countless camps shuttered or abandoned. Multifamily camps that once rivaled nearby villages in population seemed more like quiet retreats from them.
High prices for heating fuel and limited fishing income left many lower-river residents in dire straits last winter and prompted shipments of food and other aid. With this year threatening to be even worse, Alaska’s governor, Sean Parnell, in August sought federal disaster relief for Yukon River residents. The request is still pending.
In Marshall, people are bracing for a long winter. Heating oil costs more than $7 a gallon here, and a can of condensed milk sells for nearly $4. Villagers are going moose-hunting in groups to save on the cost of gasoline.
“The whole community is kind of hurting,” said Mike Peters, a fisherman and heavy equipment operator. “People really depended on the fish, and it’s not there.”
October 3, 2009
Walruses Suffer Substantial Losses as Sea Ice Erodes
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Half a century after Pacific walruses began recovering from industrial-scale hunting, marine biologists are growing worried that they face a mounting threat from global warming.
Masses of lumbering walruses have been crowding on beaches and rocks along the Russian and American sides of the Bering Strait in the absence of the coastal sea ice that normally serves as a late-summer haven and nursery.
While the retreats in sea ice around the Arctic this summer were not as extensive as in 2008 or 2007, the Chukchi Sea, at the heart of the walrus subspecies’ range, was largely open water.
On Thursday, biologists from the United States Geological Survey issued a report concluding that 131 walruses found dead near Icy Cape, Alaska, on Sept. 14 died from being crushed or stampeded. Several thousand walruses had been congregating in the area, a situation that scientists from the agency said was highly unusual.
Last month, a team from the World Wildlife Fund reported seeing 20,000 walruses on the shore at Cape Schmidt, Russa. In that same area, scientists in 2007 reported several thousand crushing deaths after tens of thousands of walruses crowded on the shoreline.
Walruses have endured more than 15 million years of climatic ups and downs, so experts do not foresee the species’ becoming extinct, particularly if hunting remains controlled. (Thousands are legally killed each year by indigenous communities in both countries.)
But there has been growing confirmation that the walrus is suffering substantial losses as the sheath of sea ice in coastal waters erodes in the summer.
The floes normally provide a floating nursery for pups while adults dive to root for clams and other food in the seabed in shallow coastal waters along the continental shelf. Last month, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, responding to a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, concluded that there was sufficient scientific evidence of rising stress on the animals from climate change to consider granting the Pacific walrus protection under the Endangered Species Act.
That review is under way, and the service is taking public comment until Nov. 9.
The polar bear, which is similarly dependent on sea ice, was listed as threatened under the species act last year.
“I think there is reason to be concerned,” said Brendan P. Kelly, a marine biologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who has been studying walruses for several decades.
Fatal stampedes among walruses have occurred in past years, Mr. Kelly said, citing research he conducted on a similar event in 1978 and reports by hunters on islands in the Bering Sea more than a century ago. But the expansion of open waters along the coasts raises the odds and adds to other pressures on the animals, he said.
For the moment, the Pacific walrus remains abundant, numbering at least 200,000 by some accounts, double the number in the 1950s.
The Atlantic walrus, a subspecies in Canada, Norway, Russia and Greenland numbering about 22,000, has never recovered from sustained slaughter.
Dr. Kelly said the long-term forecast of warming and less summer ice for the Arctic did not bode well for the Pacific walrus.
“The Pacific population did recover,” he said. “But it is hard to imagine that it will not decline in the coming century.”
This article has been revised to clarify the year in which several thousand walrus crushing deaths on the shore of Cape Schmidt, Russia. They deaths occurred in 2007.
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sumac
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Sat 3 Oct, 2009 06:56 am
October 3, 2009
After a Devastating Fire, an Intense Study of Its Effects
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST, Calif. " The Station fire, which in over a month has burned away nearly a quarter of this vast, mountainous backdrop to the Los Angeles skyline, is finally just about out, sending all but a handful of firefighters home. Now, the scientists swoop in.
Adam Backlin and Liz Gallegos, federal biologists, stood thigh-deep in a stream last week, sweeping a large net over and over like frustrated anglers to collect Santa Ana speckled dace fish as part of research on the damaging effects of fire on fragile wildlife.
Earlier, another biologist, Diana Papoulias, hauled out centrifuges, dry ice, syringes and other equipment to perform autopsies on fish, delving deeper into the role that heat, fire retardant and debris in the water may have played in their demise.
And Todd M. Hoefen, a geophysicist, scooped up white and black ash as part of research to analyze “the impact of it, what blows out of these fires and what are people breathing.”
Fire, typically touched off by lightning strikes, has always been part of the life cycle of the wilderness here and elsewhere, to a large degree crucial to regenerating it. Most wildlife and landscape eventually come back.
But with the increasing frequency and size of fires " 7 of the state’s 10 largest wildfires have occurred in the last six years, and most were caused by people " scientists are intensifying study of the environmental aftermath of the changing burn pattern.
“Fire dynamics have changed a lot, and urbanization has fragmented the landscape,” said Robert N. Fisher, a biologist with the United States Geological Survey, which has coordinated a team to take a closer look at this fire and other recent ones. “We have to figure out a way to give animals a way to persist in a way they did before in a landscape that is burning too fast and too much.”
This week, Mr. Fisher coordinated an unusual evacuation of sorts. A multiagency team of state and federal forest and wildlife representatives removed a colony of mountain yellow-legged tadpoles, endangered in Southern California, from a tributary of the San Gabriel River before rock and debris unleashed by fall and winter rains imperil their creekside habitat.
The tadpoles were taken to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, where they will be raised, with the young spawned there eventually returned to the wild.
But such maneuvers represent the extreme. Much of the scientists’ work is intended to provide a better understanding of the ecological aftermath of fires, particularly those in areas where development meets wilderness and threatened and endangered species are present.
Scott L. Stephens, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Association for Fire Ecology, said the Station fire work coincided with a burst of fire science research in recent years designed to answer questions not only about what happens during and after fires but also about the effect climate change and drought may be having on forests and scrubland in high-burn areas.
Underlying much of the interest, Dr. Stephens said, are questions like these: “Are there things we can do to mitigate fire? Are there things managers can do to reduce their impact?”
The Station fire, which was named for its start on Aug. 26 near a ranger station, has destroyed several dozen homes and caused the deaths of two Los Angeles County firefighters. It ranks as the largest fire in the modern history of Los Angeles County. It has burned more than 160,000 acres, or 250 square miles, an area nearly the size of Chicago, and has cut off access to one of Los Angeles’s most popular wilderness getaways, about 20 miles north of downtown.
But the fire may be best remembered for the towering, thundercloud-like plume that loomed for days over the city.
Just what happened to all that ash and how thousands of gallons of fire retardant sprayed on the forest is affecting its creatures is now the focus of much investigation.
Much of the work requires painstaking field research in the deepest reaches of craggy forest.
On a recent afternoon, in the moonscape of the “burn scar,” Mr. Backlin and Ms. Gallegos bounced in a truck along trails and hopped out at the edge of a creek for an afternoon of “fishing.”
With a Forest Service fire truck parked nearby and water-dropping helicopters dashing overhead to hit the last smoldering hot spots, the two cast a literal wide net in an effort to collect small, finger-length speckled daces.
“We’re on fire now,” Mr. Backlin exulted, after several previous efforts turned up nothing but trout and water bugs.
“When the winter rains come, we won’t have any idea what these fish were like if they are washed away,” he said, tossing a few more into a collection bucket.
Later, the two biologists sat in the dirt and measured the specimens, euthanized them and placed them in jars to take back to the laboratory for autopsies.
DNA samples were taken, their internal organs analyzed and other tests performed to assess their overall health and the presence of toxins.
With Forest Service officials already warning that heavy rains could produce severe mudslides because so much vegetation holding the soil in place has burned away, scientists worry about the consequences, particularly to aquatic creatures.
Cascading rock and debris can turn streams into roiling, concrete-like concoctions, burying or shredding all manner of aquatic life, Mr. Fisher said.
Another group of scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University and the California Institute of Technology plan to take detailed, high-resolution aerial photographs of the burn in the coming days as part of research on erosion and the movement of sediment in the mountains.
“Fire changes a lot of dynamics and releases a lot of sediment,” said Todd Farr, a geologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose offices in La Cañada Flintridge abut the forest.
But even without the rain, the fires created a threat.
Already, scientists have found that ash particles in the streams can shred the fish’s gills and drive up the water’s alkalinity, possibly affecting reproduction and setting the stage for die-offs.
A research ecologist, Edward E. Little, said soil and water samples reddened by retardant were being analyzed to determine toxicity to fish and amphibians, among the creatures most susceptible to environmental changes.
Similar work has been done after fires in Colorado and Idaho, Dr. Little said, but “the interesting thing about the Station fire is it is such a different kind of fire than we have visited, in terms of devastation of vegetation in the area.”
Mr. Hoefen, who also helped analyze ash from the World Trade Center collapse, said ash samples had shown elevated levels of minerals that could be the result of what the burned plants had absorbed from the soil or air pollution. They mirror findings from devastating fires in San Diego in 2007, he said, though additional research is needed to pinpoint how harmful the ash could be to human health and the environment.
With rains expected to wash much of the ash into the watershed, Mr. Hoefen said, the quality of rivers, streams and reservoirs could be affected.
“Hopefully, our science will start to show people that it is not just fire, but there could be problems for the frogs, fish and the runoff,” Mr. Hoefen said. “Wind and rain blowing the ash into streams and ponds could have an effect after the fire.”
English archaeologists find new prehistoric site
2 hrs 12 mins ago
LONDON " Archaeologists have discovered a smaller prehistoric site near Britain's famous circle of standing stones at Stonehenge.
Researchers have dubbed the site "Bluehenge," after the color of the 27 Welsh stones that were laid to make up a path. The stones have disappeared but the path of holes remains.
The new circle, unearthed over the summer by researchers from Sheffield University, represents an important find, researchers said Saturday. The site is about a mile (2 kilometers) away from Stonehenge.
Bluehenge, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of London, is believed to date back 5,000 years.
Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University said he believed the path and Stonehenge itself were linked to rituals of life and death.
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sumac
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Sat 3 Oct, 2009 08:06 am
From NPR, a study on an important difference between dogs, wolves, and babies.
A new study shows that dogs and young human babies both make the same classic error in a famous psychology experiment " while wolves raised by people do not.
The experiment was originally devised decades ago by the well-known child psychologist Jean Piaget. He found that if babies 10 months old or younger repeatedly see a toy placed in location A, they will look for the toy there even after watching the toy being placed in location B.
This is called the "A-Not-B Error." By 1 year of age, children have grown out of it. But it's such a weird observation that psychologists have been talking about it for decades. Some think it has to do with how babies perceive the permanence of objects. But others think it has something to do with how infants learn from people.
More Animal Minds
Crows can recognize human faces and remember them for years.
The Crow Paradox July 27, 2009
Adam Miklosi of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, is interested in how dogs have evolved to live with people, so he decided to see how dogs and their wild relatives, human-raised wolves, would do on this test.
In their experiment, wolves were generally not misled by what they had seen humans do before, according to a report in Science. They'd make a beeline for the right hiding place.
But dogs would act like a 10-month-old baby, going to screen A even though they'd just seen someone put the toy behind screen B.
The Human Influence
Miklosi think this means that dogs interpret the situation as a learning situation and choose to trust what the human is communicating rather than what they see with their own eyes.
"The dogs are sort of looking at the human as a sort of a teacher that has the privilege of some sort of information and they don't want to override it with their own understanding of the case," says Miklosi.
When the experiment was rigged up so that it involved no people, and the toys were instead dragged from place to place by a moving string, the dogs were less likely to make the mistake. They suddenly acted more like their wolf relatives.
"If there's no teacher there, then the dogs are switching back, and then they are solving the problem on their own," Miklosi says.
Human babies also were more likely to find the toy in the correct location if it was moved by a string instead of a person. "For me," says Miklosi, "this was the biggest surprise."
He believes all this shows that the presence of a person " social interaction " has a profound effect on how both dogs and babies interpret the situation.
For Dogs, It All Depends On the Person
There was one difference between dogs and young babies, though. When they redid the classic experiment but had more than one person do the hiding, it didn't matter to the babies. They kept reaching for screen A, suggesting they were able to generalize about people.
But adding a new person changed everything for the dogs. "For the dog, if you're changing the person, the knowledge is gone," says Miklosi. The dogs ignored what had previously happened and, like the wolves, went straight to the toy.
"It's a very original approach. It's a very thought-provoking experiment," says Clive Wynne, who studies dog cognition at the University of Florida. "I think like a lot of good studies, it doesn't lead so instantly to conclusions. It leads to new questions."
For example, he says, "there's a puzzle in this paper in that you've got adult dogs behaving like 10-month-old children, when 10-month-old children are only going to act like this for two more months. They're going to grow out of it very quickly."
Still, he thinks we need more studies like this one, to learn about both human cognition and the inner lives of our canine companions.
"It is important that we understand how dogs think about us," Wynne says, "because we have 70 million of these animals in our homes in the United States " more dogs than we have children."
Interesting the "blue stones" are missing from the older site..... and not all are missing from the newer site. Hmmmmm - - - do we have a possible case of "blue stone thieves"??
Clicked for rainforest and wolves. And let's hear it for the salmon!
October 4, 2009
Editorial
End to the Klamath War
The announcement that four dams on the Klamath River will be removed to restore imperiled salmon runs is a victory for fish, farmers, Indian tribes and the much-maligned Endangered Species Act.
The dams in Oregon and California will not come down until 2020. In the meantime, PacifiCorp, the Portland utility that owns them, has promised to improve water quality and salmon habitat. The cost could run as high as $200 million, which is roughly what the company would have been obliged to pay anyway to construct fish passage around the dams to increase the salmon’s chances of survival.
All sides will also benefit from a separate agreement that will divvy up scarce water flows in the Klamath. Taken together, the two agreements mean that we can finally see the end of a dispute that grabbed national headlines in 2001, when federal water managers cut irrigation deliveries to farmers to preserve water flows for two threatened or endangered fish species " coho salmon and a less majestic critter known as the suckerfish.
Cries that farmers were being sacrificed to the lowly suckerfish drew Karl Rove and other Bush politicos into the fray. More water was released to the farmers, at which point 33,000 fish died downstream. At which point, too, wiser heads began to see that what was needed was a water-sharing plan that " coupled with federal aid to farmers who agreed to let their land go fallow in dry seasons " would guarantee everyone enough to survive.
Neither the restoration plan nor the plan to remove the dams would have been possible without the Endangered Species Act. The act requires the federal government to identify species at severe risk and then devise ways to shape human behavior to give these species a chance to survive. In this case it has worked brilliantly.
good golly Miss Molly>, dear sweet Alex et al
