When people think of hunting and fishing politicians in America — at least prominent ones – two things spring to mind: 1. Republican and 2. Climate change skeptic. Former President George W. Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin all fall into both categories.
But the hunting and fishing crowd — widely seen as reliably Republican because of that’s party’s successful portrayal of itself as the defender of God and guns — has also started to take note of climate change. After all, hunters and anglers are in the outdoors in pursuit of wildlife season after season, year after year.
But what may concern some Republican strategists is that many of them also accept the science of climate change, which overwhelmingly points to fossil fuel emissions as the main cause driving global warming.
This may help explain why Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina broke ranks with his party to outline a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a Sunday New York Times opinion piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry. Hunters and anglers in the U.S. South are widely seen as part of the Republican base and his call for action was saluted on Wednesday during a teleconference call hosted by the South Carolina Wildlife Federation (SCWF) and involved other outdoor groups.
“I have observed things in my life time that suggest that significant impacts have already been felt here in our state,” said Clinch Heyward, the 60-year-old chairman of the SCWF.
He noted that in a life time of duck hunting he had noticed a decline in the state’s duck population while Virginia, where one of his sons now lives, had more and more ducks.
“I was deer hunting last weekend and here it is October and it is 90 degrees (about 32 Celsius),” he said in his thick southern accent.
The SCWF said in a statement that: “Sportsmen are calling for passage of comprehensive climate and energy legislation“.
Such legislation is currently being considered in the U.S. Senate and is one of President Barack Obama’s top domestic priorities.
The shooting and fishing crowd is not always seen as a natural ally of the bunny and tree-hugging crowd. Do you see at least some of them uniting on this issue? And what might the political implications for the Republican Party be?
(PHOTO: A young hunter takes aim at the Cabela’s store in Fort Worth, Texas June 26, 2008. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi (UNITED STATES)
Before he became a body builder, before he was the Terminator, and before he turned into the Governator, it turns out that Arnold was the youngest in a family that had no running water and relied on an outhouse. That’s what he told fourth graders who innocently asked about how he spoke to his kids.
“I have major fights with my kids,” he responded, quickly segueing into the difference between post-World War European poverty and the Golden State.
“We had kind of a system where we carried the water from 200 yards away from the well, to our house upstairs to the second floor where we lived, and then my father would wash himself first, and then my mother would wash herself, and then my brother would wash himself in the same water, and then I would wash myself, and it was all dirty, because I was the youngest. So that’s how I grew up because conservation was big in Europe. Especially since I grew up after the Second World War. There was no food, there was little electricity, there were blackouts left and right, there was nothing. After the war was worse than during the war. So we had absolutely nothing,” he said.
And while the Governor now has solar panels to heat the water in his pool and jacuzzi, a hydrogen-powered Hummer, and he recycles, it seems conservation is still BIG — and mandatory — in the Terminator household.
He recalled watching his kids take a stool into the shower to sit and enjoy the hot water — for a long time.
“I’m sitting outside timing it now, and it’s 15 minutes, and still they are in the shower. So I open the shower door and turn off the hot water and then all of a sudden they start screaming, because it is cold,” he said, adding that he had created rules: no shower longer than 5 minutes — or else.
Here’s the three-minute history of Arnold’s conservation conversion, at a Commonwealth Club event in San Francisco:
When the United States and Mexico talk of cooperation over their shared border, that usually means working to stamp out drug trafficking and gun running. But this week the two neighbors put their shoulders behind a gentler effort: safeguarding a unique area of wilderness straddling the Rio Grande River.
The area of adjoining parks and protected areas includes high desert, rugged mountains and plunging canyons that together form one of the borderland’s most haunting natural landscapes, far from troubled cities where drug-related killings are rife.
The area includes the Rio Grande River – known as the Rio Bravo south of the border in Mexico — and 3 million acres of parks and protected areas. It is home to more than 450 species of birds, a number of them unique to the borderlands, including the Mexican duck, the Lucifer hummingbird, the Mexican jay and the Colima warbler.
The joint announcement revives a bilateral conservation effort begun in 1944, when the presidents of the United States and Mexico exchanged letters on the creation of the Big Bend National Park in Texas, which envisaged the conservation of the shared ecosystems on both sides of the border. Mexico later established the Cañon de Santa Elena and Maderas del Carmen protected areas in Chihuahua and Coahuila.
“Building upon our shared history of ecosystem and species conservation, the plan will develop a model of bi-national cooperation for the conservation and enjoyment of shared ecosystems for current and future generations,” Salazar said in a news release posted on the U.S. Department of the Interior web site. Salazar announced the plan in conjunction with the North American Leaders Summit in Guadalajara , Mexico, where U.S. President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, met on Sunday and Monday to discuss issues including trade, climate change and drug trafficking.
Salazar said that he and Elvira would develop a plan to enhance coordination in the area and report back to Obama and Calderon in six months’ time.
(Photo: Big Bend’s 5,400 ft Casa Grande in fog, photo credit: National Park Service)
MEDICINE BOW NATIONAL FOREST, Wyoming - From the vantage point of an 80-foot (25 meter) tower rising above the trees, the Wyoming vista seems idyllic: snow-capped peaks in the distance give way to shimmering green spruce.
But this is a forest under siege. Among the green foliage of the healthy spruce are the orange-red needles of the sick and the dead, victims of a beetle infestation closely related to one that has already laid waste to millions of acres (hectares) of pine forest in North America.
“The gravity of the situation is very real,” said Rolf Skar, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace.
The plague has cost billions of dollars in lost timber and land values and may thwart efforts to combat climate change, as forests are major storing houses of carbon, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
The beetle outbreak, which has taken a lesser, but mounting, toll on spruce trees, could make it that much tougher to meet the ambitious target to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.
That is laid out in a climate bill that narrowly passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and waits Senate debate.
Many researchers have also linked the infestation in the U.S. and Canadian West to climate change, notably a dearth of winters cold enough to kill the voracious little bugs.
“Pine beetle infestations are cyclical in nature and have been occurring for thousands of years but what is making things worse now is the effects of global warming,” said Skar.
“If you don’t have the real cold extremes to kill off the larvae under the bark you are going to have extreme infestation events,” he said.
CARBON FOOTPRINT
In the Medicine Bow National Forest, scientists are getting a first-hand look at the carbon implications.
The forest is home to the U.S. Forest Service’s Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments site in a tower with gadgets that, among other things, examine the “carbon flux” of the forest.
The site was established a decade ago, before the spruce beetle infestation, and gives scientists a unique chance to measure the changes to carbon storage wrought by the insects.
“We are getting readings here every half hour,” said Colorado-based U.S. Forest Service scientist Mike Ryan, shouting above the wind as he pointed to an instrument that measures carbon. This gas analyzer resembles a small space capsule on the end of a horizontal metal pole.
(See more from Ryan in the video below)
In the terminology of trees and carbon, a healthy forest is a net “sink,” with trees storing carbon as they grow. When they die and rot they “emit” carbon back into the atmosphere, and so a dead or dying forest becomes a “net source” of greenhouse gas, meaning it emits more carbon dioxide than it stores.
Ryan said the net carbon storage in this patch of woods is about half of what it was three or four years ago. In another three or four years, he believes it will become a net source.
A SEA OF GREEN TURNS ORANGE
This scenarios is being replayed across the West.
In Colorado, aerial surveys show that from 1996 to 2008 Colorado lost almost 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of pine forest to the beetle outbreak, Wyoming 677,000 acres and South Dakota 354,000 acres.
Over the same period of time, the spruce beetle, which has also ravaged forests as far north as Alaska, took out 374,000 acres of spruce trees in Colorado and 340,000 in Wyoming.
That cumulative total of over 6 million acres (2.5 million hectares) is an area larger than Israel or South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
A composite picture above, shot from 2003 to 2008 by the Forest Service, shows trees dying over time in an Engelmann spruce stand in southeastern Wyoming due to a spruce beetle epidemic.
Farther north in Canada, the pine beetle has attacked trees over an area of about 39 million acres (14.5 million hectares) in British Columbia since the 1990s.
The sheer scale of the damage can be seen northwest of Denver in Colorado’s Yampa Valley. Vast tracts of formerly evergreen forest now have huge splashes of orange running through them.
Vast tracts of formerly evergreen forest now have huge splashes of orange running through them.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, a third of the United States’ land area is covered in forest but it is only expanding at a rate of about 0.1 percent per year.
Under “cap and trade” provisions in the U.S. climate bill, additional forest growth may be encouraged through a market mechanism that will allow reforestation efforts by landowners and other groups to be counted as “carbon offsets.”
Such projects could generate cash through “carbon credits” paid by polluters who want to exceed their own emissions caps.
A forest can recover, but that can take decades.
“Most forests will recover the carbon they lose but if the next 50 to 100 years is important we may not have that much time. It’s setting back carbon storage efforts,” said Ryan.
Forest growth in the United States currently sucks up about 12 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s a big number. To get another 10 percent you would have to convert a third of U.S. agriculture land to forest,” said Ryan.
The outbreak has other consequences. It is creating huge fire hazards as it leaves mountains of combustible wood in its wake. In a worrying trend, it also has spread from lodgepole pine to ponderosa pine.
There are expenses for landowners as well.
On his ranch in northern Colorado, mountain realtor Bill McClelland points to a dying tree and says: “A week ago that tree was green. I’ve lost another one.”
In May, he had to cut 476 pines on his property and then have them ground into wood chips — an expensive operation that is one of the few ways to contain the outbreak. He reckons an infestation will generally shave about 20 percent of the value off a private wood lot or ranch.
Past beetle outbreaks have been stopped by very cold winters but recent winters have not been cold enough.
Another factor scientists attribute to the outbreak is past forest clearance and fires that saw large areas cleared.
Often when this happens, the forest that regrows in its place will have huge patches of trees the same age and this makes them susceptible to a collective attack when they mature at the same time into the older trees that the bugs favor.
The beetles may collectively wreak havoc by nesting and feeding in the trees but they look harmless enough as individuals, not least because they are so tiny.
At Medicine Bow, Ryan points to a few writhing in a glass jar that have been trapped on the trunk of a spruce tree.
“Until we get a big cold spell they are going to go on until they have nothing to eat,” he said.
CARBON, Wyoming - They used to mine coal in the abandoned town of Carbon. Now this patch of southern Wyoming is a battleground in the debate over what many hope will be the clean energy source of the future: wind power.
At the heart of the dispute are plans to build a network of wind farms in the American West that conservationists fear could disrupt threatened habitat such as sage brush, a dwindling piece of the region’s fragile ecosystem.
This has made the greater sage grouse — which as its name suggests is totally dependent on sage brush — an unlikely poster child for some U.S. environmentalists, in much the same way that the rare spotted owl became a symbol in the 1980s of pitched battles with the logging industry.
Wyoming is home to 54 percent of the greater sage grouse population in North America. The bird’s status is being evaluated for inclusion on the U.S. government’s threatened or endangered species list, which would give it more protection.
The problem: The chicken-sized bird lives in the vast tracts of wind-whipped open spaces that make Wyoming highly attractive to the wind industry.
Near Carbon, the focus is on a 198-turbine, $600 million wind farm proposed by Horizon Wind Energy.
“They want to build it around here but we need to be thinking truly green. It is not just about our carbon footprint,” said Alison Holloran of the National Audubon Society in Wyoming, as she pointed to clumps of grayish sage brush along a dirt road.
(see video below for more from Holloran’s comments)
Wind power will play a huge role in any move by the United States to reduce its emissions of the greenhouse gases that most scientists believe are the main causes of rapid climate change. The burning of coal and the use of other fossil fuels such as oil are the largest single source of carbon emissions, so the race is on for “clean energy” alternatives.
SHADES OF BROWN
In the public mind, wind is regarded as about as “green” an energy source as you can get. But some environmentalists see shades of brown in the industry.
They say the wind turbines and the development that goes with them, including roads and transmission lines, will further fragment critical sage habitat and disturb the grouse and other wildlife.
Horizon says the grouse issue requires more study.
“There is no peer-reviewed research on how sage grouse respond to turbines,” said Arlo Corwin, Horizon’s development director for the western region. “We believe that obtaining this research is essential to see if wind turbines and sage grouse are going to be able to coexist.”
There have been several wind power skirmishes in the United States. Off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, there is a battle over plans for an offshore wind farm that opponents say will disrupt navigation and shipping. There have also been concerns about bird/turbine collisions in some places.
Wind now delivers about 1.25 percent of the United States’ electricity supply, but the industry is growing fast, according to the American Wind Energy Association. It says wind power generation now offsets about 54 million tons of carbon a year.
In Wyoming, there are about 20 wind farms and four additional projects under construction, the association says. It ranks the state 12th in U.S. wind production but seventh in potential generation — meaning a lot of untapped capacity.
Wind turbines already spin in Carbon County not far from Horizon’s proposed development area, where the treeless countryside looks stark. The town of Carbon was abandoned over a century ago and only a few brick foundations remain.
HARSH LANDSCAPE
In this harsh landscape, sage sustains life. The greater sage grouse and around 20 other bird species depend on it for survival, and the sturdy plant also sustains big game species such as elk and mule deer during the cold Wyoming winter.
Corwin said Horizon’s planned wind development, known as the Simpson Ridge project, would make use of existing transmission lines that run through the area, removing at least one concern.
Horizon is evaluating when to apply for a permit to develop the site, which is also attractive because landowners have agreed to host the turbines on their property.
Last year, Wyoming said it would restrict development on greater sage grouse habitats it has designated “core population areas.”
U.S. government wildlife officials say that other kinds of development have not been favorable for the grouse.
“The impact of fragmentation is very, very clear. We know that they won’t occupy habitat close to an interstate for example. They are a landscape species and need big open intact habitats,” said Brian Kelly, a field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Wyoming.
Kelly said such concerns applied to all developments, including gas, oil and even housing — not just wind.
About 20 percent of the state is regarded as “core” for the bird.
“If we conserve that 20 percent we effectively conserve 40 percent of the birds in North America. That’s why it is significant,” Kelly said.
The state government estimates that only about 14 percent of Wyoming’s “economically viable wind areas” — which is based on factors like wind strength, speed and duration — is within core sage and grouse grounds while 86 percent is outside.
“We don’t need to pick one or the other, grouse or wind. We can have robust sage grouse populations and robust wind development in Wyoming — no problem,” said Aaron Clark, an energy advisor to the governor of Wyoming.
The wind industry has disputed these figures and some of the definitions used by wildlife and state officials.
Horizon’s Corwin noted that sage, which has lost about half of its historic range by some estimates, is also under threat from climate change. And reducing greenhouse gas emissions by harnessing energy sources such as wind is seen as the best way to slow or stop global warming.
America's social and religious conservatives are turning up the heat as they galvanize heartland opposition against the latest example of President Barack Obama-inspired "socialism" -- a climate change bill that aims to reduce fossil fuel emissions, which most scientists have linked to climate change.
The Democratic Party-led House of Representatives passed the bill on Friday. It would require large companies, including utilities and manufacturers, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with global warming by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, from 2005 levels. It must still go through the U.S. Senate, where its ultimate fate remains uncertain despite the Democratic majority there.
Conservative Christians, a key base -- if not THE base -- for the out-of-power Republican Party, are among the biggest skeptics of human-induced global warming. In the eyes of many environmentalists, they were part of an "unholy alliance" with the energy industry that enjoyed its zenith under former president George W. Bush, who pulled America out of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at cutting emissions in the developed world. The Bush administration was widely seen as hostile to any attempt to cap emissions as well as the science behind it.
Conservative Christians are sounding the alarm bells about the climate bill, which represents Obama's first major legislative victory and which Republicans see as a major opportunity to gain political ground ahead of the 2010 congressional elections. You can see our coverage of this issue here.
Republicans are calling it a "job killer" while the Cornwall Alliance -- a conservative Christian coalition -- has described its cap and trade provisions, which allow companies that pollute less than their limit to sell some of their permits to others struggling to meet such green requirements, "as the largest tax hike in history." Analysts have said such arguments may appeal to voters especially against the backdrop of the current recession.
Conservative Christians are distributing an online petition called We Get It! which reads in part: "Our stewardship of creation must be based on Biblical principles and factual evidence. We face important environmental challenges, but must be cautious of claims that our planet is in peril from speculative dangers like man-made global warming."
Taking aim at other religious groups that have lobbied for emissions-cap measures on the grounds that the poor will suffer most from climate change, the Cornwall Alliance says the poor will be ill-served by cap and trade and its impact on the economy. In its "Talking Points" on cap and trade it says it is "a regressive tax ... . Because the poor spend a higher proportion of their monthly income on energy than do others, they pay more of their disposable income for the increase in energy costs."
It also puts its faith in such matters in the hands of a higher power.
"Cap and trade rests on an unbiblical world view. It assumes that a minuscule change in atmospheric
chemistry (carbon dioxide rising from about 3 in every 10,000 to about 5 in every 10,000 molecules in the atmosphere) could cause catastrophic climate change, putting human and other life at risk. That belief is contrary to the Biblical teaching that a wise Creator made the Earth (Genesis 1–2) and on observing it saw that it was 'very good' (Genesis 1:31)."
Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and a leading figure in the social conservative movement, devoted much of his nationally syndicated radio show on Saturday to the topic, calling cap and trade a "regressive tax to the max." Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said in his blog last week that it "would increase an already staggering national debt by 26 percent by 2035" -- a figure taken directly from the Cornwall Alliance's estimates.
Some evangelical Christians also have said that the social upheaval that analysts have linked to climate change may be signs of the second coming of Christ. Perkins has outlined such a scenario in his recent book "Personal Faith, Public Policy."
One thing is clear: this issue has the potential to really stir up the Republican Party base. But will it stir it enough to have an impact when the Senate considers the climate bill or when Americans go to the polls in 2010?
(Photo: A demonstrator for clean energy holds up a sign during a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington March 2, 2009. Moves to cap greenhouse gas emissions and promote green energy have some conservative Christians seeing red. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
The contestants are chunky to say the least, but to their celebrity coaches and sponsors they are things of beauty: 11 endangered leatherback sea turtles, competing to be the first to swim from their chilly feeding grounds off the Canadian Atlantic coast to their breeding grounds in the Caribbean.
The Great Turtle Race starts April 16, but the handicapping began early, with boosters for massive entrants Nightswimmer and Backspacer boasting that they were sure to win.
“Our turtle, Nightswimmer — huge, beautiful,” said Mike Mills, bass player with alternative pop/rock group R.E.M., which is sponsoring the big male racer. “Of course with (former U.S. Olympic champion swimmer) Janet Evans as coach I really don’t see how we can lose.”
Evans said that as a distance swimmer, she can relate to Nightswimmer’s challenge. Because he weighs 970 pounds, she said, “I’m going to try to get him to use his size to move through the water quickly and to conserve some energy, because he really has a long way to go.”
Olympic swimmer Eric Shanteau is coaching female competitor Backspacer, sponsored by alternative rock group Pearl Jam. He had nothing but praise for her training regimen.
“She’s bulked up on jellyfish to a stout 825 pounds, but that being said she is in her peak aerobic shape,” Shanteau said on a telephone conference call promoting the race. “You guys try swimming 4,000 miles down the coast and doing it all lugging around a 1000-pound shell!”
To show what good condition Backspacer is in, Shanteau said, “She’s almost able to do her first sit-up, which for a turtle I think is pretty good … I’ve got faith in our girl. She’s put in the work, she’s put in the training, she’s going to come out on top.”
The competitors should complete the 4,000 mile journey in about 14 days, though the general migrating period lasts four to six months. They’ll be tracked as they swim with satellite transmitters attached to their leathery backs, which will let scientists and fans know not just where they are but how cold the water is and how deep the turtles are diving.
Organized by National Geographic, Conservation International, the race aims to raise awareness of the leatherbacks’ endangered status. This is the first time the event has taken place in the Atlantic; the previous two turtle races have taken place in the Pacific.
Photo: The Canadian Sea Turtle Network (Leatherback turtle with satellite transmitter, off Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 24, 2008)
California utility PG&E is at the head of the class when it comes to smart meters in North America, having installed 2.3 million of them. It is on track to have nearly 10 million working by 2011, according to figures gathered by the utility and a survey of smart metering programs by the Energy Retail Association, of Britain.
Smart meters are in their infancy but their numbers are expanding rapidly in the United States and around the world.
After PG&E, PECO in Pennsylvania has installed 2.2 million meters — all of its power and natural gas customers. Even at 2.3 million, PG&E and North American utilities lag behind Italy and it biggest utility, Enel, which installed 30 million smart meters nationwide in four years.
The digital meters allow for near real-time readings by customer and utility, allowing better informed decisions on cutting demand as well as getting a better handle on whether new power plants and lines are needed. Smart metering also offers the chance for customers to voluntarily set limits so that appliance turn off automatically if prices rise to high.
It will cost PG&E customers — the cost is passed through to them — about $2.2 billion to install the 5.3 million electricity and 4.8 million natural gas meters.
The current issue of the American magazine Foreign Affairs has a thought-provoking piece that asks if the geoengineering option shouldn’t be used as a last resort in the battle against climate change. You can see the introduction to the article here (but will need to be a registered user to read all of it online).
Climate geoengineering is a thinly explored branch of science which to date has seen little in the way of peer-reviewed research. Some of its advocates envision global systems which would launch reflective particles into the atmosphere or position sunshades to cool the earth.
Another approach is to dump iron dust into the sea to spur the growth of algae that absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the air. When algae die, they fall to the seabed and so remove carbon.
We’ve done stories on these and related topics before which you can read here and here.
Part of the controversy around the subject stems from the fact that many environmentalists and policy-makers view geoengineering as an “easy fix” that governments might be tempted to take instead of the hard option of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Many scientists have been reluctant to raise the issue for fear that it might create a moral hazard: encouraging governments to deploy geoengineering rather than invest in cutting emissions,” write the authors, who include David G. Victor of Stanford Law School and M. Granger Morgan, director of the Climate Decision Making Center.
There are also concerns about unforeseen side effects — a worry with almost any new technology that is perhaps greater when humanity intentionally tampers with the environment.
But the authors argue that the challenge of climate change is too great not to try everything at our disposal.
“Humans have already engaged in a dangerous geophysical exercise by pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The best and safest strategy for reversing climate change is to halt this buildup … but this solution will take time,” they say.
“Meanwhile, the dangers are mounting. In a few decades, the option of geoengineering could look less ugly for some countries than unchecked changes in the climate.”
It is noteworthy that this argument has been made in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which is sober, influential and often features analysts who are ahead of the curve. This alone signals that geoengineering is emerging from the fringe.
What do you think? Is geoengineering an option that should be used in the struggle against climate change? Or do the risks outweigh any possible benefits?
(Photo: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10, 2008. Could geoengineering be used to help stop climate change consequences such as melting sea ice? REUTERS/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Handout (UNITED STATES)
Good news on the marine front is about as rare as these days as a Grand Banks’ cod.
So it’s nice to be able to report that scientists have discovered a bigger than expected population of one of the world’s most endangered species of marine mammals — the Irrawaddy dolphin.
Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society announced this week that they estimated there were nearly 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins living in freshwater regions of Bangladesh’s Sundarbans mangrove forest and adjacent waters of the Bay of Bengal.
“Prior to this study, the largest known populations of Irrawaddy dolphins numbered in the low hundreds or less,” WCS said in a statement.
This is the marine equivalent of discovering a thriving and previously unknown population of snow leopards or Asian cheetahs — the kind of thing that gets a conservationist’s heart racing.
I had the great privilege of observing some wild Irrawaddy dolphins in Thailand in 2004 when I was covering a conservation conference and the scientists I was with at the time told me I was unbelievably lucky. I was led to understand then that there were only a handful of marine mammals in more trouble.
Irrawaddy dolphins frequent large rivers, estuaries and freshwater lagoons in South and Southeast Asia. The researchers reported that the previously little-studied population in Bangladesh still faces threats such as accidental entanglement in fishing nets — a dolphin killer in many places.
Irrawaddy dolphins have also been targeted by the aquarium trade because they can live in fresh-water tanks which are less costly to operate than salt-water ones.
(Photo credit: An Irrawaddy dolphin is seen at Chilika Lagoon in the eastern Indian state of Orissa February 25, 2006. REUTERS/Dipani Sutaria/Handout (INDIA). )
