Environmentalism and Wildlife Conservation Discussion

Does increased geyser activity mean an eruption is imminent?

Not at all. Geysers require more than just a heat flux, they need a water supply. Increased geyser activity could mean that there has been wet weather, that a small earthquake or the tides have changed water conduits underground etc.

It's Bat Week!

Edited by megaeliz on Oct 25th 2018 at 5:11:49 AM

Good news: palm oil will doom us all.

(I got to experience the haze first hand for a few months back in 2015, and it wasn't very fun at all.)

trump's plan to role reduce sage grouse protected lands for drilling and mining is expected to go through next year.

If a new president comes in, can they reinstate the old nature reserves after.trump reduced them?

Edited by Kaiseror on Dec 6th 2018 at 3:17:10 AM

Invasive parakeets have been killing bats in Spain.

they definitely came up with a creative punishment here.

Red wolf DNA has been found in a pack of wild dogs on Galveston Island.

Going through the Green New Deal proposal and finding nothing concrete so far. I'm not a fan of US politics at the best of times, but US environment policies have tons of global ramifications and it's kind of worrying to see the document completely ignoring urban density, nuclear power and emission trading. Carbon capture is a good move, though I think it would need to be tied to agriculture in order to be financially viable enough to gain traction in the private sector. And I'd really like to know how the logistics of a total switch to renewables would be handled.

The politics of manufacturing probably belong in another thread, but to deal with it you'd need to scale up the production of storage devices accordingly. That means a jump in the global rate of lithium mining and processing. That's not all, of course. Most lithium ion batteries still depend on cobalt cathodes (barring some models using nickel-based alloys that still suffer from longevity issues), and over 60% of the world's cobalt is currently mined in DR Congo, under conditions not exactly conducive to labour rights and the environment.

These are the kinds of externalities that every national-level environmental policy needs to take into consideration. The biofuel bullshit that followed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (plus its EU equivalents) indirectly led to huge swathes of Southeast Asia's rainforests going up in an annual death smog, and I think the rest of the world would appreciate if the next major US energy legislation doesn't end up as another boneheaded wishy-washy move that messes up more things than it fixes.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Feb 8th 2019 at 6:02:51 AM

The Bramble Cay melomys may be the first mammal species to be officially classified as extinct as a result of climate change. Looks like its extinction was likely caused by rising water levels impacting its island.

I haven't gotten the chance to read the document in full, but so far it seems to be more of a statement of "something should be done" than anything concrete, and my faith in American politicians to actually enact anything meaningful has been pretty limited. Still, it's a start?

About cobalt, I'm studying geology and there's been some effort recently to develop sources of cobalt here in Canada, but what I've seen so far hasn't left me hugely optimistic. There's been some recent research looking into alternatives manganese for lithium batteries, however.

So, uh, turns out the World Wildlife Federation are war criminals. Well, then.

I really hope this doesn't cause as backlash against wildlife conservation in general.

To put it into perspective: Assam state, Cameroon and the Central African Republic are all active conflict zones. Nepal in 2008 was still demilitarising from a long civil war, with lots of armed ex-rebels roaming around. The Virunga gorilla reserve in DR Congo lies at the historical epicentre of the Congo Wars and employs many former child soldiers looking for a way to escape.

This isn't just regular conservation work. It's conservation in a war zone, where heavily-armed rebel groups and mercenary poachers go up against government soldiers, who often already harbour a racism against the native populace and a string of abuses under their belt. Cutting WWF's funding out of the process won't solve the problem. If you don't pay the governments to guard their wildlife, they'll simply abuse the natives for some other deal that pays better. The conflict will continue to express its violence through other means. If biodiversity in conflict zones is worth conserving at all, then you either work towards a humane resolution first, or you get your hands dirty.

Also, it's worth pointing out that this isn't anything new. Back in the 90s, the dilemma of the day was that the only way to protect animals from the ivory trade was to turn the poachers into game wardens and give them a regular salary that made it worth their while to protect wildlife instead of killing it. It always, inevitably, fed into the balance of power in these regions. There was absolutely no escaping it.

This problem won't go away any time soon. It's existed for decades. Hell, the modern westernised concept of 'conservation' has even been founded on it.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Mar 10th 2019 at 11:15:39 AM

So yeah, we've had a major disaster on our hands here in the Houston, Texas area.

A tank farm owned by Intercontinental Terminals Company in Deer Park had a fire for about four days. Due to the winds, the chemicals for the fire basically covered the entirety of Harris County (Texas' most populous county) and the chemicals were detected all the way to Austin, and the smoke was seen all the way in San Antonio.

And not only have there been sporadic fires since the main fire was put out, the dike surrounding the tank farm partially collapsed sending some chemicals into nearby Tucker Bayou. Need I remind you that all bayous in the Houston area feed into the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, with this particular one needing to feed into Galveston Bay before it does so.

This is a major environmental hazard of all sorts.

Edited by tclittle on Mar 22nd 2019 at 11:13:52 AM

The Attwater Prairie Chicken Nation Refuge's yearly-count of the bird has quadrupled since last year, showing the critically endangered species has rebounded after being nearly decimated by Hurricane Harvey back in 2017.

Scientists warn a million species at risk of extinction

We're fucked.

How quickly is this supposed to occur?

Well, the article says that in the report it's stated a majority of those species are in danger of going extinct within the next few decades if things continue as they are.

Far-fetched idea that probably sounds like scifi, but it increasingly seems like it is the only option at this point. Would it be possible to conserve at least a few individuals of each of these species? Not enough to form a breeding population in captivity, but maybe preserve some DNA on the off-chance that humanity will get its shit together in the future and be able to clone them?

I think they started somekind of genome project last year.

Turns out, we didn't need nukes, or engineered viruses, to kill ourselves off. We're doing it with our own stupidity and short-sighted greed.

Never has the trope In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves ever felt more appropriate than now.

Should of never posted that, Boris, or at least you shouldn't have said "we're fucked." You cut that nihilism out too, Tech Priest 90.

Edited by CookingCat on May 8th 2019 at 2:56:25 AM

Humans can certainly survive the loss of biodiversity, even if we and the planet are greatly impoverished by it. But that is part of the problem, as long as the influential people think they can withstand the incoming changes, they'll continue their harmful actions.

Creating a Blight Resistant Chestnut.

I actually found this really interesting, since it involves the ethics of releasing a Genetically Modified tree into the wild. The Chestnut Blight absolutely devastated the American Chestnut, which went from making up about 25 percent of American forest, to near extinction outside of a few individual specimen and stump sprouts, and the environmental niche it created, hasn't quite been filled by anything else.

The traditional way of breeding disease resistance into a species is through backcrossing. In the case of the American chestnuts, that means crossing a disease resistant hybrids of the American and Chinese Chestnuts, with pure American chestnuts through multiple generations. The goal is to get a tree that resembles the American Chestnut, but has the blight resistance of the Chinese chestnut. This is complicated by polygenetic nature of the Chinese Chestnut's blight resistance, so there's no guarantee that the resistant backcrossed trees will pass that trait to their offspring.

The other way to try to breed that trait, is through Genetic Engineering. instead of creating a hybrid that is mostly American, but still has about 1/16 Chinese Chestnut, we can just insert one gene that provides disease resistance, and create methods to ensure the offspring inherit that particular gene. ^note  (Personally, I find the argument that "reintroducing the American Chestnut could hurt ecosystems that have developed in their wake", silly. The loss of the American Chestnut was a massive ecological disaster, and no other tree was able to fill its ecological niche as effectively. If we have the capabilities to right this wrong, I see no reason why we shouldn't.)

If anyone wants to get into this deeper, this is a great video. (The Audio is kinda awful for the first 5-6 minutes, but gets much better after that.)

Of course, the end goal would probably be to breed them with backcrossed varieties and surviving rootstock, to provide the genetic diversity needed to survive in the wild, but first it needs to get through regulatory approval.

Edited by megaeliz on Sep 7th 2019 at 9:02:48 AM

This got me misty-eyed and gut punched over clay animated sea turtles voiced by Hellboy and Hilda. If I had to see it, so do you.

P.S. that's David Harbour as the dad and Bella Ramsey as the daughter.

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Jan 15th 2020 at 9:19:47 AM