Green Options

25% of all the world’s large-scale terrestrial migrations have already ceased due to habitat loss and human-caused changes to the landscape, and it may not be long before all migrations disappear entirely.

That according to a new study, which warns that with continued population growth, development and habitat encroachment, storied epics like those of wildebeest parading across the Serengeti or herds of bison rumbling across North American plains shall become tall tales of the past.

Scientists studying northeastern Greenland’s hairy, meat-eating wolf spiders have discovered every arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.

It appears that as the Earth has been warming and summers have been getting longer, the 8-legged hunters have been steadily growing larger and more numerous. And it’s likely that other creepy-crawly species around the world could be growing larger too.

By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,” in which he challenged the view that the sun revolved around the earth, arguing instead that the earth revolved around the sun. With his new model of the solar system, he began a wide-ranging debate among scientists, theologians, and others. His alternative to the earlier Ptolemaic model, which had the earth at the center of the universe, led to a revolution in thinking, to a new worldview.

Today we need a similar shift in our worldview, in how we think about the relationship between the earth and the economy. The issue now is not which celestial sphere revolves around the other but whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Economists see the environment as a subset of the economy. Ecologists, on the other hand, see the economy as a subset of the environment.

Like Ptolemy’s view of the solar system, the economists’ view is confusing efforts to understand our modern world. It has created an economy that is out of sync with the ecosystem on which it depends.

Ecologist Erik Meijaard of the The Nature Conservancy posted on their site last week about the discovery of up to 1000 or slighly more Borneo Orangutans, which are an endangered species. Human demand for timber and agricultural products is reducing their habitat swiftly.

In fact the nearby Sumatran Orangutan is critically endangered and has an estimated population of about 7,000 in the wild. Borneos may be as many as 50,000 total.

That may seem like a large number, but their habitat is being altered so rapidly they could be wiped out just as swiftly. In 2007 a United Nations report indicated 98% of orangutan range in both Borneo and Sumatra could be wiped out by 2022.

Scientists gathering specimens in a submersible off the coast of Hawaii have discovered the oldest living colonial creature on Earth, dated at 4,265 years old.

The geriatric discovery (Leiopathes sp.) is a deep water tree-like coral, which grows only a few micrometers every year. That’s an annual growth rate at around the size of a human blood cell. And the Leiopathes sp. wasn’t the only old creature found. Also discovered was a 2,742 year old gold coral (Gerardia sp.).

The discovery raises needed awareness about the delicate, fragile ecosystems of deep sea reefs, which are endangered due to trawling and global warming.

Even though sea turtles are legally protected, their populations have been drastically dwindling worldwide. All marine turtle species are listed as endangered, except the Loggerhead, which is listed as threatened. Sea turtles face a number of deadly threats, including poaching, fishing, rapidly shrinking habitat, human encroachment, polluted oceans and global warming. However, in San Francisco, Nayarit the turtles are beginning to make a slow resurgence.

Britain’s largest water company has been fined £125,000 ($180,000), after polluting London’s River Wandle to such an extent that it wiped out twenty years of painstaking conservation work in a single day.

The shocking incident occurred in 2007, when Chlorine escaped from a Thames Water sewage treatment works, killing most of the fish along a 3 mile stretch of one of the city’s most iconic urban rivers. Local residents tried to save some of the distressed fish by transferring them from the river into buckets of clean water, but they were too late. One man rescued a large number of eels, but found they were bleeding from the gills and they all later died.

A huge increase in China’s demand for rubber is leading to the destruction of vast swathes of the country’s precious old-growth forests, and could cause irreversible environmental damage.

The shocking findings have been revealed in a new study by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Science’s flagship conservation institute, the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG). The team have discovered that China is producing a third more rubber than it was in 2007 to feed its booming automobile and tyre industries, which has led to an astronomical rise in the number of rubber plantations.

According to one of the scientists, “We will soon hit the wall in an ecological credit crunch. This is hardly a viable investment.”

English tours at Japan’s largest eco-fair show international visitors the hottest green gadgets from a country renown for technological innovation.

At RICOH booth, we saw the demonstration of a new erasable advance paper. Printed document on this advance paper can be erased by ironing and be ready for another round of printing.

I had an opportunity to take the English guided tour at Eco-Products 2008. The Eco-Products exhibition is one of the largest green fairs in Japan, showing all kinds of green products and services to the public. The event draws a large number of visitors. It’s possibly the world’s largest event of its kind. The tenth Eco-Products 2008 exhibition was successful enough to attract 173,917 visitors this year according to the event organizer.

Visitors came from all over the world to see the latest of Japanese green activities. To accommodate such foreign visitors, guided tours in English, Chinese and Korean, were offered for free by volunteer staff from Japan for Sustainability (JFS) and EcoNetworks (ENW). The English guided tours were offered twice during the three-day event, but you needed to register for the tour beforehand at JFS’s website.

Our tour was guided by Frank H. Ling Ph.D. from USA, who works as a researcher for the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Japan. Our group had five visitors including me plus a lead guide, Mr. Ling, with a few more staff for additional assistance.

In the aftermath of another extended rainy season, Liberia has experienced its worst caterpillar plague in three decades. Tens of millions of the black-haired creatures have swarmed farms, devastated crops and contaminated several major waterways with their feces. The lingering rainy seasons, which might be an indication of global warming, are the likely culprit for the creepy invasion.

Liberian agriculturalists have called for extensive aerial spraying to combat the rapacious larvae, since the caterpillars have managed to bypass more minimal, local attempts to divert the hordes. But UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) officials are concerned that these drastic measures could sacrifice long term recovery for a short term fix. The pesticides could contaminate an already precarious food and water supply, which would escalate environmental concerns in the region for years to come.

Have you ever wondered about Mother Nature’s counterpart, Father Nature?

Look no further than ecologist and artist of nature, Steven Apfelbaum. You could even call him Father Nature. His book, Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm (Beacon, 2009), offers an engaging and refreshingly personal narrative of how, as humans, we can reconnect with the land, our community, and our true selves through restoration work on the land. (The book is also available as an eBook.)

“Dirty hands and sweat welded my relationship with Stone Prairie Farm … where I have worked to give nature a second chance,” writes Apfelbaum in the book’s Introduction. “My years of planting, of nurturing the resurgence of prairie, wetland, and forest cover where eroded fields once lay exposed, have created a deep, direct connection to nature.” The land became his home, love, passion, and peace — even the humble beginnings for his livelihood after launching the ecological consulting firm, Applied Ecological Services, Inc., and Taylor Creek Restoration Nurseries — both exemplary triple bottom businesses.

Apfelbaum’s inspiration, like many in his field, was renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold who so clearly enunciated a vision for a land ethic to guide our human relationship with all of nature: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise.”