Green Options

An expert advisory committee this week released recommendations on restoring Minnesota’s dwindling moose population, whose decline one expert said is related to gradual warming of the state’s climate. “The moose, of course, is not an animal that deals very well with heat,’’ panel chairperson Rolf Peterson of Michigan Technological University said. “We wouldn’t even be here today if it wasn’t for climate change.’’

Thanks to everyone who shared a caption! There were many impressive entries.
Look for another caption contest sometime in late November…

Welcome to the first official “Caption Contest” for Mean Joe Green and Red Green and Blue! The winning caption will be published here next Wednesday.

Palin’s appearance on the popular sketch comedy show brought it to its highest rating in fourteen years, Reuters. The figures make it the highest-rated SNL since March 12, 1994. Although Nielsen Media Research won’t have a complete count of the show’s audience until later in the week, it will likely be around 14 million people — and 17 million for the first half hour, with the opening skit featuring Palin’s cameo.

A new study in the journal BMC Ecology indicates that coastal wolves in British Columbia switch to eating salmon in the fall as a primary food source, rather than deer. Scientists arrived at this conclusion after analyzing wolf poop they collected over a four year span.

Among the thousands of stools that were collected by the researchers in the spring and summer months, 90-95% of them contained some indications that wolves were eating deer as prey. In the fall, however, this number dropped significantly. About 40-70% of the stools in this time of year indicated that wolves were dining on salmon.

So what’s the big deal?

I haven’t always been the liberal nutjob that I am now. There was a time when I was right behind Bush for trundling in to Iraq, and found the idea of protecting animals very much the picture of “hippie” idiocy.

But, with age came wisdom, and with wisdom came a shift in my view of the world.

I say that, because in an MSNBC article entitled ‘Yukon Flats wildlife refuge eyed for its oil,’ this sentence appears; “A controversial land swap proposal could open portions of an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, dividing Alaska natives and stoking opposition from environmentalists seeking to protect the bears, moose and birds that live there.”

The moment I read “moose,” I knew that my perspective on the world had changed. A part of my mind, long since dormant, by instinct reared up and said “It’s a moose! Who cares?!” But it was immediately overridden by the new me which realized the overall importance of sustaining various ecosystems and species.

The plan is a land trade, which would give 110,000 acres of hydrocarbon-prone uplands within the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, plus mineral rights to another 97,000 acres, to Fairbanks-based Doyon Ltd. The Refuge lies just south of the ‘always-in-the-news’ Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In exchange, and definitely a plus to the deal, the Refuge would acquire 150,000 acres of bird-friendly wetlands, currently owned by Doyon, as well as 56,500 acres on which Doyon currently has pending land claims.