Richard Conniff's Blog, page 14

Here’s an Eyeful About Why We Need Wildlife Sanctuaries

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Two young tuskers play-jousting in the Corbett Tiger Reserve, Uttarakhand, India (Photo: Anuradha Marwah)

Wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are the best hope for many wildlife species in a world that is rapidly being overwhelmed by humans.  The Sanctuary Asia web site holds an annual photo contest and these are a few award-winners that caught my eye.

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Two leopards during courtship and mating at Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, Karnataka, India (Photo: Giri Cavale)

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Female says “no,” means it, at Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra, India (Photo: Kirat Mundle)

How Nations Wreck their Natural World Heritage Sites

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Aerial view of the Great Barrier Reef. (Photo: Michael Amendolia/Greenpeace)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

By any standard, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is one of the wonders of the blue planet, half the size of Texas and home to 400 types of coral, 1,500 fish, and 4,000 mollusks. When UNESCO named it a Natural World Heritage Site in 1981, it praised the reef not just for “superlative natural beauty above and below the water,” but also as “one of a few living structures visible from space.”

Since then, half the reef’s coral cover has died, a victim of bleaching, predatory starfish, cyclones, and human disturbance. You might expect its World Heritage status, marking it as one of the crown jewels of the Earth, would elicit a worldwide campaign to protect and conserve it. Instead, in the face of intense lobbying by an Australian government intent on avoiding embarrassment, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee declined in 2015 even to add the reef to its list of sites that are “in danger.”

That failure to make much difference to conservation may be more the rule than the exception for Natural World Heritage Sites, a new study in the journal Biological Conservation suggests. A team of a half-dozen researchers examined about 150 of the current 238 Natural World Heritage Sites (NWHS) worldwide, from Yellowstone National Park in the United States, among the first designated World Heritage sites, in the class of 1978, to Manas Wildlife Sanctuary in India, class of 1985.

To avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons — and cut through the politics and photo op-character of such designations — the research team examined sites through the lens of … Read the full story here.

The Deadly Myth of Clean Coal

[image error]With Donald Trump promising to promote “clean coal,” this piece from 2008 is timely again. Profitable lies, like cats, seem to have multiple lives. Not coincidentally, much of China and Europe are both now struggling with heavy pollution due in large part to coal burning.

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

You have to hand it to the folks at R&R Partners. They’re the clever advertising agency that made its name luring legions of suckers to Las Vegas with an ad campaign built on the slogan “What happens here, stays here.” But R&R has now topped itself with its current ad campaign pairing two of the least compatible words in the English language: “Clean Coal.”

[image error]“Clean” is not a word that normally leaps to mind for a commodity some spoilsports associate with unsafe mines, mountaintop removal, acid rain, black lung, lung cancer, asthma, mercury contamination, and, of course, global warming. And yet the phrase “clean coal” now routinely turns up in political discourse, almost as if it were a reality.

The ads created by R&R tout coal as “an American resource.” In one Vegas-inflected version, Kool and the Gang sing “Ya-HOO!” as an electric wire gets plugged into a lump of coal and the narrator intones: “It’s the fuel that powers our way of life.” (“Celebrate good times, come on!”) A second ad predicts a future in which coal will generate power “with even lower emissions, including the capture and storage of CO2. It’s a big challenge, but we’ve made a commitment, a commitment to clean.”

Well, they’ve made a commitment to advertising, anyway. The campaign has been paid for by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which bills itself as the voice of “over 150,000 community leaders from all across the country.” Among those leaders, according to ABEC’s website, are an environmental consultant, an interior designer, and a “complimentary healer.” Other, arguably louder, voices in the group include the world’s biggest mining company (BHP Billiton), the biggest U.S. coal mining company (Peabody Energy), the biggest publicly owned U.S. electric utility (Duke Energy), and the biggest U.S. railroad (Union Pacific). ABEC — whose domain name is licensed to the Center for Energy and Economic Development, a coal-industry group — merged with CEED on April 17 to form the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).

They’re bankrolling the “Clean Coal” campaign to the tune of $35 million this year alone. That’s a little less than the tobacco industry spent on a successful fight against antismoking legislation in 1998, and almost triple what health insurers paid for the “Harry and Louise” ads that helped kill health care reform in the early 1990s. In addition to the ads, the “Clean Coal” campaign has so far also sponsored two presidential election debates (where, critics noted, no questions about global warming got asked).

The urgent motive for an ad campaign this time is the possibility of federal global warming legislation. A cap-and-trade scheme for carbon dioxide emissions may come to a vote in the Senate this June. Coal is also struggling to overcome fierce resistance at the state and local level; Kansas, Florida, Idaho, and California have already effectively declared a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. Nationwide, 59 new coal-fired power plant projects died last year (of 151 proposed), mostly because local authorities refused to grant permits or because big banks withheld financing. Both groups are alarmed about the lack of practical remedies to deal with coal’s massive CO2 emissions.

The coal industry is clearly alarmed, too, if only about its continued ability to do business as usual. In addition to the “Clean Coal” ad campaign, the industry’s main lobbying group, the National Mining Association, increased its budget by 20 percent this year, to $19.7 million. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, individual coal companies will spend an additional $7 million on lobbying. Coal industry PACs and employees also routinely donate $2-3 million per election cycle in contests for federal office. Altogether, that adds up to a substantial commitment to advertising and lobbying.

And the commitment to clean? The scale of the problem suggests that it needs to be big. Coal-fired power plants generate about 50 percent of the electricity in the United States. In 2006, they also produced 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — 36 percent of total U.S. emissions. For a remedy, the industry was banking on a proposed pilot plant called FutureGen, which would have used coal gasification technology to separate out the carbon dioxide, allowing it to be pumped into underground storage. But in January, the federal government canceled that project because of runaway costs. At last count, FutureGen was budgeted at $1.8 billion — with about $400 million of that coming from corporate partners over ten years. That is, the “commitment to clean” would have cost roughly as much per year as the industry is now spending on lobbying and “Clean Coal” advertising.

The business logic of this spending pattern is clear: Promoting the illusion that coal is clean, or maybe could be, helps to justify building new coal-fired power plants now. The tactic is at times transparent: In Michigan recently, a utility didn’t promise that a proposed $2 billion plant would have carbon-control technology — merely that it would set aside acreage for such technology. The proponents of a new power plant in Maine talked about capturing and storing 25 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions, but didn’t say how, and even if they figure that out, the plant would still produce two million tons of CO2 annually.

Actually making coal clean would be hugely expensive. In this country, most research focuses on coal gasification, which aims to remove CO2 and other pollutants before combustion. But only two power plants using the technology have actually been built in the United States, in Indiana and Florida, and the purpose of both was to capture sulphur and other pollutants. Neither takes the next step of capturing and storing the CO2. They also manage to be online only 60 or 70 percent of the time, versus the 90-95 percent uptime required by the power industry. In Europe, researchers prefer post-combustion carbon capture. But the steam needed to recover CO2 from the smokestack kills the efficiency of a power plant.

Since neither technology can be retrofitted, both require the construction of new coal-fired power plants. So instead of reducing emissions, they add to the problem in the near term. And the question remains of what to do with the carbon dioxide once you’ve captured it. Industry has had plenty of experience with temporary underground storage of gases — and researchers say they are confident about their ability to sequester carbon dioxide permanently in deep saline aquifers. But utilities don’t want to get stuck monitoring storage in perpetuity, or be liable if CO2 leaks back into the atmosphere. In any case, data from demonstration storage projects won’t be available for at least five years, meaning it will be 2020 before the first plants using “carbon capture and storage” get built. If predictions from global warming scientists are correct, that may be too late.

A better strategy, argues Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign, is conservation, with a cap-and-trade system driving overall emissions down by two percent a year over the next 40 years. At the same time, he says, utilities need to increase their reliance on wind and solar power, supplemented by natural gas. Nilles thinks this may already be happening. In Colorado, Xcel Energy, which generates 59 percent of its power from coal, recently shelved a proposed 600-megawatt “clean coal” power plant; it’s now seeking to develop 800 megawatts of new wind power by 2015.

Finally, industry and environmentalists together also need to figure out a funding mechanism for research to make “clean coal” something more than an advertising slogan. (One possibility being debated in Europe: Instead of giving away cap-and-trade emissions permits to industry, auction them off, with some of the revenue going to research.) Nilles is also holding out for a “clean coal” technology that can be retrofitted on existing plants.

But nobody expects coal to give up dirty habits easily. Some coal advocates are already trotting out one dire study by M. Harvey Brenner, a retired economist from Johns Hopkins University. It takes a hypothetical example in which higher-cost alternative energy sources replace 78 percent of the electricity now produced by coal — leading to lower wages, higher unemployment, and the death of 150,000 economically distressed Americans per year. (In another scenario described by Brenner, 350,000 Americans die annually because they did not show coal the love.) Only a spoilsport would add that the study was paid for by the coal industry and that the article appeared not in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a trade magazine. Someone from ACCCE is probably already on the phone. “BURN COAL OR DIE” is a little crude as an advertising slogan. But the clever folks at R&R Partners can no doubt polish it into something that will make “Harry and Louise” want to get up and dance.

Dollars for Duck Penises: Why Taxpayer-Funded Basic Science Matters

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(Photo: Michal Cizek/Getty Images)

I’m re-publishing this piece from 2014 because it seems relevant to the current war on scientific research.

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

In 2009, a presidential wannabe named Bobby Jindal stood before the cameras to denounce the federal government for frivolous spending, and he got off what passes among politicians for a clever sound bite, targeting a $140 million science program to monitor volcanoes: “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”

Jindal was apparently too young to remember the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980, which flattened a blast zone 19 miles out from the volcano, killed 57 people, and caused $2.7 billion in damage. (Oh, it happened in some place called Washington. Never mind.) Though he is governor of Louisiana, Jindal also seemed to be unaware that studying potential natural disasters is a good way to save lives and minimize destruction.

This is how it always seems to go with lamebrain politicians and the scientists struggling to understand the natural world. But nobody gets it worse than scientists who study animal behavior, probably because the subject matter is both so familiar and so easy to make sound completely absurd. Or as University of Massachusetts biologist Patricia Brennan puts it, “Most people know about ducks; most people know about penises. You put the two together, and it sounds silly. That’s just how it goes.”

Brennan speaks from painful experience. Last year, when Republicans in Congress shut down federal spending, her National Science Foundation–funded research on sexual conflict came under withering attack: “Feds Fund Vital Study on Snail Sex and Duck Penises,” one typical headline announced. Meanwhile, “White House Tours Still Canceled Over Lack of Funds.”

But Brennan fought back, defending her research in a widely read article on Slate. “Basic research has to be funded by the government rather than private investors,” she wrote, “because there are no immediate profits to be derived from it.” Yet the entire National Science Foundation budget costs the American public only about $20 a person, versus upward of $2,000 a person for the military budget. Her own work on genital morphology in ducks was a way to understand “one of the few vertebrate species other than humans that form pair bonds and exhibit violent sexual coercion.” (Though she didn’t say so, it’s the sort of study the military, which has its own problems with sexual coercion and which understands the value of basic research, might well have funded.)

Now Brennan and two coauthors are laying out an agenda for other behavioral scientists to explain and defend their own work. Writing in the journal Animal Behaviour, they argue that simply lying low and letting the storm pass over is a mistake: Silence can look like “implicit acceptance that there is something wrong with your project,” and that risks further eroding public confidence in science at large.

Among the “talking points” they suggest: The federal government funds only about a quarter of all U.S. science, but this “guarantees that at least some of our discoveries are free of special interests.” Because no one knows what basic science will turn out to be useful, the funding agency must cast a wide net, and it needs to expect that there’s rarely going to be a straight line from basic science to everyday applications.  The “potential economic gains” are “unpredictable and generally long term.”

The coauthors tell a brief story about one such case of unpredictable economic gains.  In 1975, U.S. Sen. William Proxmire singled out the taxpayer-funded work of a researcher named E.F. Knipling for ridicule, awarding him one of his early Golden Fleece Awards. Knipling’s study of “the sex life of parasitic screwworm flies” sounded even dumber than studying duck penises. But that research, paid for by a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, now produces an annual benefit of $1 billion a year for U.S. cattle ranchers. (The technique Knipling developed for releasing sterilized male insects has also dramatically reduced populations of a host of other agricultural pests.)

Likewise, Proxmire and other politicians would surely have run to the nearest camera if they knew in the 1960s that the NSF was paying for a scientist named Tom Brock to study the microbiological life in thermal ponds in Yellowstone National Park. That work resulted in the discovery of Thermus aquaticus living in the scalding hot mud of Mushroom Spring. Other scientists figured out how to use a product of this species, Taq polymerase, which today is an essential ingredient in any DNA test for any purpose anywhere in the world. The economic gains are beyond price.

But maybe I shouldn’t be too quick to call all politicians lamebrain. In 2012, a few renegade members of Congress banded together to create the Golden Goose Award. At a time when federal spending for scientific research is under furious attack, the award means to remind Congress itself that this research has a history of producing “life-saving medicines and treatments; game-changing social and behavioral insights; and major technological advances related to national security, energy, the environment, communications, and public health,” leading to “economic growth through the creation of new industries or companies.”

Among the first recipients was Tom Brock and his Taq polymerase. A few years from now—who knows?—the winner could be Patricia Brennan and those duck penises.

 

In Beijing and Washington, A Breath of Foul Air

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Airport ad for a way to breathe in Beijing. (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

When friends cautioned me about Beijing’s notorious air pollution recently, ahead of my first visit there, I brushed it off. It was an old story, and having grown up in northern New Jersey in the era of unregulated industrial air pollution and open garbage burning on the Meadowlands, I figured I could handle it. But I began to have second thoughts on the flight in from the north, when we crossed a mountain ridge and the clear air turned instantly to dense smog. It was still 20 minutes to touchdown.

After a day or two in the city, I felt as if I had taken up cigarettes. Same burned-out feeling at the back of the throat, with bits of airborne grit catching on the epiglottis. Same clearing of the throat by soft coughing. It got worse over the weekend, when regulations limiting cars on the road don’t apply. Coming back into the city on a Sunday afternoon was like a slow apocalypse. The air was a filthy brownish gray, and pedestrians, many of them wearing white face masks, walked hunched over as if through a rainstorm. Buildings emerged ghostlike from the haze a half-mile ahead and vanished again behind.

But I was a novice. It turned out that this was a relatively normal winter day for Beijing, with the air quality index at just 269. That’s rated “very unhealthy” by the World Health Organization, and many times worse than the maximum safe exposure level, but nowhere near those headline-making, sky-darkening days when the Beijing index has topped 700.

Back in New Jersey, the air quality index was generally under 50, and it reminded me how lucky we are to have relatively strong laws and regulations to protect our air. These are the same protections that President Donald J. Trump loudly promised during his campaign to undo on his first day in office. Indeed, the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives this month passed a Regulatory Accountability Act, which will give the new president power to roll back an array of governmental regulations, including 50 years of environmental protections — with as little public notice as possible. It could undermine even the Clean Air Act of 1972 and for the first time oblige regulators to put corporate profits ahead of public health.

The disingenuous logic of this attack …   to read the full article, click here.

The Master of Nonsense and Wonder

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

[image error]‘The first owl to lodge in my memory,” the naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough confesses in his foreword to “The Natural History of Edward Lear” by Robert McCracken Peck, wasn’t the short-eared owl, say, or any of Britain’s four other native species. It “was the one that went to the sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.” Like so many other children, Mr. Attenborough was enchanted not just by Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” but also by his Jumblies on their perilous voyage to “the hills of the Chankly Bore” and by “the Dong with the luminous nose” wandering by night “over the great Gromboolian plain.”

Lear, born in 1812, the 21st child of a London stockbroker and his unfortunate wife, became the great 19th-century master of nonsense and wonder. We tend to remember him first for the ingenious loopiness of his language—an imagined world of “torrible zones” and “runcible spoons” and, of course, that “ombliferous person of Crete” who “dressed in a sack, / Spickle-speckled with black.” Lear’s fanciful line drawings—the man “on whose nose, / Most birds of the air could repose,” or the old lady “whose folly / Induced her to sit in a holly”—take a whimsical second place.

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Lear, however, saw himself first as an artist. Raised by his doting eldest sister after their parents suffered a financial reversal, he began drawing “for bread and cheese” at the age of 15, making what he called “morbid disease drawings for hospitals and certain doctors of physic.” His sister seems wisely to have steered him to plants and animals instead, and he flourished at it. Mr. Peck, a historian of scientific discovery and art at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, ranks him “among the best natural history painters of all time,” though that phase of his career lasted barely a decade.

The opening of the London Zoo in 1828 gave the young artist ample material to work with. The zoo was then an exclusive, members-only society, and Mr. Peck notes that it denied access to an older and far better known artist and animal dealer named William Swainson. But Lear was adept enough as a bird artist, and sufficiently socially acceptable, that the zoo allowed him at the age of 18 to make paintings in its menagerie for what would become his first book. Surprisingly, for those who know Lear only as a children’s author, it bore the title “Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots.”

This project soon immersed Lear in the work of finding subscribers and learning to draw backward on rented slabs of limestone. He called lithography “this lampblack & grease work,” and the economics of the enterprise obliged him to erase each precious image after just 175 prints and start over again. But it was a labor of love. He wrote to a friend that “the whole of my exalted & delightful upper tenement” is overflowing with sketches and lithographs, “and for the last 12 months I have so moved—thought—looked at,—& existed among Parrots—that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.”

Lear painted living animals, not specimens, and it showed. His birds were “perky and slightly impish in personality (a bit like Lear himself),” Mr. Peck writes. The Scottish engraver William Lizars, who worked with many of the great nature artists of the day, including John James Audubon, commented, “Lear’s drawings are nature, and all others Pottery-ware.” The evidence in Mr. Peck’s copiously illustrated book bears out at least the first half of this judgment.

Through the zoo, Lear came to work for John Gould, an ornithologist who poured out illustrated bird books on an industrial scale. But Gould, Lear later wrote, was “a harsh and violent man . . . unfeeling for those about him” who “owed everything to hi[image error]s excellent wife, & to myself.” He was also humorless. Lear found more agreeable employment when Edward Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby, president of both the Zoological Society of London and the Linnean Society, became his patron in the 1830s.

At Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool, Lord Derby kept 619 bird species, including 114 kinds of parrot and an astonishing assortment of other animals. (The family maintains the estate as a safari park to this day.) Lear clearly delighted in his many commissions there. He was less comfortable at first “with the uniform apathetic tone assumed” by the human residents at Knowsley Hall, and he confided to a friend that there was “nothing I long for half so much as to giggle heartily and hop on one leg down the great gallery.”

[image error]Fortunately, there were children about, and they became the occasion for Lear’s first escape into nonsense. In 1846, at the age of 34, he published his “Book of Nonsense” under a pseudonym. Lord Derby had by then sponsored him on a two-year tour in Italy, where Lear would spend much of the rest of his life. (Mr. Peck describes Lear and his friends abroad as “expatriots.” But they seem, sensibly enough, merely to have disliked British weather.)

That European tour enabled Lear to give up straightforward natural history and launch himself on a new career as a modestly popular travel writer and illustrator. He managed to escape with his life after being taken captive by bandits in Jordan and to survive being driven off in a shower of stones by an angry mob in Albania that regarded his landscape paintings as the work of the devil. But nonsense, and a smattering of natural history, stayed with Lear for life. He published his masterpieces, “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “The Jumblies,” in his late 50s, followed by “The Dong With the Luminous Nose” and “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò” at 65.

Mr. Peck, intent on delivering a concise survey of the various stages in Lear’s life, recounts his turning away from natural history without much explanation and without visibly wincing at the grievous loss to naturalists. In truth, he makes little effort throughout to explore Lear’s complicated psychology, perhaps meaning to stick to the natural history and leave the rest of it to the standard biography, “Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer” (1969) by Vivien Noakes.

The reader wants to know more, however, about both the fabulous bird artist and the manically inventive fabulist, and about the connection between the two. The portraits of Lear in the book suggest a wan, somewhat melancholy figure, neatly dressed, in oval eyeglasses, who possessed a chameleon ability to fit in at any social stratum. (He served for a time as art instructor to Queen Victoria, no less.) But other authors suggest that he was deeply scarred by his parents’ decision, when he was just 4, to exile him, albeit into his sister’s loving care. He was also mortified, from the age of 5, to suffer from epileptic seizures, which he called “the demon.” And he remained single for life, his apparent romantic interest in male friends unrequited, perhaps even unspoken.

[image error]“How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! Who has written such volumes of stuff!” he wrote, late in life, in his familiar persona of whimsical mockery. But the truth is that Lear remains a glorious and beloved enigma. His soul, if there is justice, now brawls across some equatorial sky, joyously squawking in a parrot flock of his own colorful kind.

END

—Mr. Conniff is the author, most recently, of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.”

Sorry, Cat Lovers, TNR Simply Does Not Work

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“Cat eating a rabbit” (Photo: Eddy Van 3000)

While this site is on a bit of a hiatus, I am re-posting this 2014 piece on the feral cat fight.

by Richard Conniff

Various estimates say that anywhere from 20 to 100 million feral cats roam the United States. Together with pet cats that are allowed to wander free, they kill billions of birds, mammals, and other animals every year.

Every time I write about the need to deal with this rapidly worsening problem, certain readers argue for a method called TNR, which stands for “trap, neuter, and release,” or sometimes “trap, neuter, and return.” So let’s take a look at how it might work.

TNR is an idea with enormous appeal for many animal welfare organizations, because it means cat shelters no longer have to euthanize unwanted cats: They just neuter and immunize them, then ship them back out into the world. It’s a way to avoid the deeply dispiriting business of putting animals down, not to mention the expense of feeding and caring for the animals during the usual waiting period for a possible adoption. And it enables animal shelters to put on a happier face for donors: “We’re a shelter, not a slaughterhouse.”

TNR advocates generally cite a handful of studies as evidence that this method works. The pick of the litter is a 2003 study that supporters say shows TNR enabled the University of Central Florida to reduce the feral cat population on its Orlando campus by 66 percent. On closer examination, though, what that study showed was that

47 percent of the cat population was removed through an intensive adoption program, another 11 percent was euthanized, and at least another six percent was killed by automobiles or moved off campus to nearby woods. TNR itself appears to have accomplished almost nothing—and took 11 years to do it.

By email, the lead author of that study, Julie K. Levy, told me that adoption is a common component of TNR programs. She added, “I’d hate to speculate about what the outcome would have been without some cat removal, as that introduces a lot of uncountable variables.” But Levy, who remains a TNR advocate, was part of a team that subsequently examined just that question in two large-scale TNR programs in San Diego County, Calif., and Alachua County, Fla. She and her co-authors found that “any population-level effects” from TNR alone “were minimal.”

The programs might have been effective, the co-authors suggested, if they had neutered 71 to 94 percent of all feral cats, but that rate is “far greater than what was actually achieved.” It is, in fact, far greater than almost any TNR program ever achieves, because, as Levy has written more recently, “capturing free-roaming cats, transporting them to a central facility for sterilization, and returning them to the trapping site are resource-intensive activities,” and “challenging to sustain.”

TNR advocates also frequently cite a large-scale program on 103 cat colonies in Rome. Trapping and neutering decreased the populations of 55 cat colonies there, while the other 48 colonies either gained population or stayed the same. The authors of that study concluded that, in the absence of a public education campaign to stop people from abandoning cats, “all these efforts” are “a waste of money, time and energy.”

And yet TNR proponents just go on touting the same evidence, with an almost magical faith that it will somehow turn out to support their almost religious beliefs. They do this, I think, because anyone who has seen a pet dies knows how emotionally devastating it can be. Twice in my life, I’ve been the person who delivered a pet to the veterinarian to be, as the euphemism has it, “put to sleep.” They rank among the worst days of my life. But both deaths were quick and painless, a matter of falling asleep on my lap, and in both those cases it was infinitely better for the animal than to go on living with disease and impairment.

That’s the choice TNR advocates refuse to make. They see only the individual cat saved from euthanasia and willfully blind themselves to the consequences for the cat itself and for everyone else. When they cite the Rome study as a success story, for instance, they neglect to note that Rome doesn’t have rabies. In this country, on the other hand, rabies prevention efforts cost $300 million a year, and 40,000 people must receive treatment after being bitten or scratched.

Cats are three to four times more likely than dogs to have rabies, and yet TNR programs inevitably leave a significant percentage of feral cats on the street, untreated, for years at a time, aggravating the rabies problem and numerous other diseases of both cats and humans. Because of the threat to public health, most communities have laws preventing individuals from hoarding animals even in the privacy of their homes. But as the authors of one recent article on cat-borne diseases put it, TNR “is essentially cat hoarding without walls.”

The cats in TNR programs also go on killing. Let’s say each cat kills 30 birds a year, and the local TNR program has a population of 100 cats. Over a 10-year period, that program has made itself an accessory to 30,000 unnecessary deaths. (Yes, I’m assuming that the population stays the same. That’s because a lot of TNR programs explicitly aim “to maintain stable cat populations.”) TNR advocates see the cat deaths as individual tragedies. But birds somehow just die as populations, or species. Because the cats do their killing out of our sight, and without our direct intervention, people fail to see that those other deaths are equally individual, and—because cats like to have their fun—far more cruel.

Despite all this, TNR continues to gain popularity. It could well show up next in your community. Politicians like how it sounds to be against killing, so they are easy targets for TNR advocates driven by an extremely narrow definition of “animal welfare.” Be prepared to stand up and remind community leaders that if they are genuinely against killing animals—and if they believe in protecting public health—they need to be against TNR.

Do Foxes Get Any Cuter Than This?

I’m in Beijing, where I spent most of the day talking about pterosaurs at the motherlode of recent pterosaur discovery, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. Afterward, I went across the street and saw these guys. They’re corsac foxes,  new to me, denizens of central Asia into Mongolia. Sorry, I don’t normally indulge in cute animal videos, but these guys put the “A” in “adorable.”

Also saw a young panda amusing itself by clumsily climbing a tree trunk. Nice end to a jet-lagged day.

 

Japan Pulls Slowly Back from the Bloody Business of Elephant Slaughter

(Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

Though China has earned much of the blame for the massive slaughter of elephants across Africa over the past decade, Japan has been an equal partner in this continuing environmental crime—and a stubbornly determined one. When delegates to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voted in October to close all domestic ivory markets, Japan obstinately declared that it was not subject to the decision. Japan’s minister of the environment publicly denied that his country’s extensive ivory industry, largely devoted to the production of hanko—personal stamps, or seals, used in lieu of a written signature—trafficked in poached ivory.

But developments over the past few months suggest that this resistance may be weakening. In November, Hankoyo.com, one of the larger online retailers of ivory hanko, announced it would no longer sell ivory, and specifically cited the need to end poaching in Africa as the motive. Two other hanko retailers—Toyodo and Shoeido—have also announced an end to ivory sales.

Many others, including Yahoo Japan—described as “the world’s largest online dealer of elephant ivory,” have yet to follow. But the pressure to extend the movement against ivory appears to be growing both from the international community and at home in Japan. In the past, said Masayuki Sakamoto, executive director of the Japan Tiger and Elephant Fund, neither the government nor the press was

much interested in providing information to the Japanese public about the ivory poaching crisis, which has caused the deaths of 100,000 African elephants over the past three years. Instead, official policy has been to support the nation’s 300 ivory manufacturers, 500 wholesalers, and 8,000 retailers.

The domestic press has, however, recently taken up the cause, “and the opportunity for Japanese people to know about conservation of elephants has increased,” said Sakamoto. That’s partly the result of recent investigations demonstrating that Japan has flagrantly violated the terms under which it agreed to regulate the domestic ivory trade.

CITES first allowed Japan a limited legal trade in 1999, a decade after a highly successful international ban on the ivory trade. Japan agreed that this trade would employ only tusks legally acquired before that 1989 ban, or imported from two subsequent CITES-approved sales. The Japan Wildlife Research Center, an independent body appointed by the government, was assigned to verify the legality of ivory tusks entering the domestic market and maintain a register of those tusks.

But investigations by JTEF and the London-based nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency demonstrated that these control measures are a sham. Posing as the hopeful seller of a tusk acquired in 2000, investigators phoned 37 Japanese ivory traders—and got advice from 30 of them about how to register the tusk using fraudulent paperwork. “The thing is, we must lie on these official documents,” said one dealer. The Japan Wildlife Research Center, charged with enforcing the rules, gave the same advice on eight separate occasions, in one case offering tips on how to resist a police investigation.

“The supposedly rigorous controls in Japan are nonexistent,” says Allan Thornton, EIA’s president, and that has allowed the legal market to become a cover for a much larger trade in tusks from recently killed elephants. In 2005, he said, Yahoo Japan sold just 3,800 ivory products on its auction site. By 2015, those sales had soared to 28,000 products, including 438 whole tusks.

“On a single day in August 2015,” according to EIA’s December 2015 report, the shopping sites of Yahoo Japan and competitor Rakuten Ichiba “each carried approximately 6,000 different ivory ads. The combined sale price for the ivory products on both sites totaled more than U.S. $5.1 million.” The report calculated that just from 2011 to 2014, some 5,500 tusks entered the Japanese trade without evidence of legal origin.

After EIA presented the results of its investigations to Tokyo Metropolitan Police, said Sakamoto, government investigators visited one ivory manufacturer and handed out a penalty that amounted to little more than advice on what the company needed to do to get its ivory stockpile in legal order. It was a weak response, and yet surprising, says Sakamato, because it was the first time anyone had bothered to implement the law in 20 years. The authorities seem to recognize for the first time “that they are in a position to be strictly monitored, and if they fail, they will face strong criticisms from the international community.”

To make a real difference, that criticism needs to get louder. So what can people outside Japan do to help? In September 16 members of the United States House of Representatives sent a letter to the ambassador from Japan, noting that failure to enforce regulations on the ivory trade was directly contributing to the rapid disappearance of Africa’s elephants. They pointed out that participation in the trade also provides a funding source for “rebel militias and terrorist groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army, Al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram.” And they called for Japan to end its domestic trade.

Take a look at the letter, and if your representatives in Congress are not among the signatories, find out why. It might also be worth contacting Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer (email marissa.mayer@yahoo-inc.com or phone 408-349-3300), to ask why her company, which owns 35 percent of Yahoo Japan, is profiting from the slaughter of elephants. Or try Yahoo’s chief financial officer, Ken Goldman, who sits on the board of Yahoo Japan.

Don’t be a troll. Just ask honestly: Do you want your kids to grow up in a world without elephants? Indeed, do any of us want to stand by idly as our infinite appetite for ivory knickknacks (and profits) drives the largest land mammal on Earth to extinction in the wild?

 

Sampling The Pleasures in a Single Patch of Forest

(Photo: Knopf)

by Richard Conniff/ Wall Street Journal

When Richard Fortey, a paleontologist, popular writer and television presenter, retired a few years ago after a long career at the Natural History Museum in London, he took it as a chance to “escape into the open air.” No more specimen rooms, no more staff meetings. The proceeds from a TV series proved just enough to purchase 4 acres of “ancient beech-and-bluebell woodland” in the Chiltern Hills, near his home in the London suburb of Henley-on-Thames.

In the past, Mr. Fortey had undertaken ambitious schemes, like a sprint across four billion years of evolution for his 1997 book, “Life: An Unauthorized Biography.” Now he set out to explore “a tiny morsel of a historic land.” The previous owner had divided off pieces of Lambridge Wood, part of an old estate, and the buyers—including a retired virologist, a professional harpsichordist and a founding member of the band Genesis—each separately purchased a piece “to prevent the wood from being felled or turned into housing.”

For Mr. Fortey, his patch, dubbed “Grim’s Dyke Wood,” became a place to sit on a log, eat a bacon sandwich and contemplate mosses, a predatory fungus, crane flies, springtails, an “almost elephantine” weevil and whatever else passed by, or just stood still, through each season. In “The Wood for the Trees: One Man’s Long View of Nature,” he tells the story from April of one year through March of the next.

This sort of thing—the microcosmic exploration of one farm, forest or village—is almost a genre in the British Isles, dating back at least to Gilbert White’s 1789 “Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.” Thankfully, Mr. Fortey doesn’t pretend to be treading virgin territory either in literature or in his forest. But he makes the genre a fine playground for his characteristic blend of wide-ranging curiosity, deft observation and deep research.

His heart is in the intimate examination of nature, but he pursues this passion without sentimentality. “The wood,” he writes, “is not eternal—it is a construct, a human product. It was made by

our ancestors, modified repeatedly, nearly obliterated, rescued by industry, forgotten and remembered by turn. . . . The natural history was part and parcel of the human history.”

He is happy to recount the long exploitation of these woods, from the ship builders of the British navy on up to the latest gasp of commercialism—a modern trade crafting brooms out of tightly bundled birch twigs for real-life games of Quidditch played by overzealous “Harry Potter” fans. He even gives thanks, a little ruefully, for pheasant-shooting: “Were it not for this sport of the well-to-do or well-connected, many more beech woods would probably have been cleared by now and put down to barley.”

The writing is wryly erudite. On accidentally and agonizingly rubbing milky sap from the stately wood spurge plant in his eyes, Mr. Fortey notes: “I cannot recall such a painful reaction since they closed my favourite Chiltern pub (the Dog and Badger).” He also confesses to a passing “piece of wickedness.” Leading a tour of local mushrooms in October, “the glory time for a fungus-lover,” he is irritated by a philistine who wants to know only, “Can you eat it?” When the question comes yet again as Mr. Fortey is digressing on the wonders of Lactarius pyrogalus, whose name means “fire milk,” he replies: “No, but you can taste it.” His tormentor does so, and thus he buys an hour of silence.

Mr. Fortey brings more investigative tools to Grim’s Dyke Wood than most amateur naturalists could muster. At one point, a machine on caterpillar tracks makes its way into the wood, sets out its stabilizing legs, and sends a platform on a telescoping shaft up 80 feet to reveal the canopy of the beech trees. For a moment I had a sinking fear that a new television series was already in production. But it turned out to be a project led by a team of entomologists from among Mr. Fortey’s old colleagues at the Natural History Museum. They found that elephantine weevil and also a brilliant iridescent green jewel beetle of a sort more commonly seen in tropical rain forests.

In one of his best passages, Mr. Fortey weaves the hunt for some rare plants (a ghost orchid and a cousin of our Indian pipe, called the Dutchman’s pipe in the U.K.) with the story of rumored ghosts at a local cottage, the scene of a shocking 19th-century murder. The ghost stories are “all nonsense, of course, as every rationalist will agree,” he concludes. But then he adds: “I have been in the wood on an overcast, windy evening late in the year when I heard a sudden brief, distant cry—it must have been a red kite out late, or even a frightened blackbird. . . . Ignore the sudden shiver. Let’s not be silly.”

The book is less successful, though, in its supposition-heavy attempts to fit Grim’s Dyke Wood into the larger scheme of history: During the Civil War of the 1640s, Mr. Fortey writes, the cries of rowdies “would have carried to our wood from the other side of the valley”; an earthquake in 1683 probably “shook all the trees in Lambridge Wood”; and on an 1828 tour of the area, John Stuart Mill might or might not have “walked exactly along the footpath past our wood.”

I was also a little dismayed, roughly a third of the way into the book, when a heavy rain sends Mr. Fortey scurrying back to his car, to learn that he doesn’t necessarily walk to his bit of woods. Being unsentimental is one thing, but driving somehow spoils the enterprise (at least for the reader judging from the comfort of his living room).

Even so, the book sets an excellent model for people wondering whether there should not be more to life than the necessary round of getting and spending followed by endless click time in front of the television set. “If I could issue one injunction to humankind,” Mr. Fortey writes, “it would be: ‘Be curious.’ ” But he seems equally content just to get us quietly watching. At one point, he quotes a 1911 poem called “Leisure” by W.H. Davies, who asks: “What is this life / if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare. / No time to stand beneath the boughs / And stare as long as sheep or cows.”

With that bovine image in mind, I set down Mr. Fortey’s book, abandoned the living room, and went outside to see, hear and smell (but perhaps not taste) the very lively world of plants and animals in my own backyard.

—Mr. Conniff is the author, most recently, of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.”