All Blogs

This article in the NY Times provides a good summary of the current drought situation in the western states. It has a pro-growth bias and suggests that the solution is for farmers to let fields go fallow, rather than irrigate, and get paid by the government for crop loss.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is sending two scientists to international meetings dealing with conditions in the Arctic, according to this article from the New York Times. One is going to Norway to attend a meeting on conserving Arctic plants and animals. Another is going to the Siberian coast to discuss the increasing frequency of villager encounters with polar bears. The reason given for this apparent gag order is that climate is not expressly mentioned on any agenda(s). It seems they can talk about What but not about Why.

Distributions of plants and animals are influenced by climatic conditions and if their frequency and distributions are changing then climatic conditions must at least be examined.

Both the New York Times and the LA Times, 2/22/07, report that the Colorado River basin and indeed the entire American Southwest, does not have enough water to support planned growth. They report this as if it were news. The fact is that John Wesley Powell recognized this more than a century ago. Aridness is a feature of this region with or without global warming. Global warming only exacerbates the situation.

The problem of introduction of non-native species to ecosystems has been around for some time. I had some experience with this during my Park Ranger days. Reed canarygrass fills large portions of some Willamette Valley reservoir lake beds and streams within Corps of Engineer jurisdiction. My supervisor thought it wise to do battle by burning the grass. Pythons, once pets released by their owners and now breeding in the Everglades, eating alligators, have captured the attention of the news media. But most recently, hippos in Colombia have made the front page.

It seems that former drug lord Pablo Escobar built his own private fantasy land complete with a zoo and models of dinosaurs. Amongst the animals imported for this zoo were four (according to the LA Times article) hippopotami. An essay by Dan Willmore states that only two hippos were originally imported. Regardless of the original number there are now 16. The LA Times mentions that one adult hippo had been shot by ranchers after straying some three miles from the artificial lake the herd inhabits.

Willmore believes this to be an opportunity for South America to "... regain the kind of big wild animals that we lost ten thousand years ago..." to the Clovis point. I remain dubious about single cause explanations for Pleistocene extinctions but I'm at a loss to know what to do with the hippos. They don't seem to be displacing any native species as far as I know. As for the pythons, they are and they need to be eradicated.