Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
It’s been a good couple of weeks for polar bears. First, the Department of the Interior announced that it would propose tighter international regulations of polar bear trophy hunting and trade under international law and, today, the Department of the...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Andrew Revkin just posted a nice link to a recent response by one of the world's foremost polar bear experts to an attack on global-warming based predictions of polar bear declines. The original critique was written by J. Scott Armstrong,...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just consigned the yellow-billed loon to purgatory. Yellow-billed loons are the biggest species of loon in the world and can boast wing spans of up to a five-feet. The loon breeds in the tundra...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Curbing Pollution , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) recently made an interesting, and little noted, move that speaks volumes about this Administration's attitude towards climate change legislation. Last year the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned to list the ribbon seal, which like...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Greg Pollowitz has posted a reply to my critique of his post on the discovery of 125,000 western lowland gorillas in the Republic of Congo. In his original post, Pollowitz seemed to argue that this discovery should undermine our confidence...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Yesterday the State of Alaska announced that they had filed a long-anticipated lawsuit challenging the polar bear’s Endangered Species Act protection in federal court in Washington, D.C.. Alaska’s case joins an earlier case, filed by the Safari Club and a...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Curbing Pollution , Health and the Environment , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
For years, scientists have been concerned about the substantial increase of mercury concentrations in Arctic marine mammals such as polar bears, beluga whales, and seals. In some places in Canada, for example, levels of mercury in the tissue of...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Today the protection of polar bears under the U.S. Endangered Species Act suffered yet another delay at the hands of the Bush Administration. The Administration--which formally proposed adding the polar bears to the List of Threatened and Endangered Species in...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , The Media and the Environment , U.S. Law and Policy
John Tierney has an interesting column in today's New York Times (it doesn't seem to be available on the the Times' web site). The basic thrust of his piece is that "activists, journalists, and scientists" are all working together to...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
We've known for some time that global warming spells big big trouble for the world's polar bear populations. That's why NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Greepeace petitioned to have the polar bear protected under the Endangered Species Act. ...continued→
