Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , The Media and the Environment
As I’ve noted, the last couple of weeks have been good ones for the polar bear, with the Obama Administration proposing both the designation of over 200,000 square miles of critical habitat the bear and increased international restrictions on polar...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
Investor’s Business Daily just published a foolish editorial about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's recent proposal to designate over 200,000 square miles of Alaskan coast and sea ice as “critical habitat” for the State’s beleaguered polar bear population. The...continued→
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
Big, big news out of Washington, D.C. today on the topic of polar bear conservation. The United States, responding to NRDC, our allies, and more than 50,000 NRDC members, announced that it would propose placing the polar bear on Appendix...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
Arguably, one the most successful international environmental agreements, at least when it comes to wildlife, is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species or “CITES” (pronounced “cy-tees”). CITES is designed to control international commercial trade in endangered species,...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Over at environment360, Ed Struzik has an excellent roundup of the very thin evidence behind the arguments of those who doubt the impact that climate change is having on the polar bear. I’ve touched on these issues here, here, and...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
In another disappointing turn of events, today Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar effectively endorsed the Bush Administration's policy of excluding the effects of global warming pollution on polar bears from consideration under the Endangered Species Act. The Secretary decided...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 , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
When I was in law school, it was very common for professors to begin a classroom discussion of some theoretical topic or another by saying: “The conventional wisdom is….” This was always a sure sign that, whatever the conventional wisdom,...continued→
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
Photo: Closed Door by jeco, Creative Commons 2.0 license One of the biggest frustrations about working in the international arena on environmental issues is the limited role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like NRDC are often able to play in the...continued→
