Rape in the U.K.

My God. I had no idea that this was the state of things in Britain. This is unspeakably awful. I realize that some of this "culture of skepticism" regarding rape still exists here the U.S., but it is nowhere near the magnitude of 95% of rape cases not resulting in conviction. For anyone who thinks women's rights are no longer an issue of concern in developed nations, read this article. This needs to change now.

Giving

I found this article comforting, in a way. I sometimes feel so guilty about how fortunate and selfish I am, especially when disasters strike, such as the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar. Or when I open my inbox. Yes, I voluntarily signed up to receive e-mail news and donation solicitations from Save Darfur, Human Rights Campaign, Global Exchange, Susan G. Komen, etc. I signed up because I supposedly care, but it's pathetic how often I ignore those pleas for money that I know would be well spent. I am very impressed that Peter Singer gives over a third of his income to charity, whether his annual income is $4K or $4million. The numbers in the news lately have been staggering. Tens of thousands dead in each disaster, and I would guess exponentially more whose lives have been tragically, unimaginably altered. People have been comparing the Chinese government's response to the current disaster to that of the 1976 earthquake where about 240,000 people died. Reading about this reminded me of something I read in "When the Rivers Run Dry" by Fred Pearce. He wrote about an event that occurred in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese War. In an attempt to stop the invading Japanese army with a wall of water, Chinese troops inserted explosives into the Huayuankou dike on the Yellow River and blew it up. The death toll from this foolish act of war: 890,000, nearly all of them Chinese. Pearce saw a photo of the river valley taken in July 1938 and said the only other photo he had ever seen with such devastation was of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. I'm really poor at history, but I find it troubling that although we're taught about very important historical events such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima, there are many events of equivalent magnitude that aren't covered in great depth or even mentioned at all.

Endangered Species Day

May 16, 2008 is Endangered Species Day in the U.S. Happy Endangered Species Day everyone! There have been some small victories lately. Polar bears have finally been listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, although most scientists agree they should be listed as "endangered". In the Pacific Northwest cutthroat trout have been given a second chance at making the endangered species list after a ruling by the U.S. Appeals Court that they were wrongfully denied status by the Bush administration, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. This press release mentions some interesting facts:

The Bush administration has only protected 58 species of plants, animals, and fish to date, compared to 522 species protected during the Clinton administration and 231 during the elder Bush’s tenure. Under this administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service has not protected a single U.S. species in 712 days. This is by far the longest period without a new species being protected since the landmark federal law was passed, surpassing even James Watt, who, under President Reagan, in 1981 and 1982 went 382 days without listing a species.

“The Bush administration denied coastal cutthroat trout protection not because the species doesn’t need to be protected, but because of hostility to the Endangered Species Act,” said Greenwald. “Decisions about how to protect our rivers and fish need to be based on science, not politics.”

That last point is so important. As a scientist, especially as an ecologist, I find it so frustrating when careful, high-quality, often expensive science is simply brushed aside because it doesn't fit someone's narrow-minded agenda. But I also understand that some of the blame falls on us - our inability to effectively communicate science and the implications of our results to policy makers and voters. Some people just don't understand how important it is to preserve biodiversity and understand our natural resources. Some things can't be replaced, but it's difficult to convince someone of that who only ventures outside their air-conditioned office for a round of golf or something. How do we get people like that to care about bacteria in the ocean sediments off the Bahamas, for example? Or more importantly, get them to appreciate the ecological connections between those bacteria and the rest of the ecosystem? Something to think about on Endangered Species Day!

Yes!!!

This is huge! I can't tell you how happy I am to see such long-overdue progress. I am confident there is more to come in the next few years. Basic human rights and sensible justice will always triumph over bigotry.

AMEN!

...to Marie Cocco's column in today's Post. How awful that such things still happen in our modern American society.

I don't understand Congress!

When I had Mrs. Schofp's NSL Government class as an ignorant, naive 10th grader, I thought a three-branch government with bicameral legislature made perfect sense and was the best system possible. Now I read about stuff like this and want to bang my head against a wall. Congress sucks. We need a new political party - one that won't waste my tax $ and actually accomplishes something! I bet the Green Party would be more efficient if voters would give them a chance.

Anyway, the quality of my blogging is compromised now because my digital camera broke :( And I would rather not waste film on things like the "brutti ma buoni" cookies I made and Madeline making funny faces, even though they'd be interesting enough to post. But Andrew lent me his camera for a while so I took some pictures of the flowers in the courtyard of the building where I work. If I have some reading to do, I like to come out here instead of sitting in my office:

Adding color to the greening of America

I've been going through my electronic "to read" list and finally got to this article. It made some excellent points, and elegantly illustrates that "not only is environmentalism a human rights issue, it is also an economic opportunity." I agree! I think a massive move towards "green collar" jobs will occur out of necessity in the near future (see Stephen Colbert's interview with Van Jones).

To CG and anyone else who doesn't understand ecology

Regarding your comment to my April 20 post, I have not yet read the article you recommended on littering immigrants, but I will assume you are right and that littering is indeed a problem (but isn't it a problem everywhere - see the link in my April 15 post). However, this border fence is indeed an environmental disaster - I would guess more so than littering - and I will try to explain why. First, there's the easy-to-understand issue mentioned by one of the scientists in the Post article: in some regions the fence will cut off animals from their water supply. Alternative supplies are not easy to find in a desert, so this could be lethal for a population. Second, I'll explain all those issues that I mentioned in my posting that "government asses have no clue about". The ones I listed were dispersal and migration constraints, habitat fragmentation, inbreeding depression, and the keystone species concept. Each organism has its own habitat requirements, including a certain amount of space. That space needs to be large enough (which for many of the endangered large mammals is quite large) so that each individual can meet its energetic needs and stay within its range of environmental tolerances (e.g., temperature, moisture, pH, salinity, etc.). If a barrier is created and the organism can no longer disperse freely, its ability to survive and reproduce is compromised due to many direct and indirect effects (e.g., an isolated population on a remnant habitat becomes too dense, leading to food shortages, leading to local extinction). Besides local extinction, one common outcome of habitat fragmentation and reduced dispersal is inbreeding depression: the population may survive, but decline drastically in numbers, leading to a loss in genetic variation. A loss of genetic variation makes a population more at risk for extinction if disease or another disturbance were to befall the population. Separate from dispersal and habitat fragmentation is the issue of migration. As the Post article mentioned, the U.S.-Mexico border is an important migration route for many animals. Impeding migration could have no impact or multiple impacts, depending on the species. For some species, it will impede their ability to reproduce or reach seasonal feeding grounds. But furthermore, other species that do not migrate may be dependent on those species that do, and thus may be indirectly affected by the impeded migration. Migrating species may transfer nutrients between habitats or otherwise interact with the other species in those habitats in important ways. One example I can think of is from research done by an INHS ornithologist. I can't remember what bird species it was, but there is a certain species that gives out alarm calls when a predator is approaching. These alarm calls are understood not just by its conspecifics but by the other bird species in the community as well. If the alarm calling species fails to migrate back north, the other bird populations dwindle because that species is no longer around to warn them. This brings me to the keystone species concept. A keystone species is a species who has a disproportionate impact on the environment, compared to its biomass. Wikipedia has a decent explanation. For example, Paine's classic study shows that when the starfish, an important predator, was experimentally removed from the intertidal ecosystem, the result was not simply an ecosystem with no starfish, it was a total collapse of the ecosystem - the starfish's prey, the mussels, took over and drove all the other species to local extinction. Sometimes the impact a species has on an ecosystem is not apparent until that species is removed. Even if a species isn't a keystone per se, every organism interacts with other species and its environment, so its removal can still impact other species. The main point here is that you can't look at this border fence issue and say, "well who cares, only the antelope, jaguars, and ocelots are going to be affected". Because the reality is that a lot more organisms than we know are going to be indirectly affected, and these indirect effects won't become evident until it's too late. Everything is connected, and most of those connections are really hard to discern but are nevertheless important. This is not "gloom-and-doom" or unrealistic, it's a scenario that's already played out in so many over-developed and fragmented regions where we've lost biodiversity. I think it's really sad, but maybe you're one of those people who needs to visit places in person to appreciate their significance and irreplaceable qualities (hopefully you're not one of those people who has no appreciation for nature unless there's $ involved :) I think ecology (not just general biology) should be required for every high school student to understand this basic stuff about how nature works.