Black bears at Yosemite National Park break into minivans more than any other type of vehicle to find munchies, according to a new study published in the October 2009 Journal of Mammalogy. If this sounds like one of the elaborate faux studies cooked up by the Journal of Irreproducible Results, rest assured that actual, trained mammalogists are behind this one—albeit mammalogists who have a sense of humor about their Jellystone-esque research. The press release announcing the study is titled “Yosemite black bears select minivan as ‘Car of the Year’ ” and begins:

For a seven-year period, the top choice of vehicle by black bears in Yosemite National Park has been the minivan. The bears seem to base this decision on “fuel efficiency”—that is, which vehicle offers the best opportunity of finding a meal. As a result, black bears have shown a strong preference for breaking into minivans over other types of vehicles.

Between 2001 and 2007, bears broke into vehicles at the following rates: minivans, 26 percent; sport–utility vehicles, 22.5 percent; small cars, 17.1 percent; sedans, 13.7 percent; trucks, 11.9 percent; vans, 4.2 percent; sports cars, 1.7 percent; coupes, 1.7 percent; and station wagons, 1.4 percent.

Why is the minivan the vehicle of choice? Not simply because there are more minivans—many other types of vehicles were more often left overnight in the park, or “available” in the researchers’ parlance. The scientists from the U.S. Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Research Center offer four possible reasons:

Minivans are more likely to emit food odors, based on the fact that minivans are designed for families with children—who are more likely to spill food and drink in a vehicle.

Passengers of minivans are more prone to leave large amounts of food in a vehicle parked overnight.

Minivans may be structurally easier to break into than other types of vehicles. Bears most often gained access to minivans by popping open a rear side window.

A few individual bears could be responsible for all the break-ins, and they are displaying a learned behavior for choosing minivans.

In short, to campground bears who’ve learned bad behavior, vehicles are simply hard shells encasing many types of treats, whether it’s raw bacon and Bud Lite or goldfish crackers, dog food, and Juicy Juice. And minivans offer the best promise of treats and the easiest wrapper to open. The researchers noted that they “commonly saw car doors bent open, windows on all sides of the vehicle broken, and seats ripped out, all of which appeared effortless for bears.”

Amid the ursine humor in all this, let’s not forget that for bears, developing a taste for human food is often one of the worst things that can happen to them—“a fed bear is a dead bear,” as the saying goes. The researchers’ ultimate hope is to help resolve “bear-human conflicts” as people all around the world expand their range and more frequently come into contact with large carnivores.

See the instructional bear video that rangers show to overnight Yosemite visitors:

Source: Journal of Mammalogy

I hope everyone who’s been watching the epic PBS documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea takes inspiration from the series, which was produced by Ken Burns and his longtime collaborator, writer Dayton Duncan. But one thing I hope they’re not inspired to do is follow in Duncan’s footsteps and attempt to visit all 58 national parks, a lifelong journey that he chronicles in the problematically titled article “Collect ’Em All” in the July-August Sierra magazine.

What’s wrong with visiting all the parks? Well, for starters, doing so would leave a massive carbon footprint. When Duncan unknowingly began his quest in 1959, visiting several parks on his Iowa family’s extended vacation, gasoline was cheap and seemingly plentiful and the idea of “carbon miles” was a million miles away. But now, alas, we know better: If we burned the auto and airplane fuel it would take to visit all the parks, many of which are in remote and hard-to-reach locations, we’d emit a huge amount of CO2 that ultimately would work against the very places we’re trying to preserve.

For another thing, “park bagging,” as I’ve heard it called, is ultimately an elitist pursuit, a game that very few can play. Face it, only the wealthiest and luckiest among us has the vacation time, the money, and the means to have a chance at ticking off all 58 parks, and even announcing your achievement to the world can come perilously close to bragging about what an amazingly fortunate life you lead—not the sort of message parks advocates should be sending. The National Parks quotes Teddy Roosevelt exclaiming at the Grand Canyon, “This is one of the great sights that every American, if he can travel at all, should see.” That middle clause, added wisely, is essential: Many Americans find it hard to travel to just one national park, let alone all of them.

Finally, the “collect ’em all” mentality goes against a better, nobler impulse, which is to get to know the land intimately. Better that we should acquaint ourselves with one, two, or a few parks very well than attempt to superficially survey them all in baseball-card-collector fashion. Several years ago, I worked for the summer in Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, driving a tourist shuttle van between the tiny gateway community of McCarthy and the mining relic town of Kennicott. Among my passengers I met a few park baggers, most memorably a man and his teenage son. They “explored” the park in an afternoon, which meant strolling among Kennicott’s dilapidated buildings, looking up at the stupendous glaciers around them, and then riding my van back down to resume their journey. Never mind that Wrangell-St. Elias is the nation’s largest park at 13 million acres, and that even someone who’s there for months, as I was, can barely claim to have scratched the surface of its vast wonder. The man told me that they were off next to the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, which they would fly over in a bush plane—not even setting foot on the tundra. They added both parks to their all-important list, yet they didn’t have a true wilderness experience in either place.

Now, I’ve got to cut Duncan some slack: He racked up some of his visits while researching and filming The National Parks, and the greater good that may come of the series is arguably worth the carbon he burned to do it. (This sort of rationale is how many “environmental” speakers and writers justify their flight-intensive, conference-hopping lifestyles.) But still, it seems that he, of all people, ought to know better than to wear his completed life list as some badge of honor.

Sour grapes? Maybe. I once thought I would travel to many of the world’s most beautiful places. The Patagonian Andes, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands—all awaited my intrepid exploration. Now, with the reality of climate change hitting full force, I see that even if I had the means, visiting all my dream destinations just wouldn’t be right, and that in some ways staying close to home is the best way to honor the earth. So yes, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there are some national parks I will never see, and that photo or video images will be my only acquaintance with them. Which is why I’ve been watching every last episode of The National Parks.

Sources: PBS, Sierra, Teton Gravity Research, National Park Service 

Image by Alaskan Dude, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Volunteers across the country are transcribing 6 million birdwatching observations—handwritten notes catalogued on small index cards, and dating back to 1880—to help researchers figure out how climate change affects bird migration patterns. Audubon interviews Jessica Zelt, coordinator of the U.S. Geological Survey’s North American Bird Phenology Program, which is tapping more than 1,200 volunteers to compile “the most comprehensive data set of its kind.”

“This program is looking at how climate change is affecting migrating bird arrival and departure dates,” Zelt tells Audubon. “Once this information goes into our database, we can analyze it, along with weather and climate data, to see if there are long-term patterns and shifts. It’s possible that climate change affects certain species more than others. Being able to highlight those species and change our own lives to lessen those effects, that’s always a goal.”

Source: Audubon

Image by Noël Zia Lee, licensed under Creative Commons.

Public wildlands such as parks and reserves are great—but they’re not enough to save the world’s flora and fauna from mass extinction due to climate change. To do that, writes Jeff Langholz in the September-October issue of World Watch, it will take private landowners with a conservation ethic.

Langholz suggests that we must formally protect around 20 percent of the earth’s land, and the only way to do this is to promote privately owned protected areas:

In many regions, the most critical biodiversity areas are in private hands, and hoping that governments will simply expropriate them—despite the legal, social, and political obstacles—is absurd. Instead of leaving protected-area establishment primarily to governments, we should stimulate a robust private-sector investment in protected-area creation.

There are many types of private landowners, Langholz points out, and they’re not all “affluent outsiders” like Doug and Kris Tompkins, who created the private Parque Pumalín reserve in Chile (pictured). Some are families whose lands have been in the family for generations. Some are nonprofits such as land trusts or for-profits such as corporations. And of course some are environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and Audubon. Furthermore, these lands vary widely in the type of protection, from informal to formal. But Langholz suggests that they are essential, and that the conversation about them is changing:

John Stuart Mill commented that every great movement must go through three phases: ridicule, discussion, then adoption. Once ridiculed by the mainstream, the private protected areas movement is now the focus of considerable high-level discussion. The immense challenges facing society require that these discussions not only continue, but lead to concerted action.

Source: World Watch (article not available online)

California has drawn a line in the sediment and outlawed suction dredge gold mining, a practice in which frame-mounted, vacuumlike machines suck up the riverbed of mineral-laden mountain streams and spew it out into the water in hopes of capturing a few flecks of gold. The ban is part of a plan to help reverse declining salmon runs on several rivers—but to a bunch of hobbyist gold miners, it’s an affront to personal rights, according to the July 30 Sacramento News and Review.

“The scientific evidence against suction dredging doesn’t pass the laugh test,” James Buchal, attorney for a mining advocacy group called the New 49’ers, tells the newspaper. “This bill will put hundreds of people out of work and destroy the vacation plans of thousands of people for no purpose whatsoever.”

Despite the gold-tinged vacation dreams of the New 49’ers, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the ban into law Aug. 6. Writes the Associated Press: “Small-scale miners still drawn to California to chase dreams of striking it rich will have to find their gold nuggets the old-fashioned way for awhile, with shovels and pans.”

Over at the Nugget Shooter Forum, an amateur prospecting website, compliance with the suction dredge ban doesn’t look promising. And it appears that miners still favor the speech stylings and hotheaded temperament of Yosemite Sam.

 “We are now in a lock and load catch me if'n ya can MF state a siege,” writes a poster calling himself “John Hoser Oates.” “Never been caught before and ain’t a givn’ up now either.”

 “I say screw them,” writes “Matt.” “I will be dredging the remainder of the summer until the end of the season. I will dredge next summer also. If I get into it with an enforcing agency and my equipment gets confiscated, well, it ain’t worth shit anymore anyways.”

“I know nothing about no stinking new law till I receive a letter saying my dredge permit is revoked,” writes “creekhunter.” “My dredge will be back in the water very soon and my sluice will be full of gold.”

Violators will face a fine of up to $1,000 and up to six months in jail.

Source: Sacramento News & Review

Image by K Koski, NOAA Auk Bay Lab, licensed under Creative Commons.

Ever feel like you’re trapped in the city, exiled from your natural home in the wilds, longing for some deeper connection with nature? Yeah, me too. That’s why I’ve been enjoying Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s new book, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness (Little, Brown), which encourages us to attune ourselves to the wildlife that exists even in our paved and mowed urban landscapes. Haupt uses crows as a spirit-guide into the natural world, which goes against her instincts because a) she has a clear aversion to too much “woo-woo” talk and a hesitance to anthropomorphize, b) she sees the abundance of crows as an indicator of ecological imbalance, and c) as she states flat-out in the opening line, “Crows are not my favorite bird.”

Nonetheless, Haupt is irresistibly drawn to crows as she shakes off something that sounds like not just urban ennui but clinical depression. Getting herself out of her funk, she begins to explore her nearby Seattle environs with the expertise of an experienced birder, the sharp eye of an all-around naturalist, and the literary mind of a probing essayist:

When we allow ourselves to think of nature as something out there, we become prey to complacency. If nature is somewhere else, then what we do here doesn’t really matter. Jennifer Price writes in Flight Maps, her eloquent critique of romanticized nature, that modern Americans use an idea of Nature Out There to ignore our ravenous uses of natural resources. “If I don’t think of a Volvo as nature, then can’t I buy and drive it to Nature without thinking very hard about how I use, alter, destroy, and consume nature?” In my urban ecosystem, I drive around a corner and a crow leaps into flight from the grassy parking strip. We startle each other. If nature is Out There, she asks, then what am I?

Source: Little, Brown

For years, the animal rights movement has pushed for a court ruling that would grant animals the legal standing to sue.  Currently, animal right activists cannot represent animals in court.  If such a ruling passed, these activists could sue restaurant chains and farmers on behalf of cows waiting to be slaughtered, for example. 

Some feel that the possibility of animals achieving legal standing is heightened with the appointment of President Obama's regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.  There are few benefits to animal standing, writes Wesley J. Smith in the Weekly Standard:

...Animal standing would do more than just plunge the entire animal industry sector into chaos.  In one fell swoop, it would both undermine the status of animals as property and elevate them with the force of law toward legal personhood.

But Mother Jones paints Sunstein and the issue of animal standing with a less hyperbolic brush, first with her own words, and then with those of a former colleague. Here’s Sunstein in 2002:

I believe that it is excessive to ban experiments that impose a degree of suffering on rats or mice if the consequence of those experiments is to produce significant medical advances for human beings.

And here’s a University of Chicago colleague of Sunstein’s:

…What Sunstein is asking is that humans be able to go to court as advocates for animals who are being ill treated, when that treatment violates existing law. So it is not a radical move; it is a move that solves a problem: We pass laws against animal cruelty, and then we have no mechanism to ensure that these laws will be enforced.

Source: Weekly Standard, Mother Jones

Image by Sunfox, licensed under Creative Commons.

You’ve probably heard about Alaska ex-governor Sarah Palin’s support for aerial wolf and bear hunts—and along with it the conventional wisdom that she was simply doing what gun-totin’, predator-hatin’ Alaskans wanted. In the July-August issue of Audubon, contentious veteran columnist Ted Williams deflates this notion, noting that Palin’s brand of predator control was guided more by an anti-science stance and pressure from the trophy hunting industry than by the will of Alaskans.

In making his case, Williams notes the natural resistance of Alaskans to opinions from “away,” but talks to several well-informed Alaskans who hunt, fish, and consider Palin’s wildlife management ideas to be ill-founded at best. For instance, here’s Mark Richards, co-chair of the Alaska chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers:

“Never has political meddling been so blatant and detrimental to the future of our system of wildlife management as it is under the Palin administration. I have a letter from Palin shortly after she took office, claiming she wanted to manage wildlife based on sound science. It’s complete bullshit. What she is doing is not even close to science or sound management.”

Williams surely would have been cheered to know as he wrote his column that Palin would soon resign. Unfortunately, it will take Alaska longer to roll back her predator policies than it took her to derail the McCain campaign.

Source: Audubon

Image by peupleloup, licensed under Creative Commons.

An ever-expanding army of ATVs is destroying the wilderness as we know it! Not so fast: The Wildlands CPR blog digs into the numbers behind this conventional wisdom and reports that, actually, sales of all-terrain and other off-road vehicles have been declining since probably 2003. ATV advocates haven’t been keen to trumpet this slide as loudly as they hailed rising sales. Why? Wildlands CPR fills us in:

For years proponents of motorized recreation have claimed that the “explosive growth” in the sale of all-terrain vehicles and other off-road vehicles supports their demand that public land managers designate extensive motorized trail networks.

Here in Minnesota, home of Utne Reader, that’s exactly what has happened. Citing rapidly rising ATV sales, industry-backed ATV advocates have pressured the state Department of Natural Resources into creating a large network of expensive state-maintained trails funded by motorists statewide even as the agency fails to enforce existing trail rules and prevent habitat destruction.

The news of declining sales doesn’t make tales of environmental damage by ATVs any less real or alarming—but it does offer hope to those of us who feel that mud-running, root-ripping motorheads are trampling the last bits of wilderness on our public lands.

Source: Wildlands CPR, Star Tribune

Image by eron_gpsfs, licensed under Creative Commons.

The emerald ash borer is a persistently spreading pest that’s threatening many of North America’s ash trees. It turns out that in the northeastern United States and Canada, it’s also threatening the work of native basket weavers, who rely on thin strips of ash for their intricate work, according to Native Peoples magazine (July-August 2009)

Healthy ash trees, especially the favored black ash, are becoming increasingly difficult to find, and regulations meant to combat the borer “are severely hampering the weavers,” who produce some of the world’s finest baskets, the magazine writes.

Ash basket weaver Frank Meuse of the Bear River First Nation in Nova Scotia sees something more than a hungry bug at work here.

“The introduction of alien species was devastating to the First Peoples of this continent,” he tells the magazine. “Today we are still struggling to teach our children about the relationship they need to have with the land. We can only hope our elders are speaking the truth when they say the trees will make themselves invisible until we learn to respect them.”

Source: Native Peoples (article not available online)

Image of basket weaver Frank Meuse by John DeMings, courtesy of Digby Courier.

On any given night, thousands of people gather together in the total darkness of Alonquin Provincial Park, silently waiting to hear a wolf cry.

"This is probably the largest naturalist-led interpretation program in North America, if not the world," says Rick Stronks, the park’s chief naturalist in On Nature in their field guide to decoding the elusive call of the wolf.

The mysterious howl may mean “I’m a wolf, and I’m over here,” or “Go away—you’re not welcome here!” You’ll have a better idea of what to do after browsing this beautiful, photo-heavy piece by Ray Ford, complete with hair-raising wolf recordings. He writes: 

The roots of the public wolf howl reach back to the late 1950s, when biologist Douglas Pimlot was trying to locate wolves concealed in the park’s dense bush. Pimlott played recorded howls on truck-mounted speakers and listened for the response. The broadcasts received an almost instant—and unnerving—reply. The air filled with howls.

Source: ON Nature 

You can—but should you? In 2007 the global ecotourism industry ferried 55 million U.S. vacationers around the world on better, greener holidays. And every one of them should have been asking themselves that question. The editor in chief of Women’s Adventure, Michelle Theall, eloquently broaches ecotourism’s ethical dilemma in a candid, even haunting editorial.

“The polar bear alongside the boat makes a low chuffing sound,” Theall writes. “He dives to escape us. Each time he surfaces, he moves farther into open water, farther from land. A few passengers ask our guide, Wally, if we’re stressing the bear. I don’t hear his answer. I’m too busy kneeling low on the deck with my Canon. I stretch out one hand. The bear swims just beneath it, and he’s magnificent. . . .Only after I’ve clicked off about 100 images does it occur to me that Wally might be chasing this bear because of me. I’m with a travel magazine. I’m worse than global warming. I’m a journalist.”

 “Guilt’s a heavy souvenir,” writes Theall, who last saw the polar bear, confused and agitated, swimming out toward open water. Although Wally later reassures her that the bear most likely made it back to land, she finds a sobering ecotourism parable in the experience—what is legal is not always what is right.

Source: Women’s Adventure

Image by suneko, licensed under Creative Commons.

Ken Salazar is your new secretary of the interior. But “despite the title, he’s actually the de facto secretary of energy,” a petroleum industry source tells Alan Prendergast of Westword in the Denver alternative weekly’s April 2 issue.

“The Department of the Interior controls one-fifth of the land mass of the United States, and that land contains half of the country’s coal and a third of its oil and natural gas,” Prendergast writes.

The piece is the most detailed assessment we’ve seen yet of Salazar’s first two months in office, and while it’s ultimately too early to draw big conclusions—Salazar, true to his reputation, has so far displayed an “earnest, let’s-work-this-out centrism”—it does a good job of pointing out the challenges he faces as he makes grand pronouncements about “taking the moonshot of energy independence” and reaching a “New Energy Frontier.”

“He’s already presented glimpses of the kind of multi-layered agenda not seen since the dawn of the New Deal,” Prendergast writes. However, “true reform at Interior will require coming to terms with deep-rooted political realities that promote abuse of public lands and shortchange the public.”

(Thanks, Altweeklies.com.)

Image by Mike Disharoon, licensed under Creative Commons.

The wolf is back in a big way in Wisconsin, with more than 500 of the animals roaming the state’s northern regions where they were wiped out a half-century ago. And like many other states with growing wolf numbers, this resurgence is kicking up a heated discussion that has scientific, political, and social undertones. An article in Grow, the magazine of the University of Wisconsin’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, explores the balancing act faced by wolf biologists as they navigate this thicket of issues.

At Utne Reader, we’ve read plenty about the wolf boom further west in High Country News and other sources. And Minnesota, where we’re based, is no stranger to the discussion since Wisconsin’s wolves came from packs in Minnesota, where there are several thousand wolves. Still, the Grow article, by Erik Ness, is a fascinating read full of thought-provoking quotes from wolf researchers. Among them:

-- “Not only do [wolves] not require wilderness, they will live absolutely everywhere. As long as you don’t kill them, or hit them with a car, and there are enough deer, they’re fine. And of course, sometimes things substitute for deer.”

-- “The people who accept these large predators are often the people who don’t live near them.”

-- “Like a like of natural resource issues, the agenda is set by the people who scream the loudest.”

-- “The fact that wolves made it back on their own into Wisconsin, into a place inhabited by and used by people, gives me more hope for the places I work in the rest of the world where there isn’t a big pristine place to put wildlife in.”

Sources: Grow, High Country News, International Wolf Center

Image by Tambako the Jaguar, licensed under  Creative Commons . 

In an unusual collaboration, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and the conservation group Rare teamed up with individual artists to draw attention to eight United Nation World Heritage Sites, reports Orion magazine. All of the sites are threatened in some way—by lack of funding, floods of tourism, climate change, and a host of other pressures.

At the outset, many of the artists worried that they’d be forced into unimaginative advocacy work. “I remember thinking, ‘Do they want me to go make work about tortoises?’” said installation artist Ann Hamilton. “I mean, that is not exactly what I do.” But the museums and Rare allowed them room to respond as they saw fit. The resulting pieces highlight local issues in smart, sensitive ways.

Xu Bing, for instance, held workshops in primary schools near his site, Mount Kenya National Park. He told stories and drew pictures with the children to connect them more personally with the park, and then set up a website to auction off their work. The proceeds benefit a local organization that uses the money to replace trees lost to deforestation on Mount Kenya. 

Check out the article to read descriptions of the other projects, watch interviews with the artists, and browse a slideshow of the art. The pieces have been gathered as an exhibit, “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet,” which is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Image courtesy of John Spooner, licensed under Creative Commons.    

The image of a perfect beach usually doesn’t include piles of seaweed and other natural debris. But though it’s not aesthetically pleasing, beach wrack, as those piles are called, is a vital part of a beach’s ecosystem. Grunion, a species of fish, depend on wrack to house their incubating eggs, and other shorebirds forage in wrack for food.

Beach grooming, which scoops up these piles and flattens and redistributes sand, endangers the wrack’s fragile ecosystem and makes the shoreline more vulnerable to erosion. Grooming has been in effect for many of California’s beaches since the 1960s, but only recently did scientists and environmentalists pick up on the importance of a more natural beach look.

Scientists, activists, and beach managers have started to come together to address these concerns, reports Coastal Services. Recent efforts include a ban on grooming below the high tide line, and training workers and managers to recognize and avoid grunion breeding areas. The activist group (in the process of incorporating as the nonprofit Beach Ecology Coalition) is also exploring alternatives to current grooming practices, including seasonal or rotational grooming, hand grooming, or even leaving beaches untouched.

In order to address the potential unhappiness or confusion of the public at the idea of cluttered beaches, the group has launched a campaign to increase awareness of beach ecosystems and how proper action (or inaction) is vital to nature.

Image courtesy of willsfca, licensed under Creative Commons.

Although the environment has come up somewhat briefly in the recent presidential debates, do voters really know exactly how the candidates stack up on issues like drilling, animal protection, and conservation?

Advocacy for Animals, part of Encyclopedia Britannica’s website, has created a quick, four-part resource on those topics. "Environmental & Animal Welfare, Where the Candidates Stand" filters out the white noise of ads and accusations and leaves a clear, concise breakdown of each  presidential and vice-presidential candidate’s position on environmental matters, citing their voting records, public statements, and official actions.

The summary is not exhaustive, but still gives readers a good idea of what they can expect from the nominees.

Part 1: Drilling, Mining, and Energy 

Part 2: Animal Welfare and Protection 

Part 3: Global Warming 

Part 4: Environmental Conservation 

Image courtesy of ccgd, licensed under Creative Commons.

In an exercise in terrifying imagery, more than 400 dead baby penguins have been washing ashore in Rio de Janeiro over the past couple of months. 

The Associated Press reported last week that no direct cause for the penguicide has been found yet, though theories abound. Thiago Muniz, a veterinarian at Brazil's Niteroi Zoo, thinks overfishing could be to blame by sending the penguins on longer hunts for fish away from their native shores in Antarctica and Patagonia. "That leaves them more vulnerable to getting caught up in the strong ocean currents," he told the AP.

Erli Costa, a biologist from Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University, theorizes that global warming could be the culprit. Costa claims that climate change has caused an increase in cyclones and harsher currents, which make the seas rough on the young birds.

Global warming has already taken a heavy toll on penguins. The UK's Daily Mail reported earlier this month that the Antarctic Peninsula's average temperature has risen by three degrees to an average -14.7 degrees Celsius (about six degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 50 years, which in turn has caused freezing rain to be much more common than snow. Baby penguins don't develop water-protective feathers until 40 days after their birth, leaving them susceptible to hypothermia. Estimates are that, with tens of thousands of baby birds freezing to death, Adelie penguins could be extinct within 10 years.

(Thanks, TreeHugger and NYCsceneQueen.)

Image by Aaron Jacobs, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to step into the controversy over the Navy’s use of sonar in marine habitat off the coast of Southern California. Next term, the high court will hear the Navy’s appeal of a Ninth Circuit order to suspend or minimize the military exercises. 

Sonar has been blamed for whale strandings and severe injuries, though the Navy claims that the technology’s impacts are minimal and temporary. The science, however, is not what’s at the root of the case. Rather, as Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times explains, the judges will decide whether the executive branch has the right to overrule federal laws and statutes in “emergency circumstances”—the label the government used in January to claim that such exercises were necessary in a time of war. (That’s one more principle to be swept under the banner of the War on Terror.)

Military sonar is the most high-profile noise pollution in the ocean, but it’s not the only aural scourge for marine mammals. As Judith Lewis reports in our current issue, “researchers also worry about constant background noise in the sea: sound that causes little in the way of instant injury, and whose effects are harder to prove, but may have a long-term, chronic impact on marine mammals.” Think of the constant drone of cargo ships crisscrossing the globe, the seismic air guns blasting through waters as petroleum outfits hunt for oil, and the acoustic deterrents that fishing operations use to warn other animals off their nets. This noise might be preventing whales from hearing each other, finding mates, or navigating properly (which might send them crashing into ships). You should take a listen for yourself. We’ve compiled a few examples of the different sounds—natural and unnatural—ricocheting through the world’s waters in this online exclusive.

Medicinal herbs stave off a range of ills, including the common cold, joint stiffness, and herpes outbreaks. Soon, they might be able to stave off tiger poaching. The Wildlife Conservation Society Russia Program hopes to reduce Siberian tiger poaching by collecting and selling certified organic herbs, reports In Good Tilth (article not available online), the newspaper of the sustainable agriculture nonprofit Oregon Tilth. Russian villagers will collect Siberian ginseng root, wild rosehips, and Schisandra chinensis berries on organic certified land managed by local hunting clubs. The Wildlife Conservation Society hopes the income generated from selling organic medicinal herbs will reduce the temptation for locals to hunt or allow the hunting of the eight to 10 tigers who roam the area. Only 400 to 500 wild Siberian tigers remain worldwide.