Norway's whaling policy has attracted condemnation

Whaling vessels have left Norway for the Barents Sea to open this year's whale-hunting season, defying an international moratorium and protests.

The Norwegian government has set a quota of 670 minke whales for the season, which runs until 31 August.

The Scandinavian nation is the only country in the world that authorises whaling for commercial purposes.

Iceland and Japan are the only other nations to fish whales, though they claim to do so for scientific reasons.

National pride

Norway started commercial whaling again in 1993, despite an international ban on the practice seven years earlier.

It argues the hunt is needed to stop the whale population from growing so large that it devours huge stocks of fish. It says the minke whale population levels remain healthy and are not endangered by its annual hunt.

However, environmental group Greenpeace told AFP news agency that demand for whale meat in Norway was diminishing.

It accuses the Norwegian government of persisting with its controversial whaling policy to prop up national pride.

Grenade-tipped harpoons

Controversy has also focused on the manner in which the whales are killed.

Environmentalists say the grenade-tipped harpoons that explode inside the beast are unnecessarily cruel.

Whalers argue it is one of the quickest methods for killing a whale.

The first whaling vessels left Norway to hunt in the North Sea last week. But the main catches are made in the area of the North Atlantic known as the Barents Sea.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3701805.stm


Informant: Teresa Binstock

The onslaught is coming at us and everything from so many angles we must bend together our movements against war, against environmental destruction, against the destruction of what social fabric we have left to cover ourselves--flags don't count.

They have us so on our heels keeping us in reactionary mode, but we still must take those most needed steps beyond and can only do this with the resources of the larger movements already in place. Merging these movements can be done so it causes a media event that keeps us in the media. A voice strong and concerted enough it can no longer be ignored, because we adamantly push it into the mainstream.


May 8, 2004

Salmon unlikely to tip balance in election

By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post

SEATTLE - The Pacific Northwest woke up last week to what Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., called a ``bombshell.'' The Bush administration had abruptly changed the rules on protecting wild salmon, the semi-sacred indicators of regional identity.

As outlined in a leaked document, the administration would count hatchery salmon, bred in concrete tanks and pumped into rivers by the hundreds of millions, when deciding whether endangered wild salmon deserve federal protection.

``The president's men are plotting a brazen flanking move around the Endangered Species Act,'' wrote Joel Connelly, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in an overwhelmingly negative assessment that was echoed by editorials and politicians across the Northwest.

Suddenly, it seemed, there was an environmental issue with political legs in Oregon and Washington, both regarded as swing states in the presidential race. Pollsters see a tight contest, especially in Oregon, with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the presumptive Democratic nominee, narrowly ahead but President Bush within striking distance.

Had Bush tripped over a fish? Might an environmental issue make a significant difference in the presidential race? The realpolitik answer, from two longtime independent pollsters in Oregon and Washington, is an emphatic no.

``There are only so many issues people can be fretful about, and right now salmon is not one of them,'' said Tim Hibbits, a pollster in Portland. ``There are these monster issues out on the table: the economy and the war. The environment is not an issue in any major way. If people don't have a job, they are not going to worry as much about salmon.''

Oregon has the country's highest unemployment rate.

A decade ago, a regional poll found that three-quarters of those questioned agreed that if wild salmon were lost, an important part of the identity of the Pacific Northwest would also disappear.

But now, according to Stuart Elway, a Seattle pollster whose firm asked that salmon question, the economy and the war monopolize public attention, pushing environmental issues - salmon included - into the political shadows. ``Too many things are crowding that issue out,'' he said. ``It has been a long time since people thought the environment was enough in peril to raise it to the level of a real campaign issue.''

The Pacific Northwest, for all its avowed greenness, is not unlike the rest of the country. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the percentage of Americans who say protecting the environment should be a top priority for Bush and Congress has fallen sharply, according to the Pew Research Center. It was 63 percent in January 2001, but slid to 39 percent in 2003 before rising to 49 percent in January of this year.

``Environmental issues play much better when the economy is good, and people aren't worried about war,'' Hibbits said. ``In a more benign climate, this salmon decision would be an issue.''

The Bush administration decision on salmon appears likely to cause multiple secondary eruptions of environmentalist rage throughout the summer. Courts have ordered federal officials to decide by then whether they will remove a dozen or so salmon species from protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Many salmon biologists say the federal government has tipped its hand on this decision by announcing it will count genetically similar hatchery fish in assessing the survival chances of wild fish. They expect that a number of salmon species will be moved from the endangered or threatened list - moves that will certainly infuriate many environmentalists.

``This will give people who don't like George Bush another reason not to like him,'' Hibbits said. ``Bush supporters will probably like it, as they tend to be on the resource-extraction side of these issues. But it won't make any difference to swing voters, who are the key to the election. They won't decide based on salmon.''

The Sierra Club's executive director, Carl Pope, agrees that the administration's new salmon policy is unlikely to tip the balance for undecided voters. But he said the policy will rile up the Democratic base in Oregon and Washington and make it more likely to vote. ``This decision is the most compelling example we have to demonstrate to Northwest residents that Bush is using his imperial power to take your identity away from you,'' Pope said.

In a normal presidential election year, Pope said the environmental community expects that about 10 percent of the strongly pro-environment electorate would not bother to vote. But thanks to this decision, he said, ``we can bring them out.''

That is a prediction that Bob Moore, a Portland pollster who works for GOP candidates in the West, finds improbable. He said his polls show that while most voters do care about salmon, they do not see a distinction between fish bred in hatcheries and fish bred in the wild.

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/05/08/b3.cr.salmon.0508.html

Informant: Let's Make Change

By Debora MacKenzie
New Scientist
April 19, 2004

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994897

For years, apparent increases in illness among marine creatures, from whales to coral, have left marine scientists with the uneasy suspicion that the seas are increasingly plagued by disease. Now, US researchers have uncovered the first good evidence that they are right.

In 1998, a dozen of the world's top experts on diseases of marine animals warned that sea creatures seemed to be getting sick more often, with more diseases.

New viruses had appeared in whales and seals, while corals were dying of fungal and algal infections. Pilchards succumbed to viruses and an aggressive parasite expanded its range to attack commercial oysters, scallops and clams. In the Caribbean, some unknown bacteria wiped out what had been the dominant sea urchin.

But there was no way to tell if the apparent increase was simply due to more scientists paying more attention to marine disease. There was no baseline, as no one had ever measured disease incidence in any of these species decades ago.

Now, Jessica Ward, at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has shed important new light on the problem by looking at how the number of reports of marine diseases in nine different groups of marine creatures has changed in the scientific literature since 1970.

"We wanted to find out if something was actually happening," Ward told New Scientist. "For most groups of organisms, we found that yes, there is something going on out there. Now we hope more people will try and figure out where it is coming from."

True incidence

Ward, with Kevin Lafferty, of the University of California in Santa Barbara, first tested whether changing numbers of scientific reports of rabies in US raccoons matched the true incidence of the disease, which is known independently. They matched, suggesting more scientific reports really do mean more disease.

The pair further tested the relationship by removing the most prolific laboratory from the publications they collected for each group of marine creatures -- just in case increased reporting reflected only one scientist's funding success. This did not change any apparent disease trends. Neither did taking out multiple papers on one well-reported disease event, such as the Caribbean urchin die-off.

So using scientific reports as a measure, Ward and Lafferty found that disease has increased in turtles, corals, marine mammals, urchins, and molluscs such as oysters.

Illness seems to have remained steady in the shark and shrimp families, and in seagrasses. Surprisingly, disease reports have diminished for fish.

Easy prey

There are numerous possible reasons for rising disease. One, Ward suggests, is increasing sea surface temperatures due to global warming. This can cause corals to bleach, making them easier prey for infections.

Warming has also led to the northward spread of the oyster parasite Perkinsus. And warming is thought to accelerate the growth of tumours in turtles caused by a herpes virus.

Another possible factor is that human over-fishing has destabilised marine ecosystems. For example, when the urchins in the Caribbean died, corals were overwhelmed by the algae the urchins used to eat. "Normally fish would have eaten the algae instead, but they weren't there," says Ward.

Other suggested causes include:

• new pathogens from domestic animals, such as dog distemper virus and the parasite Toxoplasma
• bioaccumulation of toxins weakening marine mammals' immunity
• new species carried across oceans in ships' ballast tanks introducing new diseases

In the face of all this, the apparent health of fish is intriguing. Ward says this could be because the fish are simply fewer in number. Many pathogens die out among animals that are not packed densely enough to pass the infection on. But it is also possible, she says, that the frequency of disease is just as bad or worse -- but fewer fish mean fewer observations, and fewer reports.

Journal reference: PLoS Biology (vol 2, p 542)


Informant: NHNE

Weltweit ist jede achte Vogelart in ihrem Bestand gefährdet. Ursachen sind nach den Erkenntnissen der Umweltschutzallianz Birdlife vor allem intensive Landwirtschaft sowie die Abholzung tropischer Regenwälder.

http://www.sonnenseite.com/fp/archiv/Akt-News/4563.php

The Telegraph
March 19, 2004

http://tinyurl.com/3ysew

An accelerating decline in species, in particular a fall in butterflies, provides the first hard evidence that the Earth is on the verge of a sixth mass extinction.

There have been at least five over the past 500 million years, with the biggest occurring 250 million years ago.

Scientists report today that species diversity is falling fast and, contrary to current opinion, insects are particularly hard hit. This indicates that scientists may have underestimated the magnitude of the pending extinction.

If they are correct, the Earth is heading for the first global wipeout with an organic cause, with humans the dominant agent of destruction. Earlier extinctions were triggered by volcanism, cosmic impacts and other physical causes.

"The warning is there for all to see - we are poised on the verge of the sixth extinction crisis," said Dr Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum. "Britain, by virtue of its well-known and well-studied biodiversity, is the canary for the rest of the globe."

Around 28 per cent of our 1,254 native plant species have significantly fallen in abundance in the past 40 years, 54 per cent of the 201 native bird species over two decades, and 71 per cent of our 58 butterfly species over the same period, according to the milestone comparative study published in the journal Science, led by Dr Jeremy Thomas of the Natural Environment Research Council's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Dorchester.

"One form of life has become so dominant on Earth that, through its
over-exploitation and waste, it eats, destroys or poisons the others," he said. "It is accelerating, this decline, and we are going to lose more than we lost in the past 20 years."

The team's study used data collected by scientists and 20,000 volunteers scouring the countryside and could only have been done here, where more is known about diversity than anywhere else.

Until now, the idea that the world is undergoing a sixth mass extinction, with the loss of species rising to 100 times normal rates, has rested on studies of a relatively small portion of the world's plants and animals.

Population information about insects, which make up approximately half of all known species on Earth, has been particularly sparse and talk of a mass extinction was "an enormous extrapolation", said Dr Thomas.

Now this gap has been filled, as Dr Thomas and colleagues analysed six surveys covering virtually all of the native plant, bird and butterfly populations over the last 40 years, including one he helped to conduct 25 years ago, revealing the impact of pollution, habitat loss and degradation.

Dr Thomas said his team was surprised butterflies had fared so poorly, a discovery with global implications. "This provides the first objective support, for any group of insects, for the hypothesis that the world is experiencing the sixth major extinction event."

Over 20 years, the ranges of approximately 70 per cent of all butterfly species declined to some degree, many severely. Shadier woodland floors, resulting from changing management, have harmed caterpillars of the high brown fritillary, causing a "frightening" 71 per cent drop, for example. Loss of grasslands have harmed the blues, such as the Large Blue.

On average, these insects disappeared from 13 per cent of areas they once occupied. "That's the opposite of what people thought 20 years ago: that insects were much more resilient because they could fly about," Dr Thomas said.

In a second study published today in Science, Carly Stevens, a doctoral student at the Open University and the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Huntingdon, and colleagues recorded the abundance of plant species in 68 grasslands in upland areas.

She reports "strong evidence" of a decline in species richness, for instance in species such as heather, harebells and eye-bright.

Nitrogen pollution is the most likely cause: excess nitrogen can allow a few species, especially grasses, to grow fast and crowd or shade out their neighbours. The nitrogen is the result of agricultural fertilisation and fossil fuel combustion.

Informant: NHNE

US Endangered Species Act Under Attack

For the past three years, the Bush Administration has waged a war to weaken and turn back the clock on more than 30 years of environmental progress, and is now turning its sights on America’s premier federal statute created to bring species back from the brink of extinction. Utilizing a behind-the-scenes approach, in an attempt to evade media coverage and public input, the administration, through the Department of Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is proposing a rule change to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that will legalize the commercial exploitation of endangered species.

Do you believe the best way to save endangered animals is to kill them? Of course not. Yet that's the logic behind the Interior Department's plan to gut America's Endangered Species Act (ESA), which has protected animals worldwide for the last 30 years!

While attempting to evade media coverage and public input, the Fish and Wildlife Service is working to legalize commercial exploitation of endangered species. They would permit a host of previously illegal activities - including killing endangered species.

If we don't act quickly, it will be LEGAL to:

* Hunt endangered species in the U.S. as long as the hunting ranch pays something to "conserve" the species.
* Import trophy heads and parts from endangered species as long as fees paid by the hunters are used by the country to "conserve" the species.
* Import endangered animal skins for fur coats and other fashion items as long as the designers send a little cash to a "conservation" program.
* Import as much African elephant ivory as they wish as long as dealers claim the money will be used for elephant conservation.

We must prevent stop this attack on the ESA ... help spread theword about this unprecedented threat to endangered species.

http://www.care2.com/go/z/12382