More Stars of Singapore
Brittle, feathery and rudely referred to stars on the singapore celebrates the reefs blog
Celebrating nature, children and writing
Pure poetry on the flying fish friends blog
Greening a diet
on the blooooooooooo blog
Release of the heron chick
on the bird ecology blog
More coral ID at Semakau
on the discovery blog
Denise Winterman, BBC News Magazine 4 Jan 08;
"We buy things and the more things we have we sort of build a fortress around ourselves and think we can't be got at. But none of these material things really matter, illness demolishes them all."
If you were diagnosed with a terminal illness how would it affect the way you live those remaining days? Dying people often find their life gains a renewed focus that teaches them something special about how to live.
Cheese. It's what Ian John Phelps thought about after being told he had lung cancer and it would kill him. Something as "strange and stupid" as that.
"Living in Dorset we have a whole number of different types of cheese, I just thought I want to try as many different varieties of them as I can," he says.
What would you do if you were told you didn't have long to live? There's a fascinating morbidity about such a question, that many of us will have pondered, safe in the knowledge that it remains hypothetical.
The cliche is to go out and buy a fast car, rack up debts and think little about the consequences. Sampling a rich variety of local dairy produce certainly wasn't uppermost in Mr Phelps' mind before he received his grave prognosis.
In the words of John Ransom, who also has a fatal disease, it gives you a new sense of focus however "awful, hideous and catastrophic" being terminally ill is.
"There are some things about my cancer that are a gift and that may seem really odd to some people," says Mr Ransom, who was 32 when he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that affects the whole lymphatic system. He's now 46.
"It's aroused something in me that's made me more aware. You can do the same things for 20 years, running back and forth to work, or have five years where you process more about your life. I don't know which one is the best, but maybe the latter is a much richer way to live.
Slowing down
"I was walking on the North Yorkshire moors recently, I was high up and the heather was out. I just felt I was on the ceiling of the sky almost. It was an incredibly intense feeling of happiness."
Often the assumption is that people will want to squeeze the maximum out of the limited time they have left. Travel the world, climb a mountain, swim with dolphins.
Take fundraiser Jane Tomlinson, who died of cancer last year aged 43. Despite her illness she showed an indomitable spirit and raised £1.5m for charity. She ran, swam and cycled into the record books, doing marathons and cycling across America.
But happiness is not only about living life to the full, even though the pressure to do so when you don't have much time left can be immense, say those who are in the situation.
Slowing down and enjoying the day-to-day is what gives you true freedom, says Frances Byrnes, a writer from Sheffield, diagnosed at the aged of 32 with advanced ovarian cancer.
"You hear people say that if your days are numbered then everyday has to be superb. It becomes a terrible pressure. I let myself be, I let go of that voice that says all time must be valuably used.
"You let yourself be what you can be that day. Letting go of that... daily check list of achievements is freeing and the world still works without you. I actually felt really alive, I was examining the texture of everything around me."
Smell the roses
A self-confessed "busy bee" before his diagnosis, Mr Phelps, 45, agrees. He says because of his illness he has had to learn to slow down.
"Because I have it gives me the opportunity to look at things in a closer, more detailed way. My eyes are being opened up and lucky me."
A lot of research done on dealing with a terminal illness has shown that people often end up living a happier and much fuller life in the time they have left, says psychoanalyst and counsellor Gladeana McMahon.
"People deal with such news differently, some never come to terms with it. But most go through an acceptance process that includes anger and disbelief, but ultimately leads them to re-evaluate life.
"It gives them a new focus, a new clarity, a new perspective on what is important. I call it smelling the roses."
People get caught up in the petty minutiae of daily life, let it stress them and lose out on what is really important and in front of their faces, she says. Mr Ransom agrees.
"You feel you are in a war zone sometimes, trying to achieve what you think you want with a lot of other people striving for the outcome they want," says the father of two from Stockport.
"At times I have likened my own experience to the salmon swimming back to the breeding ground, struggling up the river. One of the things I've let go of is always wanting to have my own way and always wanting particular outcomes and actually going with the flow of things.
Life's misfortunes
"I've turned myself round and am going with the river. You feel happier than when you are struggling against it the whole time."
Often the pressure to achieve is about getting a certain lifestyle. But while people chase the latest gadgets and goods, they should not lose sight of the fact that these things cannot hold back life's misfortunes, says Mr Ransom.
"We spend a lot of our time trying to protect ourselves, this whole consumer society fits in quite neatly with it I think.
"We buy things and the more things we have we sort of build a fortress around ourselves and think we can't be got at. But none of these material things really matter, illness demolishes them all."
But ultimately no one knows what time they have left. Diagnosed with a terminal illness or not, your life can change in a instant. That's why you should seize the moment, to ask all those questions you have in your head and tell people how you feel, says Mr Pehlps.
"I've been to a load of funerals in my time and so many times people turn round and say if only I'd got the opportunity to ask dad or mum this question, but now I'll never know," he says.
"From the moment you are born and start learning to speak you have the opportunity to ask, so use that. Use it to tell people how you feel about them. I wouldn't wait until you have an illness or anything like that, get on and do it now."
Channel NewsAsia 4 Jan 08;
SINGAPORE : A cartoon series produced by a local company has been named as "one of the greatest products of 2007".
The accolade comes from a prestigious US media organisation known as iParenting.
It picked the 52-episode show called "Taoshu" which is created and produced by Peach Blossom Media.The series is named after a Chinese warrior boy and traces his adventures. The show propagates themes like non-violence, honesty and selflessness.
The series is aimed at children aged three to seven and has been praised for its imaginative plots and attractive visuals.
Since its debut in 2005, the cartoon has been broadcast in television stations in Hong Kong, US, France and the Middle East.
The 'Taoshu: Wild About Wildlife' DVD has been placed on par with Disney's "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" and Sesame Workshop's "Ready for School" DVDs.
iParenting is dedicated to helping parents make informed choices for their children.
- CNA /ls
LiveScience.com Yahoo News 2 Jan 08;
Two new pinky-sized salamander species and one the size of a fingernail have been discovered crawling around in a remote Costa Rican forest.
The new species, found by botanist Alex Munro of the Natural History Museum, London, and colleagues while on expedition, are among 5,300 plants, insects and amphibians recorded during three explorations of La Amistad National Park on the Costa Rica–Panama border.
La Amistad is the biggest forest reserve in Central America, yet it remains one of the least explored places in the continent. These new discoveries, announced today, increase the number of salamander species in Costa Rica from 40 to 43, making it a center of diversity for these amphibians.
"Finding so many new species in one area is exciting, particularly as this is probably the only place in the world you can find these animals," said Monro, leader of a project to explore La Amistad and record its biodiversity. "It shows we still have a lot to learn about the variety of wildlife in this region. We have four more expeditions planned this year — who knows what we could find when we go back?"
Salamanders are amphibians, not lizards, with slender bodies and short legs, the latter of which they can regenerate if lost. They keep their skin moist, by living near water or swamps.
Two of the new salamanders are from the Bolitoglossa genus and are nocturnal, coming out at night to feed. The first Bolitoglossa species is 3 inches (8 centimeters) long and black, with a bold red stripe down its back and small yellow markings on its side.
The second Bolitoglossa species is 2.3 inches (6 centimeters) long and deep brown with a pale cream underside.
The third salamander is from the Nototriton (dwarf salamander) genus and is a mere 1 inch (3 centimeters) in length, with red-brown coloring and black markings on its side.
The specimens will be studied and named later by scientists at the University of Costa Rica, where they will form part of the national collections.
The expeditions are part of a project funded by the UK government’s Darwin Initiative to provide baseline information to underpin the conservation of La Amistad National Park. The Natural History Museum is working in partnership with Costa Rica’s national biodiversity institute, INBio, the University of Costa Rica, the University of Panama and Panama’s national parks authority.
La Amistad is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it represents the most remote part of the Talamanca Mountains, mainly due to the treacherous terrain and lack of roads. It has been estimated that two thirds of all Costa Rica’s native species live there, including more than 250 species of reptiles and amphibians, 600 species of birds, 215 species of mammals and 14,000 species of plant.
Bio-rich Costa Rica's new marvels
BBC News 4 Jan 08;
Three new species of salamander have been discovered in a remote forest reserve in Costa Rica.
They were among some 5,000 plants and animals recorded by scientists from London's Natural History Museum during three expeditions to Central America.
Two species are nocturnal, while the third is a dwarf variety, growing to little longer than a thumbnail.
The three new finds bring the number of Costa Rican salamanders known to science to a total of 43.
Salamanders eat insects and worms, and live in water or in moist areas. They usually feed at night and hide during the day, often hibernating during the winter.
Some 300 species are known around the world, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, but there have been few new discoveries since 1998, when five new salamanders were found in tropical east-central Mexico.
The three new salamanders were found in La Amistad National Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site on the Costa Rica-Panama border.
Two belong to the nocturnal Bolitoglossa genus; while the third, from the Nototriton (dwarf salamander) family, is a diminutive 3cm (1 inch) in length.
"Finding so many new species in one area is exciting, particularly as this is probably the only place in the world you can find these animals," said the NHM's Dr Alex Monro, who is leading the project.
"It shows we still have a lot to learn about the variety of wildlife in this region. We have four more expeditions planned this year - who knows what we could find when we go back?"
La Amistad National Park has few roads and treacherous terrain, so remains largely unexplored.
Scientists believe the region is a centre for diversity for these tailed amphibians. It is thought to be home to some two-thirds of all Costa Rica's native species, including hundreds of birds, mammals, reptiles and other amphibians, and thousands of plants.
The new species will be named and catalogued by scientists at the University of Costa Rica. The Natural History Museum is working alongside scientists and officials in Costa Rica and Panama on the project, funded by the UK government's Darwin Initiative to promote biodiversity conservation.
Three New Salamanders Found in Remote Cloud Forests
James Owen, National Geographic News 4 Jan 08;
Three previously unknown salamanders have been discovered in remote cloud forests in Central America, scientists announced yesterday.
The newly revealed amphibians, including a dwarf salamander just the width of a fingernail and a creature with lurid markings resembling a poison frog's, were found in La Amistad International Park on the Costa Rica-Panama border.
The discoveries were made last year during expeditions led by Alex Monro of the Natural History Museum in London.
La Amistad is Central America's biggest rain forest reserve, but much it remains completely unstudied, Monro said.
The new species, which increase the number of salamanders known in Costa Rica to 45, probably don't exist anywhere else in world, the biologist added.
"These particular species will have very small ranges," he said. "This area hadn't been explored, so they just weren't known before."
Unusual Finds
The amphibians, which have not yet been named, include a dwarf salamander just 1.2 inches (3 centimeters) long. From the genus Nototriton, the tiny creature lives in mosses and leaf litter.
The other newfound species belong to Bolitoglossa, a genus that hunts small insects at night.
One species is deep brown in color with a pale cream underside.
The other, measuring three inches (eight centimeters) in length, has a bright red back and yellow blotches down each side. Its conspicuous coloration resembles the warning markings of poison arrow frogs, Monro noted.
All three creatures are very slow moving, he added, "but they have this ballistic tongue that shoots out at incredible speeds and wraps around prey."
The salamanders were among 5,300 plant, insect, and amphibian species recorded during three expeditions to the cloud forests of La Amistad, a 490,000-acre (198,000-hectare) United Nations World Heritage site that reaches elevations of more than 11,000 feet (3,350 meters) in places.
Two suspected new frog species and several unknown plants have also been identified as part of the project, which is funded by the U.K. government's Darwin Initiative to survey biodiversity in the region.
The La Amistad project also aims to shed light on the causes of a worldwide decline in tropical amphibians highlighted by recent studies.
Falling populations and extinctions have been linked to factors such as global warming, habitat loss, pollution, and a fungus found growing on dead and dying amphibians, Monro said.
"If this is a response to climate change, then we would expect amphibians to be shifting their range upwards as it gets warmer, and there is some evidence of that," he said.
"We have already documented a significant increase in elevation from one frog species."
Salamander Hunt
Hunting the salamanders was painstaking work because of their small size and nocturnal habits, Monro added.
A survey area was marked out during the day, and the study team returned at night.
Likening the task to police investigating a crime scene, Monro said researchers had to pick through leaf litter and mossy tree trunks.
"They had to tease apart mosses and loose bark and look all around in very close detail," he said. "In a night, they will have probably done only a few trees and maybe a hundred meters of pathway."
Future Expeditions
Because of the obscurity of the region, four further expeditions are planned for 2008.
"Central America is quite a densely populated region, so it's amazing there are areas like this remaining which are relatively unexplored," Monro said.
The wildlife is protected largely thanks to the park's remoteness and inhospitable terrain, he added.
"It's very steep, very wet forest, and there are no roads, partly because it would be so difficult to put any in," Monro said.
Team member Eduardo Boza, a herpetologist at the University of Costa Rica, pointed out that Bolitoglossa is the most diverse salamander group in Costa Rica, with 21 described species. But much about the group remains mysterious.
Some species are known from less than five specimens, for instance, he said by email.
"They don't have lungs but breathe through their skin, and they don't live in water at any time," Boza said.
Instead of breeding aquatically, the amphibians lay eggs or give birth to live young on the forest floor, he said.
"Costa Rica is one of the best studied countries in the world at the level of herpetology, but despite this we are still describing new species," Boza added.
"Probably there will be more new species discovered in coming trips."
Letter from Murali Sharma, Straits Times Forum 4 Jan 08;
IT SEEMS that we are clawing our way up the cleanliness scale.
According to the report, 'Less littering and rubbish collected at party spots (ST, Jan 2), we have surfaced from a stifling mountain of trash and improved greatly in the last two years.
But we can do better.
Waste management company FME Onyx reported a 40 per cent reduction in the amount of rubbish collected at the New Year's Eve countdown parties held at Marina Bay and Orchard in the past three years. And rubbish collected went down by a quarter from last year.
Many reasons have been advanced for this positive behaviour: stricter enforcement, changing public attitude and differing crowd sizes. No doubt one should not ban foam and confetti spray cans, which will ruin the festive spirit, but we can learn from this year's experience.
One of the things we can do to ensure a litter-free festival of peace and goodwill is for people to bring their own bags and take their litter home. If this is too troublesome, the revellers can throw their bags of litter into the bins so generously provided by the authorities.
This should not be too difficult if we are proud to be Singaporeans and want to set a good example to others, including our children.
Many countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States are famed for their cleanliness. It will be another feather in our cap and a great legacy we can leave for our children.
Soon to come are the Chinese New Year and Labour Day holidays. These two occasions should serve as practice runs to keep the country clean after National Day. Then come Hari Raya Puasa, Deepavali, the Hungry Ghost festival and so on. Each occasion generates its share of litter and can be used as preparation sessions to keep the country clean at Christmas and New Year's Eve this year.
So fellow Singaporeans, let us pull together to keep our country clean and conserve electricity and water as well. It is good for the national psyche and can form part of our culture.
My wish for the future, for every day of the year, is zero litter. Then, we can concentrate on how we can become a more welcoming, loving and caring society.
Yahoo News 3 Jan 08;
The Naples region was grappling Thursday with a chronic rubbish disposal problem, with at least 2,000 tonnes of excess garbage piled up outside dumps and in the streets.
Overburdened waste treatment centres in the impoverished southern region have been unable to handle the surplus, in a scenario that has been repeated countless times over the past decade and a half.
The daily La Repubblica described the region, with a population of some six million, as "a community that is sinking and suffocating in its own excrement."
Firefighters overnight doused 70 flaming rubbish heaps, set alight by angry area residents, the ANSA news agency reported.
For the second day in a row, defying a warning of tough action by the interior ministry, protesters blocked traffic on a main road near a condemned dump in the western Naples suburb of Pianura that authorities are trying to reopen, ANSA said.
Clandestine dumping by organised crime dubbed the "ecomafia" has forced the closure of several treatment centres.
Criminal investigators say the Camorra mafia pay truckers to haul industrial waste from factories in northern Italy for fees that undercut those of the legal trade. They bring it to illegal dumps in the Naples region made by blasting holes in mountainsides.
In Brussels, a spokeswoman for EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said the European Union was monitoring the situation, having opened an infringement case last June, when it sought a response on measures for protecting human health and the environment in the impoverished southern region.
"We are concerned about the waste issues," Barbara Helfferich told AFP on Thursday, adding that "if necessary we will take the infringement case a step further."
A "waste disposal state of emergency," first decreed for the region in 1994, has been renewed annually ever since.
"They call it an emergency, but ... the same story has been repeated for a decade now," commented leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
While Naples' Camorra mafia are well known for drug trafficking, experts say the multi-billion euro waste business is their second source of revenue, begun in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s.
The area's waste disposal problem was dramatised by a report in the British medical journal The Lancet Oncology in 2004 that identified a "triangle of death" east of Naples where toxic waste has been linked to a higher incidence of cancer, especially liver cancer.
Neapolitans protest against garbage crisis plan
Reuters 3 Jan 08;
NAPLES (Reuters) - About 200 people on Thursday blocked the entrance to a waste dump in Naples which authorities planned to reopen to resolve a garbage crisis blamed on mismanagement, corruption and organized crime.
Shoulder-high mounds of rotting, rat-infested garbage have accumulated in the southern city for months as delays have dogged the opening of a massive incinerator meant to end a 14-year 'state of emergency' for waste in the Naples area.
An end-year deadline for opening the incinerator, designed to burn the waste, was missed and all waste dumps are full, forcing the authorities to try to reopen a landfill that was closed in 1996.
Hundreds of garbage piles in Naples and surrounding towns have been set alight by frustrated residents in recent days, fire authorities said, prompting fears of high levels of cancer-causing dioxin emissions.
Italy declared a state of emergency for waste in Campania, the region of which Naples is the capital, in 1994. But successive trash tsars appointed by the government have failed to end the crisis.
Part of the problem is that organized crime -- rife in the Naples area -- has made illegal waste disposal an industry that was worth 5.8 billion euros ($8.6 billion) in 2006, according to a study by conservation group Legambiente.
Mafia-controlled waste disposal -- by burial or burning -- has poisoned the environment so badly that people in some parts of the region are two to three times more likely to get liver cancer than in the rest of the country, according to Italy's National Research Council.
Italy risks a legal suit from the European Commission, which has sent the government warnings about its failure to deal with waste in Campania.
"The latest developments are a cause for concern and the Commission will look at it more closely in coming weeks," said Barbara Helfferich, Commission spokeswoman for the environment.
(Additional reporting by Darren Ennis in Brussels)
(Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Sarah Marsh)
Garbage crisis stirs protest in Naples
Salvatore Laporta, Associated Press Yahoo News 5 Jan 08;
The mayor of Naples appealed to angry residents Saturday to stay calm in the city's two-week-old garbage crisis, and the prime minister called it an emergency that must to be tackled quickly.
Scattered clashes between youths and police continued, news reports said, as garbage accumulated in stinking mountains in the city. Collectors stopped picking up trash Dec. 21 because there is no more room for it at dumps.
Premier Romano Prodi told journalists in his hometown of Bologna that Naples' garbage problems had to be solved "once and for all," and that government ministers would meet on Monday to come up with a strategy.
"Everybody's watching us, and I don't want Italy to give off this negative image," Prodi said. "It's an emergency we must tackle rapidly."
Garbage pileups due to shortage of space in dumps have plagued the port city sporadically for several years. Although citizens are angered by the uncollected trash, they have also blocked plans to open new dumps in the Naples area.
Groups of youths with their faces largely covered threw stones and pieces of metal at police in several parts of the Pianura neighborhood before dashing away, some of them on motor scooters, the Italian news agency Apcom reported from Naples.
Naples Mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino said she was appealing to the "overwhelming majority" of law-abiding citizens in the Pianura neighborhood, where work has begun to reopen a long-closed dump.
"Respect the law," the mayor was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency ANSA.
In Pianura, the heart of the protests, residents tossed tree trunks on roads and spread oil on streets to try to thwart the arrival of police.
Officials have blamed organized crime infiltration of garbage collection services and disorganized bureaucracy for the piles of trash, on the city's outskirts and lining streets in Naples' historic center.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has said he was alarmed by the situation and called on officials to take up their responsibilities in resolving the problem.
Residents have taken to burning the trash, unleashing clouds of smoke in the city.
Gavin Rabinowitz, Associated Press Yahoo News 3 Jan 08;
A northern Indian state said Thursday it planned to use unemployed youths to sterilize monkeys to try to combat aggressive primates who have been raiding farms. The idea drew immediate condemnation from conservationists, who said the plan was unscientific and would likely worsen the problem.
Indian authorities have struggled in recent years to deal with the tens of thousands of monkeys that live in and around cities. They are drawn to public places such as temples and office buildings, where devout Hindus feed them, believing them to be manifestations of the god Hanuman.
In recent months, the deputy mayor of New Delhi was killed when he fell from his balcony during an attack by wild monkeys, and 25 others were injured when a monkey went on a rampage in the city.
The mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh is infested with rhesus macaque monkeys, who have been driven to farms and cities after losing their natural forest habitat.
Prem Kumar Dhumal, the state's chief minister, said Himachal Pradesh would go on a "war footing" to fight the thousands of monkeys who have been turning farms into wastelands and attacking people, according to a statement from his office.
"Affected districts would be identified and local youth involved in the process, who would be provided training in capturing and sterilization by the experts," the statement quoted Dhumal as saying, adding that they would use "laser sterilization."
The capacity of zoos in the area would be expanded to accommodate captured monkeys, and camps may be set up for them in order to protect crops and other farmland from being encroached upon, the statement said.
Conservationists condemned the proposal to let inexperienced youths sterilize monkeys, saying it was cruel and would not solve the problem.
Sujoy Chaudhuri, an ecologist who co-authored a report by prominent primatologists and conservationists that was submitted recently to the federal and state governments, said the plan would make the monkey problem worse.
"It is a ridiculous idea and what is worse, it will do nothing to contain the problem and probably make it worse," Chaudhuri said. "Can you imagine what having badly sterilized monkeys running around will do to the levels of aggression?"
Belinda Wright, the director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, added: "The government chooses not to act on recommendations from experts and instead comes out with these absurd proposals."
Julian Ryall, National Geographic News 3 Jan 08;
Millions of tiny crustaceans are causing a small island in southern Japan to disappear at an alarming rate, according to a local expert.
The animals, tiny relatives of crabs and shrimp that are known in the region as nanatsuba-kotsubumushi, are boring into the uninhabited island of Hoboro.
Recent rises in ocean temperature have led to an increase in the amount of plankton in the protected waters around the island.Plankton are a staple of the nanatsuba-kotsubumushi, and the abundance of food has led to a surge in the crustaceans.
"I first went out to the island two years ago, and I was shocked to see the number of crustaceans on the island and what they had done to it," said Yuji Okimura, an emeritus professor at Hiroshima University.
"The creatures make holes in the rock as they make nesting areas," Okimura said, "which makes it weaker and very susceptible to weathering from the ocean and the wind."
Dissolving Island
Hoboro lies about 1,650 feet (500 meters) off the coast of Japan's Hiroshima Prefecture, in the narrow sea that separates the main islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku (see map).
The island was originally named for its shape, which resembled an upside-down version of a type of bamboo basket used by the local people.
In a survey carried out in 1928, Hoboro was recorded as being 390 feet (120 meters) long and standing nearly 72 feet (22 meters) above sea level at its highest point.
Photographs from the 1960s show that the island was getting smaller but still had two distinct rocky peaks partially covered by vegetation.
All that remains today, however, is a rocky promontory about 20 feet (6 meters) high at the western end—and that is almost covered at high tide.
Hiroshima residents living nearby first noted that the island seemed to be getting smaller after every storm or typhoon.
The island's soft rock, a material called tuff that is primarily composed of densely compacted volcanic ash, is an ideal habitat for the booming population of nanatsuba-kotsubumushi, Okimura said.
Through normal weathering, it would usually take thousands of years for the elements to reduce an island the size of Hoboro to debris, he noted.
Geological Oddity
But some experts have estimated that, at the current rate, the island may be gone within a century.
"This is a quite fascinating bio-erosion phenomenon that I've never seen anywhere else," said Akihiro Kano, an associate professor of historical geology at Hiroshima University.
"From Professor Okimura's evidence, it is obvious that these creatures are promoting the erosion of this island at a very rapid pace.
"By looking at the older images of the island and comparing them with the way it looks today, the scale of the changes is incredible," he added.
"Also, I don't think there has been another case of such a high density of these creatures, so there must be some interesting reasons for that we can learn more about."
What's more, Hoboro appears to be something of a geological oddity, Okimura said, with no other islands in the immediate area made of the same material.
Although he prefers not to put a time scale on the island's destruction, Okimura added that it's unclear where the burrowing creatures will go when Hoboro does ultimately disappear beneath the waves.
Dan Joling, Associated Press National Geographic News 3 Jan 08;
Environmental groups are condemning a government plan to open sea floor off the northwest coast of Alaska to petroleum leases, saying the decision was based on incomplete information and seriously threatens already burdened arctic species.
The U.S. Minerals Management Agency planned the sale in the Chukchi Sea without taking into account changes in the Arctic brought on by global warming, and the agency proposed insufficient protections for polar bears, walrus, whales, and other species that could be harmed by drilling rigs or spills, according to the groups.
The lease sale in an area nearly 46,000 square miles (120,000 square kilometers) big—slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania—was planned without information as basic as the polar bear and walrus populations, said Pamela A. Miller, Arctic coordinator with Northern Alaska Environmental Center.
The lease sale is among the largest acreage offered in the Alaska region.
"The Minerals Management Service is required to have preleasing baseline data sufficient to determine the post-leasing impacts of the oil and gas activities that will occur," Miller said. "They simply do not have that."
The MMS announced it would hold a lease sale on February 6 in Anchorage for the ocean floor on the outer continental shelf of the Chukchi Sea, the body of water that begins north of the Bering Strait and stretches between northwest Alaska and the northern coast of the Russian Far East. (See a map of the area.)
The MMS is a branch of the Interior Department. Among its stated aims is the management of ocean energy and mineral resources on the outer continental shelf.
"A Good Balance"
The sale in February would be the first federal OCS oil and gas lease sale in the Chukchi Sea since 1991. The agency estimates the area contains 15 billion barrels of conventionally recoverable oil and 77 trillion cubic feet (2.2 trillion cubic meters) of conventionally recoverable natural gas.
MMS director Randall Luthi said the agency took steps to protect wildlife.
"MMS funds a robust environmental studies program to monitor the effects of industry activity in the OCS, including more than 40 ongoing Arctic-specific studies," Luthi said. "Following up on a workshop attended by over 100 scientists and stakeholders, we are inaugurating a new suite of research for the Chukchi Sea to further monitor marine mammals, other communities, hydrocarbons, and subsistence uses."
The sale is backed by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and community and tribal leaders, he said.
"We believe our decision is a good balance and will allow companies to explore this intriguing frontier area while still protecting the resources important to the coastal residents," Luthi said.
Global Warming
Miller and Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity said the MMS ignored dangers to animals and birds if an oil spill were to occur.
"No one yet has figured out how to clean up a spill in broken ice, so they just stick their head in the sand and pretend it won't happen," Cummings said.
He also said the agency's environmental assessment ignored changes brought by global warming.
The Chukchi Sea, he said, is the nation's most important habitat for Pacific walrus. The lease sale assumes a stable walrus population, ignoring developments of 2007.
Unlike seals, walruses cannot swim indefinitely and must "haul out" on ice or land to rest. In late summer, thousands of animals hauled out on the northwest Alaska coast for several months because their usual platform for foraging, sea ice, receded far beyond the relatively shallow continental shelf to waters too deep for walrus to dive for food.
On the Russian side of the Chukchi Sea, biologists recorded herds gathering on shore instead of the pack ice, including one group of up to 40,000 animals at Point Shmidt, a spot that had not been used by walruses as a haul-out for a century.
Russian biologists estimate that 3,000 to 4,000 mostly young animals were crushed in stampedes when polar bears, hunters, or low-flying aircraft startled walruses and sent them rushing to the safety of the sea.
"It doesn't address the reality that things are happening rapidly with walrus and we need to be very, very careful in what we do," Cummings said of the lease plan.
Polar Bears
The Chukchi Sea also is home to one of two U.S. polar bear populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is days away from deciding whether polar bears should be declared threatened because of global warming and its effect on the animal's primary habitat, sea ice.
"The chances for the continued survival of this icon of the Arctic will be greatly diminished if its last remaining critical habitat is turned into a vast oil and gas field," said Margaret Williams, managing director of conservation group WWF's Kamchatka and Bering Sea Program.
Polar bears spend most of their lives on sea ice. They use sea ice to hunt their primary prey, ringed seals. In Alaska, females use sea ice to den or to reach denning areas on land.
Arctic sea ice last summer plummeted to the lowest levels since satellite measurements began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.
The sale area will not include near-shore waters, which are about 25 to 50 miles (40 to 80 kilometers) from the coast, Luthi said. That near-shore buffer is used by bowhead and beluga whales, other marine mammals, and marine birds migrating north in the spring, Luthi said, as well as subsistence hunters from coastal villages.
Cummings said the agency used inadequate standards for assessing the effect of sound from seismic and drilling activity. It also failed to take into account recent sightings of endangered fin and humpback whales in the Chukchi Sea, he said.
"The buffer may put activities out of sight from land but it certainly doesn't shield the land from an oil spill," he said.
Jeremy Lovell, Reuters 3 Jan 08;
LONDON (Reuters) - The British government's public consultation last year on the need for new nuclear power plants to tackle climate change and bridge the looming energy gap was flawed and misleading, a group of academics said on Friday.
The government, which has said repeatedly new nuclear power stations are needed, was forced by a legal ruling last February to undertake the consultation which ended in October.
It is expected early next week to give the green light to a new generation of nuclear power plants to replace the ageing nuclear stations due to close by 2035 which currently supply nearly 20 percent of the country's electricity.
"The government was in error in asking the public for a decision 'in principle', when the core 'what if' issues were not consulted on in any meaningful way, or resolved in practice," the academics concluded in an 80-page report.
"These issues include nuclear fuel supply and manufacture, vulnerability to attack, security and nuclear proliferation, radiation waste, radiation risk and health effects, reactor decommissioning, reactor design and siting," they added.
Environmentalists, who could have given a balancing view, pulled out of the public consultations in September, saying the process was clearly intended to produce a positive outcome.
Greenpeace, which took up the legal case in February, said its lawyers would study the government's decision in detail and it reserved the right to go back to court.
"We believe we have a very strong case but will not be bounced into taking a decision," Greenpeace campaigner Ben Ayliffe told Reuters.
The main issue for the group of academics from universities including Oxford, Warwick, Sussex, Newcastle, Cardiff and Manchester is disposal of waste from the new nuclear plants.
"The government consultation documents said this issue had been resolved. That is simply not true," said Paul Dorfman of Warwick University, one of the report's authors.
CoRWM, the independent Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, said in 2006 nuclear waste, which remains toxic for centuries, should be kept forever in a specially built safe storage facility deep under ground.
But while the government pointed to this as the solution to waste from any new plants, CoRWM said it only meant this solution to apply to waste from Britain's old military nuclear program dating back to the 1950s, so called legacy waste.
The academics also accused the government of glossing over security considerations, the true costs of nuclear and alternative renewable energy sources, the availability of uranium fuel and the siting of new nuclear plants given sea level rises due to global warming.
Underlying the objections is the fact that the government green light is not actually legally necessary -- there is no legal barrier to any utility now opting to build a nuclear plant, although there is a lot of planning red tape.
"Although the government has said no public money will be involved in any new nuclear plants, a positive declaration must indicate government commitment in the final event and that can only mean taxpayers' money," said Dorfman.
The report noted that a new nuclear plant being built in Finland was not only two years behind schedule but already 50 percent over budget, a fate it suggested would not be escaped by new plants in Britain to the detriment of alternatives.
(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Richard Williams)
Marlowe Hood, Yahoo News 3 Jan 08;
Surging oil prices are a mixed blessing for the environment, experts say. Clean renewable energy and recycling are getting a major boost from 100-dollar-a-barrel crude -- but so are coal, a massive contributor to global warming, and nuclear power, which remains shadowed by safety concerns.
Oil briefly topped 100 dollars on Wednesday, driven by escalating energy demand in China, stagnant oil supplies and unrest in oil-producing Nigeria.
Less than a year ago, a barrel of crude could be had for 50 dollars, and in November 2001 the price was as low as 16.70 dollars in New York.
What is painful for consumers, though, may have benefits for planet Earth.
To start with, triple-digit oil prices can prod users into switching to more fuel-efficient cars or public transport. They also push wind, solar power and other "alternative" energies, once marginalised as too costly or exotic, into the mainstream.
"As gas-fired electricity becomes more expensive, there are more and more places where you can build wind farms that are competitive or cheaper," said Steven Sawyer, executive director of a Brussels-based industry group, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).
"At current international gas prices, there would be some place in just about every country in the world where wind would be a better economic option," he told AFP.
Preliminary figures show that in 2007, total installed wind power capacity increased from 74 gigawatts to between 92 and 93 GW, maintaining an approximately 25 percent annual increase as compared to the year before, according to GWEC.
The surge in oil prices is also causing smiles in the recycling industry, especially in plastics, which are made from oil and gas.
The higher the price of virgin materials to make plastics, the greater the incentive to recover, melt down and re-use old plastic bottles, shopping bags and other wrapping.
"Prices for plastics of all kinds have doubled in the last 10 years," says Peter Sundt, secretary general of the European Association of Plastics Recycling and Recovery Organisations (EPRO).
The long and enduring rise in oil prices in the first decade of the 21st century is particularly important. Past, sudden downturns in oil prices in the 1990s badly hit recycling, he told AFP.
Leading the charge is China, which handles around 10 million tonnes of discarded plastics a year, about five million of which is imported from Europe, the United States and other rich economies.
With oil scaling new peaks, and China becoming choosier about its garbage imports, more and more European firms are investing in hi-tech plants with low labour costs to recycle plastics for their domestic market, according to Sundt.
Yet the same economic imperatives driving the development of cleaner energy and better recycling are also driving the exploitation of other fossil fuels that are even more noxious than oil.
"High oil prices also make really nasty oil and petroleum development projects financially attractive," said Sawyer, pointing in particular to a flurry of investment in tar sands, especially in Canada.
"In terms of per unit of energy delivered, that is about the most polluting, greenhouse-gas intensive activity imaginable," he said.
Tar or oil sands are a mixture of sand, water and heavy crude that is difficult and expensive to extract. But several major oil companies, including Shell or early this month British Petroleum, have invested heavily in extraction operations that produce oil costing about 40 dollars a barrel, leaving a huge margin for profit.
An even greater environmental danger, though, is coal, which accounts for 40 percent of the electricity produced in the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Vienna.
Several of the world's largest economies -- including China, the United States and India -- are digging hungrily into domestic reserves of coal that are cheap and, unlike oil, have no geopolitical risk.
"In 2006, China built on average three coal-fired plants per week," says Cedric Philibert of the IEA.
Nuclear power is benefitting from both the high price of oil and worries about climate change, despite lingering fears about plant safety, storage of highly-radioactive waste and nuclear proliferation.
At present, nuclear accounts for 15 percent of world's electricity needs, according to the IEA.
China, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam have all put in place ambitious strategies to expand or introduce nuclear power, Britain, France and Finland are pushing ahead with plans for next-generation reactors while the United States has passed laws aimed at accelerating atomic plant construction.
In September, US President George W. Bush said rich countries should help developing nations obtain "secure, cost-effective and proliferation-resistant nuclear power."
"Nuclear power is the one existing source of energy that can generate massive amounts of electricity without causing any air pollution or greenhouse-gas emissions," Bush said.
Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press Yahoo News 4 Jan 08;
"I'd like to think of nature's diversity as a symphony and extinction is like one of the instruments in the symphony going silent."
With the new year comes a new Web site and new ringtones featuring the growls, bugles and chirps of dozens of rare and endangered species from around the globe.
The Center for Biological Diversity started offering free wildlife ringtones for cell phones a year ago to educate people about the plight of the animals, and the campaign enjoyed such success that the environmental group has collected more ringtones and revamped its Web site for this year.
The group plans to release an assortment of new ringtones each month, including the sounds of the African elephant and the Emperor Penguin of the Antarctic, said Peter Galvin, the group's conservation director.
"We've hit the 100,000th download in over 150 countries," Galvin said Wednesday in a telephone interview. "It's pretty interesting. We didn't realize how much of an international hit it would become."
The response, he said, reinforces the worldwide movement to save endangered and rare species.
"The extinction crisis is a global crisis," he said.
Available ringtones include the howl of an endangered Mexican gray wolf, the bellows of an Arctic beluga whale and the calls of dozens of other mammals, birds and reptiles. Web site visitors also can get cell phone wallpaper and facts for each of the species.
And later this year, the site will be available in Spanish and more ringtones from species in Latin America will be added, Galvin said.
It was Galvin who came up with the idea for the free ringtones as a way to educate people — especially the younger, technologically savvy generation. He has even tried collecting some of the sounds, which has proved to be a difficult task.
He's going to make another try during a trip next month to Ecuador and Peru.
"If you're birdwatching, for example, in many cases you may or may not see the bird, and then getting an actual recording of it is even harder," he said.
Despite the challenge, all but two or three of the ringtones offered on the site are from the wild. They've been collected by researchers around the world, and the center hopes for even more recordings.
Environmental activists hope the ringtones start conversations and get people interested in what Galvin calls the "interconnected web of nature" and how it relates to humanity's survival.
"I'd like to think of nature's diversity as a symphony," he said, "and extinction is like one of the instruments in the symphony going silent."
LiveScience.com Yahoo News 3 Jan 08;
Norman and colleagues note that while their study is encouraging for the Ningaloo whale shark populations, global concern over their future is justified, especially in areas where the sharks continue to be hunted for their fins and meat. The researchers hope others will apply their techniques to other whale shark populations, as well as to other species.
Whale sharks, which grow to weigh as much as two or three adult elephants, are thriving in waters off Western Australia, a new study of underwater images suggests.
Up to 65 feet long (20 meters), the whale shark, Rhincodon typus, is the world's largest living fish species — and also the largest shark. Though hefty, this shark is known as the "gentle giant" for its non-predatory behavior. Rather than tearing through meaty flesh of prey like many sharks, this fish, with its broad, flattened head and tiny teeth inside a giant mouth, eats tiny zooplankton, sieving them through a fine mesh of gill-rakers.
Relatively little is known about the health and migratory behaviors of whale sharks, which live in tropical and warm seas, including the western Atlantic and southern Pacific.
The new research combines computer-assisted photographic identification with data collected by ecotourists, among others, and suggests whale shark populations in Ningaloo, Western Australia, are healthy, although research at other locations, such as South Africa and Thailand, has reported declines in population size.
Swimming with sharks
West Australian marine scientist Brad Norman of ECOCEAN, a marine conservation organization, and Murdoch University in Australia began the study in 1995.
Swimming alongside each whale shark in the Ningaloo Reef, the researchers photographed or video-taped the white lines and spots along the flanks of the animal. Like a human fingerprint, the patterns of speckles and stripes on the skins of whale sharks are thought to be unique to each individual.
To make sense of the images, Norman teamed up with ECOCEAN computer programmer Jason Holmberg and astronomer Zaven Arzoumanian of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who adapted software originally used with the Hubble space telescope. The pattern-recognition software developed by Holmberg and Arzoumanian allowed the group to positively identify individual whale sharks.
Based on 5,100 underwater images of 355 whale sharks contributed by hundreds of researchers, divers and ecotourists, Norman, Holmberg and Arzoumanian obtained almost 10 times more data than any previous study.
“To study whale sharks in a meaningful way, we really had to rethink how we collect data and how we analyze it,” Holmberg said. “The results surpassed our expectations, allowing hundreds of individuals to contribute and providing the necessary data to obtain a closer look at the population’s health.”
Reef management
Ningaloo Reef is one of the best locations to find whale sharks, especially between April and June. The researchers found that more whale sharks are returning to the northern area of Ningaloo Marine Park from season to season, suggesting the population is growing. They found that about two-thirds of the sharks were repeat visitors, while one-third were sighted only once during the study period.
As a rare and highly migratory fish, whale sharks are a big draw for Ningaloo’s ecotourism industry, where tourists pay to get close views and even swim with the sharks. In spite of their gargantuan size, whale sharks are fairly docile; the main risk to humans comes from getting in the way of their very large and powerful tails.
The authors say their study, published in the Ecological Society of America’s January issue of the journal Ecological Applications, suggests that the management guidelines for whale shark ecotourism at Ningaloo appear to be on target.
“Applying these guidelines to other locations along whale shark migration routes may offer a viable alternative to hunting these fish, one that yields both economic and conservation benefits,” Norman said.
Norman and colleagues note that while their study is encouraging for the Ningaloo whale shark populations, global concern over their future is justified, especially in areas where the sharks continue to be hunted for their fins and meat. The researchers hope others will apply their techniques to other whale shark populations, as well as to other species.
Cheah Ui-Hoon, Business Times - 04 Jan 2008
But being a capitalist, he understands that the forest is also the means to a livelihood. 'We can't deny local communities that depend on the economy of the forest. We can't stop progress. Poverty must be eradicated, there must be a growing middle class for society to be stable. An environment which sustains itself - that's a critical part of what a capitalist needs,'
VINOD Sekhar, chief executive of the Malaysian Petra Group, wouldn't be a familiar corporate name in Singapore if not for the fact that he created a buzz by bringing in Hollywood producer and actor Mel Gibson for the Forbes Asia conference in September.
Mr Gibson is a shareholder in Green Rubber Global, Mr Sekhar's company which recycles rubber and is slated for a London listing next year.
Making the grant to the Royal Society's South East Asia Rainforest Research Programme (SEARRP) - witnessed by Mr Gibson - is yet another commitment towards ecological concerns that his father had instilled in him, declares Mr Sekhar.
His father, Dr BC Sekhar, was the first Asian director of the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia and is regarded as the father of the country's modern rubber industry.
In a candid phone interview, Mr Sekhar, 38, points out that for all his environmental concerns, he is ultimately a pragmatic capitalist. 'I'm a realist, so it's about finding a balance and ways of getting there, such as creating technologies to help solve the problems we're facing,' he says.
We see climate change right at our doorstep these days, he points out. 'We're dealing with it and our children will be directly affected.'
But being a capitalist, he understands that the forest is also the means to a livelihood. 'We can't deny local communities that depend on the economy of the forest. We can't stop progress. Poverty must be eradicated, there must be a growing middle class for society to be stable. An environment which sustains itself - that's a critical part of what a capitalist needs,' he notes.
With this in mind, it made sense to become partners with the Royal Society and the Sabah Foundation and fund their research programme - one of the longest-running research programmes in the world, thanks to the infrastructure put in by the Sabah Foundation.
'We're not just sponsors, but partners. We want to eventually expand it into other reserves like the Maliau Basin (which is about the size of Singapore, incidentally) and Imbak Canyon, and to find commercial applications for the research there,' he says.
'We've got to walk the talk,' he stresses, referring to corporates, while describing the Petra Foundation's support as 'the boring stuff' because it's about research. 'It's not sexy because we're not just saying 'save the trees'; we're looking for a long-term, permanent solution.'
As to how he managed to get such stellar Hollywood connections, Mr Sekhar said he first got to know Bruce Davey, chairman of Icon Productions, Mr Gibson's partner, at a previous Forbes conference. 'We quickly became friends and I first got involved with them in an excavation project in Guatemala,' he explains briefly.
Subsequently, Mr Gibson invested in Green Rubber Global, and has also thrown in his support for the SEARRP.
What Mr Sekhar hopes to do is to encourage other companies to participate in funding research. 'There are commercial angles to this, and it's a great opportunity to get involved because we get first right of refusal to the scientific results that come out,' he adds.
'It is easy to get depressed about climate change and the carnage we are inflicting on the planet,' Mr Sekhar wrote in a comment piece in the UK newspaper The Independent on Sunday last month. But instead of just wringing its hands, companies like The Petra Group are doing something about it and in its own backyard, so to speak.
Business Times 4 Jan 08
CHEAH UI-HOON visits Sabah's Danum Valley, where reforestation has turned thousands of hectares of logged forest into lush greenery, providing shelter to a rich variety of wildlife - and perhaps the answer to climate change
THIS might look like any other nursery with its neat rows of leafy plants in polybags placed under thick, black netting so the plants can bask in the soft sunshine. Nestled in a vast rainforest reserve in Danum Valley, Sabah, this is not your ordinary greenhouse, however. Individuals would not head there and ask to buy a couple of Hopea Nervosas or Hopea SPPs - not unless they want a 20-metre tropical hardwood tree in their garden.
But one day, countries or companies might. Not in their respective gardens, but in tropical rainforests all over Asia. The picture you see is in fact a snapshot of the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment, one of the world's earliest and biggest reforestation projects started 15 years ago.
Through this project - which is a joint scheme with the Dutch Electricity Board to offset the greenhouse gases produced in the Netherlands - rainforest seedlings have been planted in about 11,000 hectares of logged forest since 1992. Currently, the nursery has 200,000 seedlings waiting to be planted but it could have up to a million seedlings to fill thousands of hectares of degraded forest, when funds permit.
And why it concerns us - city dwellers - is because this could well be the answer to climate change: Reforestation.
'Young, growing trees in a forest absorb a lot of carbon. And this project has shown that degraded forests can and should be restored,' explains Glen Reynolds, senior scientist and programme manager of the Petra Foundation and the Royal Society's South East Asia Rainforest Research Programme (SEARRP) in Danum Valley.
Just as the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali was wrapping up in December, a group of journalists from Malaysia and Singapore descended upon Danum Valley and the research centre there which has been a base for scientists from all over the world since 1985.
The trip was hosted by The Petra Group, a Malaysian company which recently gave a grant of £pounds;1 million (S$2.9 million) to the Royal Society's SEARRP to be disbursed over an eight-year period. The agreement will see the Petra Foundation and the Green Rubber Global company take over as the main sponsors of SEARRP from 2008.
In case the rhetorical twists and turns of the recent Bali Climate Change conference were difficult to grasp, here's one buzzword you want to remember - REDD, or Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.
Deforestation was the hot topic, according to environmentalists, because 20 per cent of carbon emissions are from deforestation, which is more than from the entire transport sector. Debate on a pay-and-preserve plan, where countries like Malaysia and Indonesia are paid to keep their forest reserves instead of converting them into other land use, dominated the news as there is as yet no financial incentive for countries to preserve their virgin forests.
'Carbon market'
Scientists like Dr Reynolds and Waidi Sinun, head of the research and development department of the Sabah Foundation which manages Danum Valley, see the day coming when there is a 'carbon market' for forests, so that they will hold a commercial value by just being what they are.
'There needs to be a shift away from thinking of the forest as a source of timber to valuing it for its services - as a bio-diversity bank and a carbon offset area, amongst other things,' says Dr Reynolds. As he said in a BBC interview, a rainforest now is worth more dead than alive, 'so there's got to be a viable financial incentive that will stand up to timber and palm oil industries'.
'It's about sustainable forest management,' says Dr Sinun, who himself is a product of Sabah's forests. The logging industry there, started in the 1960s, paid for his education.
Those who want to find out about reforestation can take a lesson from the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment, currently the only reforestation project around on such a large scale, points out Dr Reynolds. 'People have been talking about reforestation, but here, the Sabah Foundation is actually doing it.'
Danum Valley is one of the world's top three rainforest research centres, the others being in Costa Rica and Panama. Its valued status in science is little known or acknowledged in this part of the world, however, unless you're a tropical ecologist.
Just to get an idea of the richness of the rainforest in Sabah's one-million-hectare Danum Valley forest reserve: A hectare of forest there contains about 300 species of trees. A hectare in the United Kingdom (which has only 10 per cent of its forest left) has just 30 tree species.
With the new focus on and recognition of forests and the role they play in climate change, the lessons learnt in the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment can apply to degraded forests elsewhere, says Dr Sinun. 'We've learnt how to conduct Reduced Impact Logging, which damages the forest less than conventional logging, and also learnt that forests can be rehabilitated if not damaged repeatedly.'
The evidence is in the rich wildlife and the towering trees you see in Danum Valley, which, incidentally, includes formerly logged forest. The one-million-hectare valley was given to the Sabah Foundation, an educational trust, by the Sabah government. Logging provided the finances to fund the Foundation's activities, which include conservation and environment protection.
Logging in Danum was to be phased out at the end of last year. No wonder then, the frenzied pace of logging trucks going to and fro from the forest to town when journalists visited. In the two hour-plus drive from Lahad Datu town to the Danum Valley Field Centre, we must have passed more than 10 logging trucks lumbering to town, each of them laden with thick, round, freshly-cut tree trunks.
Despite that, the forest we passed through was green and lush with a fair number of 20-metre and 30-metre trees on the horizon. 'I see wild elephants on the trail every day,' declares Victor Brant, who works for a heli-logging company. The jovial foreman had pitched in to help get our bus out of a muddy spot - at a part where the dirt road had sagged badly, heavily indented by the weight of logging trucks and kept mushy by the rainy weather. It took us about an hour to get out of that spot, where we had caused a minor traffic blockage - one laden logging truck and three four-wheel drives ahead of us, and up to five empty logging trucks behind waiting to go into the valley for their wooden cargo.
Animal sightings
We thought Mr Brant was bragging at first, even though we'd seen elephant dung by the roadside earlier on. But true enough, barely half an hour after we resumed our journey, we saw a group of four or five small elephants - which looked like the Borneo pygmy elephants - just by the logging road, retreating quickly and silently back into the forest when we stopped and fumbled with our cameras.
At the Borneo Rainforest Lodge, located even deeper in Danum Valley, the wild-animal sightings noted by the eco-lodge's guests are impressive: wet tarsier, rhinoceros hornbill, red leaf monkey, pygmy elephant ('a herd of 20', a guest jotted in the visitor's book), orang utan, gibbon, slow loris, sambar deer, giant tree squirrel - just on daily jungle trail walks. Although a clouded leopard would be a bonus to spot, it's already like Jurassic Park minus the dinosaurs.
And this is logged - not virgin - forest as far as the eye can see, says Dr Reynolds, gesturing from the viewing deck of Danum Valley Field Centre's observation tower which is next to a Malaysian government-funded global atmosphere watch station, the only one of two in the Asia-Pacific region.
With the greenery all around, can he tell the difference between degraded and restored forest? 'In a degraded forest, you'd see a lot more creepers growing over the trees, for example,' he explains.
It turns out that during replanting, which is laborious work, Danum Valley's research assistants do a fair bit of clearing of creepers as well, when they mark out an area to replant - to make sure the seedlings grow unhindered. They also have to go back regularly to make sure there is no competing vegetation.
The reforestation carried out so far is proof that a logged forest can be restored, rather than justify converting it into oil palm plantations. 'What we're trying to do here is to restore the rainforest, to get it back as a primary rainforest which it started off as,' says Dr Reynolds. 'If converted into plantation, then the impact on biodiversity is really severe. You'd lose 90 to 95 per cent of it.'
With the limited funding the project has, it's running under-capacity for now. 'But the technology and methods we've developed here can easily be replicated in other parts of Malaysia and South-east Asia,' says Dr Sinun.
Now it's just a matter of waiting for the world's politicians to catch up, and come up with a viable carbon market. 'For now, this is a voluntary market, as the carbon this project is absorbing isn't tradeable under the Kyoto Protocol which favours reforestation of empty land, not existing forest,' says Dr Reynolds. 'Then it becomes interesting financially - potentially anyway. For now, only companies which want to be seen as carbon-neutral are funding this project.'
Meanwhile, some 30 species of indigenous rainforest tree seedlings are waiting to shoot up in the under-capacity-run nursery. Hopea Nervosa and SPP, known locally as Jangkang and Selangan, are quite aptly named. They could well be the hope of the planet in years to come.
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