Pulau Semakau
on the teamseagrass blog with sightings on the wild shores of singapore blog
Seagrass Watch workshop: Level 1 classroom session
on the teamseagrass blog
St John's Island
on the Psychedelic Nature blog
A woodpecker’s hyoid apparatus
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog
Greater Racket-tailed Drongo building nest
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog
Cake
on the annotated budak blog
But it's hard to wipe out as trade is global and sales go online
Nicholas Yong, Straits Times 2 May 09;
A SINGAPOREAN who tried to smuggle live birds through the Woodlands Checkpoint in his car in mid-February was given away by squawks coming from the glove compartment.
Customs officers found a plastic bag containing three newspaper- wrapped bundles. Inside were a zebra dove and two long-tailed parakeets, which he claimed he had bought.
The birds were confiscated and the case referred to the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA).
The parakeets, highly endangered, are worth about $250 each; prices for the zebra dove start at $150 and go up to as much as $50,000.
Ten cases of possession or illegal import of protected wildlife cropped up in the first quarter of this year.
Last year, there were 17 wildlife- related enforcement cases, down from the 46 cases the year before. The numbers have been on the downtrend since 2004's high of 97 cases.
Singapore is a signatory to an international agreement that seeks to ensure trade does not threaten wildlife species with extinction. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or Cites as it is called, protects about 5,000 species of animals and 28,000 species of plants.
A person found guilty of smuggling protected wildlife here can be fined up to $50,000 for each species on the Cites list, up to $500,000 in total, or jailed up to two years, or both.
The same applies for those caught possessing, selling or offering for sale endangered species illegally imported into the country.
The AVA has been stepping up enforcement against the illegal wildlife trade. Its officers at the various checkpoints have been briefed on Cites and wildlife smugglers' tactics.
But wiping out the smuggling is tough because the trade is global, estimated by Interpol to be worth US$10 billion (S$14.7 billion) to US$20 billion a year.
Wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic said the problem is 'rampant' in South-east Asia. Contributing factors include the region's diverse collection of animals and plants and its uneven enforcement measures stemming from a lack of resources.
Traffic has listed Singapore, Malaysia and the United States among the world's top 10 wildlife smuggling hubs. Traffic's regional director for South-east Asia Azrina Abdullah said the 'world-class' infrastructure in these countries facilitates the trade.
Mr Louis Ng, executive director of the Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Acres), said constant enforcement here is paying off.
In the last three years, 9,000 animals have been confiscated as a result of public tip-offs, and fewer pet shops are selling protected species.
Mr Ng noted, however, that the illegal wildlife trade had gone online - Acres now gets tip-offs on websites selling exotic wildlife almost weekly.
There is an upside to this. 'People are more aware now, when previously, they might not have known that these animals were illegal,' he said.
48 seized animals are with zoo
Straits Times 2 May 09;
WHEN the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) raided three locations on March 25, it netted 48 illegally kept animals.
The haul comprised 31 reptiles such as snakes and tortoises, and 17 arachnids such as spiders.
Ms Lye Fong Keng, who heads the AVA's wildlife regulatory department, said investigations are ongoing. The animals have been sent to the zoo.
Animals confiscated by the AVA are either sent there, to the Jurong BirdPark or Underwater World. Some of them are released into nature parks.
The AVA handled 10 wildlife-related enforcement cases in the first three months of this year. Eight cases involved illegal possession of live wildlife; the other two involved attempts to illegally import such animals.
No decision has been made yet on whether the 48 animals seized in the March 25 raids will eventually be absorbed into the zoo's collection.
All animals sent to the zoo are quarantined - reptiles for a month, and primates and hoofed animals, up to three months. By the end of the quarantine, the zoo would have decided where to put them:
# Local animals such as squirrels or pangolins may be released back to nature parks.
# Exotic animals which the zoo already has may be sent to partnering institutions.
# Some animals may be absorbed into the zoo's existing collection.
Former zoo favourite, the orang utan Ah Meng, for example, was confiscated from a family that kept her illegally as a pet. She was given to the zoo in 1971.
Animals are put down only as a last resort, for instance if they are in poor condition. Of the 342 animals the zoo received last year from the AVA, police or members of the public, only five were euthanised.
Members of the public turned in 47 animals to the zoo last year. While some donations are genuine finds by members of the public, others could have been illegally kept pets that people decided to give up, said the zoo's assistant director of zoology Biswajit Guha.
'Some people claim to have come across the wild animals in their gardens, but in some instances, you can tell it's a lie.' he said.
'You can see that they are really sad to give up the animals.'
In Singapore, keeping wild animals without a licence is an offence under the Wild Animals and Birds Act. The fine can be up to $1,000 per animal.
ANG YIYING
The haul comprised 31 reptiles such as snakes and tortoises, and 17 arachnids such as spiders.
Ms Lye Fong Keng, who heads the AVA's wildlife regulatory department, said investigations are ongoing. The animals have been sent to the zoo.
Animals confiscated by the AVA are either sent there, to the Jurong BirdPark or Underwater World. Some of them are released into nature parks.
The AVA handled 10 wildlife-related enforcement cases in the first three months of this year. Eight cases involved illegal possession of live wildlife; the other two involved attempts to illegally import such animals.
No decision has been made yet on whether the 48 animals seized in the March 25 raids will eventually be absorbed into the zoo's collection.
All animals sent to the zoo are quarantined - reptiles for a month, and primates and hoofed animals, up to three months. By the end of the quarantine, the zoo would have decided where to put them:
# Local animals such as squirrels or pangolins may be released back to nature parks.
# Exotic animals which the zoo already has may be sent to partnering institutions.
# Some animals may be absorbed into the zoo's existing collection.
Former zoo favourite, the orang utan Ah Meng, for example, was confiscated from a family that kept her illegally as a pet. She was given to the zoo in 1971.
Animals are put down only as a last resort, for instance if they are in poor condition. Of the 342 animals the zoo received last year from the AVA, police or members of the public, only five were euthanised.
Members of the public turned in 47 animals to the zoo last year. While some donations are genuine finds by members of the public, others could have been illegally kept pets that people decided to give up, said the zoo's assistant director of zoology Biswajit Guha.
'Some people claim to have come across the wild animals in their gardens, but in some instances, you can tell it's a lie.' he said.
'You can see that they are really sad to give up the animals.'
In Singapore, keeping wild animals without a licence is an offence under the Wild Animals and Birds Act. The fine can be up to $1,000 per animal.
ANG YIYING
Schools, firms are taking the lead to recycle used devices like phones and IT products
Tan Weizhen, Straits Times 2 May 09;
SCHOOLS and companies are leading the drive to give used gadgets such as phones and computer equipment renewed life, reducing the electronic waste that is piling up at an increasing rate.
The move to recycle e-waste is slowly picking up, thanks to students like those at the Singapore Management University (SMU), who have started collecting unwanted thumbdrives for the needy, and the National University of Singapore (NUS), who recently donated 1,000 old phones to be recycled.
Landfills are rapidly filling up, said recycling companies here such as Recycling Point Dot Com and TES-AMM, which have noticed more items being discarded as people cycle through their TV sets, computers and other appliances more quickly.
Several years ago, Recycling Point collected only fiveto 10 tonnes of e-waste a month from households and companies. Now, it collects as much as 50tonnes in just one week. 'People, especially youth, are upgrading their gadgets all the time,' said Recycling Point founder Joseph Tan.
Phone company Nokia has chosen to work with schools to 'cultivate a sense of ownership of and responsibility to' the environment among youth. It has proposed a long-term e-recycling programme with NUS and Nanyang Technological University.
Late last month, it did the same with four primary and secondary schools, as well as St Andrew's Junior College. Under the programme, students who donate phones get trees planted in their names in the reforestation programme with the World Wide Fund For Nature in Indonesia. They can view their trees on online map Google Earth.
Nokia will donate $3 for every phone donated at the schools to any of their green projects.
About 1,000 old phones were collected from NUS students at its first drive in December. The phones will be put through mills to have the raw materials recycled. One donor, Mr Loo Deliang, 26, contributed five phones. 'They have very little value left, so I might as well turn them in for recycling and do something good for the earth.'
SMUstudents have started a year-long 'Flash Your Thumb' campaign to collect 3,000 old thumbdrives for needy students here and overseas. The team is working with the North West Community Development Council, other universities and schools to set up collection points for unwanted devices.
Project chairman Loreen Zhuo said: 'People are going for thumbdrives with higher and higher memory these days. We do not want to see workable thumbdrives go to waste.'
The higher-capacity thumbdrives will go to pupils at local primary schools, while thumbdrives below 1GB will go to students overseas.
There are also more opportunities now for the public to hand over old and unwanted devices.
At the Sitex IT shows in the last two years, visitors exchanged their old computer monitors, hard drives, keyboards, laptops and printers for cash.
Cash Converters, a second-hand goods company, gave out $40,000 last year, and $28,000 the year before, for goods in working condition.
IT firms like Nokia and Fujitsu have drop points for customers to return unwanted laptops, cellphones, chargers and batteries. But Nokia said only 2per cent of all customers do so because of a lack of awareness.
Nokia's environment manager Francis Cheong said Singapore is doing its fair share for the environment. It is one of the few countries which allow other countries to bring in electronic waste for recycling. 'Many other countries do not currently allow that as irresponsible e-waste recycling and recovery can pollute the environment.'
Vegetarian society enlists RI students to promote healthy lifestyle among youth, raise environmental awareness
Amelia Tan, Straits Times 2 May 09;
THE Vegetarian Society of Singapore (VSS) wants to spread its creed among youth and has roped in a dozen Raffles Institution (RI) students for the job.
The boys, all in Secondary 3 in RI's Integrated Programme (IP), will spread awareness about health and environmental problems caused by eating and producing meat. They will do so by giving talks and mounting exhibitions in schools.
Their mission: To get fellow students to eat more vegetables and cut down on their meat intake by year's end. With help from VSS, they will also try to get canteen stall owners on board by suggesting ways of including more greens in their menus.
The IP students are doing this project under Research Education, a subject in their curriculum.
Just a month in, the 12 ambassadors of vegetarianism have yet to decide on the schools where they will promote their cause, but they scored a victory two weeks ago when they persuaded RI's Indian food stall owner to sell vegetarian burgers.
To fan publicity for these new-style burgers, they ran a quiz on environment-related issues over two days. Students who answered at least two questions could buy the $1.50 burger for 50 cents.
The team's head of publicity Amos Mah, 14, said 300 burgers were sold on each of the two days of the campaign, but this has fallen to under 100.
Undaunted, he said: 'We learnt that it is not easy to change eating habits and mindsets. But we believe that, over time, by presenting our schoolmates with the facts on the effects of eating meat, they will be encouraged to make changes to their lifestyles.'
The team has been busy: It has produced posters, now plastered all over RI, on the environmental and health benefits of a more plant-based diet.
VSS education officer Loh Yeow Nguan said the society decided it was best that students be the ones to persuade their peers to eat more greens, since VSS has not had much success after years of giving talks and holding exhibitions in schools.
He added: 'Getting the students directly involved helps them to understand better the damage that eating meat can do to their health and the environment.'
This has certainly been true for team member Cheong Kah Wah, 16, who said: 'I did not know eating meat could cause so many health and environmental problems. I've decided to eat less meat and am cutting down on fast food.
'I hope that, by doing this, I can encourage my friends to change their eating habits too.'
In recent years, efforts have been made in several countries to change the eating habits of youth. Britain, for example, has banned junk food from its school canteens.
Here, schools under the 'Model Tuckshop' Programme do not sell drinks with more than 8g of sugar per 100ml as well as deep-fried food and preserved meat more than once a week.
VSS president George Jacobs said these efforts are heartening, but more needs to be done. 'We can restrict the number of times fried food is sold in schools, but it won't make much of a difference if students do not believe in the importance of healthy eating. They will still buy fried food from other places.'
Straits Times 2 May 09;
ALLOW me to offer an anecdote from Choa Chu Kang with reference to the report, 'Mango season hits the streets' (April 19).
The signs installed by the National Parks Board (NParks) at the public park in Choa Chu Kang opposite my flat warn visitors to beware of falling durians.
The durians on the trees in the park ripen twice a year. In the more than 10 years that I have lived there, I cannot recall any park visitor being struck by falling durians or being seriously hurt as a consequence.
Was it because of the warning signs? I doubt so.
The signs may have paradoxically created a buzz by revealing the existence of durians in the park rather than convey the honest-to-goodness intention of NParks to warn visitors about the fruit for safety reasons. The signs may well have attracted more people to the trees - durians being irresistible to the average Singaporean's palate.
So, what occurs each durian season at my neighbourhood park is a ritual involving packs of durian hunters from all walks of life, who land there for a free harvest of the king of fruits.
Some even take the trouble to camp overnight as they wait for the durians to fall.
It's durian season again at Choa Chu Kang Park. Bunches of durians have been spotted hanging from the branches of the trees in recent weeks. There has been much excitement as regular park users speculate when the fruit will ripen and drop.
Which brings me to NParks' warning to the public in the article not to harvest ripening mangoes from roadside trees for various reasons. I would like to know, for instance, how picking a fallen durian is harmful to the tree? Will the board now install signs warning durian hunters to stay away on pain of a $200 fine?
I hope not. I would hope that NParks keeps to its current policy of hiring a contractor to clear the durians for public safety - never mind the fact that the ritual involving durian hunters from all walks of life takes care of the job just as well.
Tan Peck Cheong
A village will be built in Johor to introduce youth here to a more rustic way of life
Theresa Tan, Straits Times 2 May 09;
WORRIED about children who are growing up hooked on television and computer games and have no contact with Mother Nature, two men are aiming to develop a kampung in Johor to introduce Singapore's youth to a more rustic way of life.
Mr Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organisation, which promotes clean toilets and sanitation, is offering his 4ha plot of land in Johor - at a nominal $1 rent a year - for the non-profit project, called Kampung Temasek.
Joining forces with him is well-known architect Tay Kheng Soon, 68, who is designing a village where 'children can plant organic vegetables, go on hikes, climb trees, go river rafting and milk cows'.
'My friends with young children are telling me their children are growing up absurd,' Mr Tay told The Straits Times.
'They are afraid of ants and insects, think that chickens come in plastic bags without feathers and spend their time playing computer games, watching television and shopping.'
At Kampung Temasek located at Sungai Tiram, less than a 30-minute drive from Johor Baru, families can join 'get back to nature' programmes and stay in one of the 65 non-air-conditioned huts for a few days to weeks at a stretch.
There will also be three longhouses, which can sleep up to 100 children each.
The village, estimated to cost about $5 million to develop, will be open to the public - who can pay to join its programmes - as well as to charities, which can use the place to run adventure camps for youth, for example.
The two men hope the initiative will also attract artists and farmers to live and work there, adding to the kampung atmosphere.
So why is Mr Sim, 52, offering his land which he bought for RM$400,000 back in 1993, for next to nothing?
The father of four said: 'The land is sitting empty and I thought, why don't I offer it up for a good cause...Besides, my children are now in their teens and have no use for it until maybe in 20 years' time when they can take over the land.'
The businessman turned full-time campaigner for clean toilets feels that Singapore's urban, high density, fast-paced living will eventually take its toll on the younger generation.
Mr Sim, who grew up in a poor family in a kampung near Paya Lebar, said: 'Life here can be dehumanising sometimes. We are so orientated towards economic development and often, we are not in touch with our feelings, other people and nature. If you are isolated from people and nature, you will find it hard to work with others.'
He added: 'With Kampung Temasek, we hope to bring back the old feeling, the old Singapore we enjoyed so much. It's not that we don't like Singapore today, but we feel that kampungs are missing here...Since there are no more kampungs here, let's create one.'
Kampung Temasek is expected to be completed in about a year's time.
The Star 2 May 09;
I TRAVEL widely and appreciate the great outdoors of Malaysia. We truly have an array of diverse landscapes waiting to be explored, especially the mountains and river ecosystems.
However, what irks me is the rapid unsustainable development at the river riparian zones, whether they are in places like Johor, Pahang, Perak or other parts of the country.
These areas are fundamental buffer zones that form part of the greater river ecosystems, better known as wetlands, throughout the world.
The river systems in Malaysia are an integral part of the water resources. There are over 150 river systems in Malaysia, contributing more than 90% of the raw water supply source.
My concern is where is the enforcement to ensure that those who damage such resources don’t get away.
Time has taught us that floods are man-made disasters, caused by lackadaisical
planning and inertia about the importance of riparian zones and wetlands.
The end result is disastrous as floods in Kota Tinggi and Segamat, Johor, have shown.
Wanton agriculture and human settlement are part of the problem.
What makes me even more angry is the mushrooming of contractors being hired to clear the rivers of sedimentation everywhere, including the river mouths such as those of Sungai Johor and other rivers and canals in all states.
If only someone care to be pro-active enough to analyse the problems and take preventive and educational approaches, the national budget for such unsustainable works could be reduced and millions of ringgit saved.
Clearing the silt by dredging alone is a short-term answer and is costly.
Dredging changes the ecology of the area and affects marine flora and fauna while it can also cause long term erosion.
Sustainable communities all over the world do not practise this negative approach and they always look at the root cause for remedial action.
All stakeholders must be involved.
More strategies need to be evaluated and stakeholders educated.
Environmental consciousness is the critical element in laying the foundation of sustainable development.
Let us educate ourselves on the important role of these wetlands, which include the riparian zones to ensure we live in harmony with these vital natural ecosystems.
The future generation has a right to clean rivers and the rich wetland ecosystems.
The Drainage and Irrigation Department, fisheries, town planners and local authorities need to revisit the key wetlands and Ramsar (wetlands of international importance) sites and be briefed on the importance of their roles and how every Malaysian can help protect them for the benefit of all.
Kuala Selangor Nature Park (Selangor), Matang (Perak), Kinabalu wetlands (Sabah), Tanjung Piai and Kukup Island (Johor) are some of the vibrant educational centres that can assist the local authorities and relevant people to make them appreciate the value of the river ecosystems and wetlands.
We must save and protect them.
Conservation is everyone’s job, more so for the politicians and leaders.
Let’s act before our rivers and wetlands are treated as wastelands and become continuous flood zones!
There are vast materials of technical input on water resource management that needs to be carried out.
We must also cease to be “penny wise, pound foolish”.
HARBAN SINGH,
Johor Baru.
Are you unwittingly contributing to the devastation of the rain forests?
Does your shopping basket contain KitKat, Hovis, Persil or Flora? If so, you may be contributing to the devastation of the wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, where orangutans and other species face extinction as their habitat disappears.
Report by Martin Hickman, The Independent 2 May 09;
It's an invisible ingredient, really, palm oil. You won't find it listed on your margarine, your bread, your biscuits or your KitKat. It's there though, under "vegetable oil". And its impact, 7,000 miles away, is very visible indeed.
The wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are being chain-sawed to make way for palm-oil plantations. Thirty square miles are felled daily in a burst of habitat destruction that is taking place on a scale and speed almost unimaginable in the West.
When the rainforests disappear almost all of the wildlife – including the orangutans, tigers, sun bears, bearded pigs and other endangered species – and indigenous people go. In their place come palm-oil plantations stretching for mile after mile, producing cheap oil – the cheapest cooking oil in the world – for everyday food.
It's not that people haven't noticed what is going on. The United Nations has documented this rampage. Environmental groups have warned that what we buy affects what is happening in these jungles. Three years ago, Britain's biggest supermarket, Tesco, was persuaded to join the only organisation that just might halt the chopping, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.
In his globe-trotting Tribe series two years ago, the TV explorer Bruce Parry was visibly moved by the sad fate of the Penan, a forest-dwelling tribe in Borneo. Most recently, the BBC's prime-time Orangutan Diary showed the battle to create fresh habitats for "red apes" orphaned by deforestation, principally for palm oil.
But if there's plenty of evidence of the devastating environmental effects of palm-oil, little of it can be seen on the products in Britain's biggest supermarkets.
Until now, the best estimate of the number of leading supermarket products containing palm oil (Elaeis guineensis) has been one in 10, the figure quoted by Friends of the Earth in its 2005 report, "The Oil for Apes Scandal". After a two-month investigation, The Independent has established that palm oil is used in far greater quantities. We can reveal for the first time that it is confirmed or suspected in 43 of Britain's 100 bestselling grocery brands (see box, right), representing £6bn of the UK's £16bn annual shopping basket for top brands. If you strip out drinks, pet food and household goods, the picture is starker still: 32 out of 62 of Britain's top foods contain this tree-felling, wildlife-wrecking ingredient.
It's in the top three loaves – Warburtons, Hovis, and Kingsmill – and the bestselling margarines Flora and Clover. It's in Special K, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, Mr Kipling Cakes, McVitie's Digestives and Goodfella's pizza. It's in KitKat, Galaxy, Dairy Milk and Wrigley's chewing gum. It's in Persil washing powder, Comfort fabric softener and Dove soap. It's also in plenty of famous brands that aren't in the top 100, such as Milkybar, Jordan's Country Crisp and Utterly Butterly. And it's almost certainly in thousands of supermarket own brands. Yet none of these manufacturers can prove their supply is "sustainable".
What, then, is "unsustainable" palm oil? Step one: log a forest and remove the most valuable species for furniture. Step two: chainsaw or burn the remaining wood releasing huge quantities of greenhouse gas. Step three: plant a palm-oil plantation. Step four: make oil from the fruit and kernels. Step five: add it to biscuits, chocolate, margarine, soaps, moisturisers and washing powder. At breakfast, when millions of us are munching toast, we're eating a small slice of the rainforest.
From outer space, borneo and sumatra resemble giant emerald stepping stones between Thailand and Australia. Reaching the heart of their still-massive jungles takes days of boat trips and trekking. Gibbons hoot and long-tailed macaques squawk. Mongooses and pangolins scamper through the undergrowth. Large-beaked rhinoceros hornbills soar above the forest. The huge green and black Rajah Brooke's butterfly flutters by.
These rainforests are honeypots for flora and fauna, among the most biodiverse places on Earth. Consider the figures. Sumatra – the size of Spain, owned by Indonesia – has 465 species of bird, 194 species of mammal, 217 species of reptile, 272 species of freshwater fish, and an estimated 10,000 species of plant. Borneo – the size of Turkey and shared between Indonesia and Malaysia – is even richer: 420 birds, 210 mammals, 254 reptiles, 368 freshwater fish and around 15,000 plants.
All these species evolved to live in this unique forest environment. The Sumatran rhino is the smallest, hairiest and most endangered in the world; the Sumatran tiger is the smallest tiger. The black sun bear, with its U-shaped patch of white fur under its chin, is the smallest bear. Some of them are curious in the extreme: the bug-eyed western tarsier; the striped rabbit; the marled cat; and the tree-jumping clouded leopard, which feasts on pygmy squirrels and long-tailed porcupines.
Of all the animals, though, the most famous by far is the orangutan (or "man of the jungle"). With its orange hair and long arms, the orangutan is one of our planet's most unusual creatures. And one of the smartest, too. The Dutch anthropologist Carel van Schaik found that orangutans could perform tasks which were well beyond chimpanzees, such as making rain hats and leakproof roofs for their nests.
The primatologist Dr Willie Smits estimates that orangutans can distinguish between 1,000 different plants, knowing which ones are edible, which are poisonous, and which cure headaches. In her book Thinkers of the Jungle, the psychology professor Anne Russon recalled that one orangutan keeper took three days to solve the mystery of who'd been stealing from the fridge. It turned out that an orangutan had been using a paperclip to pick the lock of its cage, then hiding the paperclip under its tongue.
Along with chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos, orangutans are great apes, sharing 97 per cent of their DNA with humans, having split from us a mere 13 million years ago. They exist only in these forests of Borneo and Sumatra, and it is their arboreal nature that leaves them so vulnerable to deforestation. Between 2004 and 2008, according to the US Great Ape Trust, the orangutan population fell by 10 per cent (to 49,600) on Borneo and by 14 per cent (to 6,600) on Sumatra. As the author Serge Wich warned: "Unless extraordinary efforts are made soon, it could become the first great-ape species to go extinct."
Native people too, known in Borneo as Dayaks, are under threat. About 10,000 members of the semi-nomadic Penan tribe survive but their traditional lifestyle – which includes harvesting the starchy sago tree – is being felled.
A researcher with Survival International, the London-based human-rights organisation, returned to the UK last month with transcripts of interviews with the Penan conducted deep in the jungle. According to one headman, called Matu, hunters were increasingly returning empty-handed. "When the logging started in the Nineties, we thought we had a big problem," he complained. "But when oil palm arrived [in 2005], logging was relegated to problem No 2. Our land and our forests have been taken by force.
"Our fruit trees are gone, our hunting grounds are very limited, and the rivers are polluted, so the fish are dying. Before, there were lots of wild boar around here. Now, we only find one every two or three months. In the documents, all of our land has been given to the company."
"There were no discussions," said another Penan. "The company just put up signs saying the government had given them permission to plant oil palm on our land."
Indonesia is trying to crack down on illegal foresting, but corruption is rife hundreds of miles from Jakarta. Satellite pictures show logging has encroached on 90 per cent of Borneo's national parks – and according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): "New estimates suggest 98 per cent of [Indonesia's] forest may be destroyed by 2022, the lowland forest much sooner."
In its 2007 report, "The Last Stand of the Orangutan", UNEP warned that forest rangers were outnumbered and outgunned by logging guards with military training and automatic weapons – and faced "high and sometimes lethal risks" in confronting them. The programme's executive director Achim Steiner wrote: "The driving forces are not impoverished farmers, but what appears to be well-organised companies with heavy machinery and strong international links to the global markets."
In its own way, palm oil is a wonder plant. Astonishingly productive, its annual yield is 3.6 tonnes a hectare compared with half a tonne for soy or rapeseed. Originally found in West Africa, palm oil is uniquely "fractionable" when cooked, meaning its properties can be easily separated for different products. Although high in artery-clogging saturated fat, it is healthier than hydrogenated fats. For manufacturers, there is another significant benefit. At £400 a tonne, it is cheaper than soy, rapeseed or sunflower.
Some 38m tonnes of palm oil are produced globally, about 75 per cent in Malaysia and Indonesia. Borneo's 11,000 square miles of plantations produce 10m tonnes a year while Sumatra's 14,000 square miles yield 13m tonnes.
Since 1990, the amount of land used for palm-oil production has increased by 43 per cent. Demand is rising at between six and 10 per cent a year. China's billion-plus population is the biggest consumer, importing 18 per cent of global supply. About 16 per cent arrives in the EU.
In the UK, almost every major food manufacturer uses palm oil, among them Kellogg's, Cadbury, Mars, Kraft, Unilever, Premier Foods, Northern Foods and Associated British Foods (ABF). Companies typically say they are working to source sustainable supplies – and insist their use is "small", "very small" or "minute".
The US household giant Procter & Gamble, which uses palm oil in detergents, shampoos and soaps, says: "P&G uses very little palm oil – about 1 per cent of a worldwide production of palm and its derivatives." One per cent of global production is 380,000 tonnes a year. P&G says it hopes to source a sustainable supply by 2015 – six years' time.
Right now no multinational can vouch that its supply is sustainable. The Anglo-Dutch household giant Unilever, the world's biggest user of palm oil, is swallowing up 1.6m tonnes a year, 4 per cent of global supply. It admits the product causes huge damage, but believes it has a solution. Together with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Unilever set up the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2004. For its first four years – to the frustration of green groups – the RSPO talked, devising eight principles and 39 practical criteria designed to protect native peoples, plantation workers, small farmers and wildlife.
Forty per cent of palm-oil suppliers are now members of the RSPO and it hopes all of them will eventually join. Members promise not to chainsaw any virgin forest; but they are still allowed to chop down "degraded forest" – where some trees have been felled – preventing other trees from re-growing and animals from returning.
Palm-oil plantations are barren places. When vast blocks of palms are planted in straight lines, stretching for mile after mile, 90 per cent of the wildlife disappears. In the words of Junaida Payne, of WWF Malaysia's Sabah office, they are "biological deserts".
Jan Kees Vis, Unilever's director of sustainable agriculture and chairman of the RSPO, says it is "not realistic" to halt palm-oil expansion, but believes much growth can be achieved by raising yields. The best plantations currently yield 10 tonnes per hectare, but in the future this could hit 18 or even 50 tonnes, he says.
The best plantations can obtain RSPO certification for sustainability – but only 4 per cent of global supply (1.5m tonnes) is currently certified sustainable. The first shipment arrived in Rotterdam last November and costs about 35 per cent more than normal supplies. Another scheme, Green Palm, is already bringing prices for RSPO supplies down further, adding just 5 per cent to the cost.
Unilever has publicly committed to sourcing only certified palm oil by 2015. Premier Foods has a date of 2011, United Biscuits 2012. Most companies, however, including Cadbury, Kellogg's, Nestlé, Mars and Heinz, have given no commitment to switch to an RSPO-certified supply. They merely say that their suppliers are members.
As Vis puts it bluntly: "The volume of certified palm oil traded is disappointingly low so far; the reason for this being that many companies are not prepared to pay a premium for certified oil."
Environmentalists fear that the RSPO is itself greenwash, cover for a programme of vicious and unrelenting deforestation. Even the RSPO concedes that its members have subsidiaries who plant palm oil, and who are not bound by – and do not abide by – its rules.
As if this were not enough, in the rush to replace diminishing fossil fuel, palm oil is being mixed into petrol. The EU Biofuels Directive aims to put biofuels in 5 per cent of all fuel pumps. Destroying peat forests for palm oil is especially bad for the climate, as these semi-saturated soils are dense "carbon stores" which release colossal quantities of C02 when they are burnt to make way for palm oil.
In its "Cooking the Climate" report, Greenpeace calculated that the burning of South-east Asia's peat forests – largely for palm-oil plantations – spewed 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere: 4 per cent of global climate-change emissions from 0.1 per cent of Earth's land. According to Greenpeace forest campaigner James Turner, "The destruction of these forests is a really serious cause of climate change, but some companies are still trying to look the other way. It's time for them to cancel contracts with the worst suppliers, because purchasing power is a highly effective tool in changing this industry."
Conservationists are increasingly wondering whether the wholesale destruction of rainforests to make margarine is the most striking of all examples of environmental lunacy. It isn't just destroying one of the last great wildernesses, its rare animals and some of the remaining people whose ways are at odds with modern living. It also threatens to damage our own lives in the West.
Deforestation causes 18 per cent of Co2 emissions, according to British government figures – a key element in the rising temperatures that in coming decades will alter our world for ever. No one can be exactly sure what climate change will bring but, in Britain, we can expect more flooding and winter gales, drier summers, water shortages, and more food poisoning and skin cancer. The sea will not just sweep over Bangladesh and the Maldives, but possibly threaten low-lying parts of Britain, such as London, too. Meanwhile, millions of people in developing countries with failing agriculture could migrate to northern Europe.
The wealthy Western countries who have already felled their own forests (woods once covered Britain from Cornwall to Caithness) may have to pay more and more to protect those that remain in other parts of the world. At the Copenhagen summit in December, Britain and other countries will press for REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation) – essentially a scheme for funding jungles in developing countries.
In the meantime, forest campaigners hope that big companies will come under increasing scrutiny over palm oil. The Unilever-backed RSPO wants them to commit to a sustainable supply. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace say palm-oil use should be reduced or phased out altogether. A few have already done so – PepsiCo, for instance, is phasing out palm oil from its remaining two products. United Biscuits says it has reduced palm oil in Digestives by 65 per cent and in McCoys by 76 per cent since 2005.
So far, companies have managed to avoid much scrutiny over the havoc palm oil is wreaking. For now, it is "only" the native peoples, the orangutans and the other animals of the rainforest who have experienced the most profound changes. They are losing the habitat that they thought would be around for ever.
"When I was a young girl I used to be so happy walking in the forest," one Penan woman told Bruce Parry after trekking overnight to pass on her message. "I used to sing while I was looking for sago. I loved to hear the sound of the wild peacocks, the hornbills and the gibbons, and when I looked at the forest it was lovely."
Palm oil facts
90 per cent of Sumatra's orangutan population has disappeared since 1900. They now face extinction
90 per cent of wildlife disappears when the forest is replaced by palm, creating a biological desert
98 per cent of Indonesia's forests may be destroyed by 2022 according to the United Nations
43 of Britain's 100 top grocery brands contain or are thought to contain palm oil
Phil McKenna, New Scientist 1 May 09;
Smoke from forest fires may contain potent mutagenic compounds that can damage human DNA, according to a controversial new study of fire emissions.
Researchers found nitrogen-rich alkaloids in smoke billowing from a controlled burn of Ponderosa pine trees in Missoula, Montana.
The findings could have significant health implications for those downwind of forest fires, especially smouldering, low-temperature fires such as prescribed burns that produce more smoke than higher-temperature wildfires.
The presence of alkaloids – naturally occurring toxins produced by trees and other plants – has long been suspected in smoke from forest fires, but the new study is the first to detect the compounds coming directly from a blaze.
Julia Laskin of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, and colleagues made their discovery using a specialised device to collect ultra-fine particles from the smoke of a forest fire. They then used high-resolution mass spectrometry to determine which molecules the particles contained.
Laskin says the alkaloids can be transported hundreds or even thousands of miles and play an important role in cycling nitrogen through ecosystems, but also have the potential to be quite harmful.
"Some of them are really toxic," says Laskin. "It's very well known that when cows, for example, eat pine needles they die. In a forest fire you emit aerosols into air that contain those same compounds."
'Warning flag'
Ralph Propper, an air pollution specialist at the California Air Resources Board isn't so sure.
"I'd be more concerned about eating heavily charred meat," says Propper, referring to the well-documented carcinogenic affects of burnt food.
He says the study's claim that alkaloids produced by plants can alter or damage genes is an overstatement. "That's just not accurate, a very minor percentage of alkaloids are mutagenic," he says, noting that caffeine and cacao (the key ingredient in chocolate) are also alkaloids.
Propper, emphasising that he is stating his opinion and not that of the CARB, goes on: "The pine needles of Ponderosa pine are toxic to some degree – that's how they defend themselves, with alkaloids – but there isn't anything in this paper to show that they are mutagenic."
The study's main shortcoming is that it identifies classes of compounds found in smoke rather than specific compounds, he says. "It certainly gives a warning flag that the possibility for mutagenic or carcinogenic compounds exists, but they need to do a lot more work to establish that," says Propper.
Journal reference: Environmental Science & Technology (DOI: 10.1021/es803456n)
Phuket Gazette 2 May 09;
CAPE PANWA, PHUKET: Researchers from Bangkok and Phuket are preparing to launch Thailand’s first artificial insemination project for sea turtles at the Phuket Marine Biological Center (PMBC).
Researcher Kanjana Adulyanukosol, who heads the PMBC Endangered Species Unit, said her team will work with researchers from Kasetsart University’s Faculty of Veterinary Science to extract semen from male sea turtles and store it to fertilize females at a later date.
The first attempt at the extraction process, scheduled to take place from May 4 to 6, will start with Olive Ridley and Green sea turtles.
There are populations of both species in both the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand, and the PMBC has healthy adult males of both species already under its care.
The first step in the delicate process is also the most difficult: extracting healthy semen from males and freezing in a special chemical solution so that it can be be implanted in an adult female.
“This is the hardest part, and Thailand lacks specialist knowledge of the procedure because this is the first experiment of its kind anywhere in the country,” said Dr Kanjana.
Sea turtle populations in Thai waters continue to decrease rapidly, with many species on the verge of extinction locally, she said.
Sea turtles need clean sand to nest, but most of their traditional nesting sites on the island have been compromised by hotel and real estate developments and other aspects of the tourism boom, she said.
Another factor that might be contributing to declining numbers is rising sea temperatures.
In recent years the PMBC has found clutches of failed sea turtle eggs, called khai lom (“wind eggs”) in Thai, at a nesting site at Tai Muang Beach in Phang Nga, she explained.
Dr Kanjana thinks changing sea temperatures might be adversely affecting populations, as the gender of sea turtles is dependent upon temperatures at nesting sites.
An increase in sea temperatures could cause an imbalance in male-to-female ratios, with fewer adult males than needed to mate with females.
The issue requires further study, but it could pose yet another obstacle to reproduction among the dwindling populations, she said.
Meanwhile, the Green Sea Turtle whose shell was damaged by fishermen and sent to the PMBC for treatment on April 20 is recovering well. The PMBC plans to release the turtle in mid-May near Racha Island, the same spot where it was caught by fishermen.
Frank Pope, The Times Online 2 May 09;
A high-seas mission departs from San Francisco next month to map and explore a sinister and shifting 21st-century continent: one twice the size of Texas and created from six million tonnes of discarded plastic.
Scientists and conservationists on the expedition will begin attempts to retrieve and recycle a monument to throwaway living in the middle of the North Pacific.
The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Navigators usually avoid oceanic gyres because persistent high-pressure systems — also known as the doldrums — lack the winds and currents to benefit sailors.
Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one.
The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals.
“You can buy certified organic farm produce, but no fishmonger on earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is our legacy,” said Mr Moore.
Because of their tiny size and the scale of the problem, he believes that nothing can be solved at sea. “Trying to clean up the Pacific gyre would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went.”
In June the 151ft brigantine Kaisei (Japanese for Planet Ocean) will unfurl its sails in San Francisco to try to prove Mr Moore wrong. Project Kaisei’s flagship will be joined by a decommissioned fishing trawler armed with specialised nets.
“The trick is collecting the plastic while minimising the catch of sea life. We can’t catch the tiny pieces. But the net benefit of getting the rest out is very likely to be better than leaving it in,” says Doug Woodring, the leader of the project.
With a crew of 30, the expedition, supported by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Brita, the water company, will use unmanned aircraft and robotic surface explorers to map the extent and depth of the plastic continent while collecting 40 tonnes of the refuse for trial recycling.
“We have a few technologies that can turn thin plastics into diesel fuel. Other technologies are much more hardcore, to deal with the hard plastics,” says Mr Woodring, who hopes to run his vessels on the recycled fuel.
Plastics bags, food wrappers and containers are the second and third most common items in marine debris around the world, according to the Ocean Conservancy, which is based in Washington. The proportion of tiny fragments, known as mermaid’s tears, are less easily quantified.
The UN’s environmental programme estimates that 18,000 pieces of plastic have ended up in every square kilometre of the sea, totalling more than 100 million tonnes. The North Pacific gyre — officially called the northern subtropical convergence zone — is thought to contain the biggest concentration. Ideal conditions for shifting slicks of plastic also exist in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the North and South Atlantic, but no research vessel has investigated those areas. If this exploratory mission is successful, a bigger fleet will depart in 2010.
Mr Woodring admits that Project Kaisei has limitations. “We won’t be able to clean up the entire ocean. The solution really lies on land. We have to treat plastics in a totally different way, and stop them ever reaching the ocean.”
The Telegraph 24 Apr 09;
There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?
Richard Grant reports on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and a new expedition that aims to make us reassess our relationship with plastic.
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.
It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.
For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.
'It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,' says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. 'Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn't identify. It wasn't a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.'
Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn't even close. 'We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,' he says. 'No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.'
So ended Moore's retirement. He turned his small volunteer environmental monitoring group into the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, enlisted scientists, launched public awareness campaigns and devoted all his considerable energies to exploring what would become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and studying the broader problem of marine plastic pollution, which is accumulating in all the world's oceans.
The world's navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in
the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land, and the United Nations Environmental Programme agrees.
The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source.
Plastic does not biodegrade; no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across.
Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.
During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids' tears. You can find nurdles in abundance on almost any seashore in Britain, where litter has increased by 90 per cent in the past 10 years, or on the remotest uninhabited Pacific islands, along with all kinds of other plastic confetti.
'There's no such thing as a pristine sandy beach any more,' Charles Moore says. 'The ones that look pristine are usually groomed, and if you look closely you can always find plastic particles. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until you dig a foot down. On Pagan Island [between Hawaii and the Philippines] they have what they call the "shopping beach". If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of all the plastic trash that's washed up there from thousands of miles away.'
On Midway Island, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan, the British wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found that many thousands of Laysan albatross chicks are dying every year from eating pieces of plastic that their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.
Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles.
A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.
Plastic particles are not thought to be toxic themselves but they attract and accumulate chemical poisons already in the water such as DDT and PCBs – nurdles have a special knack for this. Plastic has been found inside zooplankton and filter-feeders such as mussels and barnacles; the worry is that these plastic pellets and associated toxins are travelling through the marine food chains into the fish on our plates. Scientists don't know because they are only just beginning to study it.
We do know that whales are ingesting plenty of plastic along with their plankton, and that whales have high concentrations of DDT, PCBs and mercury in their flesh, but that's not proof. The whales could be getting their toxins directly from the water or by other vectors.
Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are six major subtropical gyres in the world's oceans – their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earth's surface – and that they are all accumulating plastic soup.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now been tentatively mapped into an east and west section and the combined weight of plastic there is estimated at three million tons and increasing steadily. It appears to be the big daddy of them all, but we do not know for sure.
Dr Pearn Niiler of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, the world's leading authority on ocean currents, thinks that there is an even bigger garbage patch in the South Pacific, in the vicinity of Easter Island, but no scientists have yet gone to look.
The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio observed that every new technology opens the possibility for a new form of accident. By inventing the locomotive, you also invent derailments. By inventing the aeroplane, you create plane crashes and mid-air collisions.
When Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist, started tinkering around in his garage in Yonkers, New York, working on the first synthetic polymer, who could have foreseen that a hundred years later plastic would outweigh plankton six-to-one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Baekeland was trying to mimic shellac, a natural polymer secreted by the Asian scale beetle and used at the time to coat electrical wires. In 1909 he patented a mouldable hard plastic that he called Bakelite, and which made him very rich indeed.
Chemists were soon experimenting with variations, breaking down the long hydrocarbon chains in crude petroleum into smaller ones and mixing them together, adding chlorine to get PVC, introducing gas to get polystyrene. Nylon was invented in 1935 and found its first application in stockings, and then after the Second World War came acrylics, foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, Plexiglass and more: an incredible outpouring of new plastic products and the revolution of clear plastic food wraps and containers, which preserved food longer and allowed people to live much further away from where it was produced.
Single-use plastic bags first appeared in the US in 1957 and in British supermarkets in the late 1960s; worldwide there are more than a trillion manufactured every year, although the upward trend is now levelling off and falling in many countries, including Britain. We reduced our plastic bag use by 26 per cent last year, to 9.9 billion. Bottled water entered the mass market in the mid-1980s. Global consumption is now 200 billion litres a year and only one in five of those plastic bottles is recycled. The total global production of plastic, which was five million tons in the 1950s, is expected to hit 260 million tons this year.
Look around you. Start counting things made of plastic and don't forget your buttons, the stretch in your underwear, the little caps on the end of your shoelaces. The stuff is absolutely ubiquitous, forming the most basic infrastructure of modern consumer society. We are scarely out of the womb when we meet our first plastic: wristband, aspirator, thermometer, disposable nappy. We gnaw on plastic teething rings and for the rest of our lives scarcely pass a moment away from plastics.
The benefits of plastic, most of which relate to convenience, consumer choice and profit, have been phenomenal. But except for the small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic that has ever been manufactured is still somewhere in the environment, and some 100 million tons of it are floating in the oceans.
A dead albatross was found recently with a piece of plastic from the 1940s in its stomach. Even if plastic production halted tomorrow, the planet would be dealing with its environmental consequences for thousands of years, and on the bottom of the oceans, where an estimated 70 per cent of marine plastic debris ends up – water bottles sink fairly quickly – for tens of thousands of years. It may form a layer in the geological record of the planet, or some microbe may evolve that can digest plastic and find itself supplied with a vast food resource. In the meantime, what can we do?
What we cannot do is clean up the plastic in the oceans. 'It's the biggest misunderstanding people have on this issue,' Moore says. 'They think the ocean is like a lake and we can go out with nets and just clean it up. People find it difficult to grasp the true size of the oceans and the fact that most of this plastic is in tiny pieces and it's everywhere. All we can do is stop putting more of it in, and that means redesigning our relationship with plastic.'
At the far end of a huge loading warehouse on the San Francisco docks dub reggae is pulsing and two young women are shooting dry ice into two-litre plastic bottles. David de Rothschild, the tall, bearded, long-haired, environmentalist son of the Rothschild banking family, wearing hemp Nikes and a skull-and-bones belt buckle, strides in past a display of nurdles, an aquarium full of plastic soup and various rejected prototypes of the catamaran he intends to build and sail across the Pacific to Australia, visiting the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and various rubbish-strewn islands along the way.
He wants the boat to be made entirely out of recycled plastics and float on recycled plastic bottles, and this has presented a daunting challenge to his team of designers, consultants and naval architects. Human ingenuity has devised many fine applications for recycled plastic, but boat-building has not so far been one of them. The design team has had to start from scratch, over and over again. Furthermore, because the point of this voyage is to galvanise media and public attention on the issue of plastic waste, the boat needs to look dramatic and iconic, and it must produce all its own energy, generate no emissions and compost its waste.
'The message of this project is that plastic's not the enemy,' de Rothschild says, speaking rapidly and unstoppably in a mid-Atlantic accent. He is full of bright energy, good humour, marketing slogans and an almost childlike enthusiasm. 'It's about rethinking waste as a resource. It's about doing smart things with plastic and showcasing solutions. It's about using adventure to engage people and start a conversation that creates change in society. You're always going to get people who say, "Oh, he's a bloody Rothschild, sitting on a boat made of, what's that? Champagne bottles?" And that's fine because it gets people talking about it and thinking about where their rubbish goes.'
The idea took hold of him in July 2006. He had just got back from the North Pole, where he led an expedition designed to heighten awareness about global warming. On the internet he came across a UN report describing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and estimating that there was now an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans. 'I thought, this is nuts that we don't know about this! Six-to-one plastic-to-plankton ratio? This has got to be my next expedition.'
Born in London, de Rothschild, 31, was a reckless, hyperactive child and teenager who found an outlet for energies in competitive showjumping and triathlons. His school career was erratic but he manage to buckle himself down, pass his A-levels and get into Oxford Brookes University to study computing. Afterwards he got a job with a music licensing and merchandising company, designing websites for Britney Spears and U2, and absorbing lasting lessons on the power and strategies of marketing.
Then, with the encouragement of a girlfriend, he got deeply involved in alternative medicine, which led him to organic farming in New Zealand and the subsequent realisation that it was all for naught if the air, the water and the natural environment continued to be poisoned.
In 2004 a friend's brother invited him on a 1,150-mile traverse of Antarctica by foot and ski, and on a whim he invited schoolteachers and children in New Zealand to follow the expedition's progress and learn about Antarctica.
On his return he founded an organisation, Adventure Ecology, intended to use expeditions to get schoolchildren interested and actively involved in environmental issues. The Arctic global warming expedition was the first. Crossing the Pacific in a recycled-plastic boat will be the second.
He decided to name the boat Plastiki, in homage to Kon-Tiki, the raft of balsa logs and hemp ropes in which Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific in 1947. He recruited designers, a public relations team and corporate sponsors, including Hewlett-Packard and the International Watch Company. He won't say how much it is costing or how much of his own money is going into it, only that it is more than he would like and less than it could be.
Jo Royle, the renowed British yachtswoman, has signed on as skipper, and two of Thor Heyerdahl's grandchildren have agreed to join the crew. And through Adventure Ecology, de Rothschild has launched a competition called SMART, inviting individuals and organisations from science, marketing, art and industrial design research and technology to present tangible solutions to the problems of plastic waste, and offering grants and publicity to the winners.
In general terms, it is already clear what we need to do about plastic. Since it is made from oil, which will run out in our lifetimes and get more expensive as it does, we have to start re-using plastic and designing it for re-use. At present only a few of our many hundred plastics can simply be melted down and moulded into something else; the rest are cross-contaminated with other chemicals and types of plastic. But the billion- dollar plastic industry is tooled for virgin plastic and resistant to change.
Charles Moore gives talks to plastic industry executives whenever he can and finds very little interest in recycling, because it's the least profitable sector of the industry. 'A lot of companies and product designers and marketing people don't like recycled plastic either,' de Rothschild says, 'You can't dye it with those bright, attention-grabbing colours.'
For consumers, the easiest way to make a difference is to give up plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles, which contribute more to plastic pollution than any other products. Then comes plastic packaging, which is a little more complicated. It is easy to point out examples of excessive packaging, but plastic does have the virtue of being lighter than paper, cardboard and glass, which gives it a smaller carbon footprint. For food especially, recyclable plastic packaging is probably the best option.
For the hull and cabin of the Plastiki, the team was enthused about recycled plastic lumber until they discovered that it sags badly unless reinforced with glass rods. Now they are excited about self-reinforcing PET, a new product manufactured in Denmark, similar to fibreglass but fully recycled and recyclable. When heat-fused to boards of PET foam, it appears to be capable of withstanding the battering of Pacific waves for a hundred days, although the effect of salt water on the material is still unknown. Dry ice in the two-litre bottles hardens them without losing any flotation, although some of the bottle caps have managed to work themselves loose and are now being resealed with what de Rothschild calls 'a very cool bio-glue' made from cashew nuts and sugar.
Sitting now with a pint of beer and an artichoke in a restaurant opposite the waterfront, he is confident that the Plastiki will be built and on its way to Australia some time this summer. 'We do need to get from A to B but what this project is really about is remarketing and rebranding the message about recycling, about sustainability, about interconnectedness,' he says. What he sees as the failure of the environmental movement, as measured by ever-increasing carbon emissions, rainforest destruction, species extinctions and marine plastic debris, he understands as a failure of marketing and communication, rather than insurmountable forces working in the opposite direction.
'The environmental message has been very exclusive, very guilt-mongering, very fear-mongering, and is that the right way to engage with people? We're bombarded by 2,500 images a day. How are you going to stop someone watching Lost and make them watch someone saying, "You're a bad person because you don't drive a hybrid"? To effect change, you've got to inspire people, not moan at them.'
After another pint, he admits to serious doubts – not that the Plastiki will get built and complete its voyage, but that it is still possible to save the oceans from ecological collapse. Overfishing is the most urgent problem, but what really scares him and the marine scientists is acidification caused by global warming. The oceans are absorbing more and more of the carbon dioxide that we are putting into the air and it is changing the pH of the water, turning the seas more acid, with potentially catastrophic effects on marine organisms and ecosystems.
'A lot of scientists think we're basically screwed, but what are you going to do?' he asks. 'Enjoy your beer, enjoy your family, make the most of it while it lasts? I think there's a real big movement for that at the moment and part of me understands that. But there's a bigger part of me that says we've got to find a solution, collectively. I mean, come on. We spent $265 billion preparing for the Y2K bug and we didn't even know if it was going to happen or not. We know for an absolute fact that if we continue on our current rate of consumption, we're going to run out of resources. But the annual budget for the United National Environmental Programme last year was $190 million. And the budget for the latest James Bond movie was $205 million.'
He chuckles at that, checks his watch and calls for the bill. It is time to walk the dogs and then work the second half of his standard 17-hour day. Outside, he points to San Francisco bay, looking pristine and lovely in the late afternoon sunshine. 'Maybe that's the trouble,' he says. 'You'd never guess what's under the surface if you didn't know, would you?'
theplastiki.com ; algalita.org
Mysterious disappearance could lead to limits on fishing and ban on exports
Steven Morris, The Guardian 1 May 09;
They ought to be wriggling through briny water and marshy flatlands in their hundreds of thousands right now.
But the mystery of the vanishing eels is troubling fisheries officials, conservationists and fishermen who for generations have hunted the curious animal.
A conference in Somerset on the plight of the eel, which was attended by experts from across Europe, has been hearing this week that the eel is in crisis.
The number of European eels across the continent has declined by as much as 95% in the last 25 years, the Environment Agency says. Officials report that the number of young eels arriving in Britain's estuaries, rivers and streams this spring is significantly down on last year. Andy Don, an Environment Agency fisheries officer who has studied the eel for 20 years, said: "There is no doubt that there is a crisis. People have been reporting catching a kilo of glass eels this year when they would expect to catch 40 kilos. We have got to do something."
But the action the Environment Agency is about to take is upsetting those who rely on the eel for their livelihoods. A ban on exporting eels out of Europe - they are a popular dish in the far east - is proposed, along with a plan to severely limit the fishing season and the number of people who will be allowed licences. Some argue that such moves will effectively kill off eel fishing.
Don admitted that it was not at all clear why eels seemed to be vanishing in such large numbers. "The bottom line is we just don't know why they are struggling so badly," he said.
One reason may be that man-made structures such as weirs and dams are stopping glass eels - young eels a few centimetres long - reaching the freshwater habitats where they mature. If this is true, the plight of the eel could get much worse as hundreds of hydro projects are planned in Europe.
Another theory is that a parasite may be killing them off, while some blame illegal fishing methods. At one point a kilo of young eels was worth as much as £500, tempting some fishermen to use illegal nets to scoop as many up as possible. A kilo is still worth £210.
Many believe the shifting of the Gulf Stream means that not so many glass eels are being swept from the Sargasso Sea close to Bermuda, where they are born, to the shores of Europe, while others say there was a surge in the number of eels a quarter of a century ago and the population is now returning to normal.
The Environment Agency has launched schemes - such as building fish passes - across England and Wales to help the glass eels. In East Anglia traps are set up to catch eels, which are released further upstream ahead of impassable obstructions. In the south west of England CCTV cameras record the glass eels coming in from the estuaries on to the Somerset Levels.
Not everybody is convinced. Peter Wood, managing director of UK Glass Eels in Gloucester, called for much more investment in measures to protect the creature rather than fishing being restricted. "In some European countries they spend hundreds of thousands of pounds," he said. "Here they spend hardly anything."
Wood was opposed to measures such as limiting the season. He said that his main business now involved catching glass eels and selling them for farming and restocking projects in Europe. "We need every glass eel we can get hold of," he said.
David Bunt, vice chairman of the Institute of Fisheries Management, which speaks on behalf of commercial and recreational fishermen and women, said the organisation supported action to protect the eel but warned that many individuals would be angry if their livelihoods were affected.
Roger Castle, who has fished for silver eels - the mature eel that returns to the Sargasso Sea to breed after growing in European waters for as long as 40 years - believes the Environment Agency is paying only "lip service" to the fishermen and really wanted to see an end to eel fishing.
Castle, who has fished the Rivers Avon and Stour in Hampshire and Dorset for 30 years, said: "Limiting the season will mean it is not worthwhile for people like me." The eels, he argued, do not arrive and depart at set times to tie in with a restricted season.
"I would much rather they imposed a quota that limited the number of eels we take out but allow us to go whenever we want," said Castle, whose eels are sold on to a smokery. "They will put people like me out of business if they try to restrict us. And it would be a shame to lose those old skills."
A fish's tale
The eel remains one of the world's most mysterious creatures. It is generally accepted that European eels - Anguilla anguilla - are born in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda.
As leaf-like larvae, they are swept by the Gulf Stream towards Europe, a journey that may take a year. When the larvae reach the continental shelf they change into "glass eels" and in the spring begin to move through estuaries and into freshwater.
The animals develop pigmentation, at which point they are known as elvers and are similar in shape to the adult eel. Elvers continue to move upstream and again change colour to become brown or yellow eels.
When the fish reach full maturity - some can live to 40 and grow to 1m long - they migrate back to the ocean. Females are reported to carry as many as 10m eggs. They return to the Sargasso Sea, spawn and die.
Australian government accused of jeopardising fate of tiny pipistrelle
Kathy Marks, The Independent 2 May 09;
Australia's rarest mammal, the Christmas Island pipistrelle bat, is months away from extinction, and wildlife experts say the government is failing to take action that could save the species.
A recent audit of the pipistrelle – a minuscule bat found only on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean – concluded that fewer than 20 individuals remain, all roosting under one piece of bark in the same tree.
Experts say the only way to rescue the species is to capture the surviving bats and breed them in captivity. However, the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, claims that would entail "unacceptably high risks" to the pipistrelle, which is not much bigger than the tip of a thumb. Instead, he has set up a captive breeding trial involving a closely related micro-bat.
By the time the trial yields results, the pipistrelle will be extinct, according to Michael Pennay, president of the Australasian Bat Society. Over the past 15 years, the population has fallen by 90 per cent. "If it continues to decline at the same rate, the species will vanish altogether within months," said Mr Pennay, a zoologist.
"It could happen in one day. All it takes is for that tree to fall down – and it's a dead tree."
Australia's leading bat scientists are so concerned that they have drawn up a rescue plan and offered their services for free. A team of experts is willing to travel to Christmas Island, capture the remaining bats and establish them in enclosures at a research station. Mr Garrett has yet to respond.
Australia already has the worst mammal conservation record of any country. Of all the species lost over the past 200 years, nearly half have been Australian. They include the Tasmanian Tiger, or thylacine, which died out in the 1930s. Thanks to conservation efforts, it is half a century since the last Australian mammal, a species of wallaby, became extinct. Now, unless Mr Garrett has a change of heart, the pipistrelle looks likely to join the long list.
Bat experts accuse the government of dragging its feet. The pipistrelle has been classified as critically endangered, the highest risk category, since 2006. Covered in soft fur, the creatures weigh less than a 10p piece. Contrary to popular perception about bats, they have excellent eyesight. They also use a sonar-like system to navigate their surroundings.
Scientists have no idea why the population has decreased so catastrophically, but they theorise that disease, or introduced pests – which include black rats, yellow crazy ants, wolf snakes and giant centipedes – may be to blame. Several other species native to Christmas Island have experienced steep declines, or disappeared.
Most of Christmas Island is a national park, so habitat loss is not a factor. The island was annexed by Britain in the late 19th century; sovereignty was transferred to Australia in 1958, and nowadays about 1,500 people of Chinese, European and Malay ancestry live there.
Mr Pennay insisted that the government trial was unnecessary, since there was already plenty of evidence that micro-bats could thrive in captivity. "The highest priority now is to secure these bats from whatever is threatening them," he said. "If you leave them in the wild, they'll almost certainly go extinct."
Brian Farkas, Associated Press Yahoo News 1 May 09;
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – The U.S. Forest Service is closing thousands of caves and former mines in national forests in 33 states in an effort to control a fungus that has already killed an estimated 500,000 bats.
Bats have been dying at alarming rates from what scientists call "white-nose syndrome," so-named because it appears as a white powder on the face and wings of hibernating bats.
The problem was first spotted in New York and within two years has spread to caves in West Virginia and Virginia. There's no evidence the fungus is harmful to people.
Researchers believe the fungus is spread from bat to bat, but they have not ruled out the possibility that humans tromping from cave to cave might help to transmit it on their shoes and equipment, said Dennis Krusac, a biologist with the service's Southern region.
"We don't have the answers at this point," he said. "If we have answers in a year or sooner, we can open them back up."
Forest Service biologist Becky Ewing said an emergency order was issued last week for caves in 20 states from Minnesota to Maine. A second order covering the Forest Service's 13-state Southern region should be issued later this month.
The sites will be closed for up to a year, she said.
The orders follow a March request by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for people to voluntarily stay out of caves in 17 states.
Biologists are concerned the fungus could wipe out endangered Indiana, Virginia and Ozark big-eared and gray bats.
Bats play a key role in keeping insects such as mosquitoes under control. Between April and October, they usually eat their body weight in bugs per night. The loss of 500,000 bats means 2.4 million pounds of bugs aren't eaten in a year, Ewing said.
New York caver Peter Haberland said organized caving groups shouldn't object to the closures.
"For a period of a year, most people can deal with that," said Haberland, who serves on the Northeastern Cave Conservancy's board.
He said the order should have little effect in the Northeast since just a few national forests there offer caving and many caves are on private property.
Peter Youngbaer, white nose syndrome liaison for the National Speleological Society, another caving group, said education will be key because many people who explore caves don't belong to organized groups.
"There is a huge concern," he said. "The recreation aspect is probably the least of our concerns."
The Forest Service order says people caught in a cave or mine face up to six months in jail and fines of up to $10,000. Ewing said Forest Service officials will enforce the bans.
Youngbaer said he isn't convinced humans help transmit the fungus, which kills the bats because it affects their hibernation habits, causing them to starve.
A study based on soil samples taken from 200 sites in 30 states should help resolve that question.
"There is no question that it's spreading bat to bat and spreading from bat to bat rapidly," he said. "If it turns out the fungus is living in the caves anyway ... humans moving around doesn't mean anything."
Many of the caves in question are in the 919,000-acre Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, which this week announced it would extend a ban imposed last year that only affected caves considered to be at high risk for the fungus.
On Friday, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources moved to close caves on state-owned property until April even though the disease has not been found in Indiana.
Last month, officials closed all of the caves in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Krusac said the orders do not affect commercial caves on private property.
Officials in the Ozark National Forest are debating whether to impose restrictions on wild cave adventures on the forest's Blanchard Springs Caverns.
Yahoo News 1 May 09;
GABORONE (AFP) – Conservationists in Botswana fear that a pesticide used by the government to prevent pest birds ravaging commercial crops could kill other species, including the spectacular Kori bustard.
Officials are targeting breeding places of the quelea with aerial sprays in Panadamatenga in northern Botswana where it was reported that the birds were destroying 20 tonnes of corn per day.
Birdlife Botswana project manager Keddy Mooketsa said the quelea, which gathers in huge flocks, was troublesome as it bred quickly but that environmentally safer controls like bush burning should be used.
"That area is a breeding site for the white-backed vultures which can feed on the dead birds. The Kori bustard also is found there and it feeds on insects which would not escape the chemical."
The Kori bustard is the world's heaviest flying bird, with mature males weighing close to 20 kilogram (44 pounds), and Birdlife Botswana lists considers it to be of conservation concern.
The white-backed vulture is listed as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
"Other birds of prey which feed on the birds can also be affected," Mooketsa added.
Acting director in Botswana's department of crop production Barutwa Thebenala said recommended spray dosages of the pesticide, cyanophos, were being used.
An environmental study was under way with Britain's Greenwich University and the Plant Protection Institute.
"We are not in a position to talk about the side effects yet because we are in the middle of the study," he said.
The government is also using explosives to blast the nesting grounds of the quelea.
Mark Kinver, BBC News 1 May 09;
Scientists have identified why excessive fertilisation of soils is resulting in a loss of plant diversity.
Extra nutrients allow fast growing plants to dominate a habitat, blocking smaller species' access to vital sunlight, researchers have found.
As a result, many species are disappearing from affected areas.
A team from the University of Zurich, writing in Science, warned that tighter controls were needed in order to prevent widespread biodiversity loss.
Estimates suggest that the global level of nitrogen and phosphorous available to plants has doubled in the past 50 years.
Looking at grasslands, the researchers said it was widely recognised that an increase of chemical nutrients in an ecosystem led to a loss of diversity, but the mechanism of how it was occurring had been difficult to determine.
"You would think that more [nutrients] would lead to more biodiversity," said co-author Andrew Hector, a researcher at the University of Zurich's Institute of Environmental Sciences.
"Yet it is considered to be one of the main threats to biodiversity this century."
'Winner takes all'
Professor Hector explained that there were two main hypotheses: "One is that the presence of more resources led to a general increase in the strength of competition among plants.
"The other is a little bit more mechanistic," he told BBC News.
"When you get an increase in fertilisation, you get an increase in productivity, leading to increased plant biomass and increased shading.
"This shifts the idea to light being the critical resource, with shorter species being shaded out by taller species, resulting in a loss in diversity."
Professor Hector's team, led by PhD student Yann Hautier, fitted lights to the understory of grass in boxes containing fertilised soil.
"Additional understory light compensated for the increased shading caused by the greater above-ground biomass production," they explained.
The supplementary light "prevented the loss of species and maintained… levels of diversity".
The findings led the team to conclude that it was the lack of access to light that affects diversity, not an increase in the strength of competition.
"We have done the critical experiment that has been asking to be done for the past 35 years," said Professor Hector.
"If it all depends on light levels, then if you put the light back then you should prevent a loss of biodiversity."
However, he added that their findings did not offer a "magic bullet" for conservationists.
"What our research shows is that competition for light is very asymmetric.
"So if a plant can get between the sun and its competitors, not only can it get all the light it needs but it can also block its competitors' access to light.
"Because this competition for light is such a 'winner takes all', it emphasises how important it is that we control nutrient enrichment."
Why more fertiliser harms plant diversity
Helen Thomson, New Scientist 1 May 09;
The 35-year-old mystery of why fertilisers decrease biodiversity has finally been solved. The secret? They increase competition for sunlight.
Adding fertilisers to grasslands increases the productivity of plants, but leads to a major drop in biodiversity.
The amount of nitrogen and phosphorus available to plants has doubled in the last 50 years, but the reason why this has harmed diversity has not been easy to answer. The debate has centred on whether fertilisers increase competition above or below ground – for sunlight or soil resources?
To resolve the argument, Yann Hautier and Andy Hector from the University of Zurich, Switzerland built their own experimental plant community from scratch.
The light fantastic
Hautier's team grew 32 plant communities for four years, before transferring them to a glass house.
Each community comprised four different sets of six species. Half were fertilised, the others were left unfertilised. Half of each of these sets had light added, using a system of three fluorescent tubes that were raised as the canopy grew, while the other half were left to grow in normal light conditions.
After two years, the sets that were fertilised in normal light conditions showed a significant increase in productivity and biomass, but lost around one-third of their species diversity compared to the unfertilised groups. Those that were fertilised and given additional light showed no significant loss of diversity.
Underground competition
To uncover whether underground competition for root space had any influence on biodiversity, the team added two new species of plant at the beginning of the second year. The roots of half these plants were contained in plastic tubes, which prevented any below-ground competition: the other half were left exposed.
Removing below-ground competition from fertilised plots had no detectable impact on the mortality of the seedlings, compared to those that were exposed to full root competition, says Hautier.
"In the fertilised groups without additional light, there was no difference with or without the root-tube – they died both ways. Even if we remove competition below ground, these plants are unable to grow."
Drew Purves, a computational ecologist from Microsoft Research Cambridge is impressed with the team's findings.
"This is a rare example of a simple experiment providing an unambiguous answer to an important ecological question. If these results are general to temperate grasslands – which seems likely – then we can start to develop more targeted policies to offset one of the most important sources of diversity loss in grasslands."
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1169640
Scott Sonner, Associated Press Yahoo News 1 May 09;
RENO, Nev. – Conservationists say livestock grazing poses a threat to a wide variety of fish and other wildlife across more than three-fourths of their dwindling habitats on federal land in the West.
Using satellite mapping and federal records, WildEarth Guardians began a study last year matching wildlife habitat and U.S. grazing allotments across more than 260 million acres of federal land in the West.
It includes practically all of the remaining habitat of the Greater sage grouse, a hen-sized game bird the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering adding to the list of threatened or endangered species in 11 Western states from California to Wyoming. The environmental group wants the bird protected.
"The results confirm — in graphic form — previous research finding that incessant, ubiquitous public lands grazing has contributed to the decline of native wildlife," concludes the report entitled "Western Wildlife Under Hoof." The report is scheduled to be released Friday.
The group said continued grazing in ever-shrinking habitat hampers the recovery of fish and wildlife and in some cases threatens them with extinction.
Cattle and sheep trample vegetation, damage soil, spread invasive weeds, spoil water and deprive native wildlife of forage, the report said. It notes that then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said in 2005 that livestock grazing "is the most damaging use of public land."
Mark Salvo, WildEarth Guardians' grazing program specialist and author of the report, said the new data suggest livestock have "done more damage to the Earth than the chain saw and bulldozer combined."
Jeff Eisenberg, director of federal lands for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, criticized the findings as part of an effort to shut down grazing on federal lands.
"There's a number of environmental groups that have decided the best way to spend their time and the money of their funders is to eliminate the families and communities that have made the West what it is today," he told AP in an e-mail. "These groups don't deserve a dignified response."
Don Kirby, president of the Society for Range Management and director of North Dakota State University's School of Natural Resource Sciences, said livestock grazing is an important part of a "landscape management toolbox" that can be used to reduce wildfires and improve wildlife habitat.
"Western rangelands and the wildlife species that live there have coexisted with grazing by large herbivores for tens of thousands of years," Kirby said.
The report found livestock grazing is permitted on 91 percent of the Greater sage grouse's habitat and that grazing operations are active on 72 percent of the habitat. Grazing is active on 55 percent of the federal range of the Gunnison sage grouse and is permitted on 84 percent of it.
Likewise, grazing is permitted on about 80 percent of public land in the historic range of several cutthroat trout species, including 88 percent of the Lahontan and 76 percent of the Bonneville.
It's also permitted on about 75 percent of the federal habitat of four species of prairie dogs.
"The species included in our report are representative of the hundreds of wildlife species that are threatened by public lands grazing," said Salvo, whose group has offices in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
The bulk of the federal land studied is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which issued grazing permits and leases to 15,799 ranchers and other operators covering 128 million acres of U.S. land in 2006.
BLM spokesman Jeff Krauss said the agency has not fully reviewed the report but maintains "well-managed grazing provides numerous ecological and environmental benefits."
Among other things, WildEarth Guardians recommends buying out permits from ranchers and others willing to remove their livestock from grazing land.
"There is a greater economic value in non-consumptive uses of public land — hunting, fishing, birdwatching, hiking, camping — than livestock grazing," the report said.
The Nevada Department of Wildlife shares concerns about dwindling wildlife populations but believes there is a place for grazing on public land, spokesman Chris Healy said.
If ranchers end up selling their land, it could be subdivided and lead to development even more problematic for wildlife, he said.
"It behooves us to get everybody who uses the land to be part of the solution and that's what we've been trying to do with the sage grouse. If one sector or user of the land feels like they are being ganged up on, the odds of coming up with a solution that will work are not good," he said.
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