Tibet a “powderkeg?” How could that be?
Photo of Potala Palace by the late Galen Rowell, circa 1981; for Rowell’s famous photo of the Palace and Rainbow, click here. Read Sweeney’s post, note the difference between the two photos here.
Julia Sweeney discusses her trip there nine years ago. You’ll see things more clearly.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Pharyngula, again, and he tips to Stranger Fruit. Myers is about a lot more than just biology, and so are most other blogs by biologists.
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China, Environmental protection, foreign affairs, Freedom - Political, Politics, World history | Tagged: China, Foreign Relations, international affairs, Oppression, Political Freedom, Politics, Tibet | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Potomac Blossoms
View of Washington Monument, Cherry Blossoms and Tidal Basin
Theodor Horydczak, photographer, circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was, 1923-1959On March 27, 1912, First Lady Helen Herron Taft and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted two Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Potomac River Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. The event celebrated the Japanese government’s gift of 3,000 trees to the United States. Trees were planted along the Potomac Tidal Basin near the site of the future Jefferson Memorial, in East Potomac Park, and on the White House grounds.
The text of First Lady Taft’s letter, along with the story of the cherry trees, is available from the National Park Service’s official Cherry Blossom Festival Web site. From the opening screen, scroll down to the paragraph beginning, “The history of the cherry trees.”
A lot more, with good links, at the Library of Congress “Today in History” site.
Leave a Comment » | Environmental protection, History, Presidents, trees | Tagged: Cherry Blossom Festival, Cherry trees, Entertainment, History, President Taft, Washington D.C. | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
March 20 brought the Spring equinox, but our daffodils have been up for a couple of weeks. Spring comes a little earlier every year.
That fact, and news stories like these below must cause great angst in the bowels of the offices of U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and other places climate change deniers hold sway. One can almost imagine some poor sap of a Coburn minion laboring away long into the night trying to devise legislation that will prevent Canadian thistles, redbuds, marigolds, wheat, soybeans and corn from reading about climate change or going to see Al Gore’s movie, and getting the wrong ideas.
I hope that minion is imaginary.
Here’s story #1: The Tuesday Science Section of the New York Times carried a story by Jim Robbins, “In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance.” Longtime readers probably know of my deep affection and ties to Yellowstone and the Mountain West. So of course this story catches my eye.
Robbins details an interesting set of changes being studied by Robert L. Crabtree, who is “chief scientist with the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in Bozeman, Montana”: Invasive Canadian thistle, an exotic weed harries cattlemen throughout the world for the ways it destroys pasture land; despite its name, this thistle is an exotic from Asia, accidentally introduced to the Americas. The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, formerly a wetland, continues to dry as a result of rising temperatures and lack of usual rainfall (a predicted effect of global climate change). Canadian thistle loves drying wetlands, and has invaded along the Lamar River. Officials fought the invasion for several years, but the fight seems lost.
The changes are dramatic, to observant ecologists:
Enter the pocket gopher, a half-pound dynamo that tunnels into the ground near the surface. The gophers love the abundant, starchy roots of the plant and burrow beneath it to harvest the tubers. What they do not eat they stockpile under plants or rocks.
The expansion of pocket gophers and thistle is not gradual, Dr. Crabtree said, but a rapid positive-feedback loop. As the gophers tunnel, they churn surface soil and create a perfect habitat for more thistle. In other words, the rodents help spread the plant. And more plants, in turn, lead to more pocket gophers.
“The pocket gophers are unconsciously farming their own food source,” said Dr. Crabtree. Their numbers here have tripled since the late 1980s, he said.
For their part, grizzly bears have discovered the gophers’ caches and raid them. As a result, the Lamar Valley is pockmarked with holes where grizzlies have clawed up bundles of roots. Bears also devour gophers and their pups.
Dr. Crabtree thinks the bears started feeding in earnest on the new food source in 2004 — a poor year for another bear staple, the white bark pine nut. Now, he adds, they seem to be eating the gophers and roots more routinely.
Tom Oliff, chief scientist for Yellowstone, confirms that the growing season for the park has expanded 20 days a year since the mid-1990s, which may explain the spread of Canada thistle. Mr. Oliff said the park reduced control efforts because evidence showed that the plant ebbed and flowed and that the range would probably shrink on its own.
One doesn’t have to be a fan of the Craigheads or a biologist to be dimly aware that the Yellowstone ecosystems are intensely studied and intensely threatened. Climate change played a contributing role in the cataclysmic fires in the park in 1988; reintroduction of wolves still sparks some controversy, though the return of a top predator has already produced other dramatic changes in Yellowstone ecosystems. Yellowstone is home and refuge to a wild bison herd, and beautiful and unique — generally revered as a “crown jewel” of America’s features.
Nor does one need to be a climate scientist to recognize the signs of warming listed in the article, and the dangers that are implied: Drying wetlands, invasive species, dying traditional foodstocks for grizzlies, population explosions that almost always are a symptom of serious trouble in an ecosystem.
So I was surprised, dumbfounded even, to see The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE claim this as a good story. Why?
Something absolutely unheard-of before: an entire New York Times article talking about Global Warming but… with no hint of impending doom or catastrophes:
In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance by Jim Robbins – published: March 18, 2008
Destruction of wetlands, displacement of native species, upset of the ecological apple cart — and this is “no hint of impending doom?” (While you’re at the NY Times site, also see this story, about how warmer temperatures threaten the grizzly.)
Here’s story #2:
Cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., now appear weeks earlier than they used to. April 5 was the date of the debut of the blossoms 30 years ago, according to a story at National Public Radio, but they are out already and will have peaked by the end of March this year.
Washington’s blossomless Cherry Blossom Festivals (the dates for the festival have not kept pace) provide one more indicator that spring comes earlier. A geographer from Virginia Tech, Kirsten de Beurs, uses remote sensing satellite data to look at the dates plants spring forth, and has determined that spring is moving up 8 hours every year. (Go to the NPR site and listen to the story.) (This science is called “phenology,” the study of the timing of biological phenomena.)
Here’s the problem for climate change deniers: How can they convince the birds, bees, grizzlies, and especially the trees and flowers, that they shouldn’t be acting as if the climate were changing? How can the climate change skeptics get the Canadian thistles to stop invading, the Japanese blossoming cherry trees in the Tidal Basin to delay their blossoms, the bluegrass of Kentucky to delay its greening, the prairies of Kansas to delay the wildflowers and grasses?
Have all those plants been suckered in by Al Gore’s movie? Don’t those plants know that Anthony Watts has shown that the weather measuring stations across the U.S. are placed wrongly, and so there cannot be warmer weather?
Church authorities got Galileo to lie low on the issue of heliocentricity centuries ago; but according to the legend, as he left the room where he had agreed to keep quiet, he muttered, “but still, it moves,” referring to the motion of the Earth about the Sun. This is the problem of the climate change deniers: Still, the climate changes.
Canute couldn’t command the tides not to flow; climate change deniers cannot command the flowers not to bloom. That force that through the green fuse drives the flower? It’s the destroyer of skepticism, too. Climate change skeptics curse it today.
24 Comments | Climate change, Economics, Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Global warming, Natural history, Science | Tagged: Climate change, Economics, geography, Global warming, Politics, Science, Yellowstone Park | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It’s just one more report to throw on the pyre of reports to be burned if it ever turns out as skeptics say and others hope, global climate change is just a momentary trend: From 1999 to 2006, the pace of glacier melting worldwide picked up.
We had a cold winter; skeptics will argue that the winter of 2007-2008 was not included, and it reverses the trend.
If only that were so.
9 Comments | Accuracy, Environmental protection, Global warming, Politics, Reason, Science | Tagged: Climate change, environment, Glaciers, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
On the eve of a major conference on health effects of DDT, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control published a study it had suppressed for several months, detailing pollution effects in the Great Lakes area. The author of the study, demoted but still outspoken, was grudgingly granted permission to attend the Kenaga International Conference on DDT and Health, which opened yesterday at Alma College in Alma, Michigan.
Science won the skirmish, getting the study pried out of CDC. News coverage of the conference stopped short of spectacular so far: Only local Michigan media outlets provided coverage. If we won the war, but no one knew . . . ?
The Morning Sun suggested that further studies of health effects in the area are required, and that no successful cleanup of a toxic site is ever done without health studies showing the need.
[Jane] Keon[, chairwoman of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force] hasn’t read the entire report but did read the portions about Gratiot County.
“There’s no new information, and everything mentioned is well-known and verified by ATSDR and CDC,” she said. “I understand that in addition to 200 researchers and much peer review the report data was reviewed by state and local health departments in the areas of concern without the complaint that the science was weak.
“We in the task force view the report as further proof that a full-blown health study is needed in Gratiot County. From our own studies we also know that communities with contaminated sites that have a health study to point to get very thorough cleanups, while communities that do not have a health study do not get thorough cleanups.”
The task force has twice applied for grants to perform a comprehensive local heath study but were turned down both times.
“The reasons offered (for rejection) seemed lame and illogical,” Keon said. “One time we were told that we didn’t have enough data, and yet that is why we desired the health study – to have a scientific collection of data.”
A citizens’ group in Washington, D.C., the Center for Public Integrity, obtained a copy of the study last year and made it available on the internet. There is no indication I can find of whether there were changes made in the study between the leaking and the formal publication.
2 Comments | DDT, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, Research, Science, War on Science | Tagged: CDC, DDT, Great Lakes, health, pollution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Or, why thinking carefully often outweighs shouting loudly in the free market of ideas. I stumbled across this entry, a serious question to a serious Buddhist practitioner.
2 Comments | DDT, Environmental protection, Reason, Religion | Tagged: DDT, Environmental protection, Reason, Religion | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
DDT can interfere with the feedback loop in the pituitary gland, which releases the milk-producing hormone prolactin. Studies show that exposure to DDT at critical points in pregnancy or just after childbirth can reduce the output of breast milk, or even dry it up. In such instances the mother will turn to formula, which is expensive. And in Africa formula feeding often leads to another death sentence for babies: diarrhea (infants have no immunity to the microbes that abound in contaminated drinking water throughout much of the continent). Here, then, exposure to DDT may cause as swift and bleak an outcome as exposure to a mosquito.
On Earth is a publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
2 Comments | Africa, DDT, Environmental protection, Malaria, Public health, Rachel Carson | Tagged: Africa, DDT, environment, Malaria, Public health | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I love irony.
Henry VIII devised a novel way to save money. He ordered coins be minted containing silver, as during the reign of Henry VII, but he ordered that the purity of the silver be reduced. Edward VI continued the policy so that, by the time of the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, royal advisor and financier Sir Thomas Gresham observed that most of the old, high-silver content coins were out of circulation, hoarded by people against future inflation, allowing the lesser-valued money to circulate. Gresham told Elizabeth the bad money drove out the good money.
Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519 – 21 November 1579), British financier and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and earlier regents. Portrait c. 1554 by Anthonis Mor.
The principle had been observed earlier by Aristophanes and others. It is known in modern economics as Gresham’s Law, since 1858 when British economist Henry Dunning McLeod decided to honor Gresham by naming the rule after him.
The bad drives out the good, the cheap drives out the more expensive, gossip drives out good information — the principle is widely observed in areas beyond economics.
And so it is that with regard to DDT, the good information about the dangers of DDT and the benefits of restricting use of the chemical has been driven out of the marketplace by bad information claiming DDT is safe, and ignoring the significant benefits reaped when massive use of DDT was stopped.
And here’s the irony: DDT-happy critics of good environmental policy now claim to be the good information driven out by the “bad” information of DDT’s harms. No kidding. A columnist named Natalie Sirkin, in a column delivering almost nothing but bad, vile information, says bad information drives out the good, never once noting the irony.
The defense of DDT was, from the beginning, a lost cause. A few of us vainly hoped that science would prevail. We soon found that Gresham ’s Law, which states that bad currency drives out good currency, applies to science as well as to economics.
No kidding it applies. Do a Google search for “DDT” today and you’ll find all over the internet the disinformation of Gordon Edwards’ ghost and junk science purveyor Steven Milloy. You will have a difficult time finding any solid study showing how DDT nearly killed off the American bald eagle, however, and you’ll have to do a targeted search to learn of any dangers of DDT — information on human toxicity is almost impossible to find, though it’s easy to find many recountings of Gordon Edwards’ bold drinking of a teaspoon of DDT before lectures.
(Natalie and Gerald Sirkin write for the American Spectator; at this writing, Google features warnings on all of their material at the time of this writing, saying the site host may try to insert “malicious software” on your computer — so I have not linked there. This problem should sort itself out, I hope.)
(The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) works to get a history of the agency up on the ‘net; a lot from the DDT ban era is now available at the EPA site for scholars; Milloy will not be happy to have factual rebuttal officially and easily available.)
Below the fold, I’ll offer a point-by-point rebuttal of the bizarre claims in favor of DDT and against the noble public officials who worked to restrict its use.
8 Comments | Accuracy, DDT, Economics, Environmental protection, Geography - Physical, History, Junk science, Public health, Rachel Carson, Research, Science, War on Science | Tagged: DDT, eagles, Environmental protection, Junk science, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Meanwhile, back in reality, the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology signed on to cosponsor the conference on DDT’s effects on human health and the environment at Alma College in Michigan, set for March 14.
Logo for the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
Religionists and conservative pundits won’t boycott the conference. But they won’t be there, either, I’ll wager. They don’t want to confuse their rants with the facts, you see.
Do we know any bloggers up Alma College way (Alma, Michigan, in the heart of the peninsula) who might attend the conference and provide hourly reports? Ed Brayton, are you close? Got a day to play blog journalist for a good cause?
1 Comment | Accuracy, DDT, Education, Environmental protection, Public education, Public health, Science | Tagged: DDT, Junk science, Rachel Carson, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Anti-science and anti-environment protection advocates appear to be ramping up their campaign to poison Africa with DDT. Whether it’s related to U.S. President George Bush’s last-gasp trip to Africa or something else, is difficult to determine.
The vicious campaign is popping up everywhere. Is there too much vitriol against sanity to be more than coincidence?
Religionist Neil Simpson’s poke in the eye of reason got me going this time. In “Dangerous environmentalism” he hits just about every false claim against environmentalists and every false claim for DDT in just a few paragraphs — he got it from Steve Forbes and repeated it without bothering to consider whether Forbes was engaging in ill-informed rant.
Steve Forbes doesn’t know much about the history, science or law of DDT or malaria, but that never stops him from opining that others are dead wrong in what they do know.
The rant hits so many of the favorite punching bags of the modern angry white male bigot: Intellectuals (those scientists and environmentalists with their college degrees), women and women’s rights (Rachel Carson didn’t marry, and fought her way to prominence in fields men dominated), history (they wish it weren’t so, and if they repeat what they want history to have been, maybe Santayana’s Ghost will leave them alone — not that they are ever bothered by repeating historical error), race (never miss a chance to accuse scientists, environmentalists, intellectuals and other “liberals” with race bigotry), foreign aid (see, we can just poison Africa back to health — if you’d just stop sending them money for bed nets and good medical care, DDT is all they need).
This is the money line from Forbes:
Yet in one of history’s more murderously myopic ongoing actions, most advanced countries and international agencies discourage its use. Why? Blame Rachel Carson’s seismically influential–and now largely discredited–book, Silent Spring, first published in 1962. In it she blames DDT for imperiling birds and people, portraying it as a blight of almost biblical proportions. It ain’t so. As Dr. Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science & Health once put it, there “has never been a documented case of human illness or death in the U.S. as a result of the standard and accepted use of pesticides.” The British medical journal The Lancet similarly notes that after 40 years of research no significant health threat from DDT has been found.
Count the errors:
(It is often useful to remind critics that DDT was not banned because of dangers to human health, but instead because of its damage to beneficial animals outdoors. It’s also good to remind them that DDT was specifically reinserted into disease fighting by the EPA order in 1972 that banned DDT use on crops, only in the U.S.)
Then, with no sense for the irony, Simpson extols the virtues of mosquito netting.
Mosquito nets are another inexpensive solution. See Nothing But Nets if you want to help.
The Nothing But Net drive faces implicit opposition chiefly from interests who claim poisoning with DDT is a better idea.
One wishes critics of Rachel Carson would show a bit of Christian charity, calling for bed nets, but avoiding unjustified and misinformed calumny against Carson and environmentalists, who have labored intensively for 40 years to fight malaria.
One gets the idea it’s not malaria these pundits worry about.
A few words about totalitarianism below the fold.
88 Comments | Accuracy, DDT, Environmental protection, Junk science, Malaria, Rachel Carson, Religion, Science | Tagged: DDT, Malaria, Neil Simpson's unreason, Rachel Carson, Religion, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies will host a high-powered symposium in April, “Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest.”
The symposium is set for Saturday, April 12, 2008, at McCord Auditorium in SMU’s Dallas Hall, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Teachers and community college professors may earn up to 7 hours CEU credits. Registration is available on-line. The $20.00 fee includes a luncheon; conference-only registration is an amazingly inexpensive $5.00.
Conference organizers are looking at a second wave of energy resource development in the Four Corners region, especially, following on earlier development of uranium ore extraction, and coal-fired power generation.
The symposium and the resulting book of essays will provide an historical context for energy development on Native American lands and put forth ideas that may guide future public policy formation. Collectively, the presentations will make the case that the American Southwest is particularly well-suited for exploring how people have transformed the region’s resources into fuel supplies for human consumption. Not only do Native Americans possess a large percentage of the region’s total acreage, but on their lands reside much of the nation’s oil, coal, and uranium resources. Regional weather patterns have also enabled native people to take advantage of solar and wind power as effective sources of energy. Although presentations will document histories of resource extraction and energy development as episodes of exploitation, paternalism, and dependency, others will show how energy development in particular has enabled many Indians to break from these patterns and facilitated their social, economic, and political empowerment.
My second job out of high school, and through much of my undergraduate days, took me to Farmington, New Mexico, and far around the area for the Air Pollution Laboratory at the University of Utah’s Engineering Experiment Station, to measure air quality and effects of air pollution resulting from the Four Corners Power Plant, as the San Juan Generating Station was under construction.
I’m planning to attend the symposium.
Especially after last Saturday’s sessions for history teachers at SMU (the Stanton Sharp Symposium), I highly recommend these programs for their ability to charge up high school teachers to better classroom work. This is history, and economics, at its best, looking to improve public policy and help people.
Planned presentations are listed below the fold, copying the information from the website for the symposium.
5 Comments | Economics, Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Native Americans, Natural history, Natural resources, Teaching | Tagged: air pollution, coal, Economics, Glen Canyon, History, Native Americans, Navajo Tribe, Politics, teacher training | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
And they are available for classroom use at a very modest price.
A couple of weeks ago I caught most of a program on water resources in Texas, from the Texas Parks and WildlifeDepartment. What caught my ear was the voice of Walter Cronkite, I thought.
TP&W produces a weekly program on the lands it manages, recreation and other issues dealing with land and environmental protection in Texas. The weekly programs come packed full of information and great photography — wise Texas history and geography teachers will see whether their local PBS station carries this program and tape it regularly.
Several times in the past five years TP&W produced special programs on Texas water resources. This one was produced in 2007:
Texas, the State of Springs: This hour-long documentary, narrated by Walter Cronkite, examines the alarming decline of Texas’ natural springs and addresses the current issues that directly impact spring flow and what can be done to save these vital resources.
Texas the State of Springs, initially aired on PBS stations across Texas on Thursday, February 15, 2007.
You may purchase a DVD copy of the documentary — and of two previous editions, one narrated by Cronkite and an earlier one narrated by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. They are available for $12.00 each, a bargain. Copyright expressly encourages use of these productions in classrooms.
Every middle school and high school in Texas should have a copy of these programs in their libraries. Perhaps your PTA would donate the $36.00 to put all three of them there?
That’s the way it is!
1 Comment | Economics, Environmental protection, Natural history, Natural resources, Texas, Water | Tagged: classroom video, Economics, geography, Texas history, Walter Cronkite, water resources | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Steven Milloy must be apoplectic.
On March 14, 2008, Alma College, in Alma, Mich., is hosting a conference examining what is known about the impact of DDT on human health and the environment.
The conference will bring together a number of national and international experts to frame and lead discussions of current knowledge of DDT. Attendees will engage with experts to plan what research or other projects are needed to address questions about the impact of DDT and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
The conference is jointly sponsored by the Center for Responsible Leadership at Alma College, the Ohio Valley Chapter of the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, and the Pine River Superfund Task Force, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) community advisory group (CAG) for Superfund sites in the Pine River watershed in Michigan.
Why Alma College?
For a number of years students and faculty at Alma have helped support the work of the Pine River Task Force. The Superfund sites in the watershed of the Pine River resulted from the massive dumping of byproducts from production of DDT and a fire retardant based upon polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) by Velsicol Chemical Company. In addition to general dumping of wastes, Velsicol was responsible in 1973 for one of the worst food contamination mistakes in history, when PBB was erroneously mixed with animal feed and remained undetected for a year.
While highly contaminated for decades, the Pine River watershed has been fortunate to be the location of Alma College, with a long tradition of community involvement, and also the home of a number of people with remarkable expertise. One of the long time members of the CAG was the late Eugene Kenaga (1917-2007), for whom the conference is named.
Eugene Kenaga
During World War II, Dr. Kenaga served as an officer in a malariology unit in the Pacific Theater, using DDT. For forty-two years he was a research scientists with the Dow Chemical Company, for many years in charge of their entomological research. In 1968 he served on a three-member blue ribbon pesticide advisory panel (for Michigan Governor George Romney) that restricted use of DDT in the state. After the formation of EPA, he served on a variety of EPA advisory panels. He was also one of the founders of the International Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC).
And:
Recently, the College, SETAC, and Task Force have become aware of an international campaign that questions the national and international restrictions on the use of DDT. Knowledge of this campaign led to the decision to bring together international experts and concerned citizens to discuss what is known and needs to be known about the impacts on human health and the environment arising from exposure to DDT and the other POPs.
Serious scholars, academic rigor, real scientists, real science, government agencies charged with protecting human health and environmental quality, the Center for Responsible — will any of the DDT advocates have the backbone to show? They don’t appear to fit any of those categories.
Eugene Kenaga International DDT Conference on Environment and Health
March 14, 2008
Alma College, Alma, Mich.DDT: What We Know; What Do We Need to Know?
Speakers scheduled for the conference, listed below the fold.
8 Comments | Business Ethics, DDT, Environmental protection, History, Junk science, Leadership, Malaria, Natural history, Natural resources, Public health, Rachel Carson, Research, Science | Tagged: Alma College, DDT, environment, health, Junk science, Rachel Carson, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
One-paragraph in a story in the Philadelphia Daily Inquirer with a lot of impact:
A record number of bald eagles soared past Hawk Mountain in Berks County this fall, continuing a comeback that began with the banning of DDT in 1972. Then, 18 eagles were counted during the typical migration. The count this fall: 230. – Don Sapatkin
Caption from PennLive.com blog: Visitors and staff gather on the South Lookout at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, near Kempton, Berks County. (HAWK MOUNTAIN SANCTUARY PHOTO) (Photo substituted here for previous photo noted below, which has gone missing in DatedLinksLand)
South Lookout at Hawk Mountain: The view from a rocky ledge near the entrance at Hawk Mountain provides a spectacular view of the countryside and is a good vantage point for watching migrating raptors in the fall. This photo was taken the afternoon of 10-16-2006. Public domain photo, via Answers.com.
The white area at upper center is the “River of Rocks”. According to http://www.hawkmountain.org, this formation is a mile-long boulder field, up to 40 feet deep, which was deposited 10,000-12,000 years ago (the end of the last Ice Age), when glaciers stopped 40-50 miles to the north of this location. Repeated freezing and thawing cracked boulders from the ridgetop that gradually slid to their current position.
2 Comments | DDT, Environmental protection, Natural history, Natural resources, Science | Tagged: cience, DDT, eagles, environment | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
This University of Buffalo South Campus resident keeps a watchful eye over the nesting box in the Mackay tower that was custom-designed by UB facilities staff. – See more at: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/news-releases/arts-and-culture.host.html/content/shared/university/news/news-center-releases/2010/04/11203.html#sthash.hqz74P1J.dpuf
It was DDT that nearly did in the peregrine falcon, not habitat destruction, not hunters, not egg collectors.
Dr. [Tom] Cade, who said he had been fascinated by falcons from childhood and who did his Ph.D. dissertation on the peregrine and gyrafalcon in Alaska, recalled that at first the peregrine’s plight was mistakenly attributed to overdevelopment, molestation by falconers, collection of its brown speckled eggs by admirers and wanton killing by people who simply did not like falcons. But at a conference at the University of Wisconsin in 1965, experts realized that the crash of falcons was a worldwide problem, and, as Rachel Carson suggested in ”The Silent Spring,” DDT was probably the main culprit.
DDT is an organochloride compound that breaks down into DDE, a highly persistent chemical that is stored in the fat of animals that consume it, especially predators like peregrines that are at the top of the food chain. DDE interferes with the deposition of calcium in the shells of the birds’ eggs, leaving them too fragile to survive incubation by females weighing two or three pounds.
Remarkable story of the dedication of one ornithologist, a successful program to revive an endangered species, and serendipity with a happy ending, in an often-overlooked article by science writer Jane Brody at the New York Times, February 15, 2000.
Junk science advocates claim that DDT did no serious damage to birds; the story of the peregrine falcon indicates that DDT was the major culprit in a worldwide decline of raptors. (This is direct refutation of claims by Steven Milloy and the late Gordon Edwards.)
Apart from the rebuttal points, Brody’s story tells how scientists work, how they make mistakes and recover, and how luck plays a huge role in some endeavors.
Peregrine falcons were delisted from the endangered species list in 2000, due largely to the success of Tom Cade’s captive breeding program, coupled with a decline in DDT in the wild after DDT use was restricted.
1 Comment | Accuracy, DDT, Environmental protection, Government, History, Junk science, Rachel Carson, Science | Tagged: DDT, environment, Environmental protection, Junk science, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 