Captain Watson has been in a German prison since Sunday and is in danger of being extradited to Costa Rica where we fear for his safety from the Shark Fin Mafia and an unfair, politically motivated trial!

When we last wrote you, we had only 15 hours to make our case to the German Federal Minister of Justice, who could throw this whole case out and release Captain Watson, but a stroke of luck has come our way. There was a delay in filing by the general public prosecutor on Wednesday. The delay coupled with Thursday being a bank holiday in Germany has given Captain Watson’s supporters until this Friday to appeal to Federal Minister of Justice and the Minister of Foreign Affairs to end the unjust and politically motivated extradition of our fearless leader.

Please act now! Call, email, and fax the Honorable Ministers and politely ask them to intervene before the extradition process officially begins. If you have already written or called, please do so again! We only have hours to change the minds of the German officials who can make a difference and do something, not only to save the life of Captain Watson, but also to save the lives of the whales, dolphins, seals, and fish that he has spent his life courageously defending.

For the oceans,

Sea Shepherd HQ

P.S. Read the latest update on Captain Watson’s situation, including a hand-written note from the Captain to his supporters, and get contact information for the Honorable Ministers who have the power to FreePaulWatson.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society | PO Box 2616 | Friday Harbor | WA | 98250 | USA

Audubon Advisory
May 11, 2012
Vol 2012 Issue 5

B is for Birds: Help Protect Special Areas of the Western Arctic
The National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska encompasses an immense and spectacular Arctic ecosystem on Alaska’s North Slope – just west of the more well-known Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Reserve provides critical habitat for many species of fish and wildlife: caribou, grizzly bear, polar bear, wolves, wolverine, Arctic fox, walrus, ice seals—and millions of migratory birds that nest and rear their young there each summer.

Earlier this spring, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) developed a Draft Integrated Activity Plan/Environmental Impact Statement (IAP/EIS) to determine the appropriate management of BLM-managed lands in the Reserve. The BLM consulted with tribes, the public, and cooperating agencies to develop a range of future management alternatives.

Alternative B stands apart as the clear choice for conserving birds and habitat. Alternative B would protect several ecologically important areas with exceptional wildlife: Teshekpuk Lake/Dease Inlet, Peard Bay, Utukok River Uplands/DeLong Mountains, Colville River, and Kasegaluk Lagoon.

The wetlands along the northern edge of the Reserve teem with life during the summer. The biological epicenter of this activity is the wetland maze surrounding Teshekpuk Lake. This ecological hotspot provides essential habitat for the Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Herd and hundreds of thousands of waterfowl and shorebirds. For tens of thousands of geese, Teshekpuk Lake provides a critical safe haven when they are flightless during molt. Bird species that breed here migrate to places across the nation from coast to coast and to six continents. Some of the birds you see in your backyard may have been fledged in the Reserve!

Most of the highest-value habitat areas in the Reserve remain largely undisturbed, though more than six million acres have been leased for oil and gas exploration. Right now, you have an unprecedented opportunity to help safeguard these extraordinary areas and ensure balanced management that will protect key areas while allowing for responsible future oil production.

Alternative B is for the birds! Please send your comments supporting Alternative B to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar before June 1.

Please click on the attachment below to read the BLM’s Draft IAP/EIS:

Dear friends of Wilderness,

I have been a wilderness activist for more than 30 years.

Never in that time has a bill been introduced—let alone pass in the House of Representatives—that would do so much harm to Wilderness. H.R. 4089, which passed the House of Representatives on April 17 not only allows destructive activities like road building, logging and ATV use that would destroy the physical characteristics of designated Wilderness, H.R. 4089 places its crosshairs on the foundational underpinnings of the Wilderness Act and its definition of Wilderness—“as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man…retaining its primeval character and influence…which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.” Howard Zahniser, the author of the Wilderness Act, described these words as “the definitive meaning of the concept of wilderness, its essence, its essential character.” 

~1964 Wilderness Act (Photo credit: therichardlife)

It is this essential character of wilderness that the supporters of HR 4089 seek to destroy. We have to stop them. Please send a letter today and please help us spread the word. It may well be the most important letter you will ever write on behalf of Wilderness. Thank you.

– George Nickas, Executive Director, Wilderness Watch.

On April 17, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 4089, the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act, supposedly “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing, and shooting.” The bill is a thinly disguised measure to gut the 1964 Wilderness Act and protections for every unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System.

HR 4089 would give hunting, fishing, shooting, and fish and wildlife management top priority in Wilderness, rather than protecting the wilderness character and wilderness values, as is currently the case. This bill would allow endless, extensive habitat manipulations in Wilderness under the guise of “wildlife conservation” or for providing hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting experiences. It would allow the construction of roads to facilitate such uses, and would allow the construction of dams, buildings, or other structures within Wildernesses.

Specifically, section 104(e)(1) strips away the Wilderness Act’s prohibitions on the use of motorized and mechanized vehicles, motorboats and aircraft, other motorized equipment, and structures and installations for any activity related to hunting, angling, recreational shooting, or wildlife conservation. For example, this would allow for any hunter, angler, or recreational shooter to drive their ATV in Wilderness as long as they were engaged in one of these activities. While the sponsors of the bill have stated this isn’t the law’s intent, an amendment to the bill to make certain this wasn’t the result was opposed by the bill’s supporters and defeated in a House vote.

Section 104(e)(2) would waive “any requirements imposed by the Wilderness Act” for federal public land managers or state wildlife managers for any activity undertaken in the guise of wildlife management. In addition to allowing the construction of roads and unlimited use of motor vehicles and aircraft, this provision would allow any sort of wildlife habitat manipulation that managers desire to do. Logging would be allowed, for example, to create more forage for deer or elk. Reservoirs and watering holes could be bulldozed for bighorn sheep. Lakes and streams could be poisoned, and exotic fishes could be planted to provide more angling opportunities. Predator control, including aerial gunning, trapping, and poisoning would be allowed. There is literally no limit to what managers could do in Wilderness in the name of wildlife management. And if all this isn’t enough, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service points out that because Section 104(c) of the bill bars application of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), none of these activities will need to undergo any environmental review for their impacts on wilderness values, wildlife, or threatened and endangered species.

The bill is backed by the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, Safari Club International, and a coalition of hunting and gun-rights organizations, including the National Rifle Association. These groups are trying to rush this bill to the Senate floor for a vote. It is imperative that you contact your senator now and urge them to oppose HR 4089!

HR 4089 must be blocked in the U.S. Senate!

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Write or email both of your U.S. Senators, and send a copy to your U.S. Representative. Ask your Senators to oppose HR 4089 at every step of the way and to never let it pass the Senate. Contact http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt if you need help finding the email or snail mail addresses for your Senators or Representative. You may want to consider including the following points in your message:

1. OPPOSE HR 4089. It guts the Wilderness Act and strips protection from every single unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System across the country.

2. Massive human manipulations of fish, wildlife, and habitat like those allowed by HR 4089 should not be allowed in our precious Wildernesses or they will cease to be Wildernesses.

3. HR 4089 would allow roads and motor vehicles in Wilderness, and the construction of dams, buildings, and other structures with any connection to fish and wildlife.

4. Environmental review under NEPA must not be waived by HR 4089.

In 2014, will we celebrate or will we mourn the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act? Please Act Today!

William Laurance is a Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland. He studies tropical forests across the planet.

Australian Geographic - May – June 2012, p 118-119

HUNGRY DRAGON

China has become a black hole for the world’s timber, much of it harvested illegally. Consumers should think twice before buying wood products made in China.

IN CHINESE FOLKLORE the dragon symbolises strength, and it is an apt symbol for a nation whose economic rise has been meteoric. But for the world’s shrinking forests, the dragon is something else entirely: voracious.

Read the full article

A Keystone Habitat

Springs and seeps are crucial resources for wildlife and plants including a variety of threatened and endangered species. Aquatic and riparian habitats occupy less than 1% of the state of Arizona’s land base while 60-75% of wildlife species depend on these habitats.

Restoring Springs

A great percentage of springs in this region have been heavily altered by human impacts including piping, excavation and trampling. Springs can be successfully restored if the groundwater sources are intact. This project’s goal is to identify restoration priority levels for individual springs across the Coconino and Kaibab National Forests. The project is a collaboration led by Dr. Abe Springer at Northern Arizona University, in partnership with Grand Canyon Wildlands Council, Grand Canyon Trust and the Springs Stewardship Institute, and funded by the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Volunteers will play a crucial role in gathering needed assessment data from these large landscapes and the many springs they hold.

The Cross-cultural Volunteer Program

Grand Canyon Wildlands Council brought together volunteers from regional tribes and local communities to inventory springs on the Mogollon Rim and the Kaibab Plateau in previous years. We are pleased to have this opportunity to reunite friends and inspire new ones to help protect and restore the ecologically rich riparian habitats associated with springs. We are asking attendees of the training to agree to contribute at least 20 hours to springs trips between May and October.

Participants need to bring a lunch and be outdoor ready.

View the Training Workbook here

Please RSVP to this email by calling 928-556-9306, or click here to sign up on our website

Many-fold, tangled life is better.

Many-fold, tangled life not hobbled by Man’s will is best.

What do I mean?

By “life is good,” I am not writing a television commercial about sitting with your buddies in front of a widescreen TV for a Superbowl party with Budweiser while wives and girlfriends in tight, low-cut tops bring in nachos and other goodies. No, I am laying down bedrock that the coming out of life or living things—chemical molecules that could replicate and do things—was good. As is its further evolution. Both life—this way of being—and living things—the lone packages into which life fleetingly puts itself—are good.

The first step in ethics is to ask what is good. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “Ethics” says, “By ‘the good’ here is meant what is intrinsically good (or good-in-itself), not what is good only as a means to something else.” This is what I mean by “life is good.” It is good-in-itself. If there is good-in-itself at all, I would think “life is good” would be self-evident or unmistakable.

Whether the knowing creation of an Almighty or the outcome of a wandering, blind, goalless bubbling-over of chemistry and electricity in the right setting by happenstance, life and living things are good. Life comes together as neighborhoods (or communities as ecologists call them) in which we as dwellers or as wayfarers need to behave as good neighbors to the neighborhood and to each neighbor. Aldo Leopold wrote that the Land Ethic made one a “plain member and citizen” of the land community.I would restate that as being a good neighbor in wild neighborhoods. Being a good neighbor is being good to life, which is good-in-itself. The sign at the National Forest trailhead a quarter-mile from my front door welcomes hikers but warns that we are coming into the home of many kinds of wildlife and that we are “guests in their home.” (Italics on the sign.) When you are a guest in someone’s home, you need to be well-behaved. You do not rule the roost when you are a guest.

By “many-fold” (manifold) and “tangled” life, I mean biological diversity or biodiversity. This is the Tree of Life: many, many kinds of life living in a wealth of jumbled, messy, always-shifting neighborhoods.

By “not hobbled by Man’s will,” I mean wild—wild things, which are Earthlings that are as yet self-willed and not thralls to Man.

These other Earthlings are good because they are and because they are free by being wild. Wild things are good-in-themselves.

“Wild” is a many-fold and tangled word and thought. To understand such a word, we need to go back to its beginning in language—at least as far as we can. It means going back to the Anglo-Saxons coming into Britain as Roman civilization was withering and leaving.  Early Gothonic or Deutsch speakers—warlords (“kings” and “lords” in their high and mighty gall), churls, and bards such as those who wrote down Beowulf and other sagas and poems—struggled with will.  They lived next to wilderness—land not yet settled or plowed—and knew wildlife such as bear, wolf, lynx, wolverine, moose, wisent, eagle owl, snowy owl, golden eagle, white-tailed eagle, and other mighty beings that were untamable.

Please click on the attachment below to read the entire “Campfire.”

All photos © 2012 by Dave Foreman

The toilet paper on your grocery store shelves may have a direct impact on the 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild.

Learn more about how you can help through World Wildlife Fund and make a pledge to never buy paper products linked to rain forest and tiger habitat destruction.

Bird Death Pipes

“Hollow metal and plastic (PVC) pipes and posts are found throughout the world and serve a variety of purposes. Wildlife (birds, reptiles, small mammals) mortalities, including species of conservation concern, have been documented in mine claim marker posts (Brattstrom 1995, Lahontan and Red Rock Audubon Societies 2009) which resulted in passing a law in Nevada that called for the removal of all PVC mine claim markers across the state (American Bird Conservancy 2011). However, wildlife mortalities in pipes (death pipes) are not limited to uncapped mine claim marker posts.

In March, 2009, an employee of the Audubon California’s Kern River Preserve (…) discovered a fallen irrigation standpipe 6″ in diameter and 10′ tall on adjacent California Department of Fish and Game land that contained numerous bird carcasses and remains of other wildlife. Alarmingly, the fallen pipe contained the remains of 200 dead birds. Four additional pipes were identified and subsequently cut down. All contained dead bird debris (although we were unable to collect it because it fell down the vertical pipes and collected underground in the horizontal buried pipe).

Death Pipes are everywhere. Any open top vertical pipe can be a death trap to birds and other wildlife.”

This is an excerpt from “Bird Death Pipes,” a paper produced by Audubon California/Kern River Preserve, and Southern Sierra Research Station. Please click here to read the entire paper, and then click here to find more details and information on the Kern River Preserve website.

Seven science colleagues present tributes to Paul S. Martin, 1928 – 2010: Jim King, Geoff Spaulding, Gary Haynes, Alberto Burquez, Tom Van Devender, David Burney, and Connie Barlow (plus, Paul’s son, Tom Martin). The outdoor memorial service was held on the University of Arizona’s Tumamoc Hill (Tucson) on 12 November 2011. Pleistocene ecology and other topics discussed include: palynology, packrat middens as a chronological source of fossil pollen data, megafaunal extinctions of the Quaternary, the Overkill hypothesis, natural history of the Southwestern USA and northern Mexico, Rio Mayo plants, neotropical anachronisms (and the fruits the gomphotheres ate), Pleistocene Rewilding, and the Mammoth Memorial Service at the Mammoth Site in South Dakota. Closing hymn: “Bring Back the Elephants.” Each tribute begins at these times:

Tom Martin “Childhood Memories” (0:44)
Jim King “The Pollen Years” (7:31)
Geoff Spaulding “Packrat Middens and Pleistocene Vegetation” (15:47)
Gary Haynes “Overkill and Pleistocene Extinctions” (19:27)
Alberto Burquez “Rio Mayo Plants” (22:38)
Tom Van Devender “Natural History of the Southwest” (30:00)
David Burney “Pleistocene Rewilding” (35:00)
Connie Barlow “Bring Back the Elephants” (45:36)

To learn more about Paul Martin and for links to his online accessible writings and research, visit http://thegreatstory.org/paul-martin.html