Unforgetting Exxon Valdez

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of one of the world's great ecological catastrophes - the Exxon Valdez oil spill - The New York Times has carried a telling editorial. Excerpt:

More than $2 billion has been spent on cleanup and recovery. Exxon has paid at least $1 billion in damages. Supertankers have been made safer with double hulls, emergency teams given better equipment. Some fish species, though not all, have recovered. Yet the Exxon Valdez still sends a powerful cautionary message: oil development, however necessary, is an inherently risky, dirty business — especially so in the forbidding waters of the Arctic.

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Ice, ice baby... going, going, gone

The yellow rubber ducky in your bathtub can be more useful than you think. NASA scientists are using ducks like this to track the movement (read recession) of glaciers in Greenland and Canada. Duck out of water? Thumbing through some old articles, I've been pondering the fate of the world's glaciers (see this link for facts and figures). For those who think the future is too far away to worry about, watching the BBC Planet Earth series is highly recommended. One of the final episodes compares footage of polar bears hunting in the Arctic - one set was taken 20 years ago, the other goes back just a few years. In the first, the bears are shown rearing up on their hind legs, lunging down and breaking the ice to hunt seals under the surface. In the more recent episode, the fragile ice gives away under the bears' paws. The marooned bear swims several kilometres and finally lands amid a pod of walruses. Exhausted, the bear is unable to hunt. In a scuffle with the walruses, it suffers mortal injuries and quietly lies down to die - weary and hungry. Heartbreaking, yes. But don't miss the larger picture: The melting of Arctic ice is a reality we cannot ignore simply because most of us live too far away to experience the ill-effects of global warming. At the poles, where a mad scientist seems to be running amok in Nature's laboratory, the evidence of global warming is clear and the shocking effects more palpable than anywhere else on the planet. Warm day, huh? Image copyright: United Nations Environment Programme DEWA/GRID-Europe

Polar bear faux pas gets rubber dodo for Palin

Sarah Palin, whom we love to hate for at least two things - Republican and pro-hunting - has now been condemned by our loosely united fraternity of eco-enthusiasts as a 'global warming denier.' Cute. Arizona's Centre for Biological Diversity has awarded Palin the Rubber Dodo award for insisting that the polar bear population is in fact growing across the Arctic. Hmph. Is idiocy a reserved criterion for Republican runners? Vote her out without a thought, O citizens of the Land of the Free. WTF are you waiting for?

Worldwatch has a comprehensive analysis of Palin's environmental credentials Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin, ecology, environment, dodo

The Walrus, minus the carpenter

Here's an endearing portrait of that wonderful, little known and oft-misunderstood fatso of the Arctic pack ice known as the Walrus. Natalie Angier in NYT: In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly obscure, known mostly for their sing-song linkage with a carpenter, an eggman and goo goo goo joob. To which Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues might well respond with a blast of a Bronx kazoo. Odobenus rosmarus is a magnificent creature, they say, behaviorally, anatomically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. More