Kuala Lumpur (AFP) Sept 16, 2009 - Malaysian police said Wednesday they had dismantled blockades constructed in the Borneo jungles by Penan tribespeople protesting against logging and plantations on their ancestral land. In a separate move police also arrested 17 people, including Penan and other indigenous groups, for mounting a demonstration against a proposed dam in Sarawak state on Malaysian Borneo which will force mass relocations. ... (Link)

ENVIRONMENT groups are calling for a permanent ban on ''deadly'' artificial fishing devices used to attract huge tuna catches in the Pacific after scientific reports found that stocks of bigeye tuna are collapsing. Greenpeace activists aboard the Esperanza confiscated several of the devices known as FADs (fish aggregation devices) in Pacific waters this week and forced a Korean fishing vessel to leave a closed fishing zone in an effort to highlight the threat to the tuna fisheries. ... (Link)

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Carlton Dufrechou can fly 10 minutes from New Orleans and be over the open waters of the Mississippi Sound. Two decades earlier, before erosion took its toll, he would have looked down on lush wetlands. The destruction accelerated four years ago last month, when Hurricane Katrina struck. The third-deadliest storm in U.S. history claimed more than 1,800 lives, displaced 1 million residents and damaged more than half of New Orleans’ housing stock. Katrina also wiped out 8...

Source: Sydney Morning Herald LEAKED internal emails have revealed a massive cover-up by the British oil trader Trafigura, in one of the worst pollution disasters in recent history. The emails obtained by The Guardian prove that Trafigura, which abruptly announced an offer to pay compensation to 31,000 West African victims, was fully aware that its waste dumped in Ivory Coast was so toxic it was banned in Europe. Thousands of West Africans besieged local hospitals in 2006, and a number died, ...

Measures to protect dwindling stocks of bluefin tuna fish in the Mediterranean have failed to curb illegal fishing practices, leaked papers show. The Guardian has been passed a confidential report of a French navy inspection of the tuna fishery, which shows how fishing boats in the region routinely fail to follow regulations put in place to protect stocks. Conservation experts say the report shows that existing controls are not enough to save the species and that wider measures are needed. The...

Atlanta (September 8, 2009) —Tornadoes that occur from hurricanes moving inland from the Gulf Coast are increasing in frequency, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This increase seems to reflect the increase in size and frequency among large hurricanes that make landfall from the Gulf of Mexico. The findings can be found in Geophysical Research Letters online and in print in the September 3, 2009 issue. “As the size of landfalling hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico...

A small group of crowned sifaka lemurs (Propithecus coronatus) have been located in the corridor d’Amboloando-Dabolava, Miandrivazo district-Madagascar, but are immediately threatened with local extinction. The small, fragmented, and isolated forest shelters a group of only six adults and one baby. Interviews with local people revealed that once several groups of the species resided in the corridor, and even last year, about 20 individuals were still found there. However, within one year, the p...

Well folks, it looks like this is it for the Christmas Island pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus murrayi). This critically endangered species of microbat now appears to be doomed to impending extinction as last-gasp efforts to capture the few remaining bats and place them in a captive breeding program have failed. Eight scientists, along with volunteers from the Australasian Bat Society, spent the last four weeks on Christmas Island (a territory of Australia in the Indian Ocean), but were unable to ...

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories -- Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline. They’re building windmills. That’s wind-power turbines, to be exact — a token first try at "getting rid of this fossil fuel we’re using," said Mayor Merven Gruben. It’s a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of "y...

A disturbing incident in Eket, Nigeria reveals that unsuspecting roadside barbecue patrons may have been eating vulture meat instead of chicken. Hungry buyers tempted by the scrumptious sizzle of meat cooking over a charcoal fire may want to think twice before buying a snack from one of these outdoor roasting vendors. What they think is chicken could actually be ... vulture. ... According to recent articles in two Nigerian sources, The News and The PM News, the incident started when the vultu...

Iraq has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, but it's running out of another valuable commodity: water. Iraq's ancient name, Mesopotamia, means the land between two rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates, which flow into Iraq from Turkey and Syria. But water is now so limited for agriculture that Iraq imports 80 percent of the food Iraqis eat. During the holy month of Ramadan, traditional foods that typically come from Iraqi farms are getting harder to find. Iraq once had the most fer...

Graph of the Day: 2000-Year Reconstruction of Arctic Temperatures (Link)

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - The American West is losing its autumn colors as global warming begins to bite and there is far more at stake than iconic scenery. Aspen, the white-barked trees with golden leaves that gave their name to the famed Colorado ski resort, have been dying off across the Rocky Mountain states. The die-off is puzzling but some foresters point to climate change. This disaster coincides with beetle outbreaks that have laid waste to millions of acres of pine and spruce forest i...

Just a few hundred years ago, the world's rivers and lakes teemed with gigantic fish. Freshwater fish were so plentiful that they were used to feed farm animals and fishermen found it hard not to make a catch, according to a new review of historical accounts. ... "When you look at these accounts, it is pretty amazing how abundant and especially how large these fish species were that people wrote about," said Kirk Winemiller, a fisheries ecologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texa...

Conservationists monitoring the animals' annual migration into Biscay said the second largest whale on the planet had not appeared in large numbers this summer. While small numbers of fin whales arrived in the Bay as usual in May in the first phase of the migration, numbers turning up in July and August were far lower than in previous years, research charities Marinelife and Orca said. Marinelife chairman Clive Martin said that on return ferry crossings from Portsmouth to Bilbao observers we...

As TakePart reported earlier this week, Richard O’Barry is currently in Taiji, Japan with European and Japanese journalists in anticipation of the annual dolphin slaughter that usually takes place the first week of September. Today is September 1st, the first day of the dolphin slaughter season in Japan. But when I arrived today by bus from Kansai Airport with media representatives from all over the world, the notorious Cove from the movie was empty. There were no dolphin killers in sight. So ...

Gordon Hamilton, a Scottish-born glaciologist from the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute, is packing up equipment at his base camp in Tasiilaq, a tiny, remote east coast settlement only accessible by helicopter and where huskies howl all night. … "When we arrived there was no glacier to be seen. It was way up the fjord," he says. "We thought we'd made some stupid goof with the co-ordinates, but we were where we were supposed to be." It was the glacier that was in the wrong place. ...

Starting tomorrow, the gray wolf is about to be hunted for the first time in decades. The Obama administration removed the wolves from the endangered species list last March. And unless a federal judge decides to halt the hunt and reopen the question of whether the species is threatened, the gray wolf hunt starts tomorrow in Idaho--and hundreds of wolves will be killed. There are now some 1,640 gray wolves in the wild, living in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Federal officials say that number is ...

Oil is leaking from an offshore drilling rig in the Timor Sea near Australia's Northwest coast. Authorities say it will be weeks before the leak is plugged: they are awaiting the arrival of a drilling rig from Singapore to plug the leak. "This is a potential disaster for turtles, whales, dolphins, sea birds and sea snakes. The oil and gas spill is still not under control and is expected to continue leaking for two months. Depending on winds, the slick could be pushed to atolls like Scott and A...

Tsavo West National Park, Kenya (AFP) Aug 30, 2009 - Kenya's persistent and bruising drought is having a serious impact on the country's wildlife, one of its main tourist attractions, obliging the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) to feed hippos to keep them alive. In Tsavo West national park, a vast expanse of shrubby savannah and majestic rocky outcrops in the south east of the country, hippos are dying in large numbers and other species have been forced to change their diet. Some 15 hippos have...

Lukla, Nepal (AFP) Aug 30, 2009 - Over two decades, Funuru Sherpa has watched the lake above his native village of Dengboche in Nepal's Himalayas grow, as the glacier that feeds it melts. The 29-year-old, who runs a busy Internet cafe for tourists visiting the Everest region, remembers his grandfather telling him that 50 years ago the lake did not exist. "Before, it was all ice," he told AFP in the eastern Himalayan town of Lukla, in the shadow of Mount Everest. "This is proof that the gla...

Urban growth is quickly driving one of the world's most bizarre creatures into extinction. According to a new study, the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), a Mexican amphibian that never metamorphoses past its larval stage, has seen a 90 percent population drop in the last four years. Only an estimated 700 to 1,200 axolotls now remain. The species was already listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. (Link)

The highest level of marlin bycatch in the U.S. is taken by U.S. pelagic longline vessels in the Gulf of Mexico targeting yellowfin tuna. According to NOAA observer data, the bycatch of documented discarded billfish in the Gulf in 2007 and 2008 included 1031 billfish caught, with 400 dead discards, 589 live releases, 36 lost, and 7 unknown condition. ... Public comment on the proposed bluefin and swordfish rule changes ends Monday, August 31. Bluefin, marlin and the many types of bycatch includ...

The Madagascar pochard, the world's rarest duck, was already thought to be extinct once. After a last sighting in 1991 the species was thought to have vanished until nine adults and four hatchlings were discovered in 2006. However, conservationists have begun to fear that the species will never recover after a survey this year found only six females. ... (Link)

Bhattegaun, Nepal (AFP) Aug 28, 2009 - Three years ago Naina Shahi's husband left their small village in rural Nepal to seek work in neighbouring India, leaving her to bring up their three children alone. The dry winters and unpredictable monsoons Nepal has experienced in recent years had hit crop production on the couple's land plot in the foothills of the Himalayas, forcing them to look for other ways to feed their family. For the past two years, their crop has failed entirely and Shahi now ...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Ocean scientists recently back from a voyage to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" said on Thursday they had found plastic debris strewn across a 1,700-mile (2,700-km) long stretch of open sea. The research team from the three-week Seaplex expedition said more work remains to be done to determine the full extent of the trash vortex, how it affects marine life and how it might safely be removed from the ocean. Cleanup will be difficult because the "vast majority of things...

If it doesn't rain in the next fortnight many NSW farmers could lose crops, leading to higher food prices over Christmas, Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald says. ... Nearly a quarter of the state - 24.4 per cent - is deemed satisfactory, while 11.7 per cent is seen as marginal, up from 9.7 per cent in the same period last year. ... (Link)

RICHMOND, Vt.- Mounting evidence that several species of bats have been all but eliminated from the Northeast due to a new disease known as white-nose syndrome prompted a conservation group to send a letter today to Sam Hamilton, the new director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, urging that action on the bat epidemic be his first priority. In the letter, Kierán Suckling, executive director of the national, nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, wrote: "...while we suspect you are stil...

Even with reasonably precise numbers. That's why some of us won't do it. :) However, the fundamental argument behind oil depletion theory is sound: oil is a finite resource. There will be a point at which we have consumed half of the economically extractable oil. When does that point arrive? I don't know, but it sure looks like we've hit some sort of either a) equilibrium, or b) boundary constraint. Of course, oil will still be available in the ground, but it will be a largely stranded resour...

Conservationists have launched a new initiative aimed at safeguarding the world's amphibians from extinction. The Amphibian Survival Alliance will bring together existing projects and organisations, improving co-ordination, scientific research and fund-raising. About a third of amphibian species are threatened with extinctions. ... (Link)