Category: Uncategorized

A model has as suggested that the future of our planet is a warming place regardless of what we do with our emissions.

It has come to light that two of the biggest paper pulp companies TPL and APRIL have been intentionally mislabeling their export materials.Paper grade pulp which they claimed to be exporting is used to make paper and packaging. However dissolving pulp, which they were actually exporting is far more valuable.

As such they have cheated the Indonesian government out of more than 168 million dollars of tax. Will this have any impact on the vigor that the Indonesian government will defend their horrific environmental record?

I have spoken in the past about the ecosystem impact that wolves can have, creating what is called a landscape of fear.

The threat of being hunted means that prey change their behaviour far more more than simply the effect of direct predation.

A few weeks ago the British newspaper the guardian, wrote on this subject. I include a link below.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/24/landscape-of-fear-why-we-need-the-wolf-rewilding-scotland

This is a highly important Ecological concept. It has started to be recognized around the world, and many countries have been reintroducing predators to reserves, from which they were eliminated, sometimes centuries ago. This work is essential, and from Yellowstone and the return of the wolves to reserves across Africa and Asia the same is seen.

When will the government recognize this fact of nature, and do something similar in the UK?

Coronavirus recovery money has been spent twice as fast on fossil fuel projects as it has on environmentally friendly and carbon free electricity production.

The Indonesian government has decided to change the designation of large parts of the country from protected forest to available for food production.

Trump is going to kick start the process of selling rights to drill oil in the arctic refuge on the 6th of January.

Whats more, in the lame-duck session, he is desperately keen to get this process so far along, that it is impossible for Biden to undo this stupid move that is totally anti-democratic.

I have written about this in the past, but this last week there was an article in the guardian newspaper. In it it talks about this region of Arizona, and it’s “sky Islands” upper reaches of mountains that are left undisturbed, allowing wildlife to thrive.

This is a fascinating region of the world, as it is the only natural place where grizzlies and wolves from North America, meet with ocelots and jaguars-more commonly seen in the dense rainforest of the Amazon.

If all of trump’s contracts for wall building are completed, they will cut off 93% of the jaguars territory.

This cannot be completed by hand over, however pressure is being me to make as much progress as possible. The wall all is currently being put up at about a mile a day.

It should also be noted that in many places the wall passes through areas specifically set aside as wildlife refuges.

It is insane, in a so-called democracy, that Trump has been able to do this despite Congress blocking appropriations for its building.

A number of American groups have been working hard to recover the ecological niche that the sky Islands give, but all of this will be ruined.

It should be noted that this wall of Trump’s breaks more than 30 laws.these include the endangered species act and the national environmental protection plan.However because Trump is behind it these have been waived to allow the building to take place.

While the wall is made of slats,and the ocelots may well be able to continue to cross between the two countries, the majority of wildlife will not and therefore both fragmented populations will become far more liable to localised extinction.

We can only hope that once Joe Biden has taken office, he reverses some of these perverse and stupid decisions. Apart from anything, given the ease that has been demonstrated about how easy it is to get through or over this barrier, the only thing the barrier is going to do is to destroy this ecosystem. It is perhaps fitting that one of the last moves of Donald Trump as president will be something pointless, unlikely necessary for his successor to undo.

In the West, the idea of living alongside lion or leopard might be terrifying, but for many people in parts of Africa and Asia it’s just a way of life.

In many parts of India, the tiger reserves are far too small. If the tigers would just stay in their own reserves, without human intervention the population will fall rapidly as a lack of genetic variability I will leave the population incapable fighting off illness.

Back in 2010 the world’s tiger countries came together for a conference and declared a goal that by the next year of the tiger (falling in 2022) they would aid to have doubled the population of wild living tigers.

This was a hugely ambitious target and as you can imagine results have been decidedly mixed.

In the wild there are 8 pangolin species, 4 in Asia and 4 in Africa. The country you that is best known for using pangolin scales in ancient history is China, and while these days officially this no longer happens there is still a large portion of the wealthy elite who has until recently continued to use it. Doesn’t it seem weird that a family of animals called pangolins, until recently largely unknown in the West, could be push towards extinction for medicine that has been shown time and again to do nothing at all.