by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 1, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Fiona Harvey / The Guardian
The habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger is being rapidly destroyed in order to make tissues and paper packaging for consumer products in the west, new research from Greenpeace shows.
A year-long investigation by the campaigning group has uncovered clear evidence, independently verified, that appears to show that ramin trees from the Indonesian rainforest have been chopped down and sent to factories to be pulped and turned into paper. The name ramin refers to a collection of endangered trees growing in peat swamps in Indonesia where the small number of remaining Sumatran tigers hunt.
Chopping down these trees is illegal under Indonesian law dating back to 2001, because of their status as an endangered plant species. But Greenpeace alleges that its researchers found ramin logs being prepared to be transported for pulping. The company tested logs in lumber yards belonging to the paper giant Asian Pulp and Paper, on nine separate occasions over the course of a year, and sent them to an independent lab to be tested. Out of 59 samples, 46 tested positive as ramin logs.
Asian Pulp and Paper denied wrongdoing. The company said in a statement: “Asia Pulp & Paper group (APP) maintains a strict zero-tolerance policy for illegal wood entering the supply chain and has comprehensive chain of custody systems to ensure that only legal wood enters its pulp mill operations. APP’s chain of custody systems are independently audited on a periodic basis. This ensures that we only receive legal pulpwood from areas under legal license that have passed all necessary ecological and social assessments.
“APP’s chain of custody system traces the origin of raw material, evaluates its legal and environmental status, to minimise the risk of contamination and to ensure that endangered species are protected – in accordance with the laws of Indonesia.”
The same hardwoods that grow in the Sumatran peat swamps where the tiger lives have also been independently verified to exist in paper products found on supermarket shelves, including photocopying paper, packaging for consumer products such as tissue paper.
Because the amounts of this pulp found in the paper samples are so small, it is impossible to say that they also contain ramin. However, independent lab tests confirmed the presence of “mixed tropical hardwoods” in paper samples from a wide variety of consumer outlets in the west. This shows that valuable rainforest trees are being turned into everyday items bought by unsuspecting consumers.
These fibres are highly likely to come from the same log yards examined by Greenpeace, because once pulped these rainforest trees are widely disseminated to packaging suppliers.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/01/indonesia-tiger-habitat-pulp-paper-greenpeace
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, NEWS
By Jeremy Hance, Mongabay
Less than a year after being pulled off the Endangered Species Act (ESA), gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the western U.S. are facing an onslaught of hunting. The hunting season for wolves has just closed in Montana with 160 individuals killed, around 75 percent of 220-wolf kill quota for the state. In neighboring Idaho, where 318 wolves have been killed so far by hunters and trappers, the season extends until June. In other states—Oregon, Washington, California, and Utah—wolf hunting is not currently allowed, and the species is still under federal protection in Wyoming.
In Idaho fourteen wolves were also killed by the government using helicopters in a bid to prop up elk herds. Legislators in the state are also mulling a recent proposal to allow aerial hunting and the use of live bait to kill wolves that have harassed livestock or pets. Republican and sheep rancher Jeff Siddoway, who introduced the legislation, said he would have no problem using his dog as live bait.
Wolves are hugely controversial in the region: ranchers point to them as a cause for livestock mortalities, while hunters blame them for a decline in elk. Biologists, however, say the elk decline may be due to a combination of drought, hunting by people, and the return of wolves. By nature wolves prey on young, old, and weak animals, and likely have little overall impact on a healthy herd.
In fact, a recent study study in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains found that wolves were not a primary driver behind elk mortalities. Examining 36 elk calf kills, the study determined that mountain lions were responsible for thirteen (36 percent), black bears killed four (11 percent), wolves also killed four (11 percent), five died of natural causes (13 percent), and ten mortalities were due to unknown causes (27 percent).
However, as top predators, wolves have a big impact on elk and other prey’s behavior, which results in massive implications for the health of an ecosystem. Long-term studies in Yellowstone National Park have recorded notable changes since the return of wolves after a 70-year absence. The findings have shown that wolves are key to a healthy, diverse ecosystem.
Research has found that by keeping elk on the run and in hiding, wolves protect plants and trees that had long been over-browsed, saving some species from local extinction. The presence of wolves allowed trees to grow up along rivers for the first time in decades in Yellostone, protecting against erosion and cooling rivers through shade. In turn, the riverside trees allowed for the return of beavers, which had nearly vanished from Yellowstone. Through dam-building beavers created new habitat for fish. With more trees and shrub cover, songbird populations rose. Scavengers from bear to ravens were aided by wolf-kills. In all, biodiversity and wildlife abundance blossomed.
Less than 2,000 wolves are currently found in seven states of the western U.S., the bulk of them in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. California has only one. By contrast 3,000 wolves are found in northern Minnesota alone.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 9, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Joe Satran
Four years ago, the once-mighty Chinook salmon runs in California and Oregon were so small that the states agreed to an unprecedented moratorium on fishing. The conservation measures, along with some strategic modification of the dams that had hurt salmon in the past, seemed to work. Salmon watchers seemed optimistic that stocks were well on their way to recovery. Salmon census data indicated that the number of adult salmon returning to spawn in California’s Mokelumne River had grown from just over 400 in late 2008 to nearly 18,000 this past year.
A new study of the Chinook, though, shows that most of those salmon were born not in the wild, but in Chinook hatcheries. Only 10 percent of the salmon in the river were born in the wild and returned later to spawn; the rest were originally born in the hatcheries, which are designed to support recovery.
“When you use the raw fish counts, it looks like the population is doing well,” said UC-Santa Cruz’s Rachel Johnson in the press release for the study. “But if you look at the number of fish that are produced in the wild and return to spawn in the wild, and you follow them through the cycle, you see that the wild fish don’t survive at a high enough rate to replace their parents.”
These trends mean that hatchery-born salmon are becoming a larger and larger part of the overall population in the rivers, when you’d hope that the wild salmon would quickly take over the process. Salmon born in hatcheries are better than no salmon, but they aren’t ideal. One big problem with relying on them is that, because they aren’t forced to adapt to harsh conditions when they’re very young, they aren’t necessarily as hardy as those salmon born and bred completely in the wild.
It wasn’t clear until this study that so many of the fish in the rivers were born in hatcheries because those fish aren’t visibly marked before being released into the wild. Johnson and her team identified them by testing for traces of feed used in hatcheries lingering in their ear bones.
The New York Times writes that the study indicates that marking hatchery-born salmon — perhaps by clipping a fin — could provide an easier avenue for monitoring their prevalence in the future.
From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/chinook-salmon_n_1265477.html
