Why Worry, Be Funny.

“Here’s a plot idea: 97% of the world’s scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires and oil companies.”

— Scott Westerfield, on Twitter

I owe this one to some fool who has started a money-making operation out of Wyoming and Montana selling baby exotic animals through a Facebook page, and various dodgy online sites.

Many of these baby exotics are said to originate from the several game farms in the area that specialize in providing semi-tame animals for so-called nature photographers to bag  otherwise hard-to-get shots.

Naturally — no pun intended — the outrage has been loud, emotional and voluminous, i.e. lengthy and full.

Almost inevitably, some commenters have complained that their comments taken down, as fast as they can post them, and their accounts blocked.

Here’s an inconvenient truth: As tempting — and cathartic — as it is to rattle off angry 500-word screeds about how awful the perpetrators of these crimes are, it’s all-too-easy for the offender to delete a comment with a single click, and then click ‘Block User.’

Humour, on the other hand — as anyone who’s read Kurt Vonnegut knows — tends to be short, to-the-point, witty and cutting, when used effectively.

Also, and I’m not sure why this is, dumb people often have a hard time telling if the comment is genuine or if they’re being had. Parody can be so hard to spot, if one’s not used to it.

As issues go, the climate crisis and species extinction are serious, but all that seriousness can seem a little one-note at times. If one isn’t careful, it’s easy to allow one’s energy to flag. A reality check, no matter how real, can have the opposite of its intended effect if it seems tired and predictable.

Here goes, then — some of my favourite memes, witty ripostes and fast ’n furious comebacks about the serious issues of climate change, species extinction and environmental ruin.

“If I were ever abducted by aliens, the first thing I’d ask is whether they came from a planet where people also deny science.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson, on Twitter.

“Alien: ‘Why should I not blow up this planet?’ 

“Human: ‘We are an advanced species.’ 

“Alien: ‘How do you travel?’

“Human: ‘We light old dinosaurs on fire.’”

John Biehl, on Twitter.

What, you didn’t appreciate J.K. Rowling enough already? Try this on for size, then:

“The existence of Twitter is forever validated by the following exchange:

“Katie Mack: ‘Honestly, climate change scares the heck out of me, and it makes me so sad to see what we’re losing because of it.’

“Gary P Jackson: ‘Maybe you should learn some actual SCIENCE then, and stop listening to the criminals pushing #GlobalWarming SCAM!’

“Katie Mack: [crickets]”

J.K. Rowling, on Twitter.

And this one, an online climate change meme that doubles as a shout-out to the 1993 Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day:

“Only in America do we accept weather predictions

 from a rodent, but deny climate change evidence from scientists.”

Or this one, from humorist and late-night comedian John Oliver:

“One in four Americans is skeptical about climate change. . . . Who gives a (damn)? That doesn’t matter. You don’t need people’s opinions on fact. You might as well have a poll asking which number is bigger, 5 or 15? Or, do owls exist? Or, are there hats?”

And this, from another celebrity actor-comedian:

“The US leads the world in people who think climate science is fake, but pro wrestling is real.”

John Fugelsang

And these, from ordinary, everyday people, just regular folks:

“You know it’s serious when the introverts show up.”

Climate campaigner Deborah Elizabeth Finn, on Twitter

“We also have science to thank for ‘beer’ and ‘no polio.’”

Climate campaigner Anja Hoffman, on Twitter

And finally, this, from the former Leader of the Free World, at a 2014 midterm campaign rally at Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich:

“Ask a Republican about climate change and he’ll say, ‘I’m not a scientist!’ But when it comes to a woman’s right to choose, suddenly they all become doctors.”

Barack Obama

It’s funny because it’s true.

©Niek Verlaan-Pixabay

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Good News Story: The Luangwa is saved

“I wish to thank the government for listening to our pleas. The dam would have disturbed the free movement of wildlife in the Luangwa Valley. There are other means that can supply an equivalent amount of electricity, like solar power and windmills that can be installed along the Muchinga escarpment that would cause less damage to the environment.”

— Chief Luembe of the Nsenge people, July 5, 2019, in the Lusaka (Zambia) Times

Its cup runneth over, despite the odds. The Luangwa River has been saved.

The 1,100-kilometre river at the heart of the southern extension of Africa’s Great Rift Valley is one of the longest free-flowing rivers in Southern Africa, and it looks as if it will stay that way — for now — following an unexpected government decision in Zambia to overrule what, just a few short weeks ago, looked like a rubber-stamped go-ahead to build a hydropower dam that would have blocked the river and disrupted its flow for good.

That’s no small feat in a region that — much like Brazil and other faraway lands — has encouraged the building of more and more power dams of late, regardless of the consequences to the surrounding environment and its attendant ecosystems.

It’s a part of the world, after all, that is home to an increasing number of people, yet is desperately short of the power needed to sustain a growing population and economy.

The Luangwa is home to some of the most pristine habitat for elephants, hippos, lions, reintroduced black rhinos, endemic Thornicroft’s giraffes and countless other, less well-known but just as important  wildlife left on the African continent. Some 400 of Zambia’s estimated 732 bird species call the Luangwa home.

A dam would have disrupted not just the wildlife but the people who live there, or did live there until recently — people like “Helen” (pictured above). The Luangwa is where Helen’s husband fishes, she gathers water and her family is buried for eternal rest. Like many rural Zambians, according to the World Wilde Fund for Nature, her family doesn’t own the land, so when a foreign developer moved in and built a fence along the river — blocking her access to the water — her family was forced to leave.

In all, some 25 chiefdoms rely on the Luangwa for fresh water and food, and the river is vital to both

agriculture and tourism.

Now Helen and her family may return, thanks to the government’s decision. The WWF has been lobbying alongside other conservation-minded NGOs for legal protection for the Luangwa, to safeguard it from threats that include not just dams but also deforestation, unsustainable farming and illegal hunting. More than 200,000 people signed a petition asking the the Zambian government to sign long-term legal protections into law, now that the dam project has been officially halted.

Zambia’s future energy needs must be addressed, and WWF and other conservation groups are arguining the case for a future based on renewable energy that’s both low carbon and low cost.

Time is pressing, the conservationists argue. Fewer than a third of the world’s longest rivers remain free flowing, mostly due to dams. The Nile is already dammed between Egypt and Sudan; another, equally extensive dam project is under construction in Ethiopia. The issue matters because scientists now believe that dams — and the fragmentation they cause — are one of the deciding factors in an 83% decline in freshwater wildlife populations since 1970.

A feasibility study for the Ndevu Gorge Power Project, as the dam was called, projected costs to be as much as $1.25 billion USD. The dam, if completed, would have generated up to 240 megawatts of power. The World Wide Fund for Nature says the government’s decision has effectively put an end to the project. 

The decision is “a major boost for communities and wildlife,” according to the WWF.

And how.

https://www.lusakatimes.com/2019/07/05/plans-to-build-a-hydro-power-station-on-luangwa-river-halted/

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Grizzly 399: The Wild Side

“I am a grizzly bear, I live in Grand Teton and surrounding areas. I have had 16 cubs/grand cubs, I enjoy elk liver. Typing with claws is hard.”

— Grizzly 399, on Instagram

Grizzly 399, born in 1996, is one of the most famous bears ever photographed, thanks to more than a decade’s worth of wildlife portraits by veteran Nebraska photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen, 74, who Anderson Cooper profiled this past weekend on CBS’s 60 Minutes. (The profile first aired in May, but it’s entirely possible more people saw it this past weekend, owing to the vagaries of viewer habits, summer TV ratings and the fact that, in May, it would have aired opposite one of the final episodes of Game of Thrones.). Grizzly 399, so named because of her research number, is arguably the most famous grizzly in the world, with her very own social-media presence on Facebook and Twitter. She is followed by more than 40 wildlife photographers; hundreds of thousands of tourists trek each year to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to catch a glimpse of her — “for many people, the sighting-of-a-lifetime,” Mangelsen says — and the other bears. Grizzlies are burdened with the unfortunate Latin scientific name arctos horribilis, unfortunate because, as Grizzly 399’s provenance and demeanour over the years, is neither from the Arctic nor particularly horrible.

Grizzly 399 is a successful mother, too, with 16 cubs and grand-cubs, according to field biologists who’ve followed her through the US presidential administrations now. She has taught her offspring well — including the secret, for example, to living in close proximity with humans without being harmed. Mangelsen has recorded her teaching them to look both ways before crossing a park road. (Collision by car, believe it or not, is a common cause of death among bears, especially in a park as heavily visited as Yellowstone.)

Grizzly 399 is good with social media, too, with her own Facebook page, Instagram account, and a Twitter handle. (Truth is, no one knows quite who is running these accounts, which first appeared in 2015. Although bright by ursine standards, Grizzly 399 is clearly not up to the task of navigating the internet just yet.)

Mangelsen is one of the leading photographers in the nature field. He has lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming year-round for 40 years now, in close proximity to Yellowstone and the bears that made him famous.

He has been active in the movement to keep the Yellowstone area grizzly bears on the Endangered Species List, which may seem like a no-brainer to you but in this day and age of right-leaning pro-

hunting, anti-conservation climate deniers, is anything but a certainty moving forward. Mangelsen has ventured to all seven continents to photograph a wide panoply of wilderness landscapes and the animals that live in them. His 1988 photograph titled "Catch of the Day,” taken a split second before a fish enters the jaws of a hungry river bear, has been declared “the most famous wildlife photograph in the world,” though to be fair, there’s considerable competition for that accolade.

He has received dozens of accolades throughout the decades but, as he admitted on 60 Minutes, the awards pale in comparison to his career relationship with the 23-year-old grizzly — the muse to his art.

Grizzlies carry special meaning in the American West because they hearken back to America’s wild past, when some 50,000 grizzlies roamed the lower 48 states. Fewer than 2,000 remain today.

Mangelsen’s photos, including — but not limited to — a particularly famous one he labeled “An Icon of Motherhood” are believed to have made 399 the most famous grizzly in the world.

Under the current presidential administration, the pressure is on to life hunting bans throughout Wyoming, Montana and other areas of the Rocky Mountains, including the hunting ban on grizzlies. Mangelsen worries about what will be lost, but he is determined to show the beauty and fragility of what still survives.

“It’s my gift, in a way, that I can give people,” Mangelsen said on 60 Minutes this past weekend — “hopefully to preserve what we have left, to preserve wilderness, to preserve species like grizzly bears, and make them think about it. And make them think that this is what we need to save for our children.”

The segment ended with Anderson Cooper’s narrative coda, “And so he sets out once again, patiently making his way alone, into the wild.”

Twitter: @grizzlybear399

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Grizzly-Bear-399-278005992220778/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grizzlybear399/

©Twitter/Grizzly 399

©Twitter Thomas D. Mangelsen

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A Culling or Murder? The Media Weigh In.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

— Charles Darwin

The recent killing of a rare, 50-year-old desert-adapted elephant in by a trophy hunter in Namibia has caused an uproar in the southern African nation. The story is upsetting on any number of levels, not least because Namibia has a hard-won — and laudable — reputation for being both environmentally aware and conservation minded. It is one of the frew countries on the African continent — the only one? — to have environmental protections written into its constitution.

Namibia is home to some of Africa’s most prominent, high-profile wildlife conservation NGOs, from the AfriCat Foundation and Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) to the Save the Rhino Trust and the pangolin and cape vulture-directed Rare and Endangered Species Trust (REST).

Conservation groups and tourism operators — Namibia counts tourism as one of its most important revenue generators — have accused the government of authorizing the hunt without proper cause.

Those are the facts as recounted by the Reuters news agency. The less-reported story is how media spin has created two very different versions of what happened, and why. And it’s that media spin that may prove to be the larger conservation story. With the effects of climate change becoming increasingly clear to even the most hard-headed climate denier, conflicts are only going to grow, and become more volatile. How the outside world views those conflicts, whether it’s famine driving the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur province and exacerbating tribal and religious tensions in Mali and the Sahel, on the other side of the continent, how the media choose to report a story will have an increased effect on world opinion.

And as the killing of “Voortrekker,” as the alpha male elephant, a dominant bull in the rare Ugab desert-adapted herd was popularly called, shows, a seemingly simple story can take on different shades depending on who’s telling the story.

First, some basic facts that all sides can agree on and that I have witnessed with my own eyes. Namibia’s desert-adapted elephants are unique, by any standard. They travel vast distances, over sand and rock, to find water and food to eat. 

Over time, they have developed longer legs, for walking long distances, which makes them appear taller and bulkier than other savannah elephants.

Their tusks tend to be very short, but bulky (no one knows why, though some scientists have speculated that the lack of mineral intake stunts growth; also, the tusks are not needed as much for ploughing through tall grass and knocking down trees, since there’s no grass in the desert and trees are few and far between. For whatever reason — and this is key to wildlife-human conflict — desert elephants are much more skittish and unpredictable around people. Even experienced field biologists and tourist guides are wary around them, and the few tourists who make it into Damaraland and the barren Omatjete district are kept a long distance from the elephants, even when they appear to be quiet and minding their own business. The herds are small, by  elephant standards, and bulls often roam on their own, or in pairs.

Subsistence farming, on the desert’s edge, is a hard life for the relatively few people who live in the area, and where agricultural farmland meets thirsty, hungry elephants who have roamed hundreds of miles in some instances, conflict is inevitable.

Namibia is also a country that allows — and in many cases encourages — trophy hunting as another source of much-needed foreign currency, which puts it in league with South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania, and at odds with Botswana — for now — and Kenya. (Hard fact: Trophy hunting generates, at most, between 0.5% and 5% of total tourist revenue, so that argument, like so many arguments that support trophy hunting, is a bit of a shuck.)

The real controversy surrounding the killing of Voortrekker — which no one should be celebrating — centres on whether he was a problem elephant culled for terrorizing subsistence farmers and threatening lives and property, or simply killed for money, a one-off licence fee and an ego boost for a lone trophy hunter.

It depends on which version you read.

https://www.namibian.com.na/80250/read/Uproar-over-elephant-killing

https://africageographic.com/blog/iconic-desert-adapted-elephant-voortrekker-killed-by-trophy-hunter-in-namibia/

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More Trees, Less Flooding. Simple.

“At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees. Then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.”

— Chico Mendes

Trees help prevent flooding. That may seem obvious to anyone who knows the first thing — or cares — about soil erosion and how landslides work, but it’s especially worth being reminded of in a week when, according to a BBC report, an area of Amazon rainforest roughly the size of a football field is now being cleared every single minute, this judging from recently released satellite photographs.

As the single largest rainforest on planet Earth, the Amazon is a vital carbon-capture system that slows the pace of global heating, which scientific models show is accelerating out of control, far beyond what even the most pessimistic climate scientists’ projections were just 10 years ago.

The destruction is total. BBC observed that, in one vast tract of recently cleared land, their reporter saw giant trees lying on their sides, much of the foliage still green, even as the felled trees were surrounded by patches of bare earth drying under a relentless equatorial sun.

In recent days, the death toll has continued to rise in Russia’s Irkutsk region, where flooding caused by the combined result of a prolonged snow melt and an unexpectedly violent storm system have wreaked havoc on thousands of residents who have lost their homes; wet weather flooding continues to ravage parts of North America, from southern Alberta to Minnesota, New Jersey and West Virginia.

According to a recent survey by the European  

Environment Agency — again, this obvious to anyone with even a remote grasp of how bioscience works, but still, it bears repeating — forests provide a wide range of useful services to the ecosystem, including “water retention” — water absorbed or otherwise used by forests — and are essential for human well-being. Water retention plays an important role in mitigating the effects of heavy rainfall coupled with droughts; saving forests and nurturing tree growth plays an important role in combatting the effects of climate change and extreme weather events. Forests can and do soak up excess rainwater, which in turn prevents run-off and damage from flooding.

Soya fields in Brazil, planted to feed the planet’s ever-increasing demand for meat from cattle — the primary agricultural industry driving deforestation — is about as effective at preventing flooding as a breached hydro-electric dam.

Strange as it may seem — hashtag #sarcasm — trees have extensive root systems that both stabilize and bind together the soil around them, which in turn absorbs large amounts of water that reduces destructive run-off. They don’t have to be towering or majestic, either — though, oddly enough, the bigger the tree, the more water it will drink. Woodland acts as a barrier to floodwater, and prevents soil erosion at the same time, which in turn reduces the amount of sediment displaced in rivers.

See? Simple. Science.

©Twitter-Jonathan Watts

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