China bans ivory imports for 1 year to protect elephants – ‘The announcement is largely a window-dressing exercise’

BEIJING (AP) — China imposed a one-year ban on ivory imports that took immediate effect Thursday amid criticism that its citizens’ huge appetite for ivory has fueled poaching that threatens the existence of African elephants. The State Administration of Forestry declared the ban in a public notice posted on its official site, in which it […]

San Diego’s Frozen Zoo gets grant to sequence genome of northern white rhino

By Tony Perry26 February 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – Los Angeles-based philanthropic organization is providing money to help San Diego’s Frozen Zoo find ways to bring the northern white rhino back from the brink of extinction, zoo officials announced Thursday. The Seaver Institute, which provides funds to assist in the arts, education and science, has […]

Video: Loggers chop down tree with koala family still in it

[Sadly, this is very common: Deforestation in Australia killing and mutilating koalas – Loggers say finding dead koalas is ‘like a daily thing, sometimes a couple every hour’ –Des] By Stephen Messenger4 February 2015 (The Dodo) – A distressing new video shows a gum tree being felled by loggers while a koala and her baby […]

Panda habitat threatened by recent forest tenure reforms in China

By Apoorva Joshi27 January 2015 (mongabay.com) – Since the 1950s, plantations and second-growth forests in China have been locally managed by village communities as collective forests, which today account for 58 percent of China’s forestland. Many of these collective forests lie within mountainous rural areas, some of which are also home to the 1,600 or […]

Scientists meet to save endangered white rhino – Artificial methods of reproduction are now the only hope

OL PEJETA CONSERVANCY, 28 January 2015 (AFP) – Conservationists and scientists have held talks in Kenya this week to come up with a last-ditch plan to save the northern white rhinoceros from extinction. There are only five northern whites left on the planet: three live in a 700-acre enclosure on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in […]

Monarch butterfly population still perilously low, new survey finds

By Jeremy Hance28 January 2015 (mongabay.com) – The world’s migrating monarch butterfly population has bounced back slightly from its record low last year, but the new numbers are still the second smallest on record. According to WWF-Mexico and the Mexican government, butterflies covered 2.79 acres (1.13 hectares) in nine colonies this year in the Mexican […]

Ebola has now killed a third of the world’s gorilla and chimpanzee populations – ‘This epidemic has reduced the population to a point where it can no longer sustain itself in the face of poaching and other pressures’

By Allison Jackson22 January 2015 (Global Post) – The human tragedy caused by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been well documented. […] But humans are not the only victims of this horrible disease, which is spread through contact with the blood, sweat and other bodily fluids of an infected person. Since the 1990s, […]

Video: Last Days of Ivory – ‘Last year we were made aware of the very real connection between elephant poaching and terrorism’

7 December 2014 (YouTube) – Either we come together now to make these the last days of ivory-funded terrorism or we witness the last days of elephants in the wild. Created by Director Kathryn Bigelow, Writer Scott Z. Burns, and Annapurna Pictures, in collaboration with WildAid. Visit http://lastdaysofivory.com to get informed and take action. Last […]

Ocean life faces mass extinction, broad study finds – ‘We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event’

By Carl Zimmer15 January 2015 (The New York Times) – A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major […]

Scientists: Human activity has pushed Earth beyond four of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ – The planet ‘is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies’

By Joel Achenbach 15 January 2015 (Washington Post) – At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points […]

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