Trump attacks Endangered Species Act – “This proposal turns the extinction-prevention tool of the ESA into a rubber stamp for powerful corporate interests”

WASHINGTON, DC, 23 July 2018 (ENS) – The Trump administration is proposing new rules for implementing the Endangered Species Act, ESA, that will make it more difficult to recover Threatened and Endangered species across the country. Conservation groups fear that the revisions would allow drilling, mining and ranching in what is now protected habitat, but […]

Orcas of the Pacific Northwest are starving and disappearing – “It’s an ecosystem-wide problem”

By Jim Robbins 9 July 2018 SEATTLE (The New York Times) – For the last three years, not one calf has been born to the dwindling pods of black-and-white killer whales spouting geysers of mist off the coast in the Pacific Northwest. Normally four or five calves would be born each year among this fairly […]

Trump’s Interior Department plans to let people kill endangered red wolves – “FWS is passing a death sentence on an animal as American as the bald eagle”

By Darryl Fears 27 June 2018 (The Washington Post) – In a proposal that would essentially end a 30-year effort to reestablish critically endangered American red wolves in North Carolina, the Interior Department on Wednesday announced a plan that would allow private landowners to kill wolves that stray onto their property from a protected federal […]

Following a devastating pandemic, California’s sea stars are evolving as climate changes – “If we have too many extreme events in a row, maybe that becomes more challenging for species to respond to”

By Jason Alvarez 19 June 2018 (UC Merced) – In 2012, Environmental Systems graduate student Lauren Schiebelhut was collecting DNA from ochre sea stars living along the Northern California coast — part of an effort to study genetic diversity in various marine species that serve as indicators of habitat health. She had no idea that […]

One of the last known jaguars in U.S. killed – “This tragedy is piercing”

By Vaishnavi Vaidyanathan 23 June 2018 (IBT) – Officials at the Center for Biological Diversity said one of the last two jaguars known to be living in the United States was shown dead in a photo released Thursday.The photo provided to the Arizona Daily Star showed a jaguar pelt looked like that of the the […]

Humans have destroyed 83 percent of wild mammals and reduced the total biomass of the biosphere to half of its pre-human value

By Damian Carrington 21 May 2018 (The Guardian) – Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since […]

Endangered Florida sparrow could vanish this year and more birds are at risk – “Extinction is a real possibility”

By Jenny Staletovich 3 March 2018 MIAMI (Miami Herald) – The grasshopper sparrow, a tiny Florida prairie bird perched on the verge of extinction for the last decade, may have encountered a final, unconquerable foe: an invasive new disease quickly killing off its young. The disease has spread so rapidly that wildlife managers now fear […]

Origin of amphibian “apocalypse” finally found – “This is the worst pathogen in the history of the world, in terms of its impacts on biodiversity”

By Michael Greshko 10 May 2018 (National Geographic) – Many of the world’s amphibians are staring down an existential threat: an ancient skin-eating fungus that can wipe out entire forests’ worth of frogs in a flash.This ecological super-villain, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has driven more than 200 amphibian species to extinction or near-extinction—radically rewiring […]

Dark Mountain: Issue 13 – Bearing Witness to a Disappearing World

By Michael Malay 9 May 2018 (Dark Mountain) – Today we bring you the last in our series of extracts from our thirteenth book, an anthology of new writing and art exploring what ‘being human’ means in an age of rapid ecological and social change. Dark Mountain: Issue 13 is now available through our online […]

Only 40 red wolves remain in the wild in North Carolina as rising sea level reduces habitat

24 April 2018 (USFWS) – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today released a five-year status review and Species Status Assessment [pdf] outlining the latest science and data supporting its recommendation for no change in the red wolf’s overall status as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The status review is required every five years […]

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