Polar bears have been a hot topic lately, and it’s not just because of Knut, may he rest in peace. Ursus maritimus is one of the species that has come to symbolize the threat of global climate change. In the United States, that means controversy. In 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took the historic step of listing the polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 because of the likelihood that global warming would lead to shrinking habitats for the species — specifically, less ice. The decision was highly contested and remains so. Continue reading “searching for polar bears in the federal register”
Month: October 2011
for a limited time only
My book Wired Wilderness is available until the end of the year as a high-quality, freely downloadable PDF via the beta site for a new interface to Project MUSE, which will give subscribers access to a library of ebooks from a number of publishers when it launches for real in January 2012. For about six months before the launch, the beta site is offering free access to approximately 300 sample ebooks from several publishers, including Johns Hopkins University Press, the publisher of Wired Wilderness. Project MUSE, which has until now focused on academic journals, started in 1993 as a collaboration between JHUP and Johns Hopkins’s library, so it’s only logical that JHUP books are represented. To go straight to the page for Wired Wilderness, click here. You’ll be able to download each part of the book separately. There’s no way to download the whole book as a single gargantuan file, though if you have access to Adobe Acrobat or another PDF authoring tool you could stitch it back together yourself. Continue reading “for a limited time only”
wildlife conservation and animal rights
For anyone who’s been following the recent anti-animal-rights crusade of Michael Hutchins, the executive director/CEO of the Wildlife Society, the fact that the society has come out with an official position statement against “animal rights philosophy” should come as no surprise. But it’s a shame nonetheless. The statement caricatures the animal rights movement and will make it harder for wildlife conservationists and animal protectionists, even many of those who are skeptical of rights-based reasoning, to find common ground. Continue reading “wildlife conservation and animal rights”