Kenya has been losing 100 lions a year for the past seven years, leaving the country with just 2000 of its famous big cats, says the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) – which concludes the country could have no wild lions at all in 20 years. Conservationists have blamed habitat destruction, disease and conflict with humans for the population collapse.
But Laurence Frank, a wildlife biologist at cat conservation group Panthera, thinks the KWS estimate is optimistic. "Lions are disappearing so fast from Kenya, as well as the rest of Africa, that I think they will disappear [from Kenya] in less than 10 years if action is not taken very quickly," says Frank, who runs several lion conservation projects in the country.
The IUCN suggests that large lion populations of 50 to 100 prides are necessary to conserve genetic diversity and avoid inbreeding.
Leo horror scope
Frank says that the decline of the big cats is due to the inexorable growth in human population and consequent conflict with people over livestock, rather than disease.
"Vast areas of Kenyan rangelands that held lions 20 years ago are now devoid of nearly all wildlife," Frank says. "Predators have been poisoned and speared, herbivores have been snared for meat, and the rangelands themselves have been destroyed by massive overgrazing by domestic stock."
According to Nicholas Oguge, who works for environmental charity Earthwatch Institute in northern Kenya, people lace cattle corpses with insecticide in order to poison entire prides. This ends up killing hyenas and birds of prey too.
"In Kenya, the biggest threat to lion conservation lies outside protected areas," says Oguge. "This is because of increasing cases of poisoning by communities due to livestock loss through carnivore depredation. Typically, the communities use the insecticide Furadan by applying it on livestock carcasses."
Bribes and trophies
Those who kill lions illegally are rarely punished, says Frank. Killing tends to occur far from the influence of authorities and conservationists. In the rare cases of arrest for lion killing, Frank says that the accused may secure their release by the payment of small bribes.
Even the animal-welfare groups that seek to protect lions from trophy hunters may be unintentionally placing them at risk. Sport hunting is banned in Kenya, which has allowed lions to fare better there than in most other parts of Africa, but the prohibition could also contribute to their eventual demise.
"Under current policy, there is no way for rural people to benefit from wildlife," says Frank. "They get essentially no income from tourism, and the only other potential source of wildlife income – carefully regulated, high-paying trophy hunting – is prevented by the financial influence of American and British animal-rights lobbies."
Research by the University of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and KWS suggests that on average each lion eats livestock worth around $270 a year. "On the other hand, given the size of Kenya's tourist industry and the central importance of lions to tourist satisfaction, each of Kenya's 2000 surviving lions may be worth upwards of $17,000 per year in tourist revenues," says Bruce Patterson, curator of mammals at the museum.
The fact that Kenya is suffering a devastating drought isn't helping matters, says Zeke Davidson of the University of Oxford. "Kenya is experiencing a very severe drought at the moment and this is driving ever-increasing numbers of pastoralist communities into wildlife areas in search of grazing and water supplies for their herds of livestock," he says.
"Large herds of unattended cattle have been reported forming in northern Kenya, moving toward Ethiopia," Davidson adds. He says they have been abandoned by their owners, who have gone in search of refuge from the drought further south.
Across the continent, the future looks bleak for lions. "Only drastic action on many fronts – policy change, effective law enforcement, giving rural people an economic stake in their natural heritage, and a great deal of investment – will prevent the loss of wildlife in Africa," concludes Frank
Friday, August 21, 2009
Rat-eating plant discovered in Philippines
The plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is believed to be the largest meat-eating shrub, dissolving rats with acid-like enzymes.
The team of botanists, led by British experts Stewart McPherson and Alastair Robinson, found the plant on Mount Victoria in the Philippines.
They were inspired to search for the plant after word that it is existed came from two Christian missionaries who described seeing a large carnivorous pitcher in 2000 after they climbed the mountain.
Mr McPherson, of Poole Dorset, said: "The plant produces spectacular traps which catch not only insects, but also rodents. It is remarkable that it remained undiscovered until the 21st century."
The team, which found the plant in 2007 following a two-month expedition, published details of their discovery in the Botanical Journal of Linnean Society earlier this year following a three-year study of all 120 species of pitcher plant.
They decided to name the plant Nepenthes attenboroughii, after the wildlife broadcaster Sir David.
"My team and I named it in honour of Sir David whose work has inspired generations toward a better understanding of the beauty and diversity of the natural world," added Mr McPherson.
Sir David, 83, said: "I was contacted by the team shortly after the discovery and they asked if they could name it after me. I was delighted and told them, 'Thank you very much'.
"I'm absolutely flattered. This is a remarkable species the largest of its kind. I'm told it can catch rats then eat them with its digestive enzymes. It's certainly capable of that."
The team of botanists, led by British experts Stewart McPherson and Alastair Robinson, found the plant on Mount Victoria in the Philippines.
They were inspired to search for the plant after word that it is existed came from two Christian missionaries who described seeing a large carnivorous pitcher in 2000 after they climbed the mountain.
Mr McPherson, of Poole Dorset, said: "The plant produces spectacular traps which catch not only insects, but also rodents. It is remarkable that it remained undiscovered until the 21st century."
The team, which found the plant in 2007 following a two-month expedition, published details of their discovery in the Botanical Journal of Linnean Society earlier this year following a three-year study of all 120 species of pitcher plant.
They decided to name the plant Nepenthes attenboroughii, after the wildlife broadcaster Sir David.
"My team and I named it in honour of Sir David whose work has inspired generations toward a better understanding of the beauty and diversity of the natural world," added Mr McPherson.
Sir David, 83, said: "I was contacted by the team shortly after the discovery and they asked if they could name it after me. I was delighted and told them, 'Thank you very much'.
"I'm absolutely flattered. This is a remarkable species the largest of its kind. I'm told it can catch rats then eat them with its digestive enzymes. It's certainly capable of that."
Global warming could change Earth's tilt
Warming oceans could cause Earth's axis to tilt in the coming century, a new study suggests. The effect was previously thought to be negligible, but researchers now say the shift will be large enough that it should be taken into account when interpreting how the Earth wobbles.
The Earth spins on an axis that is tilted some 23.5° from the vertical. But this position is far from constant – the planet's axis is constantly shifting in response to changes in the distribution of mass around the Earth. "The Earth is like a spinning top, and if you put more mass on one side or other, the axis of rotation is going to shift slightly," says Felix Landerer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The changing climate has long been known to move Earth's axis. The planet's north pole, for example, is migrating towards 79 °W – a line of longitude that runs through Toronto and Panama City – at a rate of about 10 centimetres each year as the Earth rebounds from ice sheets that once weighed down large swaths of North America, Europe, and Asia.
The influx of fresh water from shrinking ice sheets also causes the planet to pitch over. Landerer and colleagues estimate that the melting of Greenland's ice is already causing Earth's axis to tilt at an annual rate of about 2.6 centimetres – and that rate may increase significantly in the coming years.
Now, they calculate that oceans warmed by the rise in greenhouse gases can also cause the Earth to tilt – a conclusion that runs counter to older models, which suggested that ocean expansion would not create a large shift in the distribution of the Earth's mass.
Tracking sea levels
The researchers modelled the changes that would occur if moderate projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a doubling of carbon dioxide levels between 2000 and 2100 – were to become reality.
The team found that as the oceans warm and expand, more water will be pushed up and onto the Earth's shallower ocean shelves. Over the next century, the subtle effect is expected to cause the northern pole of Earth's spin axis to shift by roughly 1.5 centimetres per year in the direction of Alaska and Hawaii.
The effect is relatively small. "The pole's not going to drift away in a crazy manner," Landerer notes, adding that it shouldn't induce any unfortunate feedback in Earth's climate.
But he says the motion is strong enough that it needs to be taken into account when interpreting shifts in Earth's axis. Tracking the motion of the poles could help place limits on the total amount of sea level rise over decades.
"The oceans take up at least 80 per cent of the heat that is added from greenhouse gases," Landerer told New Scientist. "They have a huge heat capacity, so this effect is going to be there for quite a bit."
Faster spin
Maik Thomas of the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, who was not affiliated with the study, says the new work overturns previous ideas. "Up to now, people had believed that height variations [from ocean temperature changes] gave no contribution to polar motion," he told New Scientist. "This is an effect that now has to be considered."
But Thomas notes that polar motion is unlikely to yield a good measurement of sea level rise, whose signal may be difficult to disentangle from a host of other factors that contribute to changes in Earth's tilt, from movements in Earth's crust and mantle to the periodic effects of El Niño, an oscillation of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Pacific.
And climate change can also affect the Earth's spin. Previously, Landerer and colleagues showed that global warming would cause Earth's mass to be redistributed towards higher latitudes. Since that pulls mass closer to the planet's spin axis, it causes the planet to rotate faster – just as an ice skater spins faster when she pulls her arms towards her body.
The Earth spins on an axis that is tilted some 23.5° from the vertical. But this position is far from constant – the planet's axis is constantly shifting in response to changes in the distribution of mass around the Earth. "The Earth is like a spinning top, and if you put more mass on one side or other, the axis of rotation is going to shift slightly," says Felix Landerer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The changing climate has long been known to move Earth's axis. The planet's north pole, for example, is migrating towards 79 °W – a line of longitude that runs through Toronto and Panama City – at a rate of about 10 centimetres each year as the Earth rebounds from ice sheets that once weighed down large swaths of North America, Europe, and Asia.
The influx of fresh water from shrinking ice sheets also causes the planet to pitch over. Landerer and colleagues estimate that the melting of Greenland's ice is already causing Earth's axis to tilt at an annual rate of about 2.6 centimetres – and that rate may increase significantly in the coming years.
Now, they calculate that oceans warmed by the rise in greenhouse gases can also cause the Earth to tilt – a conclusion that runs counter to older models, which suggested that ocean expansion would not create a large shift in the distribution of the Earth's mass.
Tracking sea levels
The researchers modelled the changes that would occur if moderate projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a doubling of carbon dioxide levels between 2000 and 2100 – were to become reality.
The team found that as the oceans warm and expand, more water will be pushed up and onto the Earth's shallower ocean shelves. Over the next century, the subtle effect is expected to cause the northern pole of Earth's spin axis to shift by roughly 1.5 centimetres per year in the direction of Alaska and Hawaii.
The effect is relatively small. "The pole's not going to drift away in a crazy manner," Landerer notes, adding that it shouldn't induce any unfortunate feedback in Earth's climate.
But he says the motion is strong enough that it needs to be taken into account when interpreting shifts in Earth's axis. Tracking the motion of the poles could help place limits on the total amount of sea level rise over decades.
"The oceans take up at least 80 per cent of the heat that is added from greenhouse gases," Landerer told New Scientist. "They have a huge heat capacity, so this effect is going to be there for quite a bit."
Faster spin
Maik Thomas of the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, who was not affiliated with the study, says the new work overturns previous ideas. "Up to now, people had believed that height variations [from ocean temperature changes] gave no contribution to polar motion," he told New Scientist. "This is an effect that now has to be considered."
But Thomas notes that polar motion is unlikely to yield a good measurement of sea level rise, whose signal may be difficult to disentangle from a host of other factors that contribute to changes in Earth's tilt, from movements in Earth's crust and mantle to the periodic effects of El Niño, an oscillation of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Pacific.
And climate change can also affect the Earth's spin. Previously, Landerer and colleagues showed that global warming would cause Earth's mass to be redistributed towards higher latitudes. Since that pulls mass closer to the planet's spin axis, it causes the planet to rotate faster – just as an ice skater spins faster when she pulls her arms towards her body.
World's ocean temps are warmest on record
Steve Kramer spent an hour and a half swimming in the ocean Sunday — in Maine.
The water temperature was 72 degrees — more like Ocean City, Md., this time of year. And Ocean City's water temp hit 88 degrees this week, toasty even by Miami Beach standards.
Kramer, 26, who lives in the seaside town of Scarborough, said it was the first time he's ever swam so long in Maine's coastal waters. "Usually, you're in five minutes and you're out," he said.
It's not just the ocean off the Northeast coast that is super-warm this summer. July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.
The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. June was only slightly cooler, while August could set another record, scientists say. The previous record was set in July 1998 during a powerful El Nino weather pattern.
At a full degree above the 20th century average of 61.5 degrees, "the global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record," the center said.
Large portions of many continents had substantially warmer-than-average temperatures, the center stated.
"The greatest departures from the long-term average were evident in Europe, northern Africa, and much of western North America," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the center. "Broadly, across these regions, temperatures were about 4-7 degrees F above average."
El Nino, emissions as factorsMeteorologists said there's a combination of forces at work: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made carbon emissions tied to global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.
"Arctic sea ice covered an average of 3.4 million square miles during July," the center said. "This is 12.7 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the third lowest July sea ice extent on record, behind 2007 and 2006."
The Gulf of Mexico, where warm water fuels hurricanes, has temperatures dancing around 90. Most of the water in the Northern Hemisphere has been considerably warmer than normal. The Mediterranean is about three degrees warmer than normal. Higher temperatures rule in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The heat is most noticeable near the Arctic, where water temperatures are as much as 10 degrees above average. The tongues of warm water could help melt sea ice from below and even cause thawing of ice sheets on Greenland, said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado.
Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.
The water temperature was 72 degrees — more like Ocean City, Md., this time of year. And Ocean City's water temp hit 88 degrees this week, toasty even by Miami Beach standards.
Kramer, 26, who lives in the seaside town of Scarborough, said it was the first time he's ever swam so long in Maine's coastal waters. "Usually, you're in five minutes and you're out," he said.
It's not just the ocean off the Northeast coast that is super-warm this summer. July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.
The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. June was only slightly cooler, while August could set another record, scientists say. The previous record was set in July 1998 during a powerful El Nino weather pattern.
At a full degree above the 20th century average of 61.5 degrees, "the global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record," the center said.
Large portions of many continents had substantially warmer-than-average temperatures, the center stated.
"The greatest departures from the long-term average were evident in Europe, northern Africa, and much of western North America," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the center. "Broadly, across these regions, temperatures were about 4-7 degrees F above average."
El Nino, emissions as factorsMeteorologists said there's a combination of forces at work: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made carbon emissions tied to global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.
"Arctic sea ice covered an average of 3.4 million square miles during July," the center said. "This is 12.7 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the third lowest July sea ice extent on record, behind 2007 and 2006."
The Gulf of Mexico, where warm water fuels hurricanes, has temperatures dancing around 90. Most of the water in the Northern Hemisphere has been considerably warmer than normal. The Mediterranean is about three degrees warmer than normal. Higher temperatures rule in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The heat is most noticeable near the Arctic, where water temperatures are as much as 10 degrees above average. The tongues of warm water could help melt sea ice from below and even cause thawing of ice sheets on Greenland, said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado.
Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.
Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says
The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.
In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.
“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.
And, the researchers say, unless people understand how much coastal landscapes changed even before the advent of modern coastal development, efforts to preserve or restore important habitats may fail.
Dr. Rick’s co-author, Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, said people who lived on the Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape.
“We have shell middens that are full of sea urchins,” Dr. Erlandson said. He said he and Dr. Rick theorized that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed.
“These effects cascade down the ecosystem,” Dr. Erlandson said.
Today, coastal scientists argue about a similar cascade, which some attribute to sea otters’ being eaten by killer whales.
But not all the effects of early inhabitants were negative, the scientists say, adding that when people in the Channel Islands hunted otters, they probably ended up increasing the abundance of shellfish. The researchers also cite systems of walls and terraces that people in the Pacific Northwest built to trap sediment and create habitat for clams, which they harvested and ate.
Dr. Erlandson said anthropologists in general were not used to thinking that people exploited marine environments before 4,000 or so years ago, when sea levels that had been rising since the end of the last ice age more or less stabilized. Much of the evidence of earlier coastal settlements has vanished under the waves, he said.
And in places where such evidence remains, it is not always recognized for what it is, he said. “Anthropologists walked past those clam gardens for years without recognizing them,” he said. He said it was a coastal geologist who first exclaimed, “Wow, those aren’t natural!”
Sea levels are on the rise today, fueled by global warming, and Dr. Rick said anthropologists were rushing to excavate the most threatened coastal sites.
“This archaeological record is really important for helping us understand contemporary issues,” he said. “It’s a threatened resource.”
In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.
“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.
And, the researchers say, unless people understand how much coastal landscapes changed even before the advent of modern coastal development, efforts to preserve or restore important habitats may fail.
Dr. Rick’s co-author, Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, said people who lived on the Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape.
“We have shell middens that are full of sea urchins,” Dr. Erlandson said. He said he and Dr. Rick theorized that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed.
“These effects cascade down the ecosystem,” Dr. Erlandson said.
Today, coastal scientists argue about a similar cascade, which some attribute to sea otters’ being eaten by killer whales.
But not all the effects of early inhabitants were negative, the scientists say, adding that when people in the Channel Islands hunted otters, they probably ended up increasing the abundance of shellfish. The researchers also cite systems of walls and terraces that people in the Pacific Northwest built to trap sediment and create habitat for clams, which they harvested and ate.
Dr. Erlandson said anthropologists in general were not used to thinking that people exploited marine environments before 4,000 or so years ago, when sea levels that had been rising since the end of the last ice age more or less stabilized. Much of the evidence of earlier coastal settlements has vanished under the waves, he said.
And in places where such evidence remains, it is not always recognized for what it is, he said. “Anthropologists walked past those clam gardens for years without recognizing them,” he said. He said it was a coastal geologist who first exclaimed, “Wow, those aren’t natural!”
Sea levels are on the rise today, fueled by global warming, and Dr. Rick said anthropologists were rushing to excavate the most threatened coastal sites.
“This archaeological record is really important for helping us understand contemporary issues,” he said. “It’s a threatened resource.”
Falling tree hits, kills OR Forest Service worker
U.S. Forest Service employee is dead after being struck by a falling tree as he helped clean up a marijuana growing operation in eastern Oregon.
Forest Service workers and members of the Baker County Narcotics Team were removing a marijuana garden in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest southwest of Unity when the dead tree toppled and hit the man Thursday morning.
Efforts were made to revive him, but he died at the scene. His name was not released.
Wallowa-Whitman National Forest spokeswoman Judy Wing says Forest Service crews often assist in marijuana eradication, pulling out plants, picking up garbage and assessing the environmental damage caused by the operations.
The Oregonian reports that the death is being investigated by federal, state and local authorities
Forest Service workers and members of the Baker County Narcotics Team were removing a marijuana garden in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest southwest of Unity when the dead tree toppled and hit the man Thursday morning.
Efforts were made to revive him, but he died at the scene. His name was not released.
Wallowa-Whitman National Forest spokeswoman Judy Wing says Forest Service crews often assist in marijuana eradication, pulling out plants, picking up garbage and assessing the environmental damage caused by the operations.
The Oregonian reports that the death is being investigated by federal, state and local authorities
Teddy Roosevelt and the search for new ‘wilderness warriors’
Theodore Roosevelt had his delicate spots—he was an asthmatic child and later a naturalist who reveled in birdwatching. But 100 years after his presidency, the image of him that endures is decidedly more swaggering—an outdoorsman who loved to hunt, a mountaineer, a populist who thundered against corporate “despoilers” of the public welfare.
He also left a legacy of 234 million acres of national parks and other protected American wilderness. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written acclaimed books on Ford Motor Company and Hurricane Katrina, focuses on the conservationist work of the larger-than-life president in his new book, the 960-page Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.
We spoke recently about Roosevelt and how he might have taken on today’s despoilers.
Q. Roosevelt’s time in the Badlands, on his African safari, and in the mountains with John Muir—he seemed link it all to his work in public. What was it that he found in the wilderness that made him such a powerful leader?
A. He had chronic asthma as a boy and got very skeptical about hyper-industrialization, seeing the smokestack factories along the East River in New Jersey. Yet when he’d go to the Catskills and later the Adirondacks, his illness would go away. He found that being out in the wild was the cure to his respiratory illness.
He also created a philosophy that what made American democracy unique was wilderness. He believed that it would have medium-sized cities surrounded by what we today would call greenbelts. And that if you let sprawl happen it would desecrate the beautiful American landscape.
He was also very influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin and this notion of the need for species survival and the classification of species. Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishment may have been his leadership in inventorying the biotic America. He wanted to know what kind of wildflowers we had, what insects, what types of prairie grass. And he wanted to educate people that the planet was one whole thing, one biological organism.
Q. What would he think of the so-called unscientific America today, where so many people reject evolution?
A. He would be aghast at people ignoring science. He pushed for science and biology to be taught in public schools. He wanted all children to grow up understanding Darwin and Huxley. On the other hand he was a bit of a romantic about nature. The combination of the two made him almost an ideal president for the current environmental moment.
Q. Today we’ve got big business interests—the National Association of Manufacturers for one—saying the world is going to end if we pass a climate change bill. It sounds like Roosevelt faced the same kind of opposition when he took on the mining industry and others who didn’t want places like Grand Canyon to be protected. What was his strategy?
A. He would have taken his fist and smashed the National Manufacturing Association. I’m not kidding, he was that vigorous a figure. Anybody who put a company profit over the public welfare, Roosevelt called them despoilers. It was his favorite word. He also called them swine. It was a trend of capitalism he worried about, that we would create a culture where the corporations could do what they wanted for their profits and do damage to the public welfare.
Q. Do we have anyone of any influence speaking like that today?
No, we don’t. Roosevelt cloaked himself in American mythology—he’d wear a cowboy hat and bandana, carry a gun, and present himself as kind of an archetype of American manhood—so he could talk to common people. Sometimes 200,000 people would come to hear him give conservation speeches.
He didn’t see it as negotiable. He was a pragmatist, but there were some things that you couldn’t negotiate. You couldn’t partially mine the Grand Canyon. It needed to be preserved forever. And that was the end of the conversation. Even though Congress voted to mine it for zinc and asbestos, Roosevelt used an executive order and overruled them.
Roosevelt also called for a global conservation congress that would have global environmental laws. One hundred years ago, in 1909, he called for that. He knew that it doesn’t go any good to save birds in America if they go down to Central America and the whole flock is massacred. It doesn’t do any good for us to keep the Rio Grande clean if Mexico’s going to dump sewage in it. So Roosevelt’s notion that we could work in a global fashion on conservation issues is very timely today.
Q. Did he have any success with that?
A. No. The first one he passed was with Canada and Mexico, and it was successful. But they were planning the global one when he left office and went to Africa to collect for the Smithsonian Institute. William Howard Taft came in with the Republican big business crowd, and they threw out the idea.
Q. A politician going to the wilderness for self-reflection—that’s such an exotic idea today, Appalachian Trail jokes notwithstanding. What’s lost with that?
A. Well, it’s tough to do. I think it’s good that President Obama visited Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon last weekend. But I’d also like the president to get into some of the wilderness areas of America and to start thinking of immediate things that can be done on climate.
For example, ANWR in Alaska should become a national monument or park. Obama should create a national caribou reserve. Roosevelt created national buffalo reserves—the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma and at the Flathead Reservation in Montana—wildly successful efforts to keep the buffalo alive and thriving. We need to do that now for the caribou that climate change has put under great stress in Alaska.
Historian Douglas BrinkleyPhoto: Danny Turner for HarperCollinsQ. And Obama could do that through executive order?
A. He can. He could do it tomorrow with an executive order declaring ANWR a national monument. The only problem is a weird stipulation put on ANWR in 1980 that says it would be sacrosanct for only one year, and then Congress would have to agree to it. [Ed: More on conservation law in Alaska.] He would have to use the political muscle to get votes on Capitol Hill. But he could get them. It’s just a matter of wanting to have these fights.
And on the Mexican border, wildlife is dying like crazy because they’re building a wall that’s killing off an entire wildlife corridor. The wall is idiotic. There’s a lot that can be done besides the big difficulty of weaning the world off of its addiction to petroleum. Those are proactive things the Obama administration should be doing now.
Q. Do you see any way that the Republican Party might embrace his conservation legacy and reclaim the environmental heroes in its past?
A. We’re on the verge of a new green revolution, and I think I think there’s an opportunity for the Republican Party to reinvent itself as promoting it. The problem is the oil lobby and the coal lobby are so powerful in Republican politics that nobody wants to stand up to them. Until you get a Republican of great vision who can be Rooseveltian in putting long-term public welfare over short-term corporate good, I don’t see it coming any time soon.
Q. How do we make environmentalism badass again, the way it was for Roosevelt?
A. Everybody likes TR, because we can see that his legacy is not a Democratic legacy or a Republican one, it’s a great American legacy. I don’t think we have to be at partisan odds over clean air, clean water, and keeping our forest reserves intact. Those should just be American goals. And I think Roosevelt helps that process along.
There’s always a need for an alliance between sportsmen—hunters and anglers—and the preservationists in the environmental movement. They have different interests, but when they work together they can get a lot of things done. It can often mean those extra Congressional votes. I know for a fact that these hunt clubs, many of them for their own reasons, want to have caribou and polar bears saved in Alaska right now. Green activists might be able to form alliances with them, working against the extraction industries. Roosevelt provides an example of bringing those communities together in a common, concerted eff
He also left a legacy of 234 million acres of national parks and other protected American wilderness. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written acclaimed books on Ford Motor Company and Hurricane Katrina, focuses on the conservationist work of the larger-than-life president in his new book, the 960-page Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.
We spoke recently about Roosevelt and how he might have taken on today’s despoilers.
Q. Roosevelt’s time in the Badlands, on his African safari, and in the mountains with John Muir—he seemed link it all to his work in public. What was it that he found in the wilderness that made him such a powerful leader?
A. He had chronic asthma as a boy and got very skeptical about hyper-industrialization, seeing the smokestack factories along the East River in New Jersey. Yet when he’d go to the Catskills and later the Adirondacks, his illness would go away. He found that being out in the wild was the cure to his respiratory illness.
He also created a philosophy that what made American democracy unique was wilderness. He believed that it would have medium-sized cities surrounded by what we today would call greenbelts. And that if you let sprawl happen it would desecrate the beautiful American landscape.
He was also very influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin and this notion of the need for species survival and the classification of species. Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishment may have been his leadership in inventorying the biotic America. He wanted to know what kind of wildflowers we had, what insects, what types of prairie grass. And he wanted to educate people that the planet was one whole thing, one biological organism.
Q. What would he think of the so-called unscientific America today, where so many people reject evolution?
A. He would be aghast at people ignoring science. He pushed for science and biology to be taught in public schools. He wanted all children to grow up understanding Darwin and Huxley. On the other hand he was a bit of a romantic about nature. The combination of the two made him almost an ideal president for the current environmental moment.
Q. Today we’ve got big business interests—the National Association of Manufacturers for one—saying the world is going to end if we pass a climate change bill. It sounds like Roosevelt faced the same kind of opposition when he took on the mining industry and others who didn’t want places like Grand Canyon to be protected. What was his strategy?
A. He would have taken his fist and smashed the National Manufacturing Association. I’m not kidding, he was that vigorous a figure. Anybody who put a company profit over the public welfare, Roosevelt called them despoilers. It was his favorite word. He also called them swine. It was a trend of capitalism he worried about, that we would create a culture where the corporations could do what they wanted for their profits and do damage to the public welfare.
Q. Do we have anyone of any influence speaking like that today?
No, we don’t. Roosevelt cloaked himself in American mythology—he’d wear a cowboy hat and bandana, carry a gun, and present himself as kind of an archetype of American manhood—so he could talk to common people. Sometimes 200,000 people would come to hear him give conservation speeches.
He didn’t see it as negotiable. He was a pragmatist, but there were some things that you couldn’t negotiate. You couldn’t partially mine the Grand Canyon. It needed to be preserved forever. And that was the end of the conversation. Even though Congress voted to mine it for zinc and asbestos, Roosevelt used an executive order and overruled them.
Roosevelt also called for a global conservation congress that would have global environmental laws. One hundred years ago, in 1909, he called for that. He knew that it doesn’t go any good to save birds in America if they go down to Central America and the whole flock is massacred. It doesn’t do any good for us to keep the Rio Grande clean if Mexico’s going to dump sewage in it. So Roosevelt’s notion that we could work in a global fashion on conservation issues is very timely today.
Q. Did he have any success with that?
A. No. The first one he passed was with Canada and Mexico, and it was successful. But they were planning the global one when he left office and went to Africa to collect for the Smithsonian Institute. William Howard Taft came in with the Republican big business crowd, and they threw out the idea.
Q. A politician going to the wilderness for self-reflection—that’s such an exotic idea today, Appalachian Trail jokes notwithstanding. What’s lost with that?
A. Well, it’s tough to do. I think it’s good that President Obama visited Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon last weekend. But I’d also like the president to get into some of the wilderness areas of America and to start thinking of immediate things that can be done on climate.
For example, ANWR in Alaska should become a national monument or park. Obama should create a national caribou reserve. Roosevelt created national buffalo reserves—the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma and at the Flathead Reservation in Montana—wildly successful efforts to keep the buffalo alive and thriving. We need to do that now for the caribou that climate change has put under great stress in Alaska.
Historian Douglas BrinkleyPhoto: Danny Turner for HarperCollinsQ. And Obama could do that through executive order?
A. He can. He could do it tomorrow with an executive order declaring ANWR a national monument. The only problem is a weird stipulation put on ANWR in 1980 that says it would be sacrosanct for only one year, and then Congress would have to agree to it. [Ed: More on conservation law in Alaska.] He would have to use the political muscle to get votes on Capitol Hill. But he could get them. It’s just a matter of wanting to have these fights.
And on the Mexican border, wildlife is dying like crazy because they’re building a wall that’s killing off an entire wildlife corridor. The wall is idiotic. There’s a lot that can be done besides the big difficulty of weaning the world off of its addiction to petroleum. Those are proactive things the Obama administration should be doing now.
Q. Do you see any way that the Republican Party might embrace his conservation legacy and reclaim the environmental heroes in its past?
A. We’re on the verge of a new green revolution, and I think I think there’s an opportunity for the Republican Party to reinvent itself as promoting it. The problem is the oil lobby and the coal lobby are so powerful in Republican politics that nobody wants to stand up to them. Until you get a Republican of great vision who can be Rooseveltian in putting long-term public welfare over short-term corporate good, I don’t see it coming any time soon.
Q. How do we make environmentalism badass again, the way it was for Roosevelt?
A. Everybody likes TR, because we can see that his legacy is not a Democratic legacy or a Republican one, it’s a great American legacy. I don’t think we have to be at partisan odds over clean air, clean water, and keeping our forest reserves intact. Those should just be American goals. And I think Roosevelt helps that process along.
There’s always a need for an alliance between sportsmen—hunters and anglers—and the preservationists in the environmental movement. They have different interests, but when they work together they can get a lot of things done. It can often mean those extra Congressional votes. I know for a fact that these hunt clubs, many of them for their own reasons, want to have caribou and polar bears saved in Alaska right now. Green activists might be able to form alliances with them, working against the extraction industries. Roosevelt provides an example of bringing those communities together in a common, concerted eff
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