Messrs. Allegre et al appear to be oblivious to what is going on in the wild. Nature is showing those of us who have a spent a lifetime in the field what burning daily 82 million tons daily of greenhouse gases are doing to our forests – killing them en masse. Rising temperatures across the West of at least 1.8 F have removed the ecological cold curtain, allowing a trillion bark beetles the opportunity to kill billions of mature trees across western North America. Instead of absorbing CO2 as they’ve evolved to do so, massive graveyards of trees are now decaying and bleeding greenhouse gases into an ever-rising atmospheric pool.

The high elevation whitebark and limber pines are of paramount importance in holding and releasing snowpacks; providing water for 50 million people, feeding our agriculture systems and stoking industries including the eighth mightiest on the globe: California. Those forests are perishing, quickly.

Tree ring growth from four thousand year old living trees, bristlecone pines, existing two miles above sea level in California and Nevada accurately depict the speed of warming over the past decade.

Ecologist study patterns on the landscape and we are now observing regional changes. Animals and plants cannot migrate fast enough to respond to the alacrity of climate change. The time to do something is now, not disregard what nature is clearly showing us.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.

Humans are exceptional problem solvers. Our best friend in the 21st century is innovation and the bridge toward it — is efficiency.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

California Lutheran University Climate Change student assessment of Earth Dr Reese Halter's class

Story ran on Huffington Post November 7, 2011

This first week of November (2011) our population surpassed seven billion humans. And in the last week of October (2011) scientists from the University of California at Berkeley irrefutably proved that over one billion temperature sensors registered warming between 1-2 degrees Celsius, in some cases more than three times greater than the IPCCs average of 0.64 degrees Celsius. Humans are forcing the climate by burning carbon-based fuels releasing over 82 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, daily, on our planet.

All life forms are in jeopardy. Our food chain is perilously close to collapsing; yet the lawmakers in Washington regularly ignore this message. My biology and environmental students at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks and I are miffed at why this issue is not front and center in DC.

Prices at the grocery store have been rising dramatically since February 2011 and will continue to do so with no foreseeable end in sight. The climate has changed that much – it’s disrupting our way of life and costing governments around the world billions of dollars in infrastructure damage.

In May of 2009, Don Gorman the publisher of Rocky Mountain Books called and asked me to write The Incomparable Honeybee. A couple months later the first edition was in print and selling like hotcakes. Last week a revised and updated edition was released; we all need to be aware of the health and wellbeing of the bees. Because without healthy honey, bumble, stingless and solitary bees there’s no chance that more than seven billion people can thrive especially since the oceans are fished-out and currently feeding, unsustainably, at least a couple billion people, daily – in addition to acidifying (from absorbing rising atmospheric CO₂) faster than any time in the last 60 million years.

One of the thrills of studying nature is discovering the magnificent interrelationships amongst critters, plants, insects and ecosystems. My students are constantly amazed at my enthusiasm and passion when I connect the dots in class.

For instance, the brutal drought that is enveloping Texas and much of the southern half of America has adversely impacted the Mexican free-tailed bats that migrate from northern Mexico in the springtime to central Texas. One hundred million bats – the largest bat colony on the globe – feast on an astounding 1,000 tons of insects and pests nightly during the summertime – nature’s exquisite insectivores. Those bats save Texas cotton farmers millions of dollars that would otherwise be spent on purchasing man-made, synthetic insecticides that kill honey, bumble and solitary bees.

The current drought, however, has significantly lambasted the Mexican free-tailed bat population (they can’t find water) and Texas farmers were forced to spend millions of dollars applying carcinogenic, synthetic insecticides to grow their bee-pollinated cotton crops. This will most certainly have a deleterious affect on all bee species.

Surprisingly, bees and humans share a number of similarities. For example, we both require restful and rejuvenating sleep. Sleep deprived bees, just like humans, experience communication problems like finding food and performing an accurate waggle dance to reveal locations of nectar, pollen, water and tree resin. Stressed bees like humans become anxious, depressed and pessimistic; they display emotion-like qualities. Moreover, bees that exhibit a high defensive behavior or optimism are likely to survive a winter rather than perish.

Did you know that humans have been keeping bees in cities for over three thousand years? Bees were kept in the “land of milk and honey” in the Iron Age city of Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley – the oldest known commercial beekeeping facility in the world. It should then come as no surprise that city councils around the world have recently allowed urban beekeepers to keep hives in Santa Monica, New York, Chicago, London, Melbourne, Tokyo and many other places. In fact, urban beekeepers along with the tremendous support of city dwellers are planting more bee-friendly trees and flowers helping to sustain urban bee populations.

And make no mistake; bees around the globe are dying by the billions from insecticides like neonictinoids, climate-driven mismatches, introduced parasites and diseases, air pollution and habitat loss. In the last four years alone over a quarter trillion honeybees have died prematurely. Of the 100 crop species providing 90 percent of the world’s food – over 74 percent are pollinated by bees.

The amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted from your cellular phone is enough for you to strongly consider using the “hands-free” mode to obviate harmful brain radiation. Researchers from Switzerland discovered that the amount of radiation given off by just one mobile phone has a noticeably negative effect on bee behavior, causing them to immediately become anxious. People would be wise to take note at what the bees are showing us about cellular phone radiation levels.

At the end of each day I take a tablespoon of local beekeepers honey and marvel that it took 12 bees laboring their entire foraging lives of three weeks, combined flying time of about 6,000 miles, to produce 21 grams or a tablespoon of delicious and nutritious honey.

Help save urban bees – please, do not use herbicides, insecticides, miticides or fungicides in your garden.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Hurricanes are nature’s fiercest storms, with about 18 occurring each year.

When Bikini Island was demolished with a thermonuclear bomb test, the explosion lifted about five million tons of water into the air. A hurricane over Puerto Rico drenched the island with 1.25 billion tons of water. In 1970, a typhoon (which is the correct name when it occurs in the Pacific) killed one million people in Bangladesh. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew wreaked $30 billion (US) damage to Florida and left 250,000 people homeless. In 2005, the total property damage from Hurricane Katrina was in excess of $81 billion (US) and over 1,836 people died from flooding. Hurricane Irene (2011) caused at least $7.2 billion (US) in horrendous flooding damages.

A hurricane is a huge heat pump that gathers the sun’s heat from a large area over the ocean and pumps it into a concentrated region. It warms the air, making it rise, sucking in air from the outskirts to fill the void and forcing the entire mass to rotate, counterclockwise, faster and faster. Finally, it collapses in on itself. Hurricanes form only over tropical oceans where water temperatures are at least 77 degrees Fahrenheit. They also only occur during the warmest months from June to about November. They pick up not only heat, but also moisture over the ocean.

The normal path of a hurricane is to the west across the Atlantic and then around to the north, as it approaches the continental U.S. For a hurricane to be a threat to Miami it has to start out far to the south below the islands of the West Indies at about seven degrees latitude. They usually do not extend beyond a 30 degree latitude.

The energy release in just one hurricane is as much as in 500,000 atom bombs.

The eye of the hurricane moves very slowly, at about 9 miles per hour, yet its outer wall can have storm-force winds in excess of 186 miles per hour. The average house is built to withstand about 87 miles per hour winds. In the six hours before and six hours after a hurricane hits land it can drop over 14 inches of rain. In addition, the storm surge of waves that can come ashore can be as high as 25 feet (Hurricane Camille 1969) or a 2.5 story building. In Galveston, Texas in 1900 one such storm surge hit the coast and killed 8,000 people.

So what conditions create such violence? First, swirling atmospheric conditions that occur off the coast of east Africa create a moist low-pressure easterly wave. Second, surface winds from the equator are displaced northward (in the Northern Hemisphere) and converge with the easterly wave. Third, when a very high altitude anticyclone (spinning clockwise) sits directly above the centre of a low-pressure tropical storm then all of the necessary ingredients are in place to create nature’s greatest storm. The upper-level high-pressure area in the centre pushes the air away, and the low-pressure area at sea level sucks in air and sends it skyward into the centre of the anticyclone, which then continues to build up pressure and spin the air away. Warm tropical seawater is evaporated providing energy and the subsequent condensation releases heat into the centre of the storm as it feeds upon itself.

The problem facing atmospheric scientists today is that they know how hurricanes move but they cannot predict with any certainty, even with the most potent super computers, the exact path.

In 1975 the Saffir-Simpson hurricane damage scale, from category one to five, was invented based upon the pressure of the system, its wind speed and storm surge. In 2004, Hurricane Charley was a category four with wind speeds in excess of 130 miles per hour and 15 feet swells. It decimated Florida’s $9 billion US citrus industry and destroyed properties costing approximately $7.5 billion US.

Fleets of geosynchronous satellites orbit earth and provide on going surveillance over the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. They enable scientists to watch the birth and growth of hurricanes from the beginning to the end, just as was the case this week as Hurricane Ivan flattened Grenada.  As the hurricanes approach continental U.S. air force airplanes fly into the eye of the storm and collect important information. Finally as the hurricane nears land, Doppler radar is used for more exact measurement of the size and swath of the storm. Winds from hurricanes can extend as far as 171 miles in front of the edge.

Once hurricanes move over land it usually marks the beginning of the end of the eye of the storm because it cuts itself off from the fuel of warm ocean water. If, however, the storm crosses the Florida panhandle and moves back onto the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico it will refuel and continue to be a hurricane.

Hurricanes are powered by the sun’s energy as absorbed in the surface layer of the ocean and subsequently transferred to the atmosphere by evaporation and condensation of water. One valid concern about global warming is that the oceans will become warmer. And there will be more days of the year when tropical waters are warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit; these waters will extend farther north and south.

The hurricane region is predicted to encompass more northern parts of the eastern seaboard as well as the hurricane season being extended. Warmer ocean temperatures will be translated into higher wind velocities and larger storm surges.

Hurricanes are a necessary part of the earth’s irrigation system. They bring fresh drinking supplies to much of the American and Asian continents.

Spewing 82 million metric tons of greenhouse gases daily, globally into the atmosphere is causing climate disruption; planning is requisite for millions of people who live in southeastern United States as climate scientists have predicted there will be more intense hurricanes as the Earth continues to warm.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

The exposed structural roots of this ancient Great Basin bristlecone pine resemble arms like that of a giant squid. White Mtns, Calif, Earth Dr Reese Halter's root research circa 1989

The antiquitous sedimentary White Mountains of east central California are home to the world’s oldest living trees – the venerable Great Basin bristlecone pines. Some of these trees have witnessed more than 1.68 million sunrises.

It seems fitting that the oldest trees on Earth should be living on layers of rock that started as sand and mud or shells deposited on the bottom of a shallow, warm sea 600 million years ago.

The White Mountains are the second highest in California next to the Sierra Nevada’s and the third-highest peak at 14,246 feet above sea level. Being located just east of the Sierra’s means that the White Mountains are dry. Most of the scant precipitation falls as snow, the remainder comes as isolated thunderstorms. From November to April the climate is inhospitable with 100 mile per hour winds occurring frequently.

At two miles above sea level the ultraviolet radiation is extreme. July and August are the hottest months, with average temperatures rarely exceeding 50 degrees F. and precipitation is a meager 12 inches per year.

Yet despite harsh environmental conditions, Great Basin bristlecone pines not only stand upright but thrive where no other of their race of 80,000 species can exist.

These remarkable trees eek out an existence not for just hundreds of years, nor a thousand years, but almost 5,000 years. The oldest known tree on planet Earth lives here. He’s called Methuselah.

He’s older than the pyramids; he’s older than writing; he’s older than the first written story; in fact he was already old as the first pyramid was being constructed.

How are bristlecone pines able to live for so long? They epitomize the word thrifty. They grow for only 45 days a year and very slowly. They produce copious amounts of gooey pitch which protects them from insects. They continue growing for hundreds and possibly a thousand years even when 80 percent of their bark is removed – and they still produce viable seeds. Fire rarely occurs in these forests and there’s very little if any wood on the forest floor to burn.  They live for so long that the soil beneath erodes away – they literally outgrow the very sites they live on.

Bristlecone pine trees and their rings are very sensitive to rainfall and they accurately record past climates dating back, continuously, 8,800 years.

As tree scientists learn the secrets of  the longevity these exquisite Great Basin bristlecone pines it will surely enable humans the opportunity, should they choose, to live longer.

Wish to know a lot more about the Great Basin bristlecone pines?

Australia, Radio 1, ABC National: Ockham’s Razor

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Join Earth Dr Reese Halter in the Great Basin bristlecone pines

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Wooded areas are a gold mine for worldwide carbon offset markets

Story ran in the  Vancouver Sun, September 16, 2010

Twenty-five years ago I was a freshman in the faculty of forestry at the University of British Columbia I was keen to learn about trees, animals, water, medicine and old-growth forests.

During the early 1980s, the province of British Columbia advertised itself to the world as “Super, Natural British Columbia.” Concurrently, the forest industry ran a campaign of “Forests Forever.”

Much has changed in a quarter of a century.

Multinational forestry corporations received massive tax credits, felled millions of hectares of old growth, shut their doors and moved to South America while thousands of British Columbian forestry workers including Ministry of Forests employees have been dislocated.

The fact is that, after a century of exploiting old growth in British Columbia, there’s not much left.

It seems incongruous that the Resort Municipality of Whistler that co-hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics, in partnership with Squamish and Lil’wat First Nation, has been given a 25-year tenure license by the province to log high-elevation old growth around an international tourism destination.

British Columbia’s old growth is a gold mine for worldwide carbon offset markets. And British Columbia is a member of the Western Climate Initiative, which includes Arizona, California, Montana, New Mexico, Washington, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec; they have all agreed to cut the region’s CO2 emissions by 15-percent below the 2005 levels by 2020.

Marriott International, with more than 3,000 global properties, has partnered with Conservation International and is the first hotel  company to calculate its carbon footprint and has launched an  aggressive worldwide campaign to lessen its impact.

Each year, it uses 3.2 million tons of CO2, or 66 pounds per available room.

To offset this, Marriott has undertaken a remarkable initiative. It is spending millions of dollars over a long-term period to protect more than 1.4 million acres of endangered rainforests in the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve, in partnership with the state of Amazonas in Brazil.

If Brazil is renting its old-growth rainforests for millions of dollars, then why shouldn’t the government of British Columbia consider its options?

The tar sands of northern Alberta are polluting trillions of gallons of fresh water, and Europeans have mounted a campaign — Rethink Alberta — dissuading international tourists from visiting that province. Surely British Columbia does not want to jeopardize its reputation as world-class tourist destination by destroying old-growth forests, one of the key attractions that draw people from around the globe to visit beautiful British Columbia. Moreover, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.

With more than 60 British Columbian glaciers receding, securing fresh water supplies is crucial, and maintaining exquisite high-elevation old-growth forests, which capture, retain and slowly release trillions of litres of snow melt in the springtime, is priceless.

While maintaining the integrity of Brazilian forests is important, so too are the Northern Hemisphere’s last contiguous great temperate rainforests of British Columbia.

Why not rent Whistler’s old growth and some of the remaining old growth throughout the province, take advantage of their awesome ability to absorb enormous amounts of rising CO2 and provide a buffer against climate disruption?

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

By Dr David Randle and Dr Reese Halter

Story ran in the Huffington Post on April 6, 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-dave-randle/earth-we-have-a-problem-f_b_845491.html

Dave’s 88-year-old father has been involved in the space program most of his career. We have always been interested and supportive of the space program and the benefits that it has brought to all humankind. When Dave served as John Denver’s environmental and political advisor, support for the space program was one of his top six priorities.

Recently, at the Kennedy Space Center, Dave picked up an Apollo 13 hat for his dad. It had the wording, “Failure is not an Option”. The hat seemed fitting as his dad had been told a couple years ago that he had only three days to live. He didn’t accept the prognosis and sought other treatment. For him failure was not an option so the hat seemed quite fitting for him to wear in the event he has to go to the hospital again.

Recently we heard a podcast where the NASA Space program was used as a metaphor for how we might better respond to critical environmental issues of our time.

This naturally caught our attention.

The story begins with the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. This was the mission where Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. The landing for this mission was tense and uncertain but they made it. The famous words were spoken by Neil Armstrong: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The Apollo 12 mission then followed with a second successful mission to the moon.

The astronauts were able to land much easier this time, spend more time on the moon, and gained more knowledge, skills, and furthered the NASA Apollo project.

Apollo 13 began its journey to the moon with the goal of further gains. Once again the launch was successful. Before the crew could land on the moon an explosion crippled the service module. The famous words were then relayed, “Houston, we have a problem”.

At first there was disbelief in Houston; the thinking was that some technical glitch was probably just giving false information. 15 full minutes past before Mission Control in Houston realized this was now a critical life and death crisis.

At that point the Apollo 13 mission was abandoned and the new mission was survival. The astronauts had to shift their priorities to the all out task of making the space craft life sustaining until they could return to Earth. This meant they needed to conserve water, get the carbon dioxide out of the air they were breathing, conserve the energy from the batteries, conserve the air needed for the last hours of the journey, learn how to adapt to uncomfortable temperature changes, conserve the limited potable water, and find ways to use the resources of the lunar module not for exploration but as a lifeboat for their survival.

Despite the great challenge and uncertainty of the return voyage, failure to both Mission Control and the astronauts was not an option.

With Mission Control putting all their focus on a new mission, and the courage and support for each other among the astronauts, all were brought home safely to what NASA called a “successful failure”.

Our state of planet Earth continues to become more perilous as we are fast approaching and in some cases have already surpassed the planetary boundaries for sustainability.

Today, we are threatened with many challenges that science has labeled our planetary boundaries. In an article in Nature, Johan Rocstrom and his co-authors argue that to avoid catastrophic environmental change, humanity must stay within defined planetary boundaries. If one boundary is transgressed, then safe levels for other processes could also be under serious risk. The planetary boundaries include: climate change, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, chemical pollution, land system changes, ozone depletion, overload of phosphorus and nitrates, and decreasing fresh water resources.

Just as the Apollo 13 mission aborted its original goals and its passengers focused on their own survival boundaries, crew aboard Spaceship Earth are being called to change their mission in order to live within our planetary boundaries. There is a need to abort the mission of business as usual to a new mission of creating a sustainable planet that functions within the limits of the planetary boundaries.

Like the astronauts aboard Apollo 13 this will mean using our resources more creatively, making sure our air is clean without to much ozone or carbon emissions, that there is potable drinking water for all, that chemicals don’t contaminate the space ships water and food supply, and all passengers are able to be able to have the basic survival needs to complete the journey.

Like the 15 minute pause in Houston where there was disbelief that the Apollo space craft was in trouble despite the warning signs, there has been the same kind of disbelief among many that Spaceship Earth is in trouble.

The question now is: Will enough people on Spaceship Earth realize that we have already exceeded some of the planetary boundaries and are dangerously close to exceeding others? Like the Apollo astronauts we need to change our mission.

There are some important lessons that we can learn from the Apollo 13 experience including:

The importance of creating a shared vision among the crew members of Spaceship Earth. In the Apollo 13 story, Mission Control set a new mission that failure was not an option and Apollo Commander James Lovell let the other crew members know “I intend to go home”. This new shared vision created a context for better solving the problems. Creating a shared vision for a sustainable planet where people live within the planetary boundaries may be half the battle.

Creating a sense of community around the vision is also important for success. We learn from the Apollo 13 story that conflict over the best approaches to take was greatly reduced once everyone agreed to work toward the same vision. The team focused on innovation and creativity to jointly solve the problems as opposed to focusing on different approaches. Commander Lovell observed that: “Thousands of people worked to bring us back home.” The more individuals and groups we can get to work on a shared vision the stronger sense of a global community will form to achieve the goals.

Developing a positive culture for change helps achieve success. Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Apollo 13, said to his co-workers: “work the problem”, meaning do the research to find the solutions. In solving the Apollo 13 challenges, the team put priority on the need for technical proficiency and getting the facts. When the explosion happened, one of the first questions was, “what do we have on the space craft that is good?” The team also made sure that everyone was getting the information they needed. Kranz created a positive culture for solving the problems.

Scientists from around the world have sounded the alarm. Many in government, higher education, NGO’s, and business sectors have started to respond. Some encouraging examples include:

In government, the United Nations Environment Programme is in the process of completing it’s 5th Global Outlook Report (GEO-5), a process that engages scientists from around the world to detail the needs of the planet and set an agenda for what needs to be done. The warnings of the last report, GEO-4, have been largely ignored.

The U.N. Academic Impact, a global initiative that aligns institutions of higher education with the United Nations in support of sustainability, human rights, literacy, and conflict resolution now has over 500 participating institutions. Each of the participating institutions makes a commitment to at least one project each year based on the program’s principles.

NGO’s such as the International Union of Conservation and Nature, have brought together over 1000 NGO’s and 11,000 scientists to work on issues such as biodiversity, climate change, sustainable energy, human well-being, and a green economy.

Corporations are becoming more sustainable in their practices. In the recent Newsweek Green Rankings of the 500 Largest U.S. Corporations, 51 had environmental performance rankings above 90 on a scale of 0 to 100. Of the Global 100 Corporations, ten percent also scored 90 or higher as well. One of the companies that was both a national and global leader in the rankings is the Walt Disney Co. The Walt Disney Co. was ranked #11 in environmental performance, #2 nationally in environmental performance in its category of Media, Travel, and Leisure, and #1 in this category globally. One of the unique things about the Walt Disney Co. is that it has proactively set ambitious goals related to each of the 9 planetary boundaries. It is fast becoming model for others to follow. For example it has set goals of reducing its carbon emissions by 50% by 2012 from 2006 levels and then becoming a net-zero carbon company thereafter. It has also set a goal to reduce its solid waste 50% by 2013 and becoming a net zero waste company thereafter.

To bring back the Apollo 13 crew safely, it took the cooperation of mission control, the astronauts, and many supporting scientists and other experts to use the ship’s resources wisely.

Imagine if there was a coordinated effort of uncompromising integrity between governments, institutions of higher education, NGO’s, and corporations. Imagine if they all worked together with a shared vision to have Spaceship Earth return to operation within safe planetary boundaries.

The simple truth is that like the Apollo 13 team, it will take bold leadership willing to acknowledge that we have serious problems on planet Earth, are willing to work to create a shared vision, sense of community, a positive culture that is committed to success, and that they really get it, that failure is not an option.

Apollo 13 clip http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-dave-randle/earth-we-have-a-problem-f_b_845491.html

Dr. David Randle is President & CEO of the Whale Center. Contact him at Whale@globalhealing.net

Earth Dr. Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology, conservation biologist at Cal Lu University and public speaker. He can be contacted through http://DrReese.com

Text © by Dr David Randle and Dr Reese Halter 2011. All rights reserved.

Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado straddles the great continental divide. It’s home to the headwaters of the mighty Colorado River. This southern Rocky Mountain park is dominated by rugged peaks, evergreen forests and breathtaking alpine tundra.

Summers can be warm with lightning and thunderstorms and winters can be cold. This high elevation park sits between 7,800 and 11,800 feet above sea level.

As you enter the park heading west on U.S. Route 36, be sure to get out of the vehicle; stop, smell and listen. On a warm summer’s day the breezy air is filled with the butterscotch scent of ponderosa pine. These magnificent, three-needles-in-a-bundle, prickly, barreled-shaped cones and furrowed russet bark trees stand proud, guarding the gateway to the west. Listen to the wind and experience what John Muir, mountaineer and naturalist extraordinaire, wrote: “This species gives forth the finest music to the winds.”

Ponderosa pine is a very interesting tree that grows across the American West and up into southern British Columbia. It is fast growing in its youth yet very long lived, easily exceeding 600 years. That is a rare trait in the tree world. Moreover, these water specialists thrive in drier ecosystems, along with Rocky Mountain Douglas-firs and grasses.

Ponderosa pines and Rocky Mountain Douglas-firs evolved with frequent, low intensity surface fires. They do this by holding their branches at least 20 feet above the forest floor and 16-inch thick bark provides excellent insulation against the heat of the fast moving surface fires.

There are over half a million lightning strikes each summer in the southerly Rockies. Many of the ponderosa ecosystems on the east side of the park have been allowed to burn and so these forests resemble the grandeur of the ecosystem and the natural fire cycle.

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Most ponderosa forests across the West, however, have been prevented from burning for the past 90 years or so. They are overcrowded, susceptible to disease and prone to insect attacks. When fire re-enters these forests, the seedlings and saplings growing underneath the mature ponderosa and Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir trees act as a ladder enabling fire to get into the treetops or crowns. Ponderosa pines and Rocky Mountain Douglas-firs have not evolved to contend with crown fires. The high intensity fires burning today across the west are killing mature ponderosa and Rocky Mountain Douglas-firs, removing seed sources and scorching forest floors.

As you travel along Route 36 it passes the edge of Beaver Meadow. In the autumn it is a renowned location to watch the 1,100-pound bull elk or “wapiti” — Shawnee for white deer — sparing for the rights to mate with a harem. The high-pitched bugle of rutting males sounds like the ancient forest primeval attracting thousands of visitors in October.

Rocky Mountain National Park has exquisite high elevation subalpine forests that are perfectly engineered for snow and cold weather. The pungent mountain air smells of subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce. These beauties with their tall spire-like crowns, evolved to shed snow and also hold it, dominate the high country.

Lodgepole pines, named because the Native Americans used the straight trunks to hold up their teepees, also live in these marvelous snow forests. Lodgepole pines are specially adapted to crown fires. Their cones open from the heat of fires providing viable seeds, which quickly germinate and re-colonize burnt-over lands.

The trees that live almost 2.2 miles above sea level at the top of the southerly Rockies are the venerable limber pines. They handle extreme cold, blasting winds filled with shards of ice particles and scalding summer sun. Admirable limber pines can live for well over 1,000 years.

These majestic subalpine forests of the southerly Rockies are crucial because they retain snow and release it very slowly in the spring and summer. This runoff feeds the headwaters of the Colorado River, which is arguably the most important river in the U.S. and certainly without a doubt the major freshwater river of the American West. The melt water from this river alone sustains tens of millions of people including the entire cities of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson and San Diego.

Alarmingly, global warming has caused a steady decline, over the past 50 years, in the amount of snow received in the southern Rockies. Climate experts have predicted by 2035 that the Rocky Mountain snowpack could be further reduced by 60 percent, cutting summertime flow in half. Moreover, the harbingers of global warming — indigenous tree-killing bark beetles — have laced into the park and its plentiful food source, pine trees. Rising temperatures across the West have enabled adaptable mountain pine beetles an opportunity to speed up their breeding cycles; now two generations within one year.

Rocky Mountain National Park is about a 90-minute drive north of Denver. It’s a spectacular place to explore nature this summer with your family.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Bees helping humankind

Save our Florida corals

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning science communicator: voice for ecology and distinguished conservation biologist. His latest books are The Incomparable Honeybee and The Insatiable Bark Beetle

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

It is indeed appropriate this Earth Day and every day to celebrate the magnificent bounty that the Earth provides for over 7 billion people — and trees are at the heart of the festivities.

Trees are truly remarkable.

Urban trees provide a healthy environment for people and animals. Urban trees and forests remove air pollution and smog; and they save communities millions of dollars a year by stabilizing storm-water runoff. Moreover, urban trees reduce energy costs for both heating and cooling by some 40 percent in our homes and buildings.

In the wild, our forests provide massive watersheds all throughout Western North America that support 55 million people. Those mature subalpine forests help retain snowfall in the winter and slowly release melt-waters in the springtime that recharge reservoirs. Trillions of tree roots provide the most effective form of water filtration known to humankind.

Wild forests in California’s Sierra Nevada’s supply almost 90 percent of the fresh water for the most intensive agricultural system on the planet, 38 million people’s daily drinking water, the eighth mightiest industrial economy on the globe and tens of millions of tourists that visit our state each year.

Trees provide scrumptious spices including cinnamon — known to lower our blood sugar.

Trees grow incredible fruits like apples with apple-skin being one of the highest recognized natural fibers that helps prevent colon cancer.

In California with the help of the bees, trees provide us with lemons, oranges and grapefruits; and we grow more almonds ($2 billion per annum) than anywhere else in the world. Almonds are also an excellent source of protein and fiber. And let’s not forget that California is also a world leader in avocado production — rich in Omega-3s that help preclude coronary disease.

Trees produce potent medicines. From the South American cinchona trees, the drug quinine was derived to help fight the mosquito-borne disease malaria. From the Pacific Northwest yew tree came taxol, the billion-dollar blockbuster that offers hope to those afflicted with breast, ovarian and lung cancers, coronary disease and even AIDS. From the Chinese Camptotheca trees, camptothecin is being trialed for breast, prostate, pancreatic, ovarian, leukemia, and lymphoma cancers as well as malignant melanoma.

Interestingly, scientists have known for at least the past couple decades that old trees are particularly important. In fact, the largest single stemmed tree — General Sherman — a Sierra Nevada Sequoia, holds several astounding records. He’s been hit at least three times with over 100 million volts of electricity or lightning yet he’s likely still the fastest growing tree on the planet, adding the equivalent volume of wood in a tree 1.5-feet thick and 60-feet tall every year. Incidentally, the tannic acid present in his near-fireproof bark is the same chemical used in all fire extinguishers.

The oldest single stemmed tree, a bristlecone pine named Methuselah, lives in east central California on the White Mountains almost two miles above sea level in an extreme environment bombarded by ultra violet radiation, blasted regularly by 80 mph winds and a growing season of about six weeks a year. He’s well over 4,700 years old and witnessed more than 1.7 million sunrises. The tree rings he lays down, almost every year, are a living window back in time assisting climate scientists as they grapple to comprehend how life is coping (or nor) with global warming.

Some ground-breaking work at Oregon State University at Mark Harmon’s lab found that the conversion of Pacific Northwest old-growth to young, fast-growing forests did not decrease atmospheric carbon as compared to old growth forests, which capture and store vast amounts of CO2. It took those low-elevation, second-growth forests at least 200 years to accumulate the CO2 storage capacity of the existing old growth forests. In other words, old growth forests are invaluable, massive living carbon warehouses that unequivocally require protection from being harvested.

Urban trees also play a crucial role in our towns and cities. In one year’s time one mature tree gives off enough oxygen for a family of four while at the same time urban trees help suck the rising greenhouse gas CO2 out of the air.

This Earth Day consider buying a fruit tree and celebrate with family and friends by planting it in your yard. Also, place a water bowl on your balcony or in your yard, replenish it daily because the bees get thirsty, too.

Ten Ways You Can Go Electricity Free for the Weekend

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

ABC 774 AM, The Progress Report with Libbi Gorr (Melbourne, Australia) – Earth Dr Reese Halter on the Magic of Kissing

For my Lovey oxox

Valentine’s is a day dedicated to lovers. And as all lovers know, the magic starts with that first kiss. So what’s exactly happens in order for that perfect first kiss to become intoxicating?

When the first kiss works it’s powerful all right as over 90 percent of lovers, irrespective of age, can remember exactly where and when it occurred. Moreover, that first kiss is a dealmaker or breaker because over 60 percent of first kisses, for both men and women, are a failure terminating any chance for romance.

Well before that first kiss occurs the eyes are conveying important information to the brain, which in turn has a tremendous influence upon our feelings associated with love. Next time you get a chance watch how new lovers look at one another – it’s thrilling.

After the eyes have helped set the mood in the brain, just prior to approaching that first kiss the prospective lover involuntarily tilts his or her head, either to the right or left. It turns out that about two-thirds of us tilt to the right.

It’s not right-handed related but rather correlated to head tilt direction while in utero as the fetus moves and tilts its head. Also, over 80 percent of nursing mother’s cradle their babies to the left thus the infant must turn its head to the right. Conditioning for feelings of love, affection and sustenance clearly begin very early in our lives.

Assuming that first kiss feels just right then five of the 12 brain nerves are now into overdrive including hearing, seeing, smelling and tasting. Each one and collectively affect the expression on the lover’s face.

As the kiss heats-up blood vessels expand to allow more oxygen to the brain, breathing becomes deeper, irregular and pupils dilate (likely explaining why many lovers close their eyes).

Invariably there will be tongue contact, more often than not initiated by the male but more about that later. The tongue allows us to sample our partner’s taste with the assistance of over 9,000 little bumps or taste buds spread across its surface.

Now all five senses are sending messages to the brain; that is, tens of billions of nerves are firing rapidly throughout the body.

Lips are very sensitive to pressure, warmth and cold; they contain the highest concentration of nerve cells on our body. There are over 100 billion complex nerve cells liberally spread throughout the lips. They are the gateway to tiny neurotransmitter molecules that help trigger hormones including dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and adrenaline.

That first passionate kiss causes dopamine to spike throughout the brain. It’s a give-me-more insatiable gene all about pleasure; when we first fall in love and have those over-the-moon thoughts, that’s dopamine. Incidentally, when we first fall in love it affects the same part of the brain – giving us a craving just like cocaine. It also causes energy to elevate, loss of appetite, sleeplessness and even intoxication.

Oxytocin is a love hormone that is crucial in promoting affection and attachment so that when dopamine wanes oxytocin surges. That’s why a kiss, hug or tender caress helps to maintain a strong sense of attachment for lovers. By the way, oxytocin is also responsible for causing pleasurable female pelvic jolts during orgasms.

Serotonin controls our emotions and movement of information to the brain, and those obsessive feelings (like dopamine) and thoughts about our new lover. When that first passionate kiss brings love into our world the high levels of serotonin mimic those associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

That first passionate kiss can cause some people to experience a sensation of weak-in-the-knees due to high levels of adrenaline, which are also spiking in the brain.

Women intuitively use that first kiss to assess whether a male is healthy and possessing “good-genes.” If that first kiss feels and tastes good, that’s an excellent start in a bonding relationship.

The other important link in determining whether that first kiss makes the grade is body scent. Not surprisingly the highest concentration of scent or sebaceous glands are near the nose, face and neck. Each of us has a unique scent and the human nose is able to detect over 9,000 different molecules. When you press your nose over your prospective lover’s neck or jaw-line, instinctively only you’ll know if their scent is just right.

Lastly, there’s a valid evolutionary reason why men slip women a wet, sloppy tongue kiss. Male saliva contains testosterone, a hormone in short supply in females. Just a few male testosterone molecules raise women’s libido, readying that passionate scene for intimacy.

This year I’ve skipped the chocolates and bee-lined to a crazy new scent from Channel for my Lovey. On Valentine’s Day consider embracing Louis Armstrong’s romantic melody “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

More than a half a century ago one of the most recognized scientists and arguably brightest mind ever – Dr. Albert Einstein said, “Our task is to widen our circle of compassion beyond a few people to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” To encompass this Einstein loved the beauty of bees.

Of the more than 1.6 million known forms of life on our home — planet Earth, bees truly are the “golden-hair” pollinator partners that have been entrusted with sustaining life on land.

Consider that at least 20,000 but perhaps as many as 40,000 species of solitary, stingless, bumble and honeybees quietly have gone about enriching the tapestry of life for over 100 million years.

Our early ancestors perhaps as far back as the Old Stone Age, millions of years ago, and certainly in the Middle Stone Age (beginning around 280,000 years ago) revered the bees and sought their honey because it’s the sweetest natural substance that nature has to offer.

Drawings carved into rock-walls, called petroglyphs, in almost 400 sites in 17 regions — including Europe, North and South Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia recorded the cherished “honey-hunts” in spectacular details.

I’m constantly encouraging my students to travel. For those privileged enough to have visited any of the honey-hunting petroglyphs — there is an incredible energy and mysticism that’s exuded through this art. Researchers hypothesize that some honey-hunters were actually clan shaman, reputed to have supernatural powers.

Throughout the ages people have been fascinated with bees and for many good reasons.

Take for example a honeybee hive. It’s a city of about 100,000, mostly females, governed by a queen, who runs a very tight and highly profitable food service industry with zero unemployment amongst workers.

The industry begins before sunrise and continues to operate seamlessly until well after sunset. Like any one of our human industrial operations, honeybees work with up-to-date information. Bees, unlike humans, are able to quickly change their production lines and in a matter of minutes, tens of thousands of worker bees update their memory banks and immediately begin new tasks — all for the common good of the city or hive.

I suspect that William Shakespeare spent many hours watching honeybees around Stratford-upon-Avon for he, too, was intrigued with them and wrote about bees in Henry V: “For so work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”

And it turns out, each year, that not only do honeybees give humans 2.65 billion pounds of honey; 44 million pounds of beeswax (for which the Roman Catholic Church uses 3.1 million pounds in candles); cotton to cloth us; powerful bee venom or apis drugs that offer relief to those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia and tendonitis; but also of the 100 crop species providing 90 percent of the world’s food — about 74 percent are pollinated by bees.

Bumblebees are two to three times bigger than honeybees, visit two to three times more flowers than their smaller brethren, resulting in 16 hour works days, seven days a week. In fact, helicopters mimic the same aerodynamic principles used by bumblebees to lift-off and fly. Helicopters use reverse-pitch semi-rotary blades. Each time bumblebee’s wings swing back and forth (one oscillation cycle), a type of cavity or vacuum is produced in the air above the wing. This cavity provides extra lift for the large bumblebee and her heavy payload of pollen, nectar, water or tree resin.

Bumblebees are helping humans solve the age-old question that the traveling salesman constantly grapples with: how to find the shortest path that allows him to visit all locations along his route. Although their brains may be the size of a pinhead, bumblebees clearly show advanced cognitive capacities with very few neurons.

Today we are one step closer to understanding how bumblebee brains work because of ground breaking research conducted by 28 British schoolchildren aged 8 to 10 who discovered that buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) use a combination of colors and spatial relationships in deciding which color of flower to forage from.

The facts are that bees and humans share a number of remarkable similarities: we both like sleep, enjoy nicotine, cocaine, perfume, voting; and as we age — our memories begin to fade.

The honeybee hive is a superlative architectural masterpiece. It takes 66,000 bee hours of activity to produce 77,000 splendid hexagonal cells that form the comb of the hive. It takes about 20 pounds of honey for young worker bees to produce 2.2 pounds of beeswax. Bees eat the honey and trigger a gland in their abdomen to secrete wax. That 2.2 pounds of beeswax is then magnificently engineered into chambers, back-to-back, at exactly a 13-degree angle to prevent 48 pounds of honey from dripping out.

Many decades ago, the aeronautics industry recognized the phenomenal strength of the honeycomb and adapted nature’s flawless honeybee design to enhance the bending and stiffness of all aircraft wings, as the wings support heavy fuel loads in the aircrafts.

Nobel laureate Dr. Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) dedicated his life to unraveling the many mysteries of the honeybee. The bee waggle-dance is indeed one of the most extraordinary forms of communication in the entire animal kingdom. This dance conveys precise information about the food’s location, including its direction and distance from the hive — as far as 8 miles away.

There are, very thankfully, at least two known healthy populations of honeybees in remote locations on our home — planet Earth. They remain disease-free, offering new genetic traits to bolster our beleaguered, worldwide, bee populations against the toxic world we have inadvertently created. One population was recently located in Libya’s Kufra Oasis and the other exists on the least populated and most remote jurisdiction in the world, the Pitcairn Islands.

Please support your local beekeepers; Google them and buy their honey — it’s an excellent, practical holiday gift.

In these very troubling times that we are living-in; let’s all take a moment, drift back to 1928, smile and dance with Cole Porter’s mellifluous lyrics… “Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it, let’s fall in love!”

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Recently my Chesapeake Bay retriever and I had the rare privilege of getting extremely close to the largest animal on Earth – a majestic blue whale. For at least 45 minutes this colossal creature remained within feet of our tiny dingy; we were awed, soaked and thrilled. Its huge eyes, its earthy aroma and complex, powerful voice were truly spellbinding.

Blue whales graces Malibu, as close as a quarter mile from the mainland coast, during its spring migration to the most productive ecosystem on our planet – the polar seas.

People have much in common with whales: we both like to eat, mate, touch, talk, sing, sleep, travel and listen.

Prior to commercial whaling, the number of blue whales was estimated at 200,000. Today only about 10,000 of these awesome creatures remain.

The size of a blue whale is breathtaking. They are about five times larger than the largest dinosaur. The only other organism comparable in size are a few remaining champion trees. About three blue whales would fit – end to end – inside the largest known tree in the world, a giant California mountain Sequoia, General Sherman.

Blue whales are 98 feet long with a mass of about 146 tons. Their hearts weigh 992 pounds (the size of a Volkswagen Beetle) and pump 14,109 pounds of blood. Their horizontal tail has the power of a 500 horsepower outboard motor. They can travel at 31 miles per hour for two hours at a time and 43 miles per hour for 10-minute intervals.

When a blue whale takes a breath it is equivalent of eight for a human. As they surface, they fill 80 to 90 percent of their lungs with air. Humans fill only about 20 percent. At rest, their heart rate is nine beats per minute. They can remain submerged for up to two hours and dive to depths greater than 379.3 feet (equal to the tallest tree on Earth – a California coastal redwood, Hyperion).

Although single-celled algae stick to the whale’s under-belly making them appear yellow to silver, their real skin color is dark. That’s because their bodies use oxygen very efficiently due to special muscular protein (myoglobin), which also prevent them from getting nitrogen in their blood preventing an affliction known to divers as the bends.

There are two distinctly different populations of blue whales: one in the northern and one in the southern hemispheres. They do not intermingle. They both spend the summers feasting in the polar seas where long days promote growth of billions of tons of plankton (minute plants and animals). They spend their winters mating and calving in warm equatorial waters.

Blue whales don’t have teeth. Instead they have an exquisite filtration system called a baleen. Three hundred and sixty plates hang from the upper jaw. One gulp contains about 5.5 tons of water. As the mouth closes, water is expelled through the baleen plates and filled with plankton, crustaceans and small fish. On average a blue whale will eat between 1,984 and 9,039 pounds of plankton for about 120 consecutive days.

Whales use sonar for radar and as a communication system. They are the loudest animal on earth at 188 decibels (louder than a 747 jet engine). We have yet, and may never come to, understand their complex language.

Blue whales are the monarch of the seas: Invincible yet gentle. To be in the wild and in the presence of a whale is indeed one of the most humbling experiences. They teach us a message; a message of respect for one another; and a respect for every strand within nature’s rich, interwoven web of life.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Join Dr Reese Halter an award-winning science communicator: voice for ecology and distinguished conservation biologist as he shows the wrath of global warming in our North American forests

ABC (Sydney) Organic Magazine – Book Review July/August 2012

Insatiable indeed. The population of North American native bark beetles has grown to hundreds of billions, each the size of a plump grain of rice, and has destroyed more than 24 million hectares of mature forest in the past 15 years. The reason for the beetles’ proliferation? Rising temperatures caused by climate change. And what will be the onsequence of losing all these trees? More climate change.

Following on from The Incomparable Honeybee Dr Halter, a conservation biologist, author and TV presenter, has produced another pint-sized but profound book that marvels at nature and appeals for humans to show a bit more common sense. Available online through boomerangbooks.com.au or fishpond.com.au

by Simon Webster

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning science communicator: voice for ecology and distinguished conservation biologist. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Join Dr Reese Halter an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University as he shows the wrath of global warming in our North American forests

Sierra Club San Francisco — book review

Los Angeles Times — book review

ABC (Sydney, Australia) Organic Magazine — book review

“All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the children of the Earth.”

Chief Seattle

Suqwamish and Duwamish

Advanced praise for The Insatiable Bark Beetle by Dr Reese Halter

Do you have a gut-feeling about the deterioration of many of your favorite trees, a suspicion that humans must be the problem?  As Dr. Reese makes clear, the beetles, the fungi are only symptoms. We must look to ourselves to safeguard our remarkable planet for future generations.

Dr. James Hansen, Director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, author Storms of my Grandchildren

Dr. Halter presents a convincing picture of the effects of global warming from an unusual perspective.   If anyone still has doubts about climate change, they need only to read The Insatiable Bark Beetle to see one of the consequences developing as pine bark beetles expand their range and destroy our temperate forests.

Dr. Gordon Moore, Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Intel Corporation

A superb science communicator on his home territory – the forests. Dr. Halter’s text is infused with passion, vision and an up-to-the-minute knowledge of the signatures of change that global warming is bringing to Earth’s forest ecosystems.  A stunning expose of recent science from around the globe that is woven with the authors’ deep knowledge of forests to sound the warning of further devastation to our forests unless we can curtail our climate-warming activities. We must heed Dr. Reese’s call so that generations to follow will be able to do what he does and “Find a special, sacred place in nature where, with just a little practice, you can feel, smell, hear and even taste the wild untamed universal energy that courses throughout our planet.”

Dr. Chris Weston, Department of Forest and Ecosystem Science, The University of Melbourne

Dr. Reese Halter’s love of nature and despair at the devastation that man is wreaking on the Earth’s wild places ring out passionately from the pages of this book. With the world changing so quickly it is hard to know which way to look, but Dr Reese’s pause to take in the tragedy threatening the ancient forests of North America puts the immediate and immense threat of global warming in sharp focus. As chilling as a howl in a moonlit wood, The Insatiable Bark Beetle is a desperate plea for sense to prevail.

Steve Payne, Editor, Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Organic Gardener

In this lucid and information-rich book, Dr. Reese Halter tells the story of an ancient relationship gone awry, perhaps the most dramatic example to date of how climate change is disrupting and imbalancing the Earth’s ecosystems.

David Perry, Professor Emeritus, Oregon State University, coauthor Forest Ecosystems

The Insatiable Bark Beetle by Dr. Reese Halter, is a well-written, systemic examination of the growing challenges we humans face by hiding behind the intellectual wall of informed denial and social irresponsibility with respect to global warming.

Chris Maser, Zoologist, coauthor Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World

Can it be true that a handful of fertile soil contains more microorganisms than the total number of humans who have ever lived? Can beetles, birds and trees be linked in a way that can transform our world? This small book has huge implications for our global future.

Robyn Williams, Award-winning Australian science journalist and broadcaster, author True Story Waiting to Happen

“”"”"‘”Dr. Halter’s call of the tiny wild”"”"”"”

Dr. Reese Halter has done it again.  Not satisfied with bringing global attention to what honeybees have been trying to tell us, in his most recent book The Insatiable Bark Beetle, he is acting as microphonist for the tiny bark beetles.

These increasingly numerous insects are chomping away at our forests at rates, and in areas never before seen.

And why?

Us.

It was the same “us” as in the story of the difficulties faced by honeybees in his last amazing book.

But this time the warnings are for damages that are not food related, but rather for damages that will be – er – are – shelter related.

As larger and larger tracts of forest are manipulated by forestry companies to keep markets indefinitely supplied with cheap wood, larger and larger tracts of ‘food’ are being created for the bark beetles to eat.

Add to this are the effects of global climate change that increasingly fails to kill off these pests during winters that are increasingly mild.  And add even MORE to this by the attempts to suppress natural forest fires.  When forests are prevented from undergoing their eternal cycle of growth, maturity, fire, growth, maturity, fire. What happens is that huge.  No…

HUGE

Well, enough from me.  I’m a retired ecologist and hence my thoughts are part of the series of events that made all of this happen.  Instead of reading what I say, read Dr Reese Halter’s new book in which he beautifully and compassionately tells these stories — then do something.  Anything.

Anything that helps.*******

Doug Larson, Professor Emeritus, University of Guelph, author Storyteller Guitar

This is not a pleasant read.  In fact it is frightening – and meant to be so.  Most commentary in the popular media is about what might be the future impact of global warming on human welfare.  Dr Reese Halter shifts the emphasis to what has already occurred, present and past, as a result of human–induced global warming with particular emphasis on the impact of exploding populations of bark beetles on forested ecosystems in North America.  I was surprised by the extent to which bark beetles have already caused such wide devastation over so many forest types and over such a wide geographical range.  Dr. Reese presents convincing evidence that increased average temperatures have caused this.  He presents the impact of bark beetles on forests as just one example of the deleterious effects of global warming, both known and predicted, on terrestrial and marine ecosystems worldwide. There is a great amount of detail in this book.  In this respect the book is fine discussion on ecosystem processes and stress physiology.  The passion (and despair) of the author pervades the book.  There may be the temptation by some to mistake the passion for ideology.  This would be a mistake.  The book is backed by quality science.  Politicians and policy makers should read this book.  I thoroughly recommend it.

Roger Sands, Professor Emeritus, University of Canterbury, author Forestry in a Global Context

Dr. Reese Halter provides compelling evidence that climate change, bark beetles, forest fires and dying forests are incredibly intertwined. He has shown us a frightening, but all too real, scenario of our future. The Insatiable Bark Beetle is a warning that the unintended consequences of climate change are already with us and are reaching deep into our forests. The balance of nature between plants and insects he describes is fascinating, and an important reminder of the interconnectedness of life on Earth. A great read!

Robert Teskey, Distinguished Research Professor, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia

Dr. Reese Halter has written a new “must-read” book. It is jam-packed with fascinating information and awe-inspiring stories that portray the intricacy and complexity of our forest ecosystems, their vulnerability to climate change, and the many services they provide to mankind.  Dr. Reese draws on his vast knowledge about tree physiology, forest ecology, climate change and conservation biology, and takes us on a grand ride to some of the wonders on planet Earth and how we all can help retain them for many generations to come.

Professor Gerhard Gries, Simon Fraser University, NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Insect Communication Ecology

As a retail management specialist and a non scientifically trained layman, I find it relaxing and fascinating to read Dr. Reese Halter stories on the life of the Giant Sequoias of California or The Insatiable Bark Beetle.

We learn of the interdependence of the various species that live on our planet and the effects of human habits and behavior.

His words, his advice are powerful, but always encouraging and full of hope for our society.

Dr. Reese Halter has a knack to simplify complex situations and describe in a poetic, simple and inviting manner the enchanting areas of the world he has studied or visited.

To the busy and curious human beings I recommend reading a few pages of Dr. Reese’s  stories on a regular basis, it will give you a positive outlook on life.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutherean University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Story Ran in the Huffington Post October 24, 2011

All is not well in the semi arid, warming oil sands of Alberta – the second largest hydrocarbon reserves in the world; only Saudi Arabia has more. To get at the oil sands and supply the Keystone XL pipeline its leaving Canada with a colossal carbon footprint, which has increased by 120 percent since 1990. Of all the industrial nations, Canada footprint has increased the most during this time.

An overheating climate has enabled mountain pine beetles – nature’s emissary of massive ecological change to march north and east like never before in modern or prehistoric times.

Recent data from the International Energy Agency shows that governments in developing countries pay $310 billion subsidies to oil, gas and coal companies.

So far both politicians and the public have a burgeoning disdain for climate and biological sciences that overwhelmingly shows that burning carbon-based fuels are forcing the climate and causing climate disruption, globally. Moreover, many politicians and the public are grabbing at whatever denial statements they can – analogous to the behavior of an addict.

They can run but they cannot hide from some conspicuous and startling facts across western North America. Indigenous bark beetles, on an epic feeding frenzy fueled by rising temperatures, have killed over 60 million acres of mature pine forests. In just over a decade the beetles have killed billions of trees or enough wood to make a city of 8 million homes.

Entire hillsides and mountains are red. Those dead forests are ripe for wildfires that are costing taxpayers billions of dollars and perilously placing over four million homeowners who straddle the urban/wildland interface at high risk.

These are the irrefutable facts whether you fly, drive or peddle your bicycle across the West, I guarantee that you will encounter the wrath of the unintended consequences of spewing 82 million metric tons, daily, of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere – death of our wild forests.

What’s more is that when forest ecosystems become destabilized by rising temperatures ranging in the Northern Rocky Mountains by 2.4 degrees F to 3.6 degrees F in the Southern Rockies some organisms, like the trees – loose; while others, like the mountain pine beetles – win.

It’s not that the bark beetles are just killing the trees but rather in less than a decade they have completely and perfectly adapted to enter Earth’s northern most contiguous forest type – the boreal or emerald crown of our planet.

Up until very recently the ecological “cold curtain” prevented the ravenous bark beetles from crossing the great continental divide. Beetles quite simply couldn’t exist on the northern, eastern side of the Rocky Mountains or if they did they reproduced within 2 years and populations never reached an epidemic.

In central British Columbia over the past decade and a half the mountain pine beetles have single-handily devoured half the commercial forests or an astounding 39 million acres (enough wood to build 5 million homes). As if that weren’t bad enough as those forests decay they will be releasing 250 million metric tons of greenhouse gases or the equivalent of five years of car and light truck emissions in Canada. Essentially, 39 million acres of British Columbian lodgepole pine forests that once sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere are now dead, decaying and bleeding CO2 into an ever-rising pool of accumulating heat-trapping gases.

The plot thickens, considerably. At least thrice in the last decade billions of bark beetles were sucked up into the lower stratosphere and spat out onto the eastern side of the Northern Rockies. Millions lived and successfully reproduced within a year (because temperatures have risen that dramatically) enabling populations to reach an epidemic.

In fact, in the summer of 2006, my faithful companion, “Naio”, a Chesapeake Bay retriever and I were on a road trip in Northern Alberta near Grand Prairie. We were exploring a pine forest when the sky rained bark beetles on us. In almost 3 decades of working in wild forests around the globe, I’ve never experienced anything like it.

Mountain pine beetles carry blue stain fungi, bacteria and micro-organisms which help them overcome the tree’s autoimmune system. The beetles have quickly found a strain of blue stain Leptographium longiclavatum that is adapted to the colder eastern Rocky Mountain temperatures. Furthermore, the beetles have reduced their body size and have successfully adapted too much thinner living bark spaces of the diminutive Jack pines.

Tree scientists and entomologists knew that mountain pine beetles could exist in lodgepole/Jack pine hybrids in Alberta. In the last half-decade the beetles have successfully transited from the hybrids into pure Jack pines – an a priori.

The coast is now clear for them to march across northern Canada to the Atlantic coast and into the Jack pines of the Lake states.

Earth’s natural systems for absorbing CO2 are rapidly breaking down. Let me remind you that 40 percent of the oceanic phytoplankton is missing because warming currents are preventing upwelling of cold waters carrying essential nutrients requisite for growing green life and supporting the base of the entire marine ecosystem.

The time for subsidizing toxic and life threatening carbon-based fuels is over. Imagine the breathtaking innovations in new green energies if we made available $310 billion per annum to all centers of concentrated brainpower – our colleges. And then imagine the millions of long-term jobs those green industries will create.

Politicians and the public can sneer at climate and biological sciences but how long can they turn a blind eye to the death of Mother Nature?

Australia, Radio 1, ABC National: Ockham’s Razor

Reese Halter and Nancy Turner – Native Trees of British Columbia

Bees helping humankind

Watch Earth Dr Reese Halter as he visits the westside of Vancouver Island

Earth Dr. Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

A quarter of a century ago my forestry class examined the Stein Valley of southwest British Columbia – it was slated to be logged. Conservationists, Natives and activists including the late John Denver persuaded the government in 1995 to create a park – a global legacy.

There are conservatively 10 million different forms of life on our planet. All living organisms are made up of the same seven major atoms and come from the blueprint of life – DNA. Grizzly bears, wolves or dolphins share over 75 percent of DNA that is identical in humans.

The challenge for conservation biologists in the 21^st century is to protect the genetic tapestry of all life forms.

The Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Park is a remarkable biological jewel. It’s about a three-hour drive from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Named after the Stein River it is the largest unlogged watershed in southwest British Columbia with an area of 410 square miles including three small glaciers.

It’s truly unique valley because it straddles two climatic regions – the cool, wet (80 inches of precipitation) coast and the hot, dry (18 inches of precipitation) interior. Temperate rainforest vegetation, drought tolerant and lightning-induced specialists and life clinging on the edge of Mt. Skihist some 9,660 feet above sea level – this place has it all!

The Stein River feeds the mighty Fraser River at a junction where the Thompson River also joins forces. Once upon a time, giant sturgeon over 8 feet long and tens of millions of salmon, more than 100 miles from the ocean, called this home.

Today this park is crucial habitat for the monarch of the wilderness grizzly bears, black bears, mountain lions, wolverines, martens, mountain goats, moose, beavers, eagles, spotted owls, loons, hummingbirds and more.

The Stein Valley has also been home to the Nlaka’pamux people for at least the last 7,500 years.

It contains some of Canada’s highest density and richest pictographs and cave art including pictographs on culturally modified western redcedars. Cedar bark was stripped off in long sheets and used for baskets, hats, and walls in sweat lodges, floors and lining underground winter food caches.

As a matter of fact, in the mid 1980s I discovered one of those culturally modified cedars with unusual pictographs.

The Nlaka’pamux youth developed a close relationship with nature spending at least four months but sometimes a year or more in isolation in the mountains surrounding the Stein River.

Initially a young boy or girl would travel into the Stein Valley, climb one of its mountains and seek a ledge over looking the river; a fire was lit and the youth sang and danced until daybreak. Exhausted sometime in the middle of the night, sleep set in.

During the sleep-time an animal spirit spoke and sang to the young person. It is believed that the numerous rock paintings along the lower 20-mile corridor of the Stein River where done by the boys and girls during their puberty training. The images of grizzly bears, owls, eagles, mountain goats, lakes, the moon and lightning drawn in red ochre on the rocks came from their dreams and visions.

Our class examined the pictographs along Stryen Creek about four 2.5 miles from the mouth of the Stein. Further up the river at Devil’s Staircase there are panels of paintings at the base of two cliffs. The upstream panel is one of the largest painting sites in British Columbia.

The wide array of plants and animals provided the Nlaka’pamux peoples with all their food, clothing and medicines. For instance, balsmroot, nodding onion, mariposa and bitterroot were staples along with wild strawberries, huckleberries, gooseberries, saskatoon berries and raspberries with sweet sugars from summertime Douglas-fir pitch, and salmon caught in fall and dried. Also, in late fall deer were hunted as an important food source.

Labrador tealeaves were collected in the fall and used as a heart medicine, relief from indigestion and to relieve pain and induce relaxation for women after childbirth.

The spring snowmelt is essential for recharging the Stein River and all life. Lichen and leaves remove nutrients from the water and change its acidity. The forest floor adds and subtracts minerals from the incoming snowmelt too.

The springtime floodwaters alter the streamside vegetation and create new habitat for trout, which feed upon tiny spineless aquatic life forms including May and caddis flies.

Equally impressive are the different forested ecosystems that thrive in the Stein Valley. For example, at the mouth of the Stein are giant floodplain cottonwoods and just into the valley are the drought tolerant, butterscotch-smelling Ponderosa pines with Douglas-firs on the north-slope. Further up the valley the mid slopes support massive Engelemann spruce and lodgepole pines. Higher elevation forests are comprised of Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir and on south facing slopes are the fire-specialists – lodgepole pines. Along the treeline its common to encounter the inseparable thousand year old gnarled whitebark pines and their seed dispersing partner’s – Clark’s nutcrackers.

On the western edge of the park one can find rainforest western redcedars and western hemlocks, and the pungent high elevation amabalis firs.

The Park is open from April to October with both day and overnight hikes. It’s a special place to explore with your family and friends – I highly recommend it.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

It is peculiar that climate coverage since 2009, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a climate bill, has plummeted on the big four television networks. Especially since a recent New York Times poll found that the public has linked extreme weather to global warming. Given that in March 2012, more than 15,000 warm temperature records were eclipsed, dating back to 1895 (that’s 1,400 months), why wouldn’t the public start to connect the dots?

It is crucial that the lawmakers in Washington, D.C., understand that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.

It’s clearly time for our nation to begin adapting to a “new normal,” as the climate is irrefutably changing. We need climate preparedness and models for a low-carbon American economy.

In 2007, a small group of visionary college and university presidents gathered to form the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Five years later they have achieved some remarkable results.

“This commitment represents unprecedented leadership by the higher education sector, which is the first and only major U.S. sector with a significant number of its members to commit to climate neutrality. Higher education leaders are sending a strong signal to society that climate change and other large-scale unsustainable practices pose a real and urgent threat and that colleges and universities are working together not only to model sustainable behavior, but also to provide the knowledge and educated graduates necessary for society to do the same,” says Dr. Anthony D. Cortese, president of Second Nature, organizer and supporter of the initiative.

Six hundred and seventy five colleges and universities have signed ACUPCC, representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia and more than one-third of the national student body, or 6 million students. Each year, 6.4 million graduates are coming though colleges and universities that have embraced sustainability and low-carbon economies.

The 599 colleges that submitted greenhouse gas inventories reported CO2 emissions of 28 million metric tons, roughly as much as 2.58 million homes’ or 5.2 million passenger vehicles’ annual output. Three hundred and twenty six institutions set a target of achieving climate neutrality by 2050 or before, whilst 100 members have pledged neutrality by 2030. The ACUPCC is the third largest buyer of renewable energy credits in America, purchasing more than 1.28 billion kilowatt-hours annually.

Essentially each college or university can be thought of as a large town or small city. And each one has developed a sustainable, low-carbon model. There is every reason to believe that these models can be applied and tailored to our towns and cities across the nation, and they will create long-term white- and blue-collar jobs.

Let’s have a look at some of the brilliant and creative innovations that are “Made in America.”

Wilson Community College in North Carolina offers a certificate program in home weatherization and features the use of a carbon footprint calculator in a required course.

Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Biologically Inspired Designs has been using the honeybee dance and information from the hive to create more efficient Internet hosting services that raised revenues by as much as 20 percent and decrease energy costs by 20 percent.

Santa Fe Community College offers a solar energy certificate program whereby students attain skills they need to find jobs in the burgeoning solar and green building sectors.

Cornell University added four new permanent staff positions for continuous maintenance and recommissioning of building energy systems. And student governments initiated a student-fee funded bike sharing program and a lights-off campaign.

Chancellor Marye Anne Fox of University of California San Diego (UCSD) has made sustainability a top campus priority. Nineteen of the 53 academic departments have incorporated sustainability into their classes. Moreover, UCSD researchers are making significant inroads into energy efficiency, alternative fuels, and solar technologies.

At University of Montana a “Forum for Living with Appropriate Technology” is university-owned housing that students have retrofitted as an example of hands-on energy efficiency and sustainable living. UM’s “Green Thread” faculty development program works to incorporate sustainability into curriculum and is open to educators from other universities in the Montana Region.

University of Pennsylvania’s “Ideas in Action” course allows students to propose projects to senior administrators on the best methods for advancing the university’s sustainable goals. Penn is among the largest purchaser of green power among American universities of more than 192,000 megawatts (46 percent of total power used) of wind energy purchased annually.

Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College’s “Climate Action Plan” is striving for climate neutrality by 2020. It intends on achieving this, in part, through conversion of the central energy plant boiler’s to burn Viesel a net-zero carbon bio-fuel made from filtered waste vegetable oil.

Pasadena City College has saved 40 percent on gas usage by “nano-wrapping” its main gas line. It has also reduced water consumption by more than 28 percent by installing ultra-low flow urinals, changes in landscaping with a highly efficient irrigation system.

These are but a few of the hundreds of examples of innovation and efficiency that are taking place across America. All rural and urban communities can easily use these low-carbon models, creating jobs so that our society is climate prepared for the “new normal” in the coming decade(s).

Wish to know a lot more about the Great Basin bristlecone pines?

Australia, Radio 1, ABC National: Ockham’s Razor

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Join Earth Dr Reese Halter in the Great Basin bristlecone pines

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

"Bombs Away!" by Anxious223 Chris Dixon. Creative Commons license.

About a year ago Conservation International was pilloried by a couple of British videographers posing as executives of the arms maker Lockheed Martin. They bamboozled a C.I. official in London into a meeting where she outlined several ways the nonprofit could “partner” with the arms maker under terms that looked a lot like greenwashing. You can watch the video here and judge for yourself if C.I. did anything wrong.

I had a few issues with the “exposé;” chiefly that C.I. already had dealings with B2 bomber maker Northrop Grumman, whose chairman and CEO Wes Bush is a member of its board of directors. And another big group, The Nature Conservancy, was already in the pay of Lockheed. These existing relationships undermined the shock value the scamsters were going for.

Still, you’d think the critique, or at least the bad press coverage it generated, would inspire reflection about the reputational damage some corporate deals can bring down on a nonprofit organization. More specifically, is a company that makes weapons of war an appropriate partner for a group whose mission is saving the Earth’s biodiversity? Well, if those questions were raised, they didn’t lead to change.

C.I. has just cranked up its P.R. machine in service of a new partnership with Northrop, “a unique and innovative professional development program for public middle and high school science teachers.”

In a nutshell: The Northrop Grumman Foundation will pay for 16 teachers from four U.S. public school systems to visit CI’s Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network’s Volcan Barva site inside La Selva Biological Station and Braulio Carrillo National Park in Costa Rica.

“We believe that supporting professional development opportunities for teachers will have the greatest impact on engaging students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. We expect this program will help cultivate the next generation of environmental stewards,” said Sandy Andelman, vice president at Conservation International in a press release the two partners issued April 19.

Whoa! That statement requires a reality check. According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are 3.6 million K to 12 grade teachers in the United States spread across 14,000 public school districts. The group selected for this program doesn’t even come close to representing 1 percent of the teachers in the country.

While they will surely have a rewarding time and may even return home to inspire their students, the scale of the program is too small to have the impact Andelman claims. Like so many of these corporate-conservationist joint ventures they are more symbolic than substantive.

They deliver real public relations boons for Northrop, however, which might explain why the Falls Church, Vir. -based company features the “ECO classroom” as a top story on its homepage.

Hat tip to Wiki Scraper for writing the search tool that brought this story to my attention.

While we’re on the subject of corporate-environmentalist ties, here’s another couple of recent stories that deserve mentions:

This upbeat Q & A featuring Wal-Mart chairman Rob Walton and C.I.’s CEO Peter Seligmann comes out as Wal-Mart as struggles to overcome awkward questions about its greening policies and a recent bribery scandal.

Many environmental groups, including C.I., don’t count donations from corporate-tied foundations as “corporate” cash. Instead, they report money from the likes of the Walton Family Foundation and the Northrop foundation as foundation grants, which helps them claim that only a fraction of their funding comes from corporate sources.  For that matter, C.I. doesn’t tally the money it receives from scions like Rob Walton in the corporate column either. But Walton, in this article, doesn’t talk like someone whose relationship to C.I. is detached from the workings of the family firm, even if he does say he leaves the day-to-day greening to “middle managers.”

Environmental Defense Fund was caught in a similar controversy last week. The group claims to take zero corporate dollars but the Walton Family Foundation granted EDF $16 million in 2009 and continuing support equal to more than $7 million in 2010, among other support.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports this morning that an obscure private foundation threatened to pull funding from the Potomac Riverkeeper group unless it dropped its opposition to a trading scheme proposed as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‘s Chesapeake Bay cleanup.

This Earth Week please help our friends: The Pollinators. If we all lend a hand then together “we” are an unstoppable force – guarding Mother Nature and our exquisite blue planet.

City dwellers often have mixed feelings about insects.

Some fear being stung by bees. But you might be pleasantly surprised to know that bee venom, or Apis therapy, is a potent medicine treating arthritis, fibromyalgia, tendinitis and multiple sclerosis. Most folks probably know bees are essential pollinators of flowers. In fact, bee pollination contributes more than $180 million to the economy in Ventura County alone. Across America, bees facilitate $44 billion in commerce annually.

Some people get frightened when they see spiders or beetles crawling on the ground, but we smile in wonder when a similar looking “bug,” the butterfly, flutters through the air in front of us. Butterflies are also important pollinators. Without pollinators, there are no seeds, and without seeds, there is no food.

So how do we treat these valuable creatures? Each year around the globe, we are adding 5 billion pounds of insecticides to our biosphere. A new group of pesticides called neonictinoids causes bees to lose their memories and shake to death, similar to humans suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Unfortunately, honeybees, wild bees (there are more than 5,000 native species in North America alone) and butterflies (in particular, monarchs) are in big trouble. Their populations are crashing, and scientists including myself have been monitoring the causes of their declines. EPA scientists are reviewing neonictinoids and may ban them, but other challenges remain.

Ventura County is on the migratory flight path of monarch butterflies. These bright orange, flittering beauties grace our county at this time of year as they return from wintering in Michoacan, Mexico, conifer forests, but their population fell by nearly 30 percent over this past year.

Their problems include global warming and the epic drought in Texas, deforestation in Mexico, and loss of feeding habitat from liberal use of herbicides.

We can help butterflies by improving their feeding habitat here in Ventura County. Female monarch butterflies will lay their eggs only in milkweed plants, and not enough cultivated landscapes include this plant. To feed these butterflies on their journey through our county, please help the monarchs by planting milkweed in your garden.

Also, this spring consider planting a bee- and moth-friendly garden with lilacs, penstemon, lavender, sage, verbena, wisteria and milkweed. In the summer, I suggest planting mint, cosmos, squash, tomatoes, pumpkins, sunflowers, oregano, rosemary, poppies, black-eyed Susan, passionflower vine or honeysuckle. And during the fall, I suggest using fuchsia, mint, bush sunflower, sage, verbena and toadflax.

Do not use insecticides, herbicides, miticides or fungicides in your yard. Also, place a small bowl of water and replenish it daily for the bees. They get thirsty, too.

At 1 p.m. April 28 in Kingsmen Park (on the north side of Memorial Parkway near Mountclef Boulevard at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks), I am presenting “Save the Bees, Savor Their Honey.” Visitors can sample honey from Camarillo’s Jubilee Honeybee Co. and find out why it is important to protect urban bees and what people can do to help. I will discuss fun bee facts, bees and medicine, bees guarding our borders and anti-aging with honey.

Make it a family day and Google your local beekeepers of Farmer’s Markets, visit them and buy their honey. Our beekeepers need your support.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

The freshwater purple crab

We feel dismayed and nostalgic when we read or hear that a threatened wildlife we are familiar about has gone extinct.

We blame it to man and his destructive ways of the environment and the changing world brought about by peculiarities of nature.

Debates ensue, not to revive what has been dead, but to save, reproduce and conserve those that are threatened and endangered among the undomesticated animals in their natural habitats.

On the other hand, it is simply a feeling of great relief and amazement when some fauna is rediscovered, when you believe it has already been listed as extinct or when new species are seen alive for the first time in your own country.

It makes one love your country more for the exotic fauna life it harbors and sustains that can’t be seen anywhere else.

Take the case of four new species of freshwater crab, bright purple in color, discovered by Hendrik Freitag of Germany’s Senckenberg Museum of Zoology in the lowland-forest ecosystems of Palawan.

According to Freitag, the tiny crustaceans burrow under boulders and roots in streams, feeding on dead plants, fruits, carrion and small animals in the water at night.

Freitag listed the new finds as belonging to the Insulamon species. They are Insulamon magnum, Insulamon purculum, Insulamon palawense and Insulamon johannchristiani.

There are now a total of five of these species recognized by science with one found in the late 1980s, the Insulamon unicorn, when scientists began extensive investigations of similar freshwater crabs in the area. Freitag has all these information written in the latest edition of the National University of Singapore’s Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.

The two newly discovered frogs, unnamed yet

On another exciting news, two new species of frog have been discovered in Leyte island’s Nacolod mountain range, whose once dense forest has been cut down for timber or burnt off to free up land for farming. In fact it has been reported that the remaining patches of forest are no longer visible by satellite. Nonetheless, country director Aldrin Mallari of the British-based Fauna and Flora International said the finds should boost conservation efforts in the Philippines, which has extremely diverse plant and animal life but where many species are threatened by extinction.

The new discoveries are a mottled brown frog with red eyes and a broad yellow stripe running down its back, and a yellow-green one not much bigger than a human thumb.

The brown frog specimens measured about 43-55 millimetres (1.7-2.2 inches) while the yellow-green ones were 20-27 millimetres (0.8-1.1 inches) long. They have not yet been formally named.

US-based Conservation International lists the Philippines both as one of the 17 countries that harbor most of Earth’s plant and animal life, and a “biodiversity hotspot” due to massive habitat loss.

Shooter Matt Sherwood on assignment with Earth Doctor Reese Halter in the Giant Sequoias along the Sierra Nevada's

Story ran in Atlanta Journal-Constitution April 21, 2011

It’s simple to save cash when you know where to look and know what to do.

This Earth week and every day consider that by changing just a few habits you and your family can save money and make a big difference by helping our environment.

The first step is to calculate how much energy you use at home, traveling and at work. We call this calculating your carbon footprint (http://carbonfund.org). Once you determine how much you and your family are spending, it is simple to begin to cut back.

Reducing is the most important habit that we can all easily change. Reduce what you use by buying quality products. This is both important for retailers and the economy. Quality products cost more but last longer, save you money (from not having to buy inferior products again); and quality products reduce the amount of waste we are putting into landfills.

Re-using also makes good sense. Every year, American’s drink more than 100 billion cups of coffee. Approximately 14.4 billion disposable paper cups are thrown away – that’s enough cups, when placed end to end, to wrap around the Earth 55 times. Instead, get yourself a stainless steel mug and most coffee vendors offer customers a 10-cent discount. At five cups a week that’s a savings of $26 a year.

Take the proceeds of your coffee savings, buy six organic cotton bags, and re-use them instead of the disposable plastic, single-use supermarket bags. Make it habit to return those cotton bags to the trunk of your car after unpacking your groceries.

Atlantans already pay 108 percent more than New Yorkers for water and the rates will continue to rise. Toilets consume an average of 20.1 gallons of water per person, per day in a home with no water conserving fixtures. That’s almost 30 percent of the average home’s, per person, indoor water use. Consider installing low flow toilets and showerheads and conserve one person’s annual water use from 27,300 gallons to 12,500 gallons. You’ll notice an immediate savings on your monthly water bill.

Turn off the taps when you brush your teeth and only run the dishwasher when it’s completely full on the economy setting and save another $72 a year.

All cars and trucks must have their tires inflated to the correct manufactures suggested tire pressure. In doing so, you will increase your miles per gallon by at least four percent and save 10-cents a gallon on gasoline. Also, make sure that your trunk is kept empty – extra weight reduces fuel efficiency.

Forty percent of all car trips in America are less than two miles. Ride a bicycle or walk that distance and get exercise instead of spending fuel. By reducing just one third of those less than two-mile car trips, at the end of the year you will have saved $215.

The average home emits about twice as much CO2 compared to the average car. An energy audit will save you as much as 30 percent on your yearly bills, and Georgia Power offers a free walk-through to help you save a bundle of money.

Roughly half of our home’s energy expense comes from heating and cooling – that means furnaces and air conditioning units must be services bi-annually and air filters changed at least twice a year.

By setting your winter thermostat to 68 and your summer thermostat to 78 you’ll save $225 a year. Also, put your clothes, after washing them in cold water only, out to air-dry and you’ll save an additional $225 annually.

Use a smart power strip and plug-in as many electronic devices that have a stand-by mode in your home, turn off the power bar and you’ll reduce your power bill by a further 5 to 15 percent, translating into another $97 savings a year. Phantom electricity drawn from devices on stand-by mode across America wastes $4 billion of electricity a year.

Remember to turn off all lights when you leave a room, shutdown computers and printers when not in use and unplug all cellular phone, laptop, camera, mp3 players and toothbrush adapters’ – save $105 a year.

This spring help our beleaguered honey, bumble and solitary bees by not using any insecticides, herbicides, miticides or fungicides in your yard. In addition, plant yellow and blue flowers in large blocks, so as to provide a safe source of nectar and pollen for our bees.

Lastly, plant a tree for every member of your family. Trees reduce heating and cooling costs around homes and buildings by as much as 40 percent. They also suck CO2 from the atmosphere, filter storm water run-off, purify the air and provide habitat for many urban critters.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

California Lutheran University Climate Change student assessment of Earth Dr Reese Halter's class

Story ran on Huffington Post November 15, 2011

Wall Street Journal November 16, 2011

Some excellent investigative research last week uncovered some startling facts: In excess of three quarters of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores is unrecognizable and would fail to be deemed honey by the United Nations’ Codex Alimentarius, European Union and the European Food Safety Authority.

What’s as stake is not just a couple hundred million forgone taxable dollars a year by the U.S. Customs Service but rather the health and safety of the American people.

Each year the incomparable honeybee produces 2.65 billion pounds of honey — nature’s golden elixir. In America we consume over 330 million pounds of honey per annum. It’s baked into everything from breakfast cereals to cookies and mixed into sauces, beverages, processed foods and even cough lozenges. (Story continues beneath The Incomparable Honeybee book cover)

Join Earth Dr Reese Halter as journeys through the amazing life of the bees - the book is available electronically and in stores around the globe.

Nature conscripted bees over 100 million years ago to be the predominant pollinators on Earth. Exquisite flowers loaded with sugar-rich nectar entice bees with a food; which they dehydrate, add some special enzymes and turn into honey. Honey is analogous in caloric energy to rocket fuel. In return bees inadvertently carry electro-charged pollen from one flower to the next and cross-pollinate the lions share of plants around the globe. They, incidentally, require some of that pollen to grow their young, build incredibly ingenious brains and healthy autoimmune systems.

In so many different ways the bees are also acting as nature’s canaries in the coalmines. Of the 100 crop species providing 90 percent of the world’s food — about 74 percent are pollinated by bees. The bees are the first critters to touch and help make our food; they are getting sick all over the world and prematurely dying by the billions. Clearly, something is terribly wrong here.

Almost 2.7 million hives in the U.S. produce on average 66 pounds of honey a year. In 2010, we produced about 176 million pounds of honey. Over the past 18 months we have imported more than 210 million pounds of honey, of which 60 percent came from Asia, mostly China, in addition to about 45 million pounds from India.

The honey market in America is valued at $12 billion. China is the world’s largest honey producer.

In 2001, the U.S. Department of Commerce accused the Chinese honey industry, rightfully so, of dumping inexpensive, subsidized honey into the American market at well below the U.S. beekeepers production costs. And the U.S. Federal Trade Commission imposed stiff import tariffs or taxes to prevent the Chinese from further flooding our domestic honey market.

Unfortunately, some humans are nefarious and where there is a will there is a way. Millions of tons of honey that’s currently either on U.S. supermarket shelves or in our pantries has been micro-filtered to remove any traces whatsoever of pollen or wax from the beehive. Not only does it fail the standard of even being considered honey; but also worse — without these essential and healthful micro-ingredients, the honey cannot be traced to its country of origin.

Dastardly tactics that have skirted the U.S. Customs Service have essentially removed the fingerprints of honey. Instead of being able to identify the country of origin as China, a flurry of honey has coincidentally entered our nation from countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines — countries that do not face the punitive tariff that was imposed in 2001 on China.

U.S. Senator Charles Schumes (D-NY) has been aware of this for a number of years and has been leading the charge to help protect U.S. beekeepers and introduce legislation to provide greater enforcement power at port-of-entry customs offices.

There’s a lot more at stake here than just illicit honey laundering and hundreds of millions of dollars. This heinous crime is one that affects our health and wellbeing. In the past, Chinese toys have poisoned our children and tainted pet food has inflicted slow and excruciating deaths of our domesticated animals.

Chinese honey is not safe. Chinese beekeepers are known to use banned North American antibiotics to keep their bees healthy. The bees touch our food first and those carcinogenic chemicals are turning up in honey sold in the U.S. In addition, duplicitous packers are cunningly masking acid notes of poor quality honey by mixing it in sugar or corn-based syrups to feign good taste.

In 2002, 154,000 pounds of Chinese honey contaminated with chloramphenicol, banned in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand and the United States because it treats anthrax but is known to cause bone marrow failure through aplastic anemia — turned up in our grocery stores, unknowingly. A half a million loaves of bread were baked with chloramphenol-laced honey and sold in the U.S.

Unadulterated honey is a powerful antiseptic; that’s why it’s used on bandages. Honey is renowned for its antibacterial properties and sealed jars recovered from Egyptian’s royal tombs were found unspoiled, after thousands of years. Honey is loaded with vitamins and minerals in specific concentrations that miraculously mimic human blood serum. Honey metabolizes easily and can be an important source of essential nutrients as well as a tremendous source of caloric energy.

Lawmakers must act unanimously and swiftly to protect Americans from potentially tainted micro-filtered Chinese honey. The brazen gall and effrontery to short-circuit our health and food security must be stopped — now!

In the meantime, I strongly suggest supporting our local beekeepers. Make it a family day (or a romantic outing) and Google local beekeepers; visit their farms or farmers markets and buy their honey.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Orangutan photo by Barefoot in Florida. Creative commons license.

UPDATE: I messaged WWF asking for comment + will post a response when I hear back.

A longtime ally of WWF has been implicated in a “massive illegal logging kickback scandal” inside one of the world’s most biologically diverse ecosystems. What’s more, the official, Musa Aman, Chief Minister of Malaysia’s Sabah region, is accused of making a fortune off of the same endangered orangutan habitat that he promised to protect.

Over the last several years, WWF has broadcast its partnerships with Aman’s Sabah government to protect the Borneo forest (home to the orangutans) and expand region’s marine protected areas. Aman even gave a keynote speech at WWF’s Asian green business conference last November. And Datuk Dr Dionysius S.K. Sharma, WWF Malaysia chief executive officer, has praised Aman’s “visionary leadership” for “walking the talk” of nature conservation.

“Sustainable development will determine if we get to keep this planet, and Sabah, with the leadership that it has, will be able to keep this part of the world intact,” Dionysius told a Malaysia newspaper last December.

WWF, however, has remained mum on the scandal that erupted this spring after a Malaysian activist group published documents allegedly leaked from two police investigations. The evidence compiled by anti-corruption units in Malaysia and Hong Kong included copies of bank records allegedly showing how an accomplice moved money from timber companies into a secret Swiss bank account held in trust for Aman.

The story is yet another dredged up by the daily news search created by the folks at Wiki Scraper. (Click on the link to check it out!)

WWF and other nature groups often court power brokers like Aman — relationships that have helped expand national parks and forests worldwide in recent decades. But corruption, weak rule of law, lack of funding, and other problems often leave these new wildlife preserves “protected” on paper only. The nonprofit groups, meanwhile, have lost credibility and local support by partnering with corrupt politicians, autocratic regimes and polluting corporations.

Previous Wiki Scraper finds include this piece alleging that staffers at my former employer, Conservation International, were directly involved in illegally felling trees inside a Vietnam nature preserve. (CI has denied the allegation and reportedly plans its own investigation.)

The recent scandals are just the latest reminder of the growing “reputational” travails facing international conservation groups, also known as BINGOs (big international nonprofit organizations). As controversies in remote rainforests start to reach their Western supporters, WWF, C.I., The Nature Conservancy and other groups are writing more people-friendly mission statements and policies. However, not everyone under the “environmentalists” umbrella buys the re-branding efforts; in fact, they’ve sparked a new round of debate over the direction of the movement.