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biodiversity > features
LETTER FROM SEA SHEPHERD
Galapagos in deep trouble
by Captain Paul Watson
It was the last day of July 2007 and the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat was preparing to depart from the Enchanted Isles of the Galapagos, when Captain Paul Watson, Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Co-Founder of Greenpeace, wrote this graphic letter. ... more
SUCCESS STORY
India honours saviour of Valley of Flowers
by Neeta Lal
Every year some 600,000 pilgrims make their way through the Valley of Flowers in the Indian Himalayas, and until recently, left behind a trail of garbage. Now the Valley and the adjoining Nanda Devi National Park has been cleaned and restored, thanks to the efforts of a diminutive female Forest Reserve Officer, Jyotsna Sitling, recipient of this year's prestigious Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar, the country's highest environmental honour. ... more
BOOK FEATURE:
Flying blind to the brink of extinction
by George McGavin
'Ultimately it is human population growth and increasing consumption that drives every aspect of environmental degradation' says Dr George McGavin of Oxford's Natural History Museum, in a beautifully illustrated new book Endangered: Wildlife on the Brink of Extinction now in the shops. In the final chapter, reproduced here by arrangement with the publishers, the author asks the question 'What next? ... more
Year of the Deserts gets under way
by John Rowley
In a long overdue recognition of the human tragedy involved in the degradation of the planet's drylands and the destruction of their biodiversity, the United Nations has launched the International Year of Deserts and Desertification 2006. It hopes to raise public awareness of the issue and protect the biological diversity of deserts as well as the traditional knowledge of those communities affected by desertification. ... more
Caviar trade suspended - but can the sturgeon survive?
The suspension of the international trade in caviar from wild sturgeon, announced today by the CITES secretariat in Geneva, has been widely welcomed by environmental groups. ... more
Birds warn of a planet in peril
by Janet Larsen
Once canaries were used to alert miners to the presence of poisonous gases deep below ground, now birds everywhere are signaling the earth's deteriorating environmental health. Worldwide, some 1,212 of 9,775 bird species - one out of every eight - are threatened with extinction. Destruction and degradation of habitat is the number one danger, threatening 87 per cent of these vulnerable birds. ... more
Close shave for Switzerland�s bearded vulture
by Mark Schulman
The bearded vulture, as with other scavenger species, gets a bad rap. Perpetually cast as the ugly villain of the alpine pastures, farmers and shepherds never took kindly to this bird and tried shooting it whenever they could. By the end of the 19th century the bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus) was hunted to extinction in the Alps. But a hundred years later, attitudes have changed and efforts are now being made to return this misunderstood bird species back to its rightful place in the fragile alpine ecosystem. ... more
Fresh hope for the orang-utan
Primate expert Simon Husson and his wife have spent the last ten years living in an Indonesian peat forest, in Borneo�s Sepangau National Park, only slightly larger than greater London, to study orang-utans, whose forest habitat is being destroyed at a rapid rate throughout Southeast Asia. They are part of a larger effort to rescue these remarkable �men of the forest� from extinction, as Jikkie Jonkman reports. ... more
Saving dolphins in the sacred Ganges
by Brian Thomson
The river dolphins of India's sacred Ganges River have been written into Hindu religious tracts dating back thousands of years. So revered, the Ganges River dolphin was one of the world's first protected species, given special status under the reign of Emperor Ashoka, one of India's most famous rulers in the third century BC. ... more
Philippines on verge of ecological disaster
by Henrylito D. Tacio
More than 100 years ago, the Philippines was rich in natural resources. Now, as the human population continues to grow (from 83 million today to a projected 133 million by 2050), it is not rich anymore. ... more
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