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The new home may be a bit more spartan than expected. For a few million seed accessions of domesticated crops, it’s a bunker deep inside a sandstone mountain on an Arctic island. For the Kihansi spray toad, it’s a rack of plastic boxes in the Toledo Zoo.

And if the desperate plans in motion work out, for the world’s corals it will be a vat of liquid nitrogen at the Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, England, with a backup freezer at the Smithsonian.

A seed of wild rice – Mitsuaki Tanabe.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is intended as a backup for the various national and regional seed repositories in case of disaster, whether natural like those that hit the Phillipines and Honduras, or entirely manmade, like the recent destruction of the seed repositories in Iraq – in a lovely little town named Abu Ghraib – and Afghanistan.

It is supposed to be reassuring that the vault is 430 feet above current sea level, so that is can survive extreme ocean rise. But what use exactly will these seeds be in a world – the world planned for in construction of the vault – where sea level has risen by, say, a mere 200 feet? The countries that deposited their national inventory of seeds and have rights to them are unlikely to find them of much use in that world.

Among other problems – like those about access – future desperate scavengers may wonder what happened to all the landraces and crop wild relatives – the ancestors and near relatives of these crops that have survived for all this time until we came along by virtue of their resistance to pests and diseases and their potential to optimally exploit their environment – traits we very well might wish we had available for breeding or some other mode of access.

Sooner or later, seeds must be taken out of storage and grown out, replenished. In the repository’s lab this all happens in the absence of evolutionary pressures – pests, predators, diseases, all the drivers. After a few hundred years there may be no world for them to return to, not because it has been destroyed but because it has changed. It is the nature of the world outside the museum that it is dynamic.

To put it very simply herbariums are not forests, and a frightening number of normal everyday people no longer seem to understand the difference, let alone the blinkered morons in the governing class.

Kihansi spray toad; photo ©Tim Herman

We learn from the 2009 IUCN Red List update that the Kihansi spray toad has officially entered the limbo of the Extinct in the Wild.

The popular media renditions of the toad’s plight reveal a subtle, pervasive bias: it’s flatly stated that the toad died out from chytridiomycosis, never mind the IUCN’s observation that

The serious decline and extinction of this species appears related to the Lower Kihansi Hydropower Project, involving the construction of a dam in 2000 upstream on the Kihansi River, which cut off 90% of the original water flow to the gorge, thereby hugely reducing the volume of spray, particularly in the dry season, as well as altering the vegetational composition.

Gee, could it possibly be that the loss of 90% of its water, vegetative cover, and insect food supply might present a little problem for an amphibian in equatorial Africa? The saga of the attempt to provide artificial spray supplements, comical in its tragic, ridiculous way, is documented at the IUCN KSP link above, and in much greater detail by Kevin Krajick in Science: The Lost World of the Kihansi Toad. The most pathetic part of the story is that there were alternate plans for the dam and diversion scheme that would have returned large volumes of water to the river above the falls, but in the absence of anything like an environmental impact assessment they were shelved.

In news that one would think might shock the public – if anyone bothered to tell them – some of the folks most familiar with coral reefs and the underlying ocean chemistry that sustain them have gone public with their belief – their certainty – that it is too late to save much of anything in situ. A crash program is proposed to save frozen samples of all existing corals, a thousand specimens of each. And let’s be clear: this means diverting resources from the hopeless task of in situ conservation.

“Unless something very remarkable happens during December’s climate talks, the world’s reefs will be reduced to slime-covered rubble by 2050,” said Dr Alex Rogers, of the Institute of Zoology, London.

Since Dr. Rogers made that statement, everyone has thrown in the towel and decided that Copenhagen will be another place holder, and that maybe we’ll do something in a year, or two, or ten. The most positive statement at Copenhagen will be the thoroughly justified walkout by the African Union. What is the point of sitting through a farce?

Here’s a discussion of the basics of coral cryopreservation (3-page pdf)

Success varies by species. If all were sampled and stored, some will die. So what is returned to the imagined more hospitable, less acidic future sea in, very optimistically, a few hundred years – when? where? how? with what resources? – will be a selection, an abridged version. As to how the new reefs are suposed to thrive absent their former community of fish, etc, well that is just one of those details.

Beamed from the moon?

Once we start down this road, it is hard to see where we draw the line but surely it would be somewhere this side of the absurd proposal for a doomsday vault on the moon complete with not just seed banks – and presumably a frozen zoo – but information on the basic building blocks of civilization – metallurgy and the like.

It would work something like this: In a postapocalyptic world awash in starving refugees, you would plug the computer you don’t have into a power source you don’t have, enter some long lost password, and voila, access information on how to smelt metals or grow wheat which you also don’t have. Without even considering the problem of gaining physical access to the seed bank, the idea is so ludicrous it needn’t be belabored. Wouldn’t a few hundred copies of a book on metallurgy, scattered somewhere in the rubble of our former cities, be a little handier? Or is is posited that no one will remember how to read, only how to access computer files on the moon?
 
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Briefly, around the age of ten, I was fascinated with Superman comics. A friend and I met in the alley to trade them. We weren’t collectors, nor were we interested in the story lines about bad guys or Clark Kent’s life. All we cared about was the backstory: every detail of life on Krypton. Nothing excited us more than Kandor, the city on Krypton stolen, shrunken, and imprisoned in a bottle by the evil Brainiac before the planet’s destruction. I forget how it came to rest among the bric-a-brac scattered around the Fortress of Solitude, awaiting the day when Superman would figure out what to do with it.

Later I came to understand that there are real heroes, like Stchukin and Ivanov who starved to death guarding the seed repository at the Vavilov Institute during the siege of the frozen fortress of Leningrad. But they are rarer than sightings of Superman these days.

(The Olympic torch rides the Lootaas on the sea leg of its trip through Haida Gwaii.)

The big news is that the Burrard thermal plant has been thrown off the rolls of BC’s baleline electrical generation. It don’t count. This means that BC Hydro is now under that much more pressure to scramble to find renewable sources – like Naikun Wind – to meet mandatory targets for renewable energy sources in the province.

Naikun is thrilled with this development.

Among other things he is not, Barack Obama is not FDR.

It was painful to listen to his Saturday talk, talking about those courageous men & women, who risk their lives protecting our nation. Flat & unconvincing. How in hell is the military protecting us? They are pawns.

Pat Tillman would have agreed with many Nidal Hasan’s opinions–not the religious ones–but the pointlessness of our current wars.

McChrystal, (oh look at how the FreeRepublic went for this man:
glady joined in the cover-up surrounding Pat Tillman’s death.

And Obama thinks he needs to listen to him?

Because, as a nation, we are so afraid to ‘dis the military?

The only thing to fear, is the MIC, itself.

Does our over-stressed military ever even occasionally get the truth out?

The dead-but-alive-guy-with-the Muslim-hanging-over his American identity is said to have objected to our wars in distant Muslim lands.

A lot of Americans without Muslim shading do that, too.

Huge suicide rates in the GWOT. Loads of PTSD. Failed states in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

And the brass wants MORE TROOPS. And I suppose that Obama wants to look at everyone’s point of view.

The bi-paritisan thing he will get, when he destroys this country along with the countries of our “enemies”.

I’ve turned to reading crime novels as the

(One of the thousands of endosulfan victims in Kasaragod, Kerala. The district was hosed down with endosulfan for over twenty years by a Kerala state run agency, all for the sake of a blemish free cashew crop. Indian activists often refer to it as the “second Bhopal,” but as the numbers continue to rise an outsider cannot help but think in terms of another Minamata.)

Last month, the Review Committee of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants effectively declared endosulfan a POP, setting the stage for a global ban to come into effect in 2011, after just a couple more rounds of bureaucratic rigamarole.

Finally.

Endosulfan is an organochlorine insecticide like DDT.

It is clearly directly responsible for thousands of human and animal deaths due to acute toxicity, most notoriously in Kerala but elsewhere as well, and among other effects is responsible for birth defects and deformities in amphibians, birds, fish, and mammals including human beings. It is a well known immunosuppresant, endocrine disruptor, carcinogen, and teratogen. Those arguments are over. In the latter capacity, it wreaks bizarre damage on the male reproductive system in particular due to its estrogen aping properties.

But acute toxicity ain’t the half of it. Like DDT, it is incredibly persistent in the environment – and its breakdown products, in particular endosulfan sulfate, are even more so – and like DDT it bioaccumulates. It has been found in the tissue of non-target species, including human beings, thousands of miles from any application, from the Arctic to the Amazon basin. Residues from African applications are carried on the wind to the Caribbean. It is found in the breast milk of women worldwide, some of them thousands of miles from anywhere its use is legal, and readily crosses the placenta. Endosulfan has been found in all our national parks that have been tested; it’s been found on Mt. Everest.

And incredibly its use is still legal in the United States.

(Endosulfan use in the US, 2002 – click to enlarge. Note the red zone in Washington state. Endosulfan has been commonly used here to control apple aphids, something that could be accomplished with overhead irrigation. Most West African countries have transitioned to growing cotton – which accounts for a full 20% of American use – without endosulfan; one would think the US could manage to as well.)

The International Institute for Sustainable Development has kindly provided a boiled down version of the review committee meeting, translated from bureaucratese into something approximating English. Here is the endosulfan decision; brackets are my comments, the money quotes are bolded.

Final Decision: In its decision (UNEP/POPS/POPRC.5/CRP.13), the POPRC:

• adopts the risk profile for endosulfan;
• invites the ad hoc working group on endosulfan to explore any further information on adverse human health effects and, if appropriate, revise the risk profile for the consideration of POPRC-6;
• considers that, although information on adverse human health effects is not fully conclusive [riiiiight], there is evidence suggesting the relevance of some effects on humans;
• decides that endosulfan is likely, as a result of LRET [long range environmental transport in English], to lead to significant adverse human health and environmental effects such that global action is warranted;
• decides to establish an ad hoc working group to prepare a risk management evaluation in accordance with Annex F [economic impact] of the convention; and
• invites parties and observers to submit to the Secretariat the information specified in Annex F before 8 January 2010.

India, the world’s largest user of endosulfan and third largest producer, was the only country on the review committee to put up a fuss – the pussyfooting language in the final decision is out of deference to India. It likely will continue to object despite very vocal opposition within the country.

Meanwhile, a decision is expected from the EPA by December, responding to a suit by environmental and farmworker groups. They are supported by the requests of consumer groups, indigenous people, and scientists and medical professionals that the EPA reverse its 2002 decision and ban all use in the US. The Fish and Wildlife Service has been on record since 2003 as advising a ban.

If the EPA does reverse itself, we will join 50 some other countries in a total ban. They include all EU member states, Bahrain, Belize, Benin, Cambodia, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, St Lucia, Sri Lanka, Syria, and the UAE.

And Kerala.

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Endosulfan identifiers:

• CAS Number: 115-29-7
• Chemical name: 6,7,8,9,10,10-hexachloro-1,5,5a,6,9,9a-hexahydro-6,9-methano-2,4,3-benzadioxathiepin 3-oxide
• Sold now or in the past under variations of the trade names: Afidanil, Benzoepin, Cekulfan, Cyclodan, Devisulfan, Endocel, Endodhan, Endosan, Endosol, Endostar, Endosulfan, Ensure [! - words fail], Fan, Farmoz, Hildan, Hoe 2671, Insectophene, Malix, Niagara, Nufarm, Parrysulfan, Phaser, Rasayansulfan, Thimul, Thiodan, Thionate, Thionex, Tiovel, and many others

Further reading: Pesticide Action Network North America has a great deal of information on endosulfan

Greenpeace welcomes climate change negotiators to their talks beginning today in Barcelona.

Criticism of the complete absence of leadership from the US and Obama is heating up. Today, from Connie Hedegaard, the Danish environment minister:

I feel it [is] very hard to imagine how the US president can receive the Nobel peace prize on December 10 in Oslo only a few hundreds kilometres [from Copenhagen] if he has sent an American delegation to Copenhagen with no offer. I remind the US that it is not the only country in the world that has to have discussions with its domestic parliament.

Has anyone noticed that Hillary Clinton is one testy Sec. of State? She’s no Josh Bolton, for sure, but I don’t think she played very well in her most recent open forum in Pakistan.

Fish and Wildlife Service Awards $800,000 in Grants to Explore Cause, Control of White-Nose Syndrome in Bats

One of the grants was awarded to the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park to establish a captive population of the Virginia big-eared bat at the Conservation & Research Center near Front Royal, Virginia. There are only 15,000 Virginia big-eared bats remaining in a few caves in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina. White-nose syndrome has already infected some of the caves in this area, and if it continues, this bat subspecies could likely become extinct.

The Conservation & Research Center to the National Zoo has developed a multidisciplinary team of scientists, veterinarians, nutritionists and curators who are working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and West Virginia Division of Natural Resource to establish this insurance population of Virginia big-eared bats, thereby buying time to determine the cause of, and cure for, this disease. Bats in this population may eventually be needed to re-establish the subspecies in the wild. Virginia big-eared bats have never been kept or bred before in captivity, so lessons learned from this project will be of broad interest to agencies and organizations if white-nose syndrome in wild bat populations makes it necessary to consider captive breeding of other bat species.

Don’t kid yourself. This, like everything else the federal government does, is the result of pressure, in this case from the Center for Biological Diversity and many other groups. That’s a good thing.

The other recipients:

• Analyzing Indiana bats to determine their susceptibility.
  Sybill K. Amelon, Ph.D., USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station; Guy Knudsen, Ph.D., University of Idaho; Sara Oyler-McCance, Ph.D., U.S. Geological Survey, Rocky Mountain Center for Conservation Genetics and Systematics; and Lori Eggert, Ph.D., University of Missouri. This project focuses on assessing the impact of white-nose syndrome on the genetic viability of Indiana bats.
• Identifying compounds to stop the fungus associated with white-nose syndrome.
  Hazel A. Barton, Ph.D., Northern Kentucky University, and Kevin Keel, DVM, Ph.D., University of Georgia. This research is on the propagation and decontamination of white-nose syndrome in the environment.
• Examining immunity and body composition in white-nose syndrome affected bats versus bats unaffected.
  Thomas H. Kunz, Ph.D., and Michael D. Sorenson, Ph.D.; Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology, Boston University, Massachusetts. This project will focus on Immune function, body composition and genetic correlates of bat white-nose syndrome.

Over a million bats have already died. Entire hibernacuala have been wiped out, and some species are being pushed close to the brink of extinction. And we know nothing about how or why. We must get a handle on this now, and the USFWS should, for once, be commended for its relatively swift action.

USFWS White Nose Syndrome pages.

On the military analyses being drawn up for Afghanistan: “I know that horseshit.”

The last few minutes are the most chilling. Ellsberg believes that Obama will commit many thousands more troops to a war he knows can’t be won for fear of a revolt by the generals if they don’t get their way. As we all know, there are far too many Americans who would support a coup.

If anyone can get at a transcript, please pass it along.

Update: Please see this letter of reisgnation from one of our diplomats in Afghanistan. (Kindly sent along by cometman.)

I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. . . .

I fail to see the value or the worth in continued US casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war. . . .

A must read.

 
Goodbye³⁵⁰

The slideshow above was put together in about half an hour. It only has 100 pics, not because there aren’t 350 or 3500 lying around, but because photobucket was running out of patience.

The Center for Biological Diversity had a similar idea: visit 350 Reasons we need to get to 350: 350 Species Threatened by Global Warming and click through their interactive map to see what we stand to lose in your neighborhood, and how climate change directly or indirectly affects the rest of life on this planet.

Much food for thought in some of the meatier diaries posted at the Greenroots site today. Of the few I’ve read, two that resonate are veritas curat’s The Church of 350 and Kitsap River’s Fish out of Water.

This year, slightly to the north here in Salmon Nation, the sockeye run on the Fraser River collapsed. Maybe the right word is disappeared. Much fingerpointing has ensued and many calls for studies and investigations, never mind the hundreds already done that prove beyond any question that sea lice from BC’s salmon farms are a major culprit. (Although one wonders if there are dead zones still unknown to us, and what would happen to a million or ten sockeye if they floated into one.)

The sad, sad predictable response is to argue over the dwindling resource and fret about the price at the supermarket. No one stops to wonder what will become of the Fraser basin’s ecosystem as a whole. Already ravaged by pine beetles, it now faces nutrient deprivation as the ancient cycle of replenishment from the sea is broken. Not to mention the probable starvation of the bears, and the dead zones approaching. We’re not talking about Lake Chad drying up, or Kashmir’s water supply shrinking to nothing, but right here in North America.

If you bring these things up, you are dismissed as a tree hugger. I have one question: How do you expect your children to live in a world that is unfit for animals?

We are awed not so much by the notion of the sacred any more, but by roided up athletes and trashy starlets. Why are we not awed by the mysteries of the interconnections between our planet’s chemistry and its life forms? That is what got us this far after all. Is that such a small thing?

I’d call it the Church of Earth. We don’t have to live in a state of mystical reverence. But we have to pay attention. And we have to do something about a popular culture dominated by baying lunatics, that thinks Sean Hannity’s opinion is as worthy of consideration as that of E. O. Wilson or Rajendra Pachauri. And about a governing and chattering class that has proven this summer that it cannot even do one thing at a time, and that dares – dares – to discuss intergenerational equity in the context of tax policy but not that of permanently impoverishing the natural world or destroying huge chunks of it forever. Turning bays into cesspools, mountains into sterile moonscapes, grinding up the last fish in the sea to make biofuel – these things constitute all out war on the future.

My favorite photo of the day said “There is no Planet B.”