It’s a bit too late for this one. Now a floormat worth $US7995.00 at Bear Skin World. Surprisingly, Canada, home to two-thirds of the total polar bear population of up to 25,000, has not listed the species as threatened.

The US Government has listed polar bears as a threatened species, warning that melting of Arctic sea ice is risking their habitat.

“Today I am listing the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act,” said Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, after satellite imagery found ice coverage had fallen to its lowest level yet recorded.

The Government was acting on advice from scientists and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Mr Kempthorne detailed greater steps to monitor polar bear populations in Alaska and outlying islands in the Beaufort Sea, and more co-operation with foreign governments to protect the species.

[From US lists polar bears as threatened species | The Australian]

The environmental group Sea Shepherd says it doubts its attack on a Japanese whaling ship off Antarctica yesterday injured anyone.

The group threw 24 litres of rotten butter onto the Nisshin Maru whaling ship.

Meanwhile, the Taipei Times reports:

“Militant environmentalists hurled stinging acid for more than an hour onto a Japanese whaling ship off Antarctica yesterday, hurting three crew members, Japanese government officials said.”

But the Sea Shepherd’s founder, Paul Watson, does not believe the claims.

‘We certainly didn’t injure anybody because we saw where every container hit — it was fully videotaped,’ he said.

‘The Japanese videotaped it and I’m sure that if we had have hit somebody they’d have it on their website, which they do not have.

‘My understanding is that the three injuries were three guys who got sick from the smell and just threw up.

‘So three guys chundering on the deck, really that’s the extent of it.’

Ocean-borne trash plagues the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The stomach of this dead albatross held more than a half pound of plastic.

They captioned it with this damning quote from Art Buchwald — written in 1970:

And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate and the disposable bottle, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy his food all in one place and he could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use.

And pretty soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles, and there was nowhere left to sit down or to walk.

And Man shook his head and cried, ‘Look at all this God-awful litter’.

(Via Sierra Magazine)

Paul Sorensen photographed the five-metre long whale shark as it swam close to his group

A young whale shark has been found off the Queensland coast, as far as 1,000 kilometres off course of its annual migration.

The discovery has puzzled scientists, who have not ruled out a link to climate change.

The lonesome whale shark comes from the world’s biggest fish species, characterised by a wide flat mouth and covered in white stripes and spotted skin.

It is a highly migratory species, but to be seen off Stradbroke Island in Queensland’s south is extraordinary.”

According to a new NASA study, Arctic perennial sea ice has been decreasing at a rate of 9 percent per decade since the 1970s.

The photographs show the difference between 1979 and 2003.

The changes in Arctic ice may be a harbinger of global climate change, says Josefino Comiso, researcher at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland.

In a recent Journal of Climate paper, Comiso notes that most of the recent global warming occurred over the last decade, with the largest temperature increase occurring over North America.

Researchers suspect the loss of Arctic sea ice may be caused by changing atmospheric pressure patterns over the Arctic that move sea ice around, and by warming Arctic temperatures that result from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch.

“It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

In a letter released today, PEER urged the new Director of the National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, to end the stalling tactics, remove the book from sale at the park and allow park interpretive rangers to honestly answer questions from the public about the geologic age of the Grand Canyon.

PEER is also asking Director Bomar to approve a pamphlet, suppressed since 2002 by Bush appointees, providing guidance for rangers and other interpretive staff in making distinctions between science and religion when speaking to park visitors about geologic issues.

Known as the Guayana Shield, the 57,915-square-mile area contains more than 25 percent of the world’s remaining humid tropical forests and the largest remaining unpolluted fresh water reserves in the American tropics.

The protected areas will link to existing reserves to form a vast preservation corridor eventually stretching into neighboring Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

Campaigns to reverse the damage done by indiscriminate damming of rivers are springing up everywhere, especially in the western USA, where many a project promoted as the wave of the future has led to silting and the ruin of of many a river ecosystem.

But possibly the first such campaign started as long ago as 1973 in Tasmania after an unsuccessful effort to stop the drowning of one of the world’s most beautiful lakes.

Lake Pedder, in the wild and rugged south-west of Tasmania, was dammed as part of an aggressive and misguided government program to attract heavy industry by offering cheap electricity.

The downside was that the cost of industrial electricity was underwritten by overcharging domestic and small business consumers; corporate electricity deals in Tasmania are state secrets.

Since then, inspired by the work of photographer Olegas Truchanas, a refugee from World War II Lithuania whose life was ultimately claimed by the wilderness he sought to protect, Tasmanians have lobbied and protested to get the government to pull the plug on Pedder.

The spectacular white sand beach can still be seen under metres of water and an Australian Federal Government inquiry concluded in 1996 that the recovery of the lake and its ecosystems was feasible.

This led to the foundation of one of the earliest and most robust conservation movements which now has many triumphs to its name, including the preservation of one of Australia’s greatest wild rivers, the Franklin.

The Lake Pedder campaign lives here.

It hasn’t succeeded yet, but in a pragmatic and power-hungry world, these things take time. Better get started now in your own back yard.

A scavenger rather than an aggressive predator, the shy and elusive thylacine had the undeserved reputation of preying on livestock; its habitat was soon destroyed by logging, damming and farming and a government bounty finished the job.

Many Tasmanians believe that somehow the thylacine lives on in remote and impenetrable areas in the south-west of the island, but it is more likely that it now exists only in the imagination of a few taciturn and obsessive searchers.

Having seen off the thylacine, Tasmania’s government continues to promote the relentless and not particularly profitable destruction of old growth forests, which are replaced by monoculture timber plantations in which wildlife is poisoned under official permit.

But there must be some residual guilt in the collective consciousness. The government’s emblem is, of all things, the thylacine, a logo referred to by bureaucrats as the Dead Dog. Tasmania is probably the only political entity which identifies itself with an extinct animal, and there is a growing uneasy feeling that if we don’t stop wrecking and polluting the place, we’ll go the way of the thylacine ourselves. FB