Kill, Baby, Kill

Source: BBC News

According to this BBC News report, the International Fund for Animal Welfare is reporting that the level of noise in the world's oceans are causing serious problems for whales, dolphins and other marine mammals, blocking their communication and disrupting their feeding. Apparently, the noise generated by ships' engines and propellers, seismic airguns used in oil and gas exploration and military sonars have been implicated.

Whales and dolphins are cool, and this makes me sad. . . .

Stop Those Pesky Unsolicited Catalogs Today!

I just spent 15 minutes at http://www.catalogchoice.org/ removing my name from the mailing lists of unsolicited catalogs that I've been receiving. Catalog Choice is a free service that helps you to decide what gets into your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources. You'll be asked to create an account when you go on and all your information will be saved. As you get new catalogs, you can just log on and add them to your list of unwanted catalogs. At the moment, the site only offers opt out requests for individual catalog titles – unfortunately, there is no way to stop all catalogs with one click. It works best if you have your catalogs on hand when you log on so that you can type in the customer number (usually found on the mailing label at the back of the catalog) for each catalog you want to stop receiving. If you don't have the customer number you can indicate that it's not available and they'll still process the request. I've tried calling merchants in the past to get off their mailing lists and, believe me, this is a lot easier. And you don't have to talk to anyone!

Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.

Environment: Plastic in the Ocean

I am ashamed to admit that I did not know about this (and learned of it from, of all places, Nick Olsen's blog on the Domino website), but apparently there is an island of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean that's twice the size of Texas! According to this very disturbing article, countless seabirds, marine mammals, and fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from becoming ensnared in it and drowning. If that's not disturbing enough, chemicals leaching from the stuff are getting into our food chain and have been linked to everything from obesity and diabetes to cancer and infertility. What's more, since plastic takes forever to biodegrade, almost every bit of plastic ever made still exists. I think that I will never buy another bottled water again.

Environmental Angst

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. ~ Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848 ~

The World Conservation Union has released its 2007 Red List of Threatened Species. The organization reports that 188 animals and plants have been added to a global database of threatened species, and that the number is certainly on the low end. Among the more troubling developments: the Western lowland gorilla is being decimated by the ebola virus and commercial hunting, coral reefs in the Galapagos Islands are threatened and the Yangtze River dolphin may be extinct. Out of 41,415 species assessed, more than 16,300 species are threatened with extinction. According to the IUCN, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70 percent of the world’s assessed plants on the 2007 Red List are in jeopardy. Here's a link to a report from MSNBC News, which also contains a slideshow: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20738173/