Kimberly Marion Suiseeya (2006) was invited by the Woodrow Wilson Center to write a "from the field" piece on environmental conflict and security. This piece was published in their online blog, New Security Beat,.

New Security Beat

Thor Hanson (1998) is on the road promoting the release of a revised and expanded edition of his book, "The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda," published by 1500 Books. The book was a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist.

The Impenetrable Forest

Robert Long (2003) has co-edited a book on noninvasive carnivore survey techniques based on his experiences and methods as a wildlife ecologist. Robert's book, entitled, "Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores," is available through Island Press. Robert co-edited the book with his wife, Paula MacKay, and colleagues William Zielinski and Justina Ray.

Island Press

Jason Grumet, 1993 Fellow, formerly the Executive Director of the National Commission on Energy Policy in Washington, D.C., is now Senator Barack Obama's lead advisor on energy and environmental issues. Jason was named in a June 23, 2008 New York Times article on the Obama campaign's endorsement of ethanol as an alternative energy source.

New York Times

John Berger, 1988, has authored a new book on the politics of forestry, taking a hard look at the dangers facing American forests. The book was released nationwide on June 20th. "Forests Forever: Their Ecology, Restoration, and Protection" is co-published by the Forests Forever Foundation, San Francisco, and The Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago.

Forests Forever Foundation

1992 Fellow Stuart Siegel is serving as the Technical Lead for ecosystem restoration planning activities in support of Delta Vision’s Blue Ribbon Task Force’s preparation of a Strategic Plan for the 750,000-acre California Delta. Governor Schwarzenegger established Delta Vision by Executive Order in September 2006 “to develop a durable vision for sustainable management of the Delta” with the goal of “managing the Delta over the long term to restore and maintain identified functions and values that are determined to be important to the environmental quality of the Delta and the economic and social wellbeing of the people of the state.” Delta Vision issued its Vision document in December 2007 that set as its primary and co-equal goals the recovery of the Delta ecosystem and providing a reliable water supply. It concludes in October 2008 with its Strategic Plan. Switzer Fellow Stuart Siegel has been responsible for guiding a large working group to define desired ecosystem characteristics, establish quantitative targets, develop a suite of recommended strategies to achieve those targets and characteristics, and prioritize actions to implement those strategies.

The June 8, 2008 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday magazine included an article on Healy Hamilton's perspective as a conservation biologist on the effects of the U.S.-Mexico border fence on jaguars and other wildlife. Healy is the Head of the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information at the California Academy of Science.

"I model how species are responding to climate change, and I'm modeling species moving right out of the areas that we've designated to protect them. If we don't have a place for species to go, they may go locally extinct. The border wall will go from San Diego almost uninterrupted to the Gulf of Mexico. It's not like wildlife can just go around it. The border wall is right now about to sever the room that animals need to roam in."

Follow link below for entire article.

San Francisco Chronicle Sunday magazine

The San Lorenzo Valley Water District has reached a settlement with California-American Water to purchase the Felton, California waters system for $10.5 million, pending approval of the water district’s board of directors. The community of Felton has been working for years to purchase their water rights back from the corporation. See the link below for more information and media coverage.

Friends of Felton Locally Owned Water

2001 Switzer Fellow Steve Rasmussen Cancian's work was featured in an April edition of KQED's The California Report. This Report profiled Steve's work on creating "community living rooms" in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

The California Report

Jefferson Hall (1991), Director of the Applied Ecology Program at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, reports that one of their research projects was recently featured in a story on NPR's Climate Connections series. The story runs for a little over five minutes and takes place on a field visit where Jefferson is interviewed regarding the project that STRI is undertaking regarding understanding the "sponge" effect in tropical forests. To hear the story, follow the link below.

Climate Connections story

Rafe Sagarin (2000), Associate Director for Ocean and Coastal Policy at The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, has announced the publication of a book he co-edited called, "Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World" (University of California Press). Rafe mentions that another Switzer Fellow, Kate Smith (2004), contributed a chapter to the book.

Rafe was also interviewed about the book in the February 9, 2008 edition of New Scientist.

For more information about the book, go to the University of California Press website below.

University of California Press

Mike Wilson, 2003 Switzer Fellow and Research Scientist at UC Berkeley's Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, has co-authored this report which was commissioned by the California EPA. "Green Chemistry: Cornerstone to a Sustainable California" details the existing problems associated with exposure to harmful chemicals by workers and children and recommends policy solutions to better protect public health and the environment. The report is available on UC Berkeley's website below.

UC Berkeley News

Emily Scott (2007), a founding member of the L.A.-area activist group The L.A. Urban Rangers, says the group was profiled recently as the cover story for a recent edition (Vol. 18, No. 6) of Legacy magazine. In addition, they were profiled on public radio station KCET, including a videotaped interview of Emily and co-founder Jenny Price.

KCET interview

2001 Fellow Dr. Christopher Bacon has announced the publication of a book he co-edited with colleagues called, "Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America." Following is the text of the announcement used in publicity for the book:

Our morning cups of coffee connect us to a global industry and an export crisis in the tropics that is destroying livelihoods, undermining the cohesion of families and communities, and threatening ecosystems. Confronting the Coffee Crisis explores small-scale farming, the political economy of the global coffee industry, and initiatives that claim to promote more sustainable rural development in coffee-producing communities. Contributors review the historical, political, economic, and agroecological processes within today’s coffee industry and analyze the severely depressed export market that faces small-scale growers in Mexico and Central America. The book presents a series of interdisciplinary, empirically rich case studies showing how small-scale farmers manage ecosystems and organize collectively as they seek useful collaborations with international NGOs and coffee companies to create opportunities for themselves in the coffee market.

The findings demonstrate the interconnections among farmer livelihoods, biodiversity, conservation, and changing coffee markets. Additional chapters examine alternative trade practices, certification, and eco-labeling, discussing the politics and market growth of organic, shade-grown, and Fair Trade coffees. Combining interdisciplinary research with case-study analysis at scales ranging from the local to the global, Confronting the Coffee Crisis reveals the promise and the perils of efforts to create a more sustainable coffee industry.

Christopher M. Bacon is a Researcher and Lecturer associated with the Agroecology Group as well as both the Latin American and Latino Studies and Sociology Departments, University of California at Santa Cruz. V. Ernesto Méndez is Assistant Professor in the Environmental Program and Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont. Stephen R. Gliessman is Alfred Heller Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. David Goodman is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Jonathan A. Fox is Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Follow link to January 29, 2008 Science Times online.

Science Times

For complete story, follow link below.

High Country News

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Frustrated by a lack of regulations limiting global warming, a conservation group wants ribbon seals listed as threatened or endangered because their habitat — sea ice — is disappearing amid climate change.

The Center for Biological Diversity on Thursday filed a 91-page petition with the National Marine Fisheries Service seeking to list ribbon seals as threatened or endangered. The group says the classification is needed because sea ice is disappearing due to climate change brought on by humans.

"The Arctic is in crisis state from global warming," said biologist Shaye Wolf, lead author of the petition. "An entire ecosystem is rapidly melting away and the ribbon seal is poised to become the first victim of our failure to address global warming."

A message left by The Associated Press on Thursday with the federal fisheries service was not immediately returned.

The petition marks the center's second attempt to use the Endangered Species Act to force action on global warming. Within weeks, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide whether to list polar bears as threatened because of habitat loss from global warming.

World climate experts who made up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in February that global warming "very likely" is caused by human use of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

The Endangered Species Act requires animals to be categorized as endangered if they risk extinction due to destruction of their habitat. A species is threatened if it is likely to become endangered.

Either listing would require federal wildlife managers to create a recovery plan that could address U.S. causes of global warming. When considering permits for development, other federal agencies could be required to take action to avoid harm to threatened animals.

Attorney Brendan Cummings, ocean program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said that without a national legal mechanism regulating greenhouse gases, his organization has turned to the Endangered Species Act.

"Absent action by Congress and this administration, it's perhaps the best law on the books to gain some benefits," he said.

The group's strategy is twofold, he said.

"One is to increase political, public and legal pressure on the Bush administration to squarely confront global warming and the reality that it's arrived in the Bering Sea and Alaska and the Arctic," he said.

Also, regulatory agencies are not considering changes in the Arctic before issuing permits, he said.

"Management decisions for things like oil and gas leasing are largely based on the fiction of a static Arctic that's not warming," he said.

The National Marine Fisheries Service manages ribbon seals. The animals are distinguished by the patterns of their fur — four white bands or ribbons encircling the head, base of the trunk and the two front flippers over a dark coat, a pattern that gives them the coloration of a panda bear.

Among marine mammals, ribbon seals may be the most dependent on sea ice, Cummings said. The rough estimate for the number of ribbon seals is about 240,000, he said.

During summer and fall, ribbon seals live in the water and feed on fish, squid and crustaceans in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. But from March through June, ribbon seals rely on loose pack ice in the Bering and Okhotsk seas for reproduction and molting, and as a platform for foraging.

Ribbon seals give birth and nurse pups exclusively on sea ice. Ice allows the seals and their young, which can't swim, to avoid predators. Newborn ribbon seals have a coat of soft, white hair called lanugo that provides insulation until the thick layer of blubber develops. Pups can only survive submersion in the icy waters only after they've formed a blubber layer.

Sea ice provides a dry platform necessary for pup survival during lactation, and after weaning, a resting platform when pups are learning to be proficient in water.

According to the petition, it's critical for ice floes used for pupping to remain stable until pups are independent. Weaned pups have poor swimming and diving skills because their hefty blubbers stores make them buoyant. They spend substantial time on sea ice as they slowly learn diving and foraging skills.

The group predicts ribbon seals could be extinct by the end of the century without changes. Sea ice is breaking up earlier in spring and ice thickness has declined.

"The Arctic is imperiled and it's not just the polar bear. it's the entire ecosystem and the ribbon seal is part of that ecosystem," Cummings said.

Associated Press

Ha'aretz

Smithsonian magazine

Eric Jay Dolin, 1989 Fellow, has recently published a book through W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. called, "Leviathan: A History of Whaling in America." This book was reviewed in the July 23, 2007 edition of The New Yorker. To read the review, follow the link below.

The New Yorker magazine

Switzer Trustee Ashley Boren was recently honored with receipt of the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for her "unwavering commitment to innovative, balanced problem-solving to address a variety of critical environmental problems facing California." The Irvine award celebrates individuals throughout California who embody ingenuity, dedication and collaboration in solving pressing issues facing the state. Ashley was one of six Californians to receive this prestigious award.

Sustainable Conservation Press Release

Nancy Steele (1993), Executive Director of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, received an award from Environment Now on behalf of the organization for its role in the completion of a multi-purpose park that will help alleviate chronic flooding in northeast San Fernando Valley and reduce polluted rainwater that drains into the Los Angeles River. The Sun Valley Watershed Management Plan outlines innovative, sustainable, and multipurpose/multibenefit solutions to the watershed issues in Sun Valley. Sun Valley Park, one of the projects identified in the plan, includes catch basins, a conveyer system, and underground treatment and infiltration systems. In total, the systems will capture, filter, and recharge about 10 million gallons of rainwater into the local aquifer in an average year. In addition to the Watershed Council, other environmental organizations honored by Environment Now for this project were the California Coastal Coalition, California Native Plant Society, Los Cerritos Wetland Stewardship Inc., North East Trees, Theodore Payne Foundation, TreePeople, and Verde Vistas. These organizations collaborated with Los Angeles County Department of Public Works to develop real solutions to difficult flooding and water pollution problems in Sun Valley.

Healy Hamilton, 1991 Switzer Fellow and Head of the California Academy of Science's Center for Biodiversity Research & Information, was profiled in the Summer 2007 newsletter of the Academy for her work in seahorse conservation. To read the full article, click on the link below.

Healy will be giving two talks on seahorse biology at the Academy on June 12, 2007. For more information, go to: http://www.calacademy.org/lectures/.

California Academy of Science Summer 2007 newsletter

Switzer Fellow Shaye Wolf was a part of a challenge against Chevron Texaco of Mexico trying to get them to stop building a Liguid Natural Gas plant adjacent to Los Coronado Islands off Tijuana. This plant would have negatively impacted the world’s largest Xantus’s Murrelet breeding colony, a California threatened species and Mexican threatened species. The plant would have been located just offshore of the island, precisely where the some of the highest densities of these seabirds has ever been recorded (the birds stage in the nearshore waters of breeding islands during the breeding season, doing courtship and other social behaviors before going to the island to attend their nests).

Shaye was instrumental in getting a petition going through the NAFTA CEC which ruled against the project, a big reason Chevron Texaco pulled out. This is a true David and Goliath story of a small group going up against a huge international corporation during a time of enormous profits and resources available to said corporation.

Shaye's graduate work (while a fellow) was also a large part of this since she looked at trans-boundary conservation issues of seabirds between the US and Mexico in this region.

In addition, my work as a Switzer Leadership Grant recipient in 1999 included surveying Xantus’s Murrelets in Mexico, which helped establish that Los Coronado Islands were the world’s largest colony of Xantus’s Murrelet and those data were used by me in presentations to Chevron Texaco warning them of the risks to the species from the proposed plant.

Lastly, my work as a Leadership Grant recipient in 2001 was to promote protected area status for islands of the Pacific coast of Baja California, of which Los Coronado is a part. We got Guadalupe Island declared a protected area in June 2005 and a petition to create a protected area for the remaining islands, of which Los Coronado is a part, has been accepted and it is expected to be declared in 2007 or 2008. This petition, along with the Mexican Congress’s decree that this area should be protected, was mentioned as one reasons against placing the proposed Chevron Texaco plant at Los Coronado Islands.

(An article on the Chevron deal was published in the San Diego Union Tribune at:

San Diego Union Tribune

Switzer Fellow Kathy Fallon Lambert (’91) recently completed a three-year mercury project with the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (HBRF) culminating in the publication of two papers in the journal BioScience. The papers, which were co-authored by a team of 8 scientists and featured as the cover story in the January 2007 issue, identified biological mercury hotspots and their causes in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Kathy also worked with HBRF to summarize the major findings in a companion report entitled, Mercury Matters: Linking Mercury Science with Public Policy in the Northeastern United States (see www.hubbardbrookfoundation.org).

The mercury papers and report are products of the HBRF Science Links program which Kathy helped develop in 2000 with the support of a Switzer Environmental Leadership grant. The purpose of the program is to distill and communicate ecosystem science from the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study to policy makers at the regional and national level.

To reach policy makers, Kathy provided media and communication training to her co-authors and organized a series of events to share the major findings and their implications for mercury emissions and trading from coal fired power plants. She coordinated a trip to Washington DC to release the findings at a press conference at the National Press Club and led briefings for staff members of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, House Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The release of the new mercury findings was covered by many media outlets including The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and National Public Radio Science Friday.
The research also prompted the reintroduction of a bill by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) calling for steep cuts in mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, as well as the introduction of new federal legislation to establish a National Mercury Monitoring Program. The Mercury Monitoring Bill is co-sponsored by Senators Clinton (D-NY) and Lieberman (R-CT) and the House version of the bill was recently introduced by Representative Tom Allen (D-ME) and James Walsh (R-NY).

In statements to the media, the importance of the HBRF results were widely cited.

Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton:
"The groundbreaking mercury study released earlier this year by researchers from…the Hubbard Brook Foundation clearly shows that there are mercury "hotspots," where levels of this dangerous neurotoxin are dramatically higher…The confirmation of these hotspots means that we cannot allow "trading" of mercury pollution from power plants, as the Administration has proposed in its "Clean Air Mercury Rule." We also need to do a much better job at measuring how mercury from air pollution accumulates in the environment, and that's what this legislation would do."

Senator Susan Collins:
The legislation follows up on new studies, by David Evers and Wing Goodale of the Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham, Maine, Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University, Kathleen Fallon Lambert of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation in Hanover, New Hampshire, and others, which were published in the January issue of BioScience. The studies demonstrate the existence of mercury hotspots in the northeastern United States and attribute much of the cause of the hotspots to power plant emissions. The studies conflict markedly with EPA's computer modeling data which was used to justify the EPA Clean Air Mercury Rule. For example, the studies showed that mercury deposition is five times higher than previously estimated by EPA near a coal plant in the vicinity of a biological mercury hotspot spanning southern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts. The studies demonstrate major flaws in the EPA Mercury Rule, and also demonstrate the need for real mercury measurements, instead of the computer model used by EPA.


In the coming months, Kathy will work with scientists from across the U.S. to promote the passage of the Mercury Monitoring Bill, and will collaborate with staff from several federal agencies develop an implementation plan for the national mercury monitoring network. For more information or to receive copies of the reports or bills, contact Kathy at kfl@ecosysteminfo.com.

Hubbard Brook Foundation

Daniel Orenstein's op-ed article on human settlement patterns in Israel was published in Ha'aretz Newspaper on March 25, 2007. For a link to the article online, please go to:

Ha'aretz Newspaper

Jessica Hall (2000), Ballona Creek Watershed Coordinator at the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission in L.A., was featured in a recent article in L.A. Weekly about her work with urban stream daylighting.

L.A. Weekly

Steve Chase, 2000 Switzer Fellow and Director of Antioch New England Graduate School's Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program, addressed a group of over 450 citizens in Keene, New Hampshire following an Antioch-sponsored showing of Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." Steve's remarks are summarized in a blog he has created called, "The Well-Trained Activist." Steve invites members of the Switzer community to contribute.

The Well-Trained Activist

Michael P. Wilson, 2002 Switzer Fellow and research scientist at UC Berkeley's Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, was the lead author on a report on setting a "green chemistry" policy for California. This report is the first in the nation to establish such a framework on a statewide level.

UC Berkeley press release

Palm trees, cultivated for their dates, can require an entire cubic meter of water per day, per tree

Water resource issues are important everywhere. Here in the Hudson Valley, adequate water has to be supplied to farmers, industries, residents, and a host of other users, including the natural ecosystem. Decisions about water resources in our watershed are not always easy, but imagine adding the complexities of intense, centuries-long conflict between users, an uneven distribution of water sources, and a lack of abundant water to begin with.

I recently returned from a two-week, NATO-sponsored Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on trans-boundary water resource management, hosted by the Arava Institute of Environmental Studies in Israel. The ASI, which included participants from 17 countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, concentrated on water management within and between Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan.

The alignment between water quality and water usage is much more immediate in the arid Middle East than in temperate North America. Who gets water and for what purposes become hyper-sensitive questions in the face of extreme scarcity. Across the Middle East, agriculture accounts for 60-90% of water usage. The cultural importance of growing food may lead to water subsidies costing much more than what agriculture pays back, even when conservation measures are rigidly employed.

In dry regions such as Israel’s Negev Desert, the best water is reserved for drinking, with progressively poorer quality used for animal husbandry, vegetable crops, and date palms. Even with efficient usage, it was hard to see herds of dairy cattle or fields of lettuce and not question this intensive drain of water in such an arid climate.

For regions up against the wall of water availability, desalination of sea-water is an attractive option. One of the more controversial programs in the region is the Red-Dead Canal or “Peace Conduit”, a massive engineering proposal to pump water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, where downhill energy production will power the desalination of 800 million cubic meters of water annually. Most of the “new” freshwater would be pumped to Amman, Jordan’s capital, and the briny leftovers used to halt the Dead Sea’s continued shrinking. The plan, a cooperative venture between Israel and Jordan, poses many questions, such as the role and voice of the Palestinian Authority (which also borders the Dead Sea), the risks of aquifer contamination through chronic leakage or acute spills, the cost-effectiveness of the proposal, and the ultimate environmental effects to both waterbodies and the watershed.

Editorial columns and recent books have claimed that future international wars, especially in the Middle East, will be fought not over oil or land, but over water rights. However, this ASI highlighted evidence that managing water resources has usually been a catalyst for peaceful cooperation between nations, not aggression. David Brooks of Friends of the Earth reported that an international conflict primarily over water hasn’t occurred in several millennia, in part because water is relatively cheap compared to the expense of wars, and partly because of the immediacy of solving water disputes sooner rather than later.

Cooperative water agreements between Israeli and Jordanian governments may be criticized, but the fact that the dialogue exists is a remarkable success in a shaky political arena. Even though political tensions hamper larger-scale water management in Israel and Palestine (they inequitably share a major aquifer), small-scale but significant progress in trans-boundary water monitoring continues between the Arava Institute of Israel and the Water and Development Organization of the Palestinian Authority.

Ultimately, water resources in this region probably won’t be solved without political stability. In the meantime, cooperative management of the Middle East’s most precious resource – water – will hopefully strengthen the peace process, rather than widen the chasms of conflict.


Chris Bowser is a researcher with the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve, an Adjunct Instructor at Marist College, and a recipient of a Switzer Environmental Fellowship.

The idea for Hope For Women (HFW) began in a small village in the Indian Himalayas in 1993. At that time Evan Goldsmith was working with a local non-profit group devoted to women’s development and environmental issues. He noticed a missing opportunity.
Evan watched a group of trained artisan women working long days crafting beautiful handmade note cards and envelopes using flowers and other plants that grew locally in the mountains and valleys of the Himalayas. However, after one large order, the women had no access to sustainable markets to sell their cards. They received small financial rewards for their efforts and neither they nor their families could take advantage of the valuable skills they had acquired. “It was disheartening and unfortunately a not-so-unusual example of how ‘development’ happens,” said Evan. “In this case, a foreign funding source provided money and training to develop cards for the upcoming holiday season. They then placed a large order for that year but they lacked funding or plans for any subsequent orders, or for helping develop new markets for the cards. A classic one and done.”

The result was a group of highly skilled artisan women with no means to market their products. Their skills lay dormant and they returned to subsistence agriculture. Years after returning from India, Evan maintained strong ties to the area through multiple return visits and close relationships. He realized that the opportunity to utilize the women’s skills and their desire for stable employment was still fresh. He started Hope For Women in 2001 to market their products via an e-commerce website.

“I started Hope For Women after working with and becoming deeply connected with the people of the Garhwal region of Uttaranchal, India. In order to get at the roots of poverty, health and environmental sustainability I worked on a project that focused primarily on women, since they had the greatest ability to make a positive impact on these issues.” Due to the high rate of male migration to New Delhi, the women of this region are in control of food production and intake, their children’s education and health, and their communities’ impact on local resources. However, due to cultural realities, they are not the primary decision makers in the households. “This leads to very differently defined needs based on who you ask,” said Evan. “A good example is one of the meetings we held with some of the men who returned home from New Delhi for a visit. We asked what they felt was needed to improve development in their village and they replied that more water buffalo would be the answer since they could sell surplus milk for a profit. When we spoke to the women they shook their heads knowing that more buffalo translated into much more labor for them, since to feed a buffalo requires harvesting oak leaves from the forest – in many cases 2-3 km away. Collecting animal fodder is time consuming, exhausting and contributes greatly to deforestation in the already stressed forests. More buffalo were not the answer – the women clearly knew that.”

Instead of more buffalo the women wanted to develop ways to get access to LPG stoves so that they could spend less time harvesting wood for fuel and more time on food production and village improvements. They also recognized the clear environmental benefit that would result from reducing the amount of fuel wood they were collecting. They suggested growing high value crops such as garlic and ginger that they could store and sell during times of low supply in order to gain the highest profits for their efforts. From the profits they could purchase LPG gas. In addition, the women hoped to use the money to buy rice. This would eliminate some of their rice paddy production, an extremely labor and resource intensive endeavor.

Both the men and the women had the same goal of developing a cash source in the village, but they had very different ways of getting there. After much discussion the men agreed to the alternative cash crop strategy.

“It was clear that women were doing 95% of the work and had the best understanding of the relationships between the village and the local resources – so that when it came time to talk meaningful development strategies we knew we had to go to the women.”

Hope For Women looks to expand on Evan’s experiences working with women’s groups and co-operatives. The company is dedicated to creating stable employment for economically disadvantaged women by providing an international market for their premier quality handmade products. “I am thrilled to be focusing all of my time and effort on this important work,” said Evan. “Our goal is to give consumers an affordable choice that will not only be a high-quality, desirable item, but will also provide great benefits to the women who produce the goods – a real win-win.”

The fair trade movement is picking up steam in the U.S. and Hope For Women hopes to capitalize on the growing market of consumers that want to do good. “People want to do ‘the right thing’ and fair trade provides an easy way to do so in their everyday purchases. What makes Hope For Women different is that we work only with women producers, and we try to keep prices competitive with conventional items so that the consumer will have no reason to choose another brand.”

Currently, Hope For Women works with 3 different co-operatives in India that produce 4 different lines of note cards with over 75 card faces. They are exploring other products within India and have established relations with two South African groups.

The for-profit Hope For Women has an innovative for-profit/non-profit relationship model that it hopes to expand to other countries. “Right now we are in the process of creating the Hope For Women India Trust,” said Evan, “a non-profit group within India that can function on a peer to peer basis with our current NGO partners. In addition, it will allow us to be better able to put into practice our social programs that are at the heart of the company by having the women producers work directly with the Trust. When I last met with the women all of them expressed a desire to have this relationship since as artisans they would be working directly with the company that is selling their goods thereby providing them with more control and a greater profit.”

Currently Hope For Women operates under fair trade principles by ensuring the women a clean and safe work environment, providing above market-rate wages, giving payment in advance for their goods, involving the women producers in the decision-making process, following environmentally sustainable production practices, and offering a portable profit-sharing program. Goldsmith states, “As we move forward we have plans to offer health care and child care, provide entrepreneurial development training for women who want to branch out and start their own business, create a sponsored education program, and provide upward mobility opportunities via management level positions. Many of these benefits are extremely rare or not available in India, but for us are key parts of who we want to be as a company. ” The company was recently certified as a member of the Fair Trade Federation.

Hope For Women is getting ready to launch their four lines of note cards in retail stores, thereby expanding its market from its current e-commerce base. “We are starting small with our one product – note cards – and are looking to expand with other products and other countries. For us right now small is good. I have a deeply rooted relationship with the women who produce our products and that is my motivation to build this business and carry it forward. Hopefully our partnership will translate into real change in these women’s lives and have a long-lasting impact that will allow them greater opportunities for them and their families.”

Phenomena & Curiosities: Return of the Jaguar

Novel camera traps have documented the elusive cat in Arizona, suggesting it may not be gone from the United States after all

The paw print, judging from the size of it, was left by a large cat just a day or two earlier. Emil McCain kneels over it in the sandy bottom of an Arizona canyon a mile from the U.S.-Mexico border. "This isn't a mountain lion track," McCain says, shaking his head after measuring and then tracing it onto a piece of plexiglass.

The print is huge, four-toed and without claws, like that of a large mountain lion. But the heel pad is too big for a mountain lion, the toes too close to the back pad.

We follow the cat's trail below camel-colored rimrock and live oaks to where it passes an automated camera. For the past year, McCain has operated nearly 30 heat-triggered cameras in these remote mountains that connect the U.S. borderlands to Mexico's northernmost Sierra Madre. When the film is developed days later, McCain's instincts are proved correct. The cat isn't a mountain lion—it's a jaguar, low slung and powerful, moving past yucca and volcanic rock, its eyes reflecting gold in the camera's flash.

For four years, camera traps operated by the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project, based in Amado, Arizona, have documented two jaguars in these high, arid washes. They may have caught a third animal on film—the cat appears differently patterned than the others. If it is a female, it would be the first one known in the United States in 40 years. It's possible the cats were here all along, unnoticed, or they may be visitors from Mexico. It's also possible that jaguars are returning to—and breeding in—the United States.

The jaguar's range historically extended from northeastern Argentina through Brazil, Central America and Mexico, and followed the mountains along Mexico's Pacific and gulf coasts into Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. But the animals lost ground in the past century. In 1963, a hunter in Arizona's White Mountains shot a female, the last of her sex to be documented in the United States. Two years later, the last legally killed jaguar, a male, was taken by a deer hunter in the Patagonia Mountains, south of Tucson.

In 1969, Arizona outlawed most jaguar hunting, but with no females known to be at large, there was little hope the population could rebound. During the next 25 years, only two jaguars were documented in the United States, both killed: a large male shot in 1971 near the Santa Cruz River by two teenage duck hunters, and another male cornered by hounds in the Dos Cabezas Mountains in 1986.

The animals' prospects brightened in 1996, when Warner Glenn, a rancher and hunting guide from Douglas, Arizona, came across a jaguar in the Peloncillo Mountains of southeastern Arizona. Catching the jaguar on a ledge, Glenn snapped a few pictures, pulled back his hounds and allowed the animal to stride away. Six months later and 150 miles to the west, Tucson houndsmen Jack Childs and Matt Colvin treed a second jaguar near the reservation of the Tohono O’odham Nation. The cat, about 150 pounds and groggy from feeding, allowed himself to be videotaped for an hour.

Not long after Childs' surprise encounter, the hunter became a jaguar researcher, even traveling to Brazil's Pantanal wilderness to study the cats. In 1999, he began placing remote cameras in Arizona where jaguars had been seen in the past. By December 2001, he had his first jaguar photograph: a male weighing between 130 and 150 pounds and later dubbed Macho A. The jaguar looked healthy, well fed and heavily built, with a broad, wide skull that flowed back to a torso shaped like a cylinder of muscle. Macho A turned up on film in August 2003, and again in September 2004. Childs and McCain have since picked up a second male, Macho B, and possibly a third animal.

Experts disagree about what the photographs signify. Alan Rabinowitz of the Wildlife Conservation Society says the animals may merely be dispersing from a dwindling population in Sonora, Mexico, about 130 miles south of Douglas, Arizona. "I think that the [Sonora] population is in serious trouble, and we're almost seeing it act like an organism reaching out and trying its hardest to survive in any way possible." But some of the photographs suggest otherwise. Macho B's canine teeth are yellow and worn, indicating that the cat is 4 to 6 years old, well past the age when he would leave his home turf, McCain says. And if the third camera-trap sighting is of a female jaguar, there's a chance the animals are mating. Craig Miller, a conservationist at Defenders of Wildlife, is hopeful that the U.S. population might recover. "For every one of those jaguars photographed, it could represent two or three more in adjacent habitat," he says.

In March 2003, a Mexico City-based conservation organization called Naturalia purchased a 10,000-acre ranch in Sonora to serve as the core of a private jaguar reserve. Mexican president Vicente Fox proclaimed 2005 the year of the jaguar, and an international convention was held in October on management of the cat.

One rainy day back in the 100-square-mile study area in southeastern Arizona, McCain and I journey to the largest canyon in the mountains. The cameras here have generated 12 photographs of Macho A and Macho B. Two elegant trogons, parrot-like birds whose range is similar to that of the jaguar, call from steep walls. "This site changed the way we think about jaguars in the Southwest," McCain says as he changes the batteries in a camera. "More jaguar photographs have been taken at this spot than in all of the Southwest since the 1950s. This site alone shows these animals are not transients."

December 2005 Smithsonian Magazine

Saludos Amigos,

From where I'm writing, I can hear salsa music blaring from the street below me, it feels like the heat and humidity are turned up to max, and somewhere in the distance roosters are crowing. Women braid each other's hair on the balcony of the house across the street, and a canoe just pulled up to unload a shipment of chickens. It's a typical day in Borbon, the town of about 5,000 people in northern coastal Ecuador that serves as the base of operations for my dissertation fieldwork.

Berkeley Science Review

BEALS ISLAND — While most commercially harvested fish species are in trouble, lobsters have confounded scientists with their remarkable abundance. Lobster catches over the past 14 years have been double or triple the size of the typical landings between 1950 and 1990. Which raises the question: If there are so many wild lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, why is Brian Beal trying to raise them in hatcheries?

Some people believe Beal's efforts are both silly and unnecessary. But Beal, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine-Machias, contends that Maine's fishing industry has become dangerously dependent on lobsters, which last year accounted for 71 percent of the total commercial harvest in Maine.

If the lobster population should plummet, as it did in 2000 in Long Island Sound, Maine's coastal communities would be hit hard, he said, especially in Washington County, where the groundfish industry has vanished.

"You can look this as Plan B," he said of his research. "You hope you never need a lobster hatchery, but what if you do?"

A lobster hatchery is not a new idea. The earliest American hatchery was established in 1883 in Woods Hole, Mass., where eggs were detached from females and placed in jars. Between 1951 and 1997, researchers at a Martha's Vineyard hatchery produced about 50,000 juvenile lobsters for release every year.

Between 1986 and 1992, the Maine Department of Marine Resources used funds from lobster license fees to set up an experimental hatchery in Cutler. Beal, who was a consultant in that project, helped create a new culture system in which air bubbles and an oversupply of food were pumped into the tanks filled with mosquito-sized lobsters. The bubbles and the food (live brine shrimp) kept the lobsters from eating one another, their usual behavior in captivity. The method dramatically increased the juvenile survival rates.

Using Beal's research, fishermen in Stonington are now turning a building on the waterfront into a commercial lobster hatchery. They plan to stock local waters with as many as 150,00 juvenile lobsters a year.

Beal said researchers have mastered the art of raising "stage 4" juveniles, which look like adults but are the size of a penny. The problem is that raising them to a larger size in a land-based hatchery is not economically feasible.

Moreover, Beal said, nobody knows how many juvenile lobsters survive to become legal-sized adults when they are set free in the ocean. Without that knowledge, he said, it's impossible to calculate whether a hatchery would ever make economic sense.

The only feasible way to find out, he said, is to tag the juvenile lobsters, which is only possible when they are about 5 inches long.

So that's Beal's mission these days: Find a way to grow the penny-sized lobsters into cellular-phone-sized lobsters in a contained environment in the ocean.

He raises the lobsters to penny size, feeding them live brine shrimp, at the Downeast Institute for Applied Marine Research and Education on Beals Island. Then he puts them in the ocean to see how much they will grow on their own.

Last year, Beal put the lobsters in 10-ounce plastic juice bottles and petri dishes. The bottles had holes in them, and the dishes had bigger holes covered with a nylon window screen.

The lobsters feed on the "fouling community," the seaweed and juvenile clams, mussels, starfish and other creatures that collect on anything immersed in the ocean for any length of time.

He put one lobster in each container so they wouldn't eat one another. He put them in the ocean late last summer and took them out in July.

Most survived, he said, but they were unusually small. He speculates that the small containers hindered the lobsters' growth, the same phenomenon that keeps goldfish from growing too much in their small fish bowls.

So this year, he developed larger containers. He used plastic milk jugs he collected at the Machias Transfer Center. He cut large openings in the sides of each container and glued nylon window screening over the opening, and put one penny-sized lobster in each container. Some are gallon-sized, some are half-gallon. Some are empty, and some have shells in them.

Over a period of several days in late August, Beal loaded his milk jugs on a lobster boat and tossed them overboard off Beals Island. In all, he immersed 400 bottles on 20 lines. A piece of cement anchors each to the bottom, and the milk jugs float 10 feet below the surface.

They will remain there until Beal retrieves them early next summer.

STUDYING HIS HOME TURF

Beal, 47, grew up in Jonesport and is related to Manwaring Beal, an early settler after whom the island is named. He grew up lobstering and clamming with his grandfather, and his father and father-in-law are lobster buyers. He said he enjoys working on science that can have an impact on a fishery that has been so important to his family.

Elmer Beal, a 77-year-old lobsterman from Beals Island, said he was a skeptic a year ago when he helped Brian Beal toss over the petri dishes and juice bottles. But he said he became convinced of the project's value in July when he saw that 90 percent of the lobsters survived.

Now, Elmer Beal and his daughter Joan Beal - neither is related to Brian Beal - keep a pet juvenile lobster named "Juniper" in a Purex bottle on the boat.

Elmer Beal said a lobster hatchery could someday help the industry, but many fishermen dismiss it.

"It could do the fishermen a lot of good, if it wasn't talked down," he said.

Aug. 26 was the last day this summer that Brian Beal tossed his milk jugs into the ocean. As Beal, his 11-year-old son Caleb and UMM student Teri Dane worked with the bottles and anchors, Elmer Beal worked at the helm and chatted with other lobstermen on his marine radio.

Over the air waves came the voice of Ordman Alley, a Beals Island fisherman, who joked that the Beals were wasting their time.

"We got a natural aquarium here. The fishermen are taking care of it," Alley said. "I don't think we need help."

But Elmer Beal shot back: "What are you going to say when there are a thousand lobsters crawling around here?"

Meanwhile, Brain Beal focused on getting his milk jugs in the water without tangling up the lines.

"It doesn't matter if anyone's a skeptic or not," he said. "It won't bother me."

Eventually, he said, he'll find out whether lobster hatcheries are worth doing. If it is not worth the investment, he said, then his research will save the state a lot of money.

"The moment we find out it's not worth doing, we'll put it away," he said.

Staff Writer Tom Bell can be contacted at 791-6369 or at:

tbell@pressherald.com

Portland Press Herald article

As the first Americans strolled onto their open real estate 13,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, their continent quickly lost much of its grandeur. More than 60 North American species weighing over 100 pounds went extinct, including the continent's own elephants, lions, camels, and cheetahs. The cause was likely overhunting; the result was elephants trotting in the circus ring rather than roaming the land. Meanwhile, most of the Earth's remaining large wild animals in Africa and Asia are threatened with extinction in the coming century. (Read the entirety of Josh's article on Slate.com by following the link below....)

Slate.com

Keeping the lights on involves more than just electricity transmission and power generation. Increasingly, power companies are addressing community and social interests in addition to environmental issues with respect to the operations and management of their facilities. Growing concern that people of color and low-income communities may bear a disproportionate burden of exposure to pollutants and environmental degradation is generating increasing attention to “environmental justice” or “EJ” issues.

For the past four years, Holly Welles has been immersed in a variety of EJ issues for Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). Her work has involved developing EJ criteria and checklists to guide review of facilities and projects and developing “good neighbor” metrics. Holly’s PhD in environmental dispute resolution and public involvement has been tested over the last few years helping the company work in San Francisco with Bayview - Hunters Point community leaders to develop a Hunters Point Power Plant closure plan that State power grid regulators could endorse. The power grid regulators have been reluctant to release PG&E from a legally mandated contract requiring PG&E to run the plant until replacement energy could be found to supply the city and county of San Francisco. Through creative planning and energy efficiency initiatives, PG&E partnered with numerous stakeholders to obtain approval on specific projects that must be completed in order to close the Plant. PG&E is working to complete nine transmission projects with the goal of shutting the plant down in mid-2006. In the meantime, upgrades to the plant helped reduce nitrogen oxide emissions and several of the on-site fuel tanks have been dismantled and recycled. Along the way, Holly spearheaded the development of a company-wide EJ policy, placing PG&E as the first energy company to commit to conducting its operations in a manner consistent with EJ principles. Holly now heads the Environmental Policy Group along with managing the EJ Program at PG&E and expects new challenges as the field of energy development and regulation in California grows ever more complex. Check PG&E’s website for details of their environmental and corporate responsibility reports and related information: http://www.pge.com/about_us/

Like the interior of a sealed adobe oven, the early morning air smothers us as we search in vain for the elusive Honduran Emerald hummingbird. Organ pipe cacti, acacia trees, and thorn scrub sit in chaotic patches, covered with epiphytes, dead branches, and bird nests- the entire mess sporadically adorned with red flowers. Our guides suddenly hunch, pointing to a nearby flower, cupping their ears to amplify the tickling buzz.

The Honduran Emerald (Amazilia luciae) holds promise for the local population to benefit from low-impact ecotourism, but the hummingbird's future is tenuous at best. Endemic to Honduras, its habitat is restricted to the Aguán River Valley, in an arid rain shadow on the southern side of Pico Bonito National Park. Its de facto island home shrinks every day- less than eight square miles at two separate sites-putting it near the top of the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) Red List as a critically endangered species. The next step is extinction.

I didn't expect a DRCLAS internship grant to put me on the trail of an elusive hummingbird. I wasn't alone in the search though. Alex, my Colombian brother-in-law, accompanies me to capture footage for a documentary film. Our mission is to compare the various organizations and landscapes we're visiting within the region -from Guatemala to Honduras to Belize. José Luis, an extension worker from FUPNAPIB, the Pico Bonito National Park Foundation, also accompanies us. Above all, we have some expert help in the form of local guides, former workers for the Standard Fruit Company.

As an intern for the Cambridge-based EcoLogic Development Fund, I'd already learned that nongovernmental entities are all that stand between conservation and destruction of biodiversity hotspots throughout Honduras because of government inaction and lack of funding. FUPNAPIB, one of many Central American conservation organizations funded by EcoLogic, strives to breach the gap. Sustainability and impact are exactly what I've been thinking about all summer-trying to craft a simple and generally applicable system of indicators to measure impact across EcoLogic's beneficiary organizations in the broad areas of conservation, human livelihoods and institutional sustainability.

My mind is wandering toward the theoretical as we follow our guides. Suddenly, we spot the hummingbird. It is flying at highspeed, constantly reversing direction, zooming in and out of view as it bounces chaotically between flowers. Its chest and throat are a dull blue-green, but when it flashes its shiny green back feathers it is easy to see why the common name in Spanish is "Diamond Collar." But capturing its brilliance with our eyes is the easy part. The next challenge we face is trapping its image on film.

I stare at the tiny bird. I try to conceptualize the linkages between this one hum mingbird, one little feature of a complex mosaic of human-landscape interactions in and around a single national park, in one small corner of Central America.

This corner of the world's nearest town is a dusty outpost named Olanchito. Unlike the humid and hopping town of Ceiba that sits between the park's northern entrances and the Caribbean, Olanchito is relatively unknown to foreign tourists, as is its dry forest habitat.

FUPNAPIB has trained guides to lead the occasional tourist to this secluded spot, post signs and help construct park trails. Our two guides, Roque and Freddy, have chosen this work over the nearby banana and pineapple plantations despite not receiving paychecks for almost nine months. On the previous night's drive from Ceiba to Olanchito, Gerardo, the high-energy, supremely dedicated FUPNAPIB director, observed how grateful he is for EcoLogic's sensitivity to the fact that his foundation is absolutely dependent on outside funding, usually granted in short spurts for targeted projects rather than administrative overhead.

Meanwhile, his workers live from hand to mouth, eking out a daily existence. The government may soon pave Olanchito's potholeladen dirt road, enabling better transport of produce and labor, but multiplying the direct pressures on the Emerald hummingbird's tiny habitat. It is a constant balancing act between nature and development.

Besides complaining about this shortterm funding dependence, Gerardo is also furious at environmentalists who, in his view, don't always get the connection between livelihoods and conservation. He derides "preservationists" for idealizing nature and forgetting about human and economic development needs. But FUPNAPIB's most obvious mission -managing a national park- intersects preservation, restoration, and human development.

Now, however, all attention is focused on the tiny bird, rather than environmental philosophy. Roque and Freddy dive into the thorny scrub, and Alex scoots in after them, determined to film the bird that has brought us all here. The thorns scratch and tear at their skin, but they find a place to wait patiently for the Emerald. In the end, Alex does capture the bird on film, if only for a fleeting moment.

ReVista Winter 2005 article

Times photo by Douglas Clifford

TARPON SPRINGS - Bruce Rinker is more of a saunterer than a hiker. Hikers usually have a destination in mind, but saunterers take their time. The trip - the saunter - is often more important than reaching the finish line.

Rinker, 49, is the new manager of Pinellas County's Environmental Lands Division. His office is at the Brooker Creek Preserve. Brooker Creek's 8,000 acres are a wonderful place to saunter, though if you want to hike instead, be Rinker's guest.

"Wild turkeys," he says. In the holiday spirit, a flock crosses the road in front of him. "If you slow down," Rinker says, "you tend to see more. If you plow ahead too fast, you scare the critters away."

Brooker Creek is as far north, and as far east, as one can go in the state's most urban county. It is also the last place in Pinellas where it is possible to encounter bobcats, wild turkeys and whitetail deer. If some wayward bear or Florida panther shows up in the distant future, Rinker won't be surprised. Brooker Creek offers genuine wilderness.

He will be surprised, however, to discover bird-eating tarantulas, vampire catfish and hungry bot flies.

Surprised, and maybe a tad disappointed.

Swimming with piranha
A burly guy with a beard and an Indiana Jones twinkle in his dark eyes, Rinker looks like he might have recently parachuted into Pinellas from the Amazon. In fact, that's close to the truth.

He is probably the only person who drives to work with a nice set of piranha jaws next to his gear shift.

"We were swimming with a school of them in the Amazon," he explains. "A fisherman came up in a canoe and started catching them right next to we swimmers. I borrowed a pole and caught a big one on a piece of raw chicken. The fisherman cleaned and cooked it for me. Piranhas are a tasty fish. Nice, white meat."

Aren't piranhas known for sampling the tasty, tender flesh of American turistas?

"No, it's mostly a movie myth. There are all kinds of piranha, including some that eat only figs. I would stay out of the water during droughts, though. Then there are some piranha that are concentrated in these little ponds. They tend to be very hungry and aggressive. You wouldn't want to go for a swim if you were bleeding or menstruating."

He stops in his tracks.

"Listen to that!"

Sadly, it's not the horrified shriek of a swimmer, but something just as cool. A red-shouldered hawk is crying above the cypress forest of Brooker Creek.

"Lots of my friends are bewildered that I'm working in Pinellas County," says Rinker, who began his job in August. "They say, "You're an Amazon guy. How can you work in an urban county?' I'd love to have my friends trail me for a while and see everything that I see."

Along came a spider
Rinker suffers from acrophobia. Being afraid of heights, however, did not scare him away from studying life in the Amazon treetops. He earned his doctorate from Antioch New England Graduate School by studying the effects of canopy herbivory on soil microarthropods in a tropical rain forest. In lay terms, he studied leaf-eating bugs, 16,472 of them, according to his dissertation.

Industrious insects treat treetops like a Brooklyn deli. They eat lots of leaves, but like a baby in a high chair, they don't retain every bite. Leaf chunks, and later insect excretions, fall to the forest floor. This "manna from the treetops," as Rinker calls it, becomes chow to countless other insects that live on the ground floor. Without the vittles, they'd go hungry. They'd be unable to perform their jobs, maintaining the health of the soil. Without insects, a tree-canopy guy will argue, there would be no Amazon forest.

Studying leaf-eating bugs involves climbing trees. Trees in the Amazon are amazonian. Climbing one requires steady nerves, ropes and sometimes even a hot-air balloon. Rinker learned to climb slowly and not think too much.

Of course, sometimes even an acrophobe gets lucky, like during the rainy season, when the forest floods. Then it is possible to paddle a canoe through the treetops.

What is good for an acrophobe, however, can be bad fortune for the explorer who suffers from arachnophobia. The largest spider in the world, found in the Amazon, is the Goliath bird-eating tarantula. A baby Goliath is about 8 inches across. In his office, Rinker has such a baby, deceased and displayed in a paperweight. A grownup, by the way, can measure 11 inches across, has 1-inch fangs and hisses.

Now, it doesn't hiss when climbing a tree and sneaking up on a nest of birds. It prefers stealth. Pouncing, it catches a young bird and injects digestive juices. The juices melt the insides of the bird, and the tarantula slurps the avian milkshake.

Rinker, it turns out, is more afraid of heights than bird-eating tarantulas. But that was untrue of the graduate student who sat in the bow of Rinker's canoe during an Amazon expedition. There they were, paddling through the treetops, knocking branches aside as they traveled along, when Rinker stopped paddling.

"Josh," he told his spider-fearing friend. "I hate to tell you this, but you have a bird-eating tarantula on your back."

Josh remained still long enough for Rinker to brush it off. Only then could Josh do what he longed to do: scream hysterically.

Bruce Rinker misses the Amazon.

Predatory tales
He also misses Virginia, his birthplace, where he once snacked on robust apples. But he likes oranges, too, and other Florida flora and fauna. "Look at this duckweed," he says, hunkering next to a pond. "You know what Emerson said about weeds, don't you? He said, "There are plants whose virtues are yet to be discovered.' "

Duckweed is the smallest flowering weed in Florida. Feeding in a pond, ducks get duckweed stuck to their legs. At the next pond, the weeds drop off. Ducks spread duckweed.

There are miles of trail at Brooker Creek, so many miles, so many pines, so many cypress, so many ponds and creeks, that it might be the only place in the Tampa Bay area where a saunterer can truly become lost. For Rinker, the idea of getting lost in the most urban county is actually pleasant. Then again, he also loves rattlesnakes, moccasins and alligators. In his opinion, predators are what put the "wild" in wilderness.

"This is perfect shrike territory," he says, sauntering among the pines. "Loggerhead shrikes are a predatory songbird, for heaven's sake. A friend of mine saw one grab a titmouse, puncture its skull and fly off with it! Isn't that something? Isn't that amazing? People tell me we don't have dinosaurs anymore, but we do. They just got smaller and evolved feathers."

He is fond of winged creatures, even biting ones. In the summer, Brooker Creek is a fine place to cultivate mosquito bites.

Worse things in life than a little old mosquito bite.

"In the cloud forests of Ecuador, there is something called the bot fly. The bot fly is a very big fly with hairy legs. They catch female mosquitoes with those hairy legs and glue their eggs to the mosquito. When the mosquito bites, the eggs of the bot fly are deposited on the victim."

When Rinker returned to the United States from such a cloud-forest expedition in 1988, he noticed a nasty lesion on his wrist. One night he felt something alive - something alive under the bandage, inside of him.

"I took off the bandage and saw what looked like a tiny snorkel coming out of the wound."

A tiny snorkel emerging from a wound would alarm most of us. But Rinker knew something about bot flies. For example, he knew he shouldn't yank it out. The only thing worse than having a bot fly inside of you is having half a bot fly. A broken bot fly, oozing body fluids, can cause serious infection.

"Luckily, I'd just come back from the butcher with a nice piece of sirloin for dinner. I cut off a little piece of the steak and strapped it to my wrist with gauze. A few hours later - actually, about 12 hours later - I felt some movement. The bot fly larvae had traveled from my wrist into the steak.

"Great for dinner conversation!"

Rinker keeps a picnic basket in the corner of his Brooker Creek office. For heaven's sake, don't ask him for a peek, because there are no bottles of wine or hunks of cheese in it.

Okay. Ask for a peek if you dare.

In the basket are souvenirs from the Amazon, including the little bottle containing his pickled bot fly.

And that other bottle? What's that floating inside?

"Oh, that's a candiru."

Anacondas and deadly fer-de-lance snakes and piranhas and bird-eating tarantulas get all the glory, but the candiru, or vampire catfish, is probably the most feared creature in the Amazon.

"I caught this beastie in a dip net," he says. "It had been one of my life goals to have one."

The candiru in his basket looks like nothing out of a horror movie. It is about an inch long and hardly thicker than a strand of spaghetti.

"Candirus feed for the most part on the blood of fish. They'll swim into the gills, throw out their spines to get secure and start feeding."

A candiru's philosophy might be described as "any port in a storm."

"They feed on more than fish. For example, you don't want to go skinny dipping in candiru habitat. If you are skinny-dipping, you definitely don't want to urinate in the water."

A nearby candiru, feeling the warmth and the flow of the urine, might come investigating. They aren't the smartest fish in the jungle and make mistakes. Looking for a fish's delicious gills, they sometimes end up swimming up the urinary tracts of human skinny dippers. Once a candiru is in place, spines erected, it can't back out.

"It's supposed to be excruciatingly painful beyond belief," says Rinker, standing outside his office at Brooker Creek. "In fact, there are actually a few documented cases of men taking the most extreme measures to end their misery. They use machetes."

In the fading light, on the other side of the parking lot, something moves through the gloom of Brooker Creek.

"Cool!" says Bruce Rinker. "It's a deer."

-- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

-- Brooker Creek Preserve is open for hiking dawn to dusk daily at the Lora Lane entrance off Keystone Road. The preserve's environmental education center and gift shop, at 3940 Keystone Road, are open from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. 727 453-6800; www.pinellascounty.org/environment

St. Petersburg Times article

Jaguar photographed with remote motion-sensing camera (Emil McCain)

Emil McCain, 2004 Switzer Fellow and graduate student at Humboldt State University in California, made a fantastic discovery
in the wildlife world recently. Emil photographed at least two different wild jaguars in the remote mountains along the Arizona / Mexico Border. This rare cat was thought to have been extinct in the U.S. since the middle of last century. The pictures Emil took really spark
hope for the majestic cat in the Southwest. The story has made news throughout the Southwest and will play a key role in future land management decisions. See news articles at:

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=1019

and

http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/44062.php

Arizona Game & Fish News

After earning a master's degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1990, Elena McCarthy (2001) worked at an undersea research center in Italy where she stumbled upon a problem that needed addressing.
"Some whales in the Mediterranean were thought to have been killed by military sonar, but the sonar was American, it was deployed by a NATO ship flying a German flag, and the whales washed up on the coast of Greece. I realized that there aren't any international laws or regulations governing the impact of ocean noises," said McCarthy, a Jamestown, Rhode Island native currently living in Italy.
So she returned to URI to learn more about maritime law and marine policy on her way to earning a Ph.D. in Marine Affairs under the guidance of Professor Lawrence Juda. Her dissertation, International Regulation of Underwater Sound: Establishing Rules and Standards to Address Ocean Noise Pollution, was published in book form last month, and it's one of the first books to assess and recommend marine policies related to man-made ocean noise.
According to McCarthy, noises in the ocean come from myriad sources—among them, sonars, shipping, oil and gas exploration, and coastal construction. These sounds can travel thousands of miles in the water, making regulation by any one nation ineffective, since noises made in the coastal waters of one country can easily impact the marine life of other countries.
"We know these noises affect marine mammals, either physiologically or (behaviorally). The animals may change their migration path or the noise may interfere with their communication. Moreover, noise could potentially affect the whole ecosystem -- fish, krill, shrimp -- not just mammals. If you disturb the krill you're disturbing the whole food chain," she said.
So McCarthy devised a variety of recommendations aimed at reducing noise pollution in the oceans and addressing its impacts.
"In some cases, establishing marine protected areas will help protect wildlife. Technological solutions, like ship quieting, can also be effective," said McCarthy, whose research was funded in part by a fellowship from the Switzer Foundation. "The primary idea I put forward is to use zoning regulations like we have on land."
McCarthy said that many communities regulate noise in neighborhoods at a certain decibel level after 10 p.m., for instance. She advocates that similar regulations could be enacted in certain regions of the ocean at particular times of the year.
"This idea needs to be addressed by the international community," she said.
McCarthy is doing what she can to get the attention of government officials and regulators. She spoke at a symposium on the effect of shipping noise on marine mammals in May and will speak at an international meeting of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission in London this month. Her ideas are also being discussed by the International Whaling Commission and other international conservation organizations.
While she expects to continue advocating for this issue while working in Italy, she plans to eventually move back to Jamestown and teach.
"This is a significant issue, and URI is the one of the few places that's really looked at it," she said.

Lauren Hertel having a MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) on a tank at Fort Irwin

2003 Fellow Lauren Hertel is currently working on her master's degree in Journalism at UC Berkeley after recently completing her master's in City and Regional Planning at Berkeley. Lauren's career goals include working to educate people about city planning issues and sustainability via the news media. Recently Lauren spent the month of June at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert training with the U. S. Army as an embedded reporter. Lauren undertook this rather unusual training opportunity because she believes that the most important movements affecting city planning and sustainability today are not happening in Chicago, Dallas, or New York, but in third-world and developing cities (Bombay, Seoul, Jakarta, Mexico City). With many of these cities experiencing the civil unrest that often accompanies large population booms, Lauren chose to do her embedded military training now so she could take on greater reporting challenges in the future.

Rafe Sagarin (2000 Fellow)

I recently took part in a voyage to retrace John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts' 1940 expedition to the Sea of Cortez. The expedition, organized by writer Jon Christensen from San Jose State, and William Gilly from Hopkins Marine Station, took us to tidepool sites in Mexico's Sea of Cortez on an old fishing boat called the "Gus D" (photo attached) that looked remarkably like the "Western Flyer" that took Steinbeck and Ricketts. We also benefitted from the donation of 70 cases of beer by North Coast Brewing Company, which
made the beer famously consumed during the original voyage. We hope to make comparisons of tidepool life between our journey and the earlier expedition. With help from a Switzer Professional Development Grant, I will present these results at a special session at the Society for Conservation Biology meeting in New York City in July.

Cover of 'Forest Canopies'

In August 2004, Elsevier Press in San Diego, CA will publish the second and completely revised edition of Forest Canopies, co-edited by Drs. Margaret D. Lowman and H. Bruce Rinker (the latter a 2000 Switzer Fellow). The full-color book will include contributions from Thomas E. Lovejoy, Lynn Margulis, E.O. Wilson, David Dilcer, and nearly 60 other colleagues from around the world, all focused on the ecology and evolution of temperate and tropical forest canopies. The book has been described as, "a splendid resource for professors, students, ecologists, resource managers, and others interested in the conservation of our woodland treasures, this book is a major contribution to an emerging science."

Cypress seedlings (photo by Ali Ansary)

Tecate cypress (Cupressus forbesii) is a southern California native tree species listed as rare by the California Native Plant Society. Known populations are on Guatay Mountain, Otay Mountain, and Tecate Peak in San Diego County, and Coal Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountain of Orange County (Dunn 1987; Little 1975; USDA 2004). Tecate cypress is adapted to natural fires. It has serotinous cones (cones that do not open and release their seeds until they are burned) and its tiny seedlings will not survive unless the brush and grasses have been reduced to ash by the fire. However, the human-induced changes in fire frequency in southern California (total suppression of natural fires in some areas and increasing accidental or arson fires in other areas) have created potential problems for the Tecate cypress (Dunn 1987).

Dr. de Gouvenain and Ali Ansary, a Chapman University undergraduate biology major student collected demographic data and tree cores to get a current picture of what was happening with the Tecate cypress, and in particular to determine whether some populations were declining, as Dunn (1987) suggested 25 years ago. Using dendrochronological data, demographic data and published survivorship data, they constructed a population matrix model to determine the intrinsic rate of cypress population growth (lambda) and project whether cypress populations were stable, increasing or decreasing. Under ideal conditions of a 30 to 40-year fire frequency, such as that observed on some parts of Otay Mountain, Tecate Peak and Coal Canyon, de Gouvenain and Ansary calculated that lambda was 1.07, which means that populations under these conditions are maintaining themselves and even growing slightly (lambda>1).

However, some populations are not currently managed under such ideal conditions. For instance, cypresses on Guatay Mountain are now old (by Tecate cypress standard) at about 40-50 years, with no seedlings or juvenile trees growing to replace them when they die. Thus fire suppression has been excellent on Guatay Mountain, which is a mixed blessing in this case because (a) Tecate cypress does not regenerate itself and (b) the chaparral brush has become extremely thick, which means that the next fire will be very destructive and hard to control.

In conclusion, de Gouvenain and Ansary found that Tecate cypress is very resilient to the human-altered fire regime in the mountains of Southern California. In some areas, however, complete fire suppression is jeopardizing the conservation of this rare cypress species.

Recommended reading:

Dunn, A. T. 1987. Population dynamics of the Tecate cypress. Pp. 367-376 in: Conservation and management of rare and endangered plants: Proceedings of a conference on the conservation and management of rare and endangered plants. T. Elias (Ed.). California Native Plant Society, Sacramento.

Little, Elbert L., Jr. 1975. Rare and local conifers in the United States. Conservation Research Rep. No. 19. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. 25 pp.

USDA Forest Service. 2004. Home Page. http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/cupfor/botanical_and_ecological_characteristics.html