The Uneasy Chair
Is Conservation Ready for the Light of Day?
By Jon Christensen
Winter 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 1)
Conservation still has a clubby smell. Sometimes there’s a whiff of wool and leather, gunpowder and fly-fishing rods, musty old maps, and remote destinations. Sometimes it’s the scent of wetlands, wet corduroy, and binoculars. Sometimes […] Read More »
Virtual Ecosystems
W. Wayt Gibbs (Fall, 2003) describes in glowing, optimistic terms a novel approach by Neo Martinez aimed at unraveling the complexity inherent in food webs. A supercomputer crunches the numbers; sophisticated programming produces glitzy graphics. It all suggests great promise for better informing conservation actions. The imagery is enhanced by portraying Martinez as […] Read More »
Books
Winter 2004 (Vol. 6, No. 4)
Some books reviewed in our book review section are available through Amazon.com. To make your purchase easier we have included a link when available. When you purchase a book through this service on our website Conservation In Practice receives a portion of the purchase price.
The Beast in […] Read More »
People are using so much groundwater that there are chronic shortages in many parts of the world. Whereas the proposed solutions focus on providing drinking and irrigation water, groundwater is also critical to the diverse creatures that live beneath the surface of the Earth. A new analysis calls for protecting groundwater ecosystems as well as […] Read More »
China has both the largest human population and the largest continuous grassland in the world, and the former makes it hard to protect the latter. So many people are grazing livestock in the Inner Mongolian steppes that the steppes are being destroyed. New research suggests a win-win solution: concentrating people in cities could both improve […] Read More »
When wolves and other large carnivores threaten people and their livestock, wildlife managers often resort to killing these predators. But now there’s hope for a nonlethal solution to controlling carnivores. New research shows that movement-activated guards with strobe lights and sound recordings can help keep wolves and bears away.
“High-technology devices are much more expensive, […] Read More »
Hand-logging is thought to be relatively conservation-friendly because it doesn’t use heavy machinery. But that doesn’t mean it’s benign. New research shows that hand-logging may threaten orangutans by breaking up the forest canopies where they live and by harvesting the large fruit trees where they prefer to eat.
Hand-logging may also affect female orangutans more […] Read More »
New research confirms fears that Endangered Species Act listings do not necessarily help — and may even harm — rare species on private lands. Since the Preble’s jumping mouse (Zapus hudsonius preblei) was listed as threatened, landowners in this study have degraded as much habitat as they have enhanced, and most oppose biological surveys critical […] Read More »
Getting the right seeds for grassland restoration is hard — collecting them in the wild is time consuming, and commercial mixes typically lack rare species. New research suggests that cows can be used to both collect and package Mediterranean grassland seeds: dung from cattle grazing in diverse grasslands may help restore grasslands that have lost […] Read More »
Although shade coffee is promoted as protecting tropical forests and birds, conservationists are split on whether it actually works. The December 2003 issue of Conservation Biology has the latest on the debate: one side says shade coffee can give farmers a reason to preserve tropical biodiversity, whereas the other side fears it can actually encourage […] Read More »
By David Havlick
Winter 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 1)
The deer is broken, legs akimbo, and lies ragged at the side of the road. Another car passes by, its driver scarcely noticing the carnage. Road kill, after all, is commonplace. On the average day in Michigan, a car brings down a deer once every […] Read More »
By John Weier
Winter 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 1)
Despite the conspicuous and environmentally corrosive nature of urbanization, tracking it has always been troublesome. Urban sprawl moves relatively fast, consuming hundreds of square miles of land in North America alone each year, and it tends to spread over the landscape in an irregular, organic fashion […] Read More »
By Jon Christensen
Winter 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 1)
Like many conservationists, Kent Redford dreams of a world where people and nature thrive side by side. But over and over, he has seen those illusions shattered.
Last fall, at the World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, indigenous groups threatened to take the stage […] Read More »
By Sarah DeWeerdt
Winter 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 1)
Ask a child to draw a wetland and you’ll likely get a pond. Ask a planner to restore a wetland and you’ll likely get a pond. The pond is the nearly universal icon for wetlands. They are easy to build, meet regulatory guidelines, and they […] Read More »
