50.

Brazils Amazon boom pits economic growth versus forest

BBC News April 7, 2012 Marcelo Gordo is standing in the back garden of a small house in a suburb of Manaus, the capital of Brazil's Amazonas state, hoping to catch sight of a pied tamarin. These small primates, with white upper bodies and brown bottoms, live only in rainforest surrounding the city and as Manaus grows and expands, they are becoming trapped in isolated patches of forest. Mr Gordo, a researcher from the Federal University of Amazonas, has been studying these creatures for some 14 years. He has pinpointed a group of about eight which live in a jungle-covered gully behind this row of houses. "They have a very strict geographical distribution and in the last few years they've been losing this space," he says. "If these animals had a very small geographic distribution in a different place, where they weren't competing with humans, there wouldn't be a problem, but they live right where Manaus is." Located deep in the Amazon rainforest, Manaus would seem an unlikely place for a city. It flourished originally as the centre of the rubber boom in the late 1870s. Once rubber plantations were developed elsewhere, it lapsed into semi-obscurity once again. But in the 1960s the military government, installed by a coup, was looking to consolidate its control over the country with economic development and galvanise its control over the Amazon region. It encouraged businesses to expand into the area by offering generous tax breaks. Tech companies Manaus has grown in the ensuing decades. The population is now about 1.8 million, almost doubling in size since 1990. With Brazil's healthy economy, the city is booming once again. Many major multi-national technology manufacturers, like LG, Samsung and Philips, have a presence here and their business is swelling the population further. "It's not easy to find employees with the background that we, the companies, are looking for," says Wilson Perico, director of the Technicolor factory which makes modems and satellite decoders. Manaus districts are spreading further into the surrounding rainforest "It's why some companies bring experts from other states or countries to help the new guys to develop their activity here." The increase in workers in the city led to the decision to build a bridge over the Amazon to open up the south bank of the river to development.

Inaugurated in late 2011, the Rio Negro bridge will give more commuters access to dormitory towns where developers are already building more housing. Other changes are on the way. Manaus will be one of the host cities when the Fifa World Cup takes place in Brazil in 2014. Construction is already under way on a 40,000-seater stadium and several new hotels are planned for the thousands of visitors who are expected to descend on the city. The tournament organisers have vowed the stadium will be environmentally friendly, using energy efficient lighting and harvesting rainwater. Road building But even with such "green" credentials, Manaus' expansion is still a threat to the environment that surrounds it. There are few roads connecting the city with the outside world and most visitors arrive by air or by boat, along the immense Amazon river. As the city grows, there are concerns that more overland routes will become necessary. Ecologists say where roads are built, destruction of the rainforest is sure to follow. "A lot of the land that's in the public domain will wind up passing to become private land by people just moving in illegally and just starting to clear," says Philip Fearnside, an American academic who has lived and worked in Manaus for more than 30 years. "You have this tremendous pressure on land that will move out from any road that is built," he says. Manaus encapsulates the conundrum facing developing countries whose leaders will be gathering in Brazil in June for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20. They will be pondering the question - how do you provide jobs and growth to eradicate poverty, without destroying the environment?

Comment: Tough issue, especially given that these people are very poor and would benefit from having more jobs and better living conditions. I think industrialization and urbanization should be green, but often the cheaper option for these people is the dirty one.

51. Feds grant $1.4 million to investigate bat killer

The Wall Street Journal (Associated Press) April 7, 2012 Federal officials are granting $1.4 million to scientists investigating deadly whitenose syndrome in bats. The fungal infection has killed more than 5.5 million bats in eastern North America since it was first detected in upstate New York in 2006. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday announced seven grants totaling $1.4 million to investigate white nose and to identify ways to manage it. Wildlife officials say the insect-eating bats are crucial to the nation's ecology and the economy. Projects will include a detailed study of the fungus that causes white nose and developing ways to control it. White-nose syndrome has been confirmed in 19 states and four Canadian provinces at caves and mines where bats hibernate.

Comment: They should use the money to not only understand the fungus, but also perhaps ways of keeping bats from having hibernation disrupted by the fungus.

52. New voluntary wind guidelines will fail to protect birds

Focusing on Wildlife (original source: American Bird Conservancy) April 5, 2012 American Bird Conservancy (ABC), the nations leading bird conservation organization, has called the final, voluntary wind guidelines released today by the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) unenforceable, and charged that they will do little to protect millions of birds from the negative impacts of wind energy. ABC supports wind power when it is bird-smart. Unfortunately, voluntary guidelines will result in more lawsuits, more bird deaths, and more government subsidies for bad projects, instead of what America needs: true green and bird-safe wind energy, said Kelly Fuller, Wind Campaign Coordinator for ABC. Years ago, we thought hydro power was the green energy of the future, so we rushed ahead and built scores of dams. Over 1,000 of those dams have now been torn down because of their serious impacts to the environment. That same blind, shortsighted rush is happening with wind power. We arent learning from our past mistakes. History is simply repeating itself, said Fuller.

The United States has had voluntary guidelines since 2003, and yet preventable bird deaths at wind farms keep occurring. This includes thousands of Golden Eagles thought to have died at Altamont Pass in California, and just recently, more than 500

songbirds reportedly killed on two nights last fall in West Virginia, said Fuller. In December, with the help of Meyer Glitzenstein and Crystal (MGC), a Washington, D.C.-based public interest law firm, ABC formally petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to establish a mandatory project permitting system (a process that would ensure that wind farms were well sited, operated, and mitigated). If adopted, this system would prevent the most egregious developments while allowing relatively benign developments to proceed in conjunction with certain mitigations. However, DOI today also rejected this petition. Had it been adopted, the proposal would have protected birds and provided legal certainty that wind developers in compliance with a permit would not have been subjected to criminal or civil penalties for violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). The petition is available here. For four years, FWS has been attempting to fix the voluntary guidelines problem with band aids. This is in spite of the fact that more than 150 organizations and 20,000 concerned citizens have shown their support for mandatory standards or are on record asking the Department of Interior for mandatory standards, not voluntary guidelines. Included in this group are the Sierra Club, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, American Birding Association, and many state Audubon societies, Fuller said. The federal government is seeking to promote an energy sector in a manner that is in violation of its own laws. The rejection of the effective alternative proposed in our petition in favor of non-binding guidelines is disappointing for many years now, voluntary guidelines have proven to be completely ineffective. All the government has done today, despite the groundswell of support for mandatory standards, is come up with yet another version of a failed strategy, said Shruti Suresh, an attorney at MGC. Switching to the project permit system proposed in our petition would have fulfilled the agencys mandate to protect migratory birds and keep them from becoming endangered while still enabling wind power development to continue, Fuller said. In 2009, FWS estimated that 440,000 birds were being killed each year by collisions with wind turbines, and recently included this figure in the agencys 2013 budget request to Congress. In the absence of clear, legally enforceable regulations, the massive expansion of wind power in the United States will likely result in the deaths of more than one million birds each year by 2030. Further, wind energy projects are also expected to adversely impact almost 20,000 square miles of terrestrial habitat, and another 4,000 square miles of marine habitat.

Comment: I agree with the ABC here. They arent fulfilling their legal responsibilities to protect migratory birds. Now its going to be a freefor-all, and wind farms wont implement bird safety if it isnt legally required. Money or birds? Most will choose the former.

53. Study: fungus behind bat die-off came from Europe

The Boston Globe (Associated Press) April 9, 2012 Original journal article Warnecke L, Turner JM, Bollinger TK, Lorch JM, Misra V, Cryan PM, Wibbelt G, Blehert DS, and Willis CKR. 2012. Geomyces destructans supports the novel pathrogen hypothesis for the origin of white-nose syndrome. PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.1200374109 The mysterious deaths of millions of bats in the United States and Canada over the past several years were caused by a fungus that hitchhiked from Europe, scientists reported Monday.

Experts had suspected that an invasive species was to blame for the die-off from "white nose syndrome." Now there's direct evidence the culprit was not native to North America. The fungal illness has not caused widespread deaths among European bats unlike in the U.S. and Canada. In North America more than 5.7 million bats have died since 2006 when white nose syndrome was first detected in a cave in upstate New York. The disease does not pose a threat to humans, but people can carry fungal spores. It's unclear exactly how the fungus crossed the Atlantic, but one possibility is that it was accidentally introduced by tourists. Spores are known to stick to people's clothes, boots and caving gear. White nose syndrome has killed bats in four Canadian provinces and 19 U.S. states, mostly in the Northeast and South. Last week, the illness marched west of the Mississippi River, infecting bats in Missouri. Now that scientists have pinpointed the apparent origin of the epidemic, what can be done to protect bats? They play a crucial role in the ecological food chain by devouring insects. "There is still not much we can do beyond making absolutely sure we don't make things worse by accidentally spreading the fungus," said biologist Craig Willis of the University of Winnipeg in Canada. Willis and a team of U.S.-Canadian scientists set out to determine whether the fungus behind white nose syndrome was native to this continent or invaded from abroad. To do this, they collected 54 little brown bats from an uninfected cave in Manitoba. The bats were divided into three groups: One group was infected with spores collected from Europe; another group was sickened with spores from North America. A third group was not infected. Researchers used infrared cameras to monitor the bats' behavior and disease progression over several months.

Both infected groups developed symptoms, including the telltale trace of white powder on the nose that gives the disease its name and scarring on the wings. Compared with uninfected bats, infected bats were roused more often from hibernation. This depletes their fat reserves and ultimately leads to death. The findings were reported online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since the infected groups showed similarly severe symptoms, scientists concluded the fungus originated in Europe. Had the pathogen been native to North America but with a mutation that made it more deadly, scientists would have expected to see milder symptoms in the group infected with the European fungus. The team planned to repeat the experiment next year with European bats and compare results. Why European bats have not died off en masse is unknown. It's possible they developed immunity to the fungus or learned to avoid places that favor the spread of the disease. North American bats have shown little protection against white nose syndrome and there's active research into whether populations can rebound. "We are still working to understand if it is possible for bats to develop resilience or resistance to the fungus," said Jeremy Coleman of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who had no role in the latest work.

Comment: Awesome news! To follow up on my comment from the other article related to white-nosed syndrome I scrapbookd this week, I think they should invest a lot of money in determining how European bats have become immune to the disease. If they can figure that out, we stand a good chance of perhaps mitigating further damage to our own bat populations.