Tigers Are Now Extinct In A Country Where They Used To Thrive
Six years after 13 countries pledged to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2020, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) declared tigers “functionally extinct” in Cambodia on Wednesday.
According to WWF, the last wild tiger in the country was observed in 2007 thanks to a hidden camera in the Mondulkiri Protected Forest. Cambodia, one of the 13 countries in the world where tigers live, has approved a plan to reintroduce tigers into the Mondulkiri protected forest in eastern Cambodia, the Guardian reports. “We want two male tigers and five to six females tigers for the start,” said Keo Omaliss, director of the department of wildlife and biodiversity at the Forestry Administration, according to the Guardian. “This is a huge task.”
Though it may be a huge task, the announcement comes a week after researchers said in a studythat forest loss has been lower than expected in tiger habitats, so there is enough space for tigers to come back from the brink of extinction, if habitats are preserved. Habitats are critical for any species, said Anup Joshi, one of the study’s authors, “and especially so with tigers, which need large areas to survive.”
Tigers are solitary animals apart from the connection between mother and cub. They traverse large territories and their size is determined mostly by the availability of prey. Joshi, a conservation biologist at the University of Minnesota, told ThinkProgress that out of the 76 conserved landscapes where tigers live, 29 were recognized as areas where tiger populations could double.
Wireless Electric Vehicle Charger With 20 kW Capacity & 90% Efficiency
the ORNL equipment could shorten the time needed to boost a battery back up to 80% range from 8 hours or more to as little as 3 hours. That could even make it suitable for applications away from home, such as shopping malls.
Hunt wants Australia to lead world in battery storage
“Solar and storage together are the future of electricity. That’s a huge direction in Australia and we are the world’s leading household solar nation. Now we want to be number one in the deployment of battery storage."
Fracking’s Total Environmental Impact Is Staggering
A new report details the sheer amount of water contamination, air pollution, climate impacts, and chemical use in fracking in the US. For the past decade, fracking has been a nightmare for our drinking water, our open spaces, and our climate.
http://thinkprogress.org/
Return of the population timebomb
May 2008
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Where do the children play?
Only since 1800, in the last 0.1% of the history of Homo sapiens, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.
Yet the population-environment link is clear. Our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption for a country or the world, is the product of population size and the average person’s consumption.
Today’s crumbling environment, racked by climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. In ecological terms we are in “overshoot” of Earth’s “carrying capacity” for humans, our demand exceeding the planet’s absorptive and regenerative capacities.
To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce both factors in the equation: our numbers and per person consumption.
Or so it would seem. Ignoring that logic, most environmentalists today avoid half the equation. An emailer’s assertion was typical: “John, if everyone on Earth just consumed less, as they do in Mexico, say, we wouldn’t have exceeded carrying capacity.”
