Silflay Hraka

Keep Fluffy Mendoza on the ground when he’s in his Bumbo chair.

In the constellation Perseus.

via amcgltd

Doesn’t care for your or your SUV.

Say what you will about President Richard Nixon, but he was a visionary president when it came to protecting the environment. Too bad the National Park Service didn’t follow through on an important requirement President Nixon signed 35 years ago to regulate appropriate beachfront driving on North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, Defenders of Wildlife and Audubon North Carolina, the 2007 population of shorebirds has plummeted. In 1999, the groups said, there were 103 Gill-billed Terns; today there are none on the Hatteras seashore. In 1999 there were 440 Common Terns; 19 today. There were 306 Black Skimmers; two remain. There were 306 Least Terns; 196 remain. There were 41 American Oystercatchers; 20 to 22 remain. Since 1996, the Piping Plover population at the seashore dropped from 14 to six.

If you really worry about wildlife, forget the SUV and focus on the Feral Cat. That’s not realluy politically palatable, though, given the powerful Feral Cat Lobby.

Florida has some of the biggest feral colonies and some of the most emotional fights. In the summer of 2002, a woman who was feeding feral cats on Singer Island in Palm Beach County was bitten by a feral cat that was found to be rabid. For public health reasons, the county decided to eradicate all the stray cats on the island, causing an uproar. The woman who had been bitten was one of the cats’ most vocal defenders.

The Hoverwing.

President Bush has issued an executive order banning commercial landings of Striper and Red Drum.

Kinda.

The order only covers federal waters, which start three miles offshore. The various states control the waters closer in, so commercial fishermen operating there are unaffected.

Under current regulations, the commercial ocean striped bass fishery in the state is held to a 480,480 pound annual quota. Commercial fishermen are allowed to harvest no more than seven red drum per day, and the annual harvest can’t exceed 250,000 pounds.

It’s not a seaweed at all, but rather an animal.

An organism that has brought commercial fishing off the southern Outer Banks to a near standstill looks like seagrass but may actually be an animal.

“We’re not one hundred percent sure, but it looks like it is sauerkraut bryozoan,” said Terri Kirby Hathaway, education specialist with North Carolina Sea Grant, from her Manteo office Thursday morning.

Hathaway said scientists with the state Division of Marine Fisheries have collected specimens for positive identification.

Sauerkraut bryozoan (zoobotryon verticillatum) is a tiny water animal that forms colonies in warm and tropical waters in the western Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The animal has tentacles, a gizzard, and colonies usually have a clear or milky color.

A fisherman on the beach near Hatteras Inlet Thursday said the organism reminded him of the artificial grass used in Easter baskets. Another said that when she first saw it on the beach, she thought it was a clump of monofilament fishing line.

Often mistaken for seagrass, bryozoans are sometimes called moss animals or sea mats.

Gene Ballance, a commercial fisherman on Ocracoke Island, said the characteristics of the organism he has seen in Pamlico Sound are consistent with descriptions of sauerkraut bryozoans.

Greetings from Ocracoke, NC. Bigwig and I are here with nine or ten other guys on our annual fishing trip. We’ve been here three days and we’ve actually caught a few fish this year. I fulfilled my quota with one fish in the first five minutes of having a line in the water and promptly gave up. I haven’t caught anything since. Of couse, my buddy Tommy and I have spent a great deal of time in kayaks and comparatively little time fishing. We paddled across the Inlet to Portsmouth yesterday afternoon and spent the better part of the morning searching the Sound side of the island for Oyster Creek. I don’t think we ever found it but we did spend two hours paddling up and down the shoreline. It was good times.

Right now we sit awaiting dinner. Tom is cooking up brats and the rest of us are recuperating from a long day of fishing, paddling, drinking, etc. We’ve caught a few pompano, a few blue and not much else. No Drum thus far, but hope springs eternal. Maybe tomorrow.

Anyway, we’ll post more as we have more stories to tell. There are really none to share so far. No poisoning to speak of, for example. We did make a lot of noise last night and were threatened with a call to the cops but no police materalized. I guess we quieted down.

It’s time for dinner. More to come, hopefully.

No idea of the original source for this. Arrived via email.

Environmentalism? At Salon, of all places.

Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in a quasi-authoritarian politics. Eco-tragic narratives diagnose human desire, aspiration, and striving to overcome the constraints of our world as illnesses to be cured or sins to be punished. They aim to short-circuit democratic values by establishing Nature as it is understood and interpreted by scientists as the ultimate authority that human societies must obey. And they insist that humanity’s future is a zero-sum proposition — that there is only so much prosperity, material comfort, and modernity to go around. The story told by these eco-tragedies is not that humankind cannot stand too much reality but rather that Nature cannot stand too much humanity.

Yes, it is a religion.
In the Book of Genesis, the Fall from Eden occurs because Adam and Eve eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In the environmentalist’s telling of our fall, humans are being punished by Nature with ecological crises like global warming for our original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge. Our fall from Nature was triggered by our control of fire, the rise of agriculture, the birth of modern civilization, or by modern science itself — which is ironic, given the privileged role the so-called natural sciences played in inventing the idea of a Nature as separate from humans in the first place.

It is this contrast between living in harmony with Nature and mastering it that unites Carson and Dubos with virtually every strain of contemporary environmentalism.

But the reason it’s doomed, is because it despises those whom it must recruit in order to survive. Can you say Shakers?

Perhaps the most powerful indictment of environmentalism is that environmentalists almost uniformly consider our long life spans and large numbers terrible tragedies rather than extraordinary achievements. The narrative of overpopulation voiced almost entirely by some of the richest humans ever to roam the earth is utterly lacking in gratitude for the astonishing labors of our ancestors.

doesn’t mean that it’s correct.

It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.