This photo of the North Sea comes courtesy of Flickr user Acheron333.

WW II fisheries closures led to a boom in North Sea fish numbers

• “During the war, though, most of the populations rebounded, with older fish showing the biggest increase. The number of ten-year-old haddock, for example, went up nearly twelvefold during the six years the conflict lasted, though year-old haddock actually declined by 50%. The team propose the theory that such yearlings are truly, in this case, the exception that proves the rule. Such small fry are prey, and as the number of older, predatory fish increased, yearling haddock suffered disproportionately.”

When marine species aren’t well managed, local fishermen’s luck begins to run out

• Fishing isn’t about luck; it’s about resources, and we are using up these scarce resources too quickly.

Plastic bag use plummets in UK supermarkets since 2006

• “Customers at the UK’s leading supermarkets used 43% fewer carrier bags in 2009-10 than they did in 2006, when figures were first recorded, with 6.1bn single-use bags used in 2009-10 against 10.7bn four years earlier.”

A wild long-tailed macaque monkey has adopted an abandoned kitten at Ubud’s Monkey Forest in Bali

• These are some of the cutest photos you will ever see.

A start towards our lower-carbon future: In 2009, Americans used more wind and solar power– and less coal and gas.

• “Using data from the U.S. Department of Energy, the laboratory said energy use fell from 99.2 quadrillion BTUs (quads) in 2008 to 94.6 quadrillion BTUs in 2009, a drop of nearly 5 percent. Laboratory analysts said that while some of the decline was due to the economic recession, the drop also came about because Americans are using more efficient vehicles and appliances.”

For 400 million years sharks have flourished in our planet’s oceans and seas;  it is only  recently, with the help of a bowl of soup, that one of our most admired ocean predators faces annihilation.

Shark finning to supply shark fin soup is threatening sharks around the world. The populations of smooth hammerheads, bull, and dusky sharks along the East coast declined 99 percent from 1970 to 2005.

Facing finning, fishing , habitat destruction, and environmental pollution shark populations are in serious trouble worldwide:

• 75 milliion sharks are killed a year by humans; that’s 8,333 sharks an hour killed by humans.
• All shark species throughout the Mediterranean Sea have declined by 97 percent in the last 200 years.
• Declines in sharks can contribute to a shift from healthy, coral-dominated reefs to barren, algae-dominated reefs.
• U.S. fishing industry exports more than half a million pounds (226,796 kilograms) of shark fins to Hong Kong alone each year.

For all the grief that sharks are given in the media, it turns out that you’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine than by a shark. Sharks have much more reasons to fear humans than the other way around.

With the dire need to protect sharks and their habitat, Rare has Pride campaigns protecting marine species and promoting sustainable fisheries.  We even made a shark a mascot for our Fiji’s campaign.

What else can be done to save sharks:

• Establishing and enforcing science-based catch limits for sharks and rays
• Ensuring an end to shark finning
• Improving the monitoring of fisheries taking sharks and rays
• Investing in shark and ray research and population assessment
• Minimizing incidental catch of sharks and rays
• Global cooperation to conserve shared populations

A campaign poster encouraging wetland protection sits next to a beautiful mural promoting the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary.

Belize Audubon Society’s Rare Pride campaign protected the wetlands of the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary by inspiring local farmers to implement sustainable methods of farming in order to reduce destructive livestock grazing.

Photo courtesy of Jason Houston, www.jasonhouston.com.

Above is a great graphic from NRDC that shows how the ongoing costs of the Senate’s inability to act on climate change. You can find the embed code here.

Drought linked to climate change has reversed a decades-long trend of increased global plant growth

• “Earth has done an ecological about-face,” a NASA statement said. “Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.”

NOAA scientist admitted that 75% of the BP oil is still in Gulf

• An August 4, 2010 report showing that 75 percent of the BP oil was gone from the Gulf was not peer reviewed.

“Opportunistic” Bacteria Feasting Slowly on Underwater Oil in Gulf

• “A new study confirming the existence of a massive plume of oil trapped deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico defies notions that bacteria, while they are degrading the oil, will make as quick work of petroleum lingering in the water’s cold depths as they have on the surface.”

Can reciprocal agreements for watershed services work? Our experience this week left us saying, yes they can.

• “The project has gone according to plan—downstream water users are contributing the equivalent of US$ 0.50 per month to a fund for conservation, and the upstream farmers in Santa Rosa have been cultivating bees instead of cutting down trees for agriculture. This is a watershed agreement that has worked.”

Three environmental catastrophes this year show why conservation is so badly needed around the world.

We have witnessed the hottest year ever on record, magnified by the Russian heat wave and wildfires, and devastating floods in Pakistan. We are also witnessing the continuing extinction of species world-wide; scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird, and mammal become extinct every 24 hours.

While a single weather event alone cannot be attributed to climate change, the increasingly amounts of extreme weather events can be. We are currently seeing twice as many record highs being set as record lows. Eventually that ratio could be 50-t0-1.

“We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes,” said Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at WMO headquarters in Geneva.

At Rare, we’re working to protect forests, which help soak up greenhouse gases. We are working to prevent deforestation by getting villagers off of fuelwood by using fuel efficient stoves, solar water heaters, and energy-efficient light bulbs. We are also working to get farmers and ranchers to trade in their fields and cattle for environmentally-friendly bee keeping and by setting up and enforcing protected areas.

If we cannot come together empathetically now to conserve our planet and species, what kind of environmental catastrophes will be required to inspire conservation?

Kids love Rare Pride mascots. We’re working to inspire children towards a lifetime of conservation.

CONANP’s Rare Pride campaign will protect a habitat for 30 species in the Isla San Pedro Martir Biosphere Reserve by training local fishers in sustainable practices such as respecting no-take zones and selective fishing methods to reduce overfishing.

Photo courtesy of Jason Houston, www.jasonhouston.com.

600,000 boys and girls between the ages of six and 14 from 95 countries submitted paintings on the theme of “Biodiversity — connecting with nature” for a United Nations drawing competition to inspire conservation and promote biodiversity.

Environmental education is important. Competitions like this help inspire conservation in children. These children can act as conservation ambassadors in their communities, and they will eventually grow up to be adults with a greater appreciation of nature and for the need for conservation.

Earlier this year, Friend’s of the Environment’s Rare Pride campaign on Abaco Island to protect the spiny lobster population featured a science fair and competition to teach children about conservation. The students learned about local lobster poluations, their life cycles and size limits.

But this education extends beyond just children. These children will keep this knowledge of the environment and conservation with them for the rest of their lives. They will also be able to educate their parents and communities about the environment.

Children routinely present unabashed creativity and inspiring passion for conservation, but as Sir Ken Robinson said in one of the most popular TED talks ever, “in our society we don’t grow into creativity rather, we grow out of creativity” and correspondingly our childhood passion for biodiversity and the planet’s wildlife can dimmish if we don’t include the environment in our education.

Lauren St. John talked about how it was a teacher long ago that taught her the importance of conservation:

Not surprisingly, my background instilled in me an abiding love of animals, but it took a junior schoolteacher to teach me the importance of conservation. Mr Mitchley was an earnest, bespectacled man who drummed into us the rules of the wild: take nothing but pictures; leave nothing but footprints. He also saw that all our school projects were about conservation. We studied soil erosion, monitored rainfall, heard about the healing properties of plants, and the importance of saving, appreciating and conserving threatened species in the wild. As a consequence, those things are now as natural to me as breathing.

St. John is concerned that children aren’t being taught about conservation in schools. She considers it an essential life skill:

“With one in four mammals facing extinction and a world population of 6.7 billion and counting, it concerns him that essential life skills aren’t taught in the classroom. “We don’t teach kids how to be good citizens. It’s all very well learning about acid rain, but we don’t teach them what to do about it. We disastrously equip kids for the challenges they’re going to face in the future. There’s one planet, one global ecosystem, and it’s a question of what can we do about it and how fast we can learn to do it.”

“We are actually soft-wired not for agression, violence, self-interest, and utilitarianism, but rather we are soft-wired for sociability, attachment, affection, and companionship.”

In this RSA video Jeremy Rifkin depicts the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society. Rifkin concludes that human empathy has progressively included more members of humanity through historical epochs, and in order to save our planet we must extend our identities to the entire human race and biosphere.

Many of our conservation campaigns are entering the home stretch with just a few months to go. Elaina Todd, our campaign manager for effective watershed management in Guam, recently wrote a blog post on RarePlanet talking about how her experience with Rare and her campaign has changed how she views conservation.

The campaign she is running will protect the coral reefs in Southern Guam by influencing the local communities to prevent and report wildland fires in order to reduce harmful sedimentation. Below is her note:

There is still so much to do! At the same time, I couldn’t believe there were only three months left!

As I work on my follow-up grant application, I am trying to think about the future, but find I keep reflecting back on the past. With time seeming to fly by, where was I two years ago today?  Where was I one year ago today?  Where will I be one year from today?

It’s a pretty crazy thing to think about. I highly recommend it!

I opened up RarePlanet this morning and looked at all the new blogs.  Things are moving along with the campaigns, no doubt about that! Changes are occurring.

We are all making innovative moves in our communities and garnering the attention of the media, our partners, and our people. And it seems that each of us is changing along the way as well. The entire Rare process has changed my life for sure.

I have learned so much. I have met so many new people. And I feel like I have grown in so many ways.

I will never look at environmental education the same way again (yes Adam, I said it- I am a convert).  I will never again embark on a new project without first understanding specific goals and measures of success (man have I become annoying to work with!).

I will never assume and always pretest! And let’s be honest, as useful as they are, I will forever hate surveys. If I did my own theory of change, I’d say that I have changed in every stage!  My knowledge, attitudes & perceptions, communication, and behavior have all shifted because of this campaign.

Two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that I would be buddies with a bunch of hunters, buying camouflage clothes, sniffing salt licks, discussing deer urine varieties and getting my firearms license! Ha! Or that I would know the issues of the hunters, the conservation officers, the fire department, and the forestry department (notice the lack or marine anything in there!)

Never did I think I would be able to name each southern mayor, know their staff, or organize a community event that didn’t involve the ocean. We’ll save the long winded version for the final report, but I am just amazed at how different life is now.

As I work on my follow up plan, I see so much potential for the future. There is still so much to do. In two years I have barely finished the foundation.

After November, the work will continue. I don’t know exactly what that will look like, but I can say that I feel prepared through the thousands of hours of Rare training (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration!), the experiences along the way (both good and bad), the tremendous support I am now getting from my lead and partner agencies, and from the excitement that is brewing around town about what’s to come.

Probably the biggest change for me right now is that this campaign has become about so much more than the number of fires per year, the turbidity of the water, or even the health of the reef. It is about understanding people, their needs, and the deficiencies in the system to meet those needs.

It is about culture and respect.

It is about listening to what people say (and don’t say). It is about building relationships and nurturing those relationships through honesty and communication.

Thanks Margie for being the catalyst to this introspection.  It is good to know that I am not the only one who is spending a little time each week to reflect and appreciate the process. To look back at where we came from, to look at where we are, and to look forward and attempt to even fathom what’s to come.

I highly recommend it!

On August 2nd, seven Pride Campaign Managers successfully graduated from Rare’s first Pride cohort in China at Southwest Forestry University in Kunming. Over the past two years, all of the seven Pride campaign managers have been inspiring innovations in hundreds of Chinese communities to address daunting threats of deforestation, overgrazing, and poaching in China’s Inner Mongolia and Yunnan, Gansu ,and Jilin provinces.

Rare hosted a reception in Kunming on August 2nd to highlight the bright spots that the first China Pride cohort has achieved. The leaders of  local Pride partners, international partners such as TNC and WCS, candidates from the upcoming China Pride Campaign cohort, media outlets, Yunnan Forestry Department, and grassroots NGOs attended the event. Seven Campaign Managers were invited as panelist to showcase their best practices during their campaigns.

The event started with a video documentary of the Hunchun Pride Campaign to protect the last remaining Siberian tigers. The Campaign Manager Jianmin Lang told a story of an old hunter who was attacked by a tiger when he was poaching many years ago. During the Pride campaign in Hunchun, the hunter realized the urgency to stop setting snares and join the patrolling team protecting tigers.

Li Xiaohong from the Yuhe Campaign to protect the Golden Monkey, who is also a professor at a local university, shared his experience about being a movie director for the first time in his life. Because the campaign survey showed the community residents liked to watch movies, Xiaohong decided to make a short movie about a story of a college student who helped his family adopt efficient stoves.

“I had never thought I could make a movie,” he said. “Now even my son wants to play a role in my movie!” Professor Li was very proud that his movie not only attracted huge crowds in the communities, but that it also helped him raise funding to build more stoves when he played the movie at a local university.

Meng Gen from Alxa in Inner Mongolia showed a special “darling bag” made by all her family members for her Pride Campaign to protect local forests. The bag is commonly seen on the motorcycle at her site, but her special “darling bags” are passing the love of nature from one family to another. “I feel myself, my family, and the community residents are tied closer through the Pride Campaign,” she said.

Zhuoma Sina from the Baima Snow Mountain campaign to protect the Golden Monkey caught everyone’s eyes with her 50-meter-long drawing cloth, which was done by the school children at her site. Through her Pride Campaign, not only did the children learn more about protecting the Yunnan Golden Monkey, but they also drew their passion for conservation on a piece of cloth. Their parents and even their teachers couldn’t believe these amazing drawings was done by children.

Honglian Duan from the Gaoligong Mountain campaign to protect the White-eyebrows gibbon shared her experience of how a cooking contest generated huge interest in her community, it inspired women to adopt electronic cooking stoves, and it reduce fuelwood usage.

“We were very surprised to find during the survey that more than 60 percent of the community residents, including those who didn’t attend the contest, were able to tell lots of details of the contest,” Honglian said. “This means the community was really excited about this event, because they have never seen such an interesting event in their community.”

Dao Meibiao from Dashanbao Nature Reserve summarized “three Pride” as the result of his campaign — pride of himself, pride of the community, and pride of the Black-necked crane. During his Pride campaign to protect the winter habitat of the Black-necked crane, he hosted a “Crane Festival” to welcome the black necked crane arriving at his site in November 2009.

The whole community went wild when a two-meter tall crane costume showed up at the festival. “An old woman went up to touch the costume and told me, ‘I have lived here for so many years and seen Black-necked crane every year, but I never got the chance to touch the Black-necked crane. Now I know how it felt!’”

At last, Huang Gang from TNC passed around a Tibetan house model to the audience, and explained how this model helped his community members to understand the concept of green building. Four demonstration houses were completed within one year, despite the road construction and bad weather. An additional three more houses were built by other villagers who voluntarily adapted the techniques of green house building. His campaign protected the coniferous forest on Meili Snow Mountain by training local carpenters and community members in green building techniques in order to reduce unsustainable logging.

All these bright spots are the result of the hard work and great team support of the Pride partners. As many campaign managers said, “Pride Campaign is a life changing experience, and will shape the path of the rest of my life.”

Below are some more photos from the festivities: