In Other News...

Preparing the house for Cletus the Fetus hasn't just kept me from keeping up this blog. I've been shirking on my work blog too. But now that the basement is largely finished and the nursery is close to done, I've had more time to write. I've got some personal anecdotes to post this week here---but I've posted some fun stuff on NRDC's Switchboard too. Check it out:

• Wolf Litigation...a snowball's chance - The fight over legal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies is contentious and, well, at times unbelievably weird. A story told by an NRA member in recent filings around NRDC's suit to return wolves to the Endangered Species list is pretty over the top. It involves snowballs and elk...
  
  
• Big Win for Bees: judge pulls bee toxic pesticide - The title says it all. This one is pretty straight forward. The win occurred the day before Christmas Eve, so not much press coverage---but I think the fight will continue this week before the chemicals are due to be pulled from store shelves.
  
  
• Eat 'Em All: "Silverfin" cannot save the Great Lakes - If you haven't talked to me about work lately, this is the story I've been working on for the last six weeks solid. The imminent invasion of the Great Lakes by Asian carp. Its a pretty amazing story. If you haven't been following it, these fish can get to 100 pounds and literally take over ecosystems that they enter by out-eating and out-breeding native fish. Oh, and they freak out when they hear things like motor boat engines, causing them to launch themselves out of the water ("missiles with fins!"). They are making their way through the canal system used to reverse the Chicago River a century ago and there is a massive legal fight over what to do to prevent the carp from getting into Lake Michigan. Of late, there has been a growing chorus saying we just need to start eating these critters. While there's no doubt that the American appetite can put a dent in any animal population it is set upon, relying on gluttony to fix the problem is just a horrible idea on so many levels...

Keep an eye out here and on Switchboard for more content this week!

Switch on Switchboard

OK, some of you probably are not monitoring such hotbeds of environmental thought as NRDC's Switchboard... You are missing out. If nothing else, you are missing out on some fine writing from yours truly... I have not been blogging much here of late (I'll fix that soon, I promise)---and sadly, not as much as I would like there either.

But I have posted a few things of late:

The Money Boat: Coins, Climate Change, and the Caribbean - dispose of your pennies, or the low-lying island paradises get it...

Snotty Tunnels of Love: tidewater gobies deserve protected territory - Not all of our endangered species work revolves around charismatic carnivores. This little fish has little going for it, aside from being fascinating and finding novel uses for mucous.

Wyoming Wolves: frustration on all sides...and one guy with serious guts - OK, I guess lots of the work is around charismatic carnivores... I wrote this before wolves were "de-listed" last month out of frustration with the way the rhetoric on this issue plays out from both sides. This is admittedly "inside baseball..."

Dam Those Mussels: Great Lakes invasive species now threatening Lake Mead - One of the less sexy issues I help with is reform of water ballast laws in the Great Lakes; but the impacts are astounding. Water from freighters have been bringing an average of one new species into the ecosystem every six months. Lake Michigan's ecosystem has been completely changed in the last couple of years by introduced mussels, algae, and fish. And now that stuff is moving west...

Nine Cents photo by Jonathan Pobre via Flickr