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North Carolina to establish birding trail

Byoliveridley

This is good news, maybe just the ticket to reawaken my long dormant birdwatching predelictions. The money this brings in will doubtless fund the continued existence of wetlands and other endangered habitats.

newsobserver.com | Beauty, bucks sought in bird trail

SWANSBORO – With hundreds of colorful birds already visiting and calling Eastern North Carolina home, the state is encouraging bird lovers to bring their binoculars and billfolds to watch them. The N.C. Birding Trail unveiled this week links dozens of sites long known to birders as packed with rare, popular or threatened species, such as the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

But state officials are promoting the trail as nature-themed tourism and hope it will give the financially stressed region an economic boost.Forget the notion of birdwatching as a sedate, nerdy activity. Now hunting and fishing guides are running bird charters and bird-related tourism is worth millions.

“We have people coming here from all over the country,” said John Ennis of Brunswick County, eastern vice president of the Carolina Bird Club. “It’s a great resource.”

When completed, the North Carolina trail will include dozens of places across the state that visitors can reach by car and look for more than 440 species of birds.

The first section, which highlights the coastal region, includes 102 birding sites in 16 groupings east of Interstate 95. A Piedmont trail that will bundle sites between Interstate 95 and Interstate 77 is scheduled to be completed next year with a mountain trail slated after that.

At least 100 sites have already been approved for the Piedmont section with three dozen in the Triangle. Birders will be directed to state and local lands such as Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve in Cary, Raleigh’s Lake Johnson Park, Eno River State Park in Orange County and Duke Forest in Durham County.

Salinda Daley, N.C. Birding Trail Coordinator, said that describing the program as a trail causes some misunderstanding because it is not just lines on a map. She said promotional material links spectacular bird watching sites and birders with communities and businesses.

hey, who’re you calling a nerd!!

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    Byoliveridley

    President Barack Obama on Tuesday called on Congress to send him legislation that places a market-based cap on U.S. carbon polluting emissions and pushes the production of more renewable energy.

    In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, Obama said that “to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.

    Good, Canada will have to harmonize. Stephen Harper was last seen pretending that his “intensity based”” approach was just a “different” way of measuring emissions. You can say that speed and distance are just two ways of measuring travel!

    It is still early and we will see what the US congress can come up with, and what egregious exemptions and offsets it will provide for. Lobbying is already fast and furious. But the news emanating from Obama is promising on the climate change front.

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    "Eminent Domain" Police Firing Update

    Byoliveridley

    I had written recently about police firing deaths in West Bengal. It appears that there is a lot more to this story than a case of police overreaction.
    BBC NEWS | South Asia | Ten held over India police firing

    But there are suspicions that outsiders may have joined the police force to attack the villagers in Nandigram, protesting against the planned acquisition of farmland for an industrial complex.

    The West Bengal government has now said it is abandoning the project.

    “Outsiders”? That’s informative! Who might these “outsiders” be? More from an Indian source:

    The Central Bureau of Investigation -, probing last Wednesday’s Nandigram deaths in police firing, Saturday recovered a huge cache of arms and ammunition from Khejuri, a base of the Communist Party of India-Marxist -.

    Ten people, presumed to be members of the CPI-M, were arrested by the probe agency during the operation.

    The CPI-M is West Bengal’s ruling party, having been in power for more than thirty years. So the emerging hypothesis is that some “operatives” (read goons) from the ruling party decided to “help” the police clear out the protesting villagers. The tragedy has gone national because the CPI(M) is a supporter of the ruling coalition in India.

    It’s a complex issue, one that I want to learn a lot more about. But the gist of the story is that the ruling Communist party in Bengal is trying to kick start industrial development that has been stagnant for many years. The Haldia Development Authority has been tasked with this rather difficult task, and has been going about its merry business trying to acquire land and setup industrial parks and so called special economic zones.

    The issue here is not the idea, which is sound, but the process, which has been top-down, and designed and implemented with no input from the people who will be affected. Some level of increased industrialization will provide more infrastructure, jobs and money eventually. But the process needed to be planned so that the farmers affected could transition a little more easily from their generations of farm employment. Medinipur, the district where Nandigram is located is predominantly agricultural with 65% of the rural population working as farmers (source Indian Census 2001). There are nearly 6 million people involved in agriculture in this district alone. That’s an arkload of people who will be affected by a major change in the occupational profile, they need to be considered and consulted.

    So when the people affected protested and took the site over, the Chief Minister of West Bengal,  Budhaddeb Bhattacharya, asked the police to clear them out, and I guess they took that literally.

    These protests are spreading, with unrest in Orissa as well. The good news is that there’s been a lot of outcry, and the whole program has been put on hold pending a national policy on acquisition of land for industries. India is not China, people know how to organize, protest and generally make themselves heard. More importantly, the press will cover stories like these (at least for a few weeks, or until India loses to Bangladesh in the Cricket World Cup! – This happened on Saturday!), so development necessarily takes a slower and more tortuous path. That is not always a bad thing. Will they get the process right the next time they do it, I am not sure, but hopefully, these deaths will not have been in vain.

  • British Columbia Introduces a Carbon Tax

    Byoliveridley

    Wow, I am already proud of my future destination, a carbon tax, no less. One that will start off at $10 per tonne of carbon (2.4c per litre of gasoline, or about 9c a gallon) and rise by a factor of three in a few years…

    VICTORIA – Finance Minister Carole Taylor introduced an escalating carbon tax on most fossil fuels Tuesday, one she says recycles revenues back to taxpayers and businesses and is designed to ignite an environmental social movement in British Columbia and across Canada to fight climate change.And she’s handing every British Columbian $100 in June as seed money to get them thinking green.

    The Canadian Press: BC introduces carbon tax, but off-sets increased fuel costs with tax cuts

    The carbon tax advocacy center sets the required starter tax as 10c a gallon, BTW, so this measure by BC is no joke, it’s a serious effort to rein in CO2 emissions from the province. Carbon taxes are in general regressive as they are flat taxes, so the poor pay the same as the rich, but obviously will suffer more. So, what is the BC government doing to ensure that the poor don’t suffer?

    The carbon tax revenue, estimated to hit $1.8 billion over three years, will be returned to taxpayers through personal income tax and business tax cuts, she said.The government will introduce legislation that requires it to table an annual plan that shows how the carbon tax revenue will be returned to taxpayers, Taylor said

    Good words. But Taylor needs to realize that in the absence of well designed tax offsets, the people and businesses of BC will be at a temporary competitive disadvantage. It’s tricky to be an early adopter, but I am optimistic that BC will be the better for it.

    Wonderful, now the rest of Canada (and the US) needs to follow suit. And, I look forward to blogging about Canada already, exciting!

    Thanks of course to the grist for alerting me…

    Update: An economist allays my regressivity and harm to business fears…

    Blogged with Flock

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    Tuesdays with Turtles – Climate change and nesting patterns

    Byoliveridley

    Turns out that in Guyana, nesting patterns are changing. Different types of sea turtles are showing up, and earlier than they used to. The earlier part can be explained by climate change, but the species distribution? I am sure there are other factors involved including habitat loss, poaching, etc. Anyway, interesting story.

    Stabroek News

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    Project Coordinator of the Guyana Marine Turtle Conservation Society (GMTCS) Michelle Kalamandeen told Stabroek News recently that climate change is affecting the sea turtle population.

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    Usually sea turtles nest in Guyana from March to August every year. However, for the last three to four years, says Kalamandeen, the nesting pattern has shifted from mid-January to mid-July. This may have a significant impact on the hatchlings as food availability may be an issue for them.

  • Global warming gets local and cloudy in Seattle

    Byoliveridley

    seattle.jpgI’ve noticed that a lot of global warming stories, and books use abstraction and remote examples to illustrate their point. Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent and readable Field Notes from a Catastrophe calls up the Arctic, the Antarctic, Polar Bears and rising sea levels. The publicity for Al Gore’s (Gore/Obama 2008!) Inconvenient Truth which I have not seen, talks about the Snows of Kilimanjaro extensively.

    This kind of imagery is useful, but in the end, Leigh Person in Gary, IN (my favorite name and average city, resp.) will not be moved by shrinking Arctic ice. How will global climate change affect Leigh’s commute? Will Leigh’s vacation home on the beach be below water in 30 years? Will Leigh’s house be invaded by cockroaches? What will happen to Leigh’s 401K? What about Leigh’s kids?

    It is difficult enough, given the false balance on climate change reporting, to make long term predictions that will not be “disputed” by “sceptics”, so to make local predictions that are more uncertain is difficult, which is why reporting like the example below must be lauded.

    Climate change is a difficult problem, because the countries responsible for the bulk of past, present and future emissions are not the ones that will face the most serious consequences. I want to go into this in greater depth as I read and learn more, but any change in the availability of fresh water in, say, India will result in utter chaos, decelerated growth and death. But the countries most significantly affected (the tropics) are helpless to deal with climate change….

    Hopefully, local focused stories will spur people to action.

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    For those harboring the guilty hope that global warming will transform Seattle into a sun lovers’ paradise on par with the Côte d’Azur, meteorologist Cliff Mass has some bad news: It might actually get cloudier.

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    Byoliveridley

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