Don’t you want to be there? Enjoy this beautiful photo of a long, cloudy sky by Samantha Frey — and see all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images, submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you — at my.nature.org.

How often do you find yourself presented with the opportunity to get up close and personal with a prairie warbler? 

Not often enough, which is exactly why I jumped at the chance to join conservation scientist Neil Gifford on a bird-banding quest late this past May.

Heading out into the Albany Pine Bush at six in the morning, we were looking for a single, specific bird — one tiny prairie warbler in a sea of scrubland three and a half times larger than Central Park. 

Yet with the help of some surprisingly low-tech gear (including a Styrofoam craft supply bird painted yellow), we found and netted the warbler in record time. Luckily, my video camera was running so you can see the action yourself!

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It’s another innovative day here at Cool Green Morning. Reducing emissions through better highway toll systems, making biofuel from human waste, using social pressure to achieve conservation goals… the world is full of creative ideas to help solve our environmental problems. Enjoy!

1. It wasn’t a surprise, but it’s still good news: the EPA has granted the state of California the right to enforce its own automobile emissions standards, which are more strict than current national standards.
2. Bark beetles are destroying forests in the West, and scientists think a warming climate is helping them gain a foothold. It becomes personal for one writer, who muses over the loss of 95 percent of the trees on his Montana land.
3. All that stopping and starting for highway tolls has to be bad for the environment, doesn’t it? A 1998 Florida study said yes. In Texas, efforts to improve convenience and safety while reducing emissions has led to a new system that eliminates the stop-and-pay toll booth and replaces it with toll bills that arrive in the mail (unless you have the TollTag, a FasTrak or EZPass equivalent).
4. The pressure’s on, and that’s a good thing. A new study found that farmers in China were more likely to sign up for a reforestation initiative if their neighbors also signed up. The study concludes that conservationists should be prepared to make use of social pressure to achieve positive environmental outcomes. 
5. We’ve heard about making biofuel from algae, but here’s a new one: making biofuel from human waste. A University of Minnesota researcher devised this ingenious approach, which not only utilizes an existing, free and readily-available resource, it also helps solve another problem by cleaning up wastewater.

P.S. Cool Green Morning will be on holiday tomorrow. Have a happy Fourth of July, and be sure to check back on Monday for all the latest in cool green news.

My fingers can barely move fast enough across the keyboard today. As soon as we broke the news on the whereabouts of our five tagged whimbrels, I received an urgent and excited email from my colleague Barry Truitt, chief conservation scientist for The Nature Conservancy’s Virginia Coast Reserve:

“This just in — Hope has departed James Bay in central Canada and is en route to (drum roll, please) the MacKenzie River in northwest Canada!”

Could this be true?

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The following is a guest post from Dr. Rob Brumbaugh,  the Restoration Program Director for The Nature Conservancy’s Global Marine Team.

Yesterday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced their selection of marine habitat restoration projects to be funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka ‘Stimulus Bill’). 

The Nature Conservancy has the simultaneously thrilling and humbling opportunity to be leading 8 of the 50 projects that were selected for funding. 

The Conservancy isn’t carrying out these projects in isolation, of course – each project has an alphabet soup of partners involved to oversee various tasks and responsibilities.

From a conservation standpoint, these restoration projects will really move the needle:

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The Nature Conservancy contributed to the ground-breaking report “The Coral Triangle and Climate Change: Ecosystems, People and Societies at Risk”, which was released in May at the World Oceans Conference and Coral Triangle Initiative Summit in Manado, Indonesia. 

Compilation of the report was led by WWF and Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, who is a world leader in the threat of climate change to coral reefs.

The report is a comprehensive study involving over 20 experts who used scenario modelling to profile the vulnerability of people and resources in the Coral Triangle to climate change. It concludes that stabilising atmospheric carbon dioxide at or below 450 parts per million is essential if Coral Triangle countries are to meet their objectives of retaining coastal ecosystems and allowing people to prosper in their coastal areas. 

It also concludes that while coastal ecosystems are facing enormous pressures from both local and global factors, many areas within the Coral Triangle show significant ecological resilience, and are among the most likely to survive the challenging times ahead. 

High levels of biodiversity, coupled with fast rates of growth and recovery, put many Coral Triangle ecosystems in a favorable position to survive climate change. Some parts of the Coral Triangle may also have inherently slower rates of change in sea temperature and acidity, representing a potential refuge in an otherwise rapidly changing world.

As an author of this report, I’m encouraged by the findings. To know that the center of coral reef biodiversity exhibits these signs of resiliency gives me hope.

But it doesn’t mean we should stop protection efforts. In fact, we need to be even more focused on ensuring the reefs of the Coral Triangle survive, since they may be one of the few areas around the world that does.

Photo caption: King tides (the biggest tides of the year) caused this coastal erosion and building collapse in Papua New Guinea. An early sign of things to come with sea level rise in the Coral Triangle?  Image: Geoff Lipsett-Moore/TNC.)

We’re starting off the first of the month with some bright innovations — synthetic trees that actually absorb carbon and robot lasers that can map the ocean floor. What more could you ask for? Oh, just resolution of the Exxon Valdez oil spill (finally) and coastal restoration projects that will create green jobs. Read on for today’s top Cool Green News.

1. Yesterday NOAA announced project recipients of their $167 million in economic stimulus funding for coastal restoration. The Nature Conservancy has eight projects on the list, including $6 million to restore shorelines in Hawai’i.
2. Remember the Exxon Valdez? The case against Exxon for damages in their 1989 oil spill has been lingering in the courts — until now. The oil company has decided not to appeal further and will pay out $470 million in interest to Alaska natives, fishermen, business owners and others. (Hat-tip: Environmental Economics.)
3. Could synthetic trees actually help climate change by soaking up carbon? Doesn’t sound plausible, but a professor from Columbia University has developed a prototype synthetic tree that absorbs 1,000 times the carbon of a natural tree. (Hat-tip: Treehugger.)
4. The most complete map of Earth’s terrain has been published — the new Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99 percent of the Earth’s surface, with each point mapped at just 30 meters apart. The map will be free to download and use, reports the BBC.
5. And let’s not forget about mapping the depths of the sea… marine researchers are working on a new system of robot lasers to map the bottom of the ocean floor. The hope is that these new lasers will be able to identify hazardous objects (such as mines) and gather information about threatened coral reef habitats.

You usually learn about sustainable living in glossy design magazines or hip blogs (ahem, Cool Green Science!), but prison seems an unlikely source to find eco-inspiration.

Until now. 

The offenders at the Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Washington are going green through a partnership with The Evergreen State College and The Nature Conservancy. The project is saving money and resources and helping enrich lives.

Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, a faculty member at Evergreen and a Washington trustee for The Nature Conservancy, started the Sustainable Prisons Project in an attempt to cultivate tree mosses to supply the floral industry. Growing mosses with the help of offenders reduced the amount of natural mosses harvested from the Olympic rainforest.

Now the program works in two Washington prisons, where offenders learn how to raise endangered Oregon spotted frogs, reclaim wastewater, recycle on a massive scale, nurture honeybees and propagate rare and threatened prairie wildflowers.

The Nature Conservancy works with Stafford Creek to grow threatened prairie perennials—Conservancy staff supply the seeds and teach interested offenders how to plant them. The manpower is helping the Conservancy sow 200,000 seeds, doubling our capacity! After the plants grow, we’ll plant them as part of our efforts to restore Washington’s native prairies.

The partnership helps our prairies, but perhaps even more rewarding, it helps offenders develop important skills to use when they re-enter society. And if a prison can go green, save money and enrich lives, what’s stopping the rest of us?

Jocelyn Ellis is a marketing specialist with The Nature Conservancy in Washington.

(Photo: Offenders at Stafford Creek plant native prairie seeds. Source: Daeg Byrne/TNC.)

This post comes to us from biologist Steve MacLean, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Bering Sea Program in Alaska.

Last summer, when biologists walked along the rocky cliffs on Rat Island, one of more than 2,000 islands in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, they encountered an eerie silence. This place should have been a cacophonous and lively melee of bird calls. 

The reason for the silence? Invasive rats. They colonized the island after a Japanese fishing vessel wrecked against its rocky shore in 1798. Their numbers multiplied, and for more than two centuries the voracious rats have preyed on bird eggs and young chicks. The birds gone, silence spread from shore to shore.

This summer, biologists discovered something new at Rat Island: encouraging signs of bird life. The reason? A seabird restoration project is at work.  

Over the course of a week-and-a-half in the fall of 2008, our project team, led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Island Conservation and The Nature Conservancy, broadcast bait across the island. Our objective was this: removing the rats and reclaiming the island as productive seabird breeding habitat.

We’ve received initial evidence that the invasive rats from Alaska’s remote Rat Island are no more. Biologists report three peregrine falcon nests. Several nesting bird species — black oystercatchers, ptarmigan, Aleutian cackling geese and others — appear to be more abundant. This means that the lively din of puffins, auklets and other birds may soon return.

But with the good news of returning nests comes an unexpected report.

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With our counterpart on week two of a European vacation, it’s no wonder that Cool Green Morning has Europe on the mind… or maybe it’s because those Europeans are so progressive when it comes to cap-and-trade and universal cell phone chargers? Read on for all the top news, from here and abroad.

1. Universal cell phone chargers are finally here! Well, by here, we mean Europe. And it’s not just a matter of convenience — universal chargers will help cut down on several thousand tons of waste a year.
2. Climate change policy is now moving through the U.S. government, but the question still remains: will a cap-and-trade system actually work to reduce carbon emissions? To help answer it, The Vine examines the only real-world example there is, the EU’s Emissions Trading system.
3. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is pushing the solar movement along. On Monday, he announced that 670,000 acres of publicly-owned lands in the Southwest will be examined for their potential to support large spreads of solar panels. 
4. Using algae to turn carbon dioxide into fuel might just become a reality… plans to build a demonstration plant are expected to be announced soon.
5. A new study says breaking down levees along the Mississippi River might not be enough to stem the loss of marshlands and further erosion of Louisiana’s coastline.