1. There’ll be no more energy-sucking televisions in the state where TV was born, now that California has passed the nation’s first law requiring TV energy efficiency standards.
2. Sometimes, incentives just don’t work. The Responsible Travel company has canceled its carbon offsets program, saying it helps travelers appease their guilt over flying but doesn’t actually help reduce emissions — and may even encourage more traveling.
3. Climate change plays favorites apparently. A new report from the U.N. Population Fund says women suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate change – but they also might be in the best position to mitigate it as well.
4. A rare giraffe species was on the brink of extinction in 1996, with just 50 animals left in Niger. But regulations against poaching and other conservation efforts have made a huge difference – 13 years later there are now 200 animals.
5. Wondering which major companies are going green? Check out this list of 5 big corporate names that are trying out new, more sustainable practices, from The Daily Green. 

What am I trying to illustrate in the above photo (a picture of cattle and elephant dung)? That conservation planning is a pile of poop?

No. But this mixture of excrement does show why such planning needs to incorporate extreme events like drought or flooding – especially for the impacts of those events on local people.

In the place where I took this photo — Mt Kenya – livestock herders have moved into protected areas. Why? Because of a protracted and devastating drought — one Kenya is (hopefully) at the end of. The drought has caused the displacement of huge numbers of people and the estimated deaths of half the livestock.

In times this tough, local herders have been forced to graze their animals in protected areas around the country – areas normally set aside for nature and tourism. I can’t blame them — but in a country that relies on tourism so heavily (it’s the second largest sector of the economy), this development is big and troubling news.

Obviously, conservationists should be planning for such extreme events. They will occur; we just don’t know when. We do often include in our plans responses to long-term environmental events (e.g., blow-downs, hurricanes, etc) and critical threats (such as habitat fragmentation and large-scale agriculture). We are even slowly coming to grips with consequences of climate change. But how often do we consider the effects of extreme events on local people, especially the poor, in the areas in which we work?

Probably not nearly enough.

Why should conservationists do this kind of planning? Because quite often the people living in and around the areas we are interested in protecting rely on their immediate surroundings for sustenance. And how extreme events effect these people will likely tell us how they will in turn use those local resources (in many cases, such as around Mt. Kenya, for their survival). By planning for these events and the ramifications on both nature and people, the effects can be at least reduced or muted.

To that end, many Conservancy projects have indirect benefits to people; but not many plan for direct ones. One example of direct benefits to people is grassbanking – the setting aside of land that can be used for grazing livestock in the event of an extreme drought. It’s simple and effective, and something the Conservancy has done in areas such as Montana, and in Kenya, with our partners at the Northern Rangelands Trust (http://northernrangelands.wildlifedirect.org/) where the grassbanks are being put to good use right now – helping both wildlife and people get through the current drought. And this grassbanking in Kenya has helped reduce pressure on protected areas and keep many more people off of Mt Kenya.

We will get droughts, or floods, or extremes of some sort or another — and people, especially those in poorer areas and countries, will turn to nature to help them through those tough times. We should make sure that nature is resilient enough not only to endure these extreme events, but also the pressures that will be brought to bear by local people — especially when those people’s very survival is at stake.

(Image courtesy Timothy Boucher/TNC.)

Ecotourism is often presented as the savior for wildlife and wild places — providing local communities with financial incentives to preserve nature while also reducing poaching and development pressure.

But, lately, others question whether rich Westerners jetting around the world really help much at all: They disturb animals, create demands for new development and only employ local people in low paying jobs.

Some conservationists even consider tourism to be a significant threat to natural areas.

Which view is correct? Is ecotourism a problem, or a solution?

My biases up front: I’d rather travel for the purpose of seeing wildlife and enjoying various outdoor activities than just about anything. My wife has remarked it’s my drug of choice.

That aside, I still think the issue of ecotourism defies easy answers. Problem or solution?

It depends.

Certainly, the ecological havoc wreaked by tourists in places like the Galapagos is well documented. A fragile ecosystem, animals unafraid of humans and an increasing number of cruise ships has been a recipe for disaster.

One doesn’t have to look hard to see tourists behaving badly in nature.

People harass and feed wild bison, leave trash strewn across the Himalayas, demand resorts in places they shouldn’t be — the list is long.

And then there’s the whole carbon footprint issue. We all know that flying has tremendous impacts, so can we really justify flying off to some far-off corner of the world to see animals or scenery?

These are important concerns. Without a doubt, ecotourism can be a threat. But is it always?

After all, would there even be a Galapagos left as we know it if it wasn’t for tourism? Really?

Consider other island ecosystems and how difficult it is to conserve native island wildlife. If it wasn’t for those tour boats, the Galapagos would likely be a highly developed, rat-infested island devoid of wildlife.

Yellowstone may at times be crowded with tourists behaving badly, but would there still be herds of bison and packs of wolves and grizzly bears without those tourists?

The Serengeti faces issues, to be sure, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the wildebeest population there continues to migrate, during a period of time when so many other large mammal migrations have disappeared.

Private ranches in places like Brazil’s Pantanal and Namibia still have large populations of wildlife, in part because many ranchers here now attract tourists. It seems naïve to expect that they will keep conserving wildlife if visitors quit showing up.

Ecotourism, ultimately, is a complicated issue. And in that way, it’s not so different from most other conservation issues.

Some conservationists have the tendency to declare activities as simply “good” or “bad” — whether it’s ecotourism, ranching, timber harvest, invasive species, hunting, fire, or agriculture. All have their proponents and detractors.

However, we should make decisions based on the reality of our world, not on utopian fantasies where humans no longer have any impacts on nature.

We can work to make sure that ecotourism is done in appropriate ways that benefit wildlife and local communities.

And as the saying goes, conservationists can’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Ecotourism isn’t perfect.

In many cases, though, it’s the best solution we have.

(Photo: Caimans draw tourists to Brazil’s Pantanal. Credit: Matt Miller/TNC.)

It’s Election Day in the United States — get out and vote! Then immediately get back on your smartphone and check out the hottest in online green this morning — including what might possibly be the best green name ever…

1. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s ice cap is disappearing — but is that climate change’s fault? Two research teams are disagreeing, reports The New York Times, with one blaming a decline in moisture rather than rising temperatures. (No word on which side of this debate the band Toto — which had the 1982 smash hit song “Africa,” which in an eerie coincidence mentions both Kilimanjaro and “the rains of Africa” — comes down. We’ll keep you posted.)
2. Meanwhile, Nepal’s cabinet plans to meet on Mount Everest to show the world how global warming is melting Himalayan glaciers, reports Associated Press. (No need for oxygen tanks — they’re only going to base camp, not all the way up.)
3. The leader of Orthodox Christianity — Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who calls himself “the green patriarch” — is in Washington this week, talking up the spiritual importance of environmentalism, reports the Washington Post.
4. Speaking of the Post, check out their great infographic tool that tracks total national per capita CO2 emissions since 1950. (Hat tip: Treehugger.)
5. Which societies will survive climate change best? Gaia Vince (which has to be one of the great green names in history) surveys the field at Yale Environment 360 and likes…Laos, among other places.

(Image: Mount Kilimanjaro. Credit: Picture_Taker_2/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. Best headline of the morning award goes to Bright Green Blog: “Surprise!  The world has more trees than you probably think.” New satellite imagery shows that trees actually cover a significant chunk of the world’s farmlands, indicating that maybe agriculture and deforestation don’t always go hand in hand.
2. Ethiopian farmers may soon be able to run carbon offsets operations via text message, according to Green Inc., which could help small farmers significantly increase their profits, in addition to reducing the carbon impact of large emitters. Win-win for everyone.
3. Computer company Dell has “planted” a number of solar trees in its headquarters’ parking lot.  CleanTechnica says that the solar trees will provide 130,000 kilowatts per year to the facility, as well as lots of shade and charging stations for hybrid and electric vehicles.
4. A new report reveals that, thanks to the Pacific garbage patch, the diet of the Pacific albatross now consists of large quantities of plastic, including lighters, fishing line and, in one case, a sealed bottle of face lotion, says Scientific American’s Observations blog. Mmm, just like Mom used to make.
5. The trucking industry is primed for a sparkly green makeover, says GreenBiz. Recent analysis shows that the technology already exists to double the energy efficiency of long-haul trucks, which will ultimately keep operating costs down and increase profits — the industry just needs to get on board.

Boys fishing the Zambezi River behind a crocodile barrier

How do you convince people that a river they’ve known their whole lives is not the river it once was…or could be?

That turned out to be my challenge last week, when I traveled to Zambia in support of The Nature Conservancy’s new project to restore the Zambezi River.  After several days of meetings with our partners — including WWF and universities and government agencies from Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique — I finally got to spend some time on the river itself, in Lower Zambezi National Park.

This was my first experience in an African wilderness, and I was awestruck by the sheer abundance of hippos and crocs and the throngs of elephants, buffalo, antelope and baboons brought to the river’s edge by the blazing heat and parched hills that marked the end of Zambia’s long dry season (see below for a slideshow of the river, dam and wildlife).

While the wildlife had left me with a childlike sense of wonder, it was our dinner companion that night that brought home for me the importance and challenge of this project.

We sat down to dinner amidst a throbbing insect soundtrack, a slow-burning fire glowing in the foreground with the Zambezi a sinuous darker void in the darkness beyond. Joining us was Kevin, a Zambian who manages the lodge where we were staying.  Conversation turned to the health of the river and he told us the majority of his guests were anglers lured by the aptly named tiger fish, a fearsome predator with teeth right off the costume rack of a B-horror movie.

Kevin mentioned that fish numbers were down and had been going down for a while. This seemed a natural opening to talk about one of the specific objectives of our Zambezi project: working with dam managers to improve how they release water from the massive upstream Kariba Dam (called “environmental flow releases”), in part to promote the productivity of fish in this part of the river.

My Conservancy colleague suggested this: “You know,” he said, “some people think the fish decline is because the river no longer has high water during the rainy season because how the dam is operated.”

Kevin, nothing if not blunt, shook his head and said: “Nah, that’s crap. The real reason is that people in the villages take too many fish — they use nets with a small mesh that catch everything in the river, even the smallest fish. That’s why the fish numbers are going down.  But what can you do? You can’t simply tell people not to fish, they have nothing else. What will they do then, come and rob you at night?” He went on to relate his skepticism that the operation of Kariba Dam should, or even could, be altered; it just seemed risky to him.

In this one riposte, Kevin succinctly framed both the need and challenges for the Zambezi project.

First, although the river appears healthy — its water is clean and its banks are wild and rich in wildlife — appearances can be deceiving.  The river is not healthy, or at least not the same healthy it once was. Kariba Dam — big enough to store every drop of water flowing in the river for two years — has tamed it, made it a different river. Before the dam, the river ran high during the rainy season and very low in the dry. Today, the big reservoir behind Kariba captures the floods and evens out the flows throughout the year

Though we don’t have fisheries data from before Kariba, if the Zambezi is like most other big rivers, much of its fish abundance would have been produced in the floodplain grasslands and wetlands when they were inundated by high flows. Now the Zambezi mostly stays in its banks.

Second, the challenges for conservation and of people are intertwined. Overfishing is hurting the Zambezi and, ultimately, the people that depend upon it. The people who live here need some combination of better fisheries management, alternative sources of income and protein, and more fish in the river (one of the goals of the environmental-flows project). These livelihood challenges are inextricably linked with nature conservation and restoration.

Finally, even potential beneficiaries of changes can be skeptical of deviations from the status quo, because the risk of disruption looms larger than the as-yet-unproven possibility of benefits. Thus, the benefits must be clearly analyzed, demonstrated, and communicated.

Kevin’s conviction that overfishing, not flow regime, is the cause of fish decline is partly right — it is a problem for the river as it is today, this river. But this river is different from the river it once was. It’s not surprising that Kevin doesn’t suspect the flow regime; the current river is the only river he’s ever known.  Kariba was built in 1955, and so the only people who can really remember how the river previously worked — let’s say those at least 12 years old then — are nearly 70 years old today.  For everyone else, this river is the river.  And this Zambezi is being overfished.  But perhaps some aspects of the old Zambezi can be restored.

It’s clear we need good communications tools.  If Kevin — who has much to gain from a new flow regime — was skeptical of changes to the river’s management, what would other people say?

Fortunately, we got some practice at that communication later in the conversation. Kevin mentioned that the anglers know they need to fish near the river’s edges, where it flows next to or through downed logs, grasses and other vegetation. “Not out in the middle of the river,” he said. “The water’s too fast and the fish don’t like it. The fish are along the edges.”

I explained that what we talked about before — environmental flows to restore the connection between river and floodplain — was really the same thing as creating lots and lots of such “edge” habitat. Rather than just being restricted to the sides of the river, the shallow, calm, and vegetated “edge” habitat would cover an extensive plain — the difference between grazing cows in a strip of grass along a highway versus a vast meadow.

Kevin nodded his head thoughtfully.  I don’t know if he was convinced, but we’d found some common understanding and vocabulary of how the river worked.  We have much work ahead of us.

(Photo credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

Over the past several months, I and many of my colleagues across The Nature Conservancy have  been working on Planet Change, a new microsite we are launching today to draw attention to the need for a global solution to climate change that significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions as well as two crucial, yet often overlooked issues in the fight against climate change:

• Reducing emissions from deforestation, and
• Helping natural systems reduce the impact of climate change on people and communities.

The site we’ve put together informs users on the importance of these issues and invites them to participate in our campaign to bring these issues to the table as U.S. lawmakers and global leaders debate the framework for national legislation and global agreements on climate change.

The site gives users the ability to post a message of hope on what they want to protect from climate change and use the social networks Facebook and Twittter to tell their friends about the importance of curbing deforestation and helping nature reduce the impacts of climate change.

While we were creating the site, much of our time was spent on esoteric and technical concerns like design, messaging, user flow, flash integration and APIs (check out Wikipedia if you must know). At the risk of sounding overly cynical, much of what we were doing could have been dedicated to marketing soap flakes instead of raising awareness of solutions to climate change.

Then, one evening last week I was putting together the video above, shot by Conservancy staff in Kenya, and my attitude changed in an instant. The video is a testimonial of a Samburu tribeswoman from Kenya talking about the changes she has witnessed from climate change during her lifetime — drought, decreased food production and loss of income.

Like all of us (whether we know it or not), the Samburu depend deeply on natural systems for their livelihood. Those systems are changing and with those changes, people are facing new hardships in an already exceedingly difficult existence.

After putting this video together, launching Planet Change was no longer an exercise in  implementing new web 2.0 tactics. It was now all about getting this woman’s message to the world and helping as many people spread that message as broadly as possible.

It brought my mission home: Use the power of the web to amplify a solitary voice that otherwise might never be heard.

Mountain gorillas, salmon, killer whales, even cute bunnies… we’re animal-friendly here at Cool Green Morning. From wild creatures to the latest news on the Senate cap-and-trade vote, we’ve got something that will float your boat in today’s round-up of Cool Green News links.

1. Can better health care for local people help save endangered mountain gorillas? It all comes down to genetics, says Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka — because humans and gorillas share 98.4% of the same genes, improving public health for Ugandans living near gorilla habitat could reduce disease spread and improve the animal’s survival rates.
2. In case you need another reason to support efforts to revive salmon populations… a new study shows that populations of killer whales decline when their primary food source — Chinook salmon for killer whales off the coast of British Columbia and Washington — is low.
3. Will the Senate vote on cap-and-trade legislation get pushed into 2010? Sounds like a possibility. And a delay could mean the United States goes into the global climate change talks at Copenhagen this December with a wishy-washy agenda at best.
4. Nuclear power as a viable source of clean energy is a hot debate in many places, including Spain. Thus, a new paper from Spanish reserachers that looks at one simple question: Is nuclear a rational economic choice?
5. What do cute bunnies have to do with the EPA? Absolutely nothing. Which doesn’t stop Grist’s David Roberts from shamelessly peppering his recent article on EPA greenhouse gas regulations with photos and video of the most adorable bunnies we’ve ever seen. Whether for the smart content or the bunny eye-candy, you should check it out.

(Image: Mountain gorilla in Uganda. Source: Chris E Moore via a Creative Commons license.)

1. That story about a Nepalese student making a solar panel from human hair? Turns out it’s bogus, reports Bright Green Blog — although much of the green blogosphere was taken in by the fable.
2. We missed this on Friday: Uganda will now track gorillas online in an effort to attract additional conservation funds, reports Green Inc. (You’ll also be able to friend gorillas by Facebook and Twitter, too. No word on whether they’ll spam you back.)
3. RIP Dr. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that revolutionized high-yield agriculture for the developing world — Sustainablog says he likely “saved more human lives than any other person in history.”
4. The loss of rainfall and vegetation in subtropical parts of the world because of global warming could set the stage for increased desertification, reports a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
5. India and China are usually said to have low per-capita greenhouse gas emissions compared with Western countries — but Environmental Capital reports that Lord Nichols Stern (of the famous Stern Report on climate change) says parts of China have per-capital emissions levels similar to some richer countries in Europe.

1. Will the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill help reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil? Environmental Capital says the current version of the bill “wouldn’t really do much to dent America’s oil appetite” nor help disempower the world’s major oil suppliers.
2. The climate change debate — man-made or natural? — is likened to the debate over evolution vs. creationism by a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has asked the EPA to hold a “Scopes-like” trial over the science of climate change.
3. Africa without wildlife? It’s impossible to imagine, but writer Richard Conniff does after reading a new study that shows wildlife in Kenya are disappearing as quickly inside national park boundaries as out. The Kenya Wildlife Service fears lions could be extinct there within 20 years.
4. Using real-life experiments to determine how warmer ocean temperatures might affect marine life, a new study found an increase in zooplankton, which could lead to fewer phytoplankton around sucking up CO2 and an overall loss of ocean life.
5. The Conservancy’s new study on energy sprawl – the amount of land it takes to produce new energy — was featured in a number of media outlets, including Nature, ClimateWire, Bloomberg and Treehugger.