By Karla Miliani, marketing specialist for The Nature Conservancy in South America

Join a team of Nature Conservancy staff and scientists as they navigate Colombia’s Magdalena River and bring to life its rich communities and culture through this series of blog posts.

At nearly 1,000 miles long, the Magdalena River is born in the Andes mountain range and runs across a large part of Colombia (covering 24% of the national territory), generating life and serving as an economic life-force for the more than 30 million Colombians that live throughout the basin.

The Magdalena River has been a major source of food for the country, but the river faces a series of threats: overfishing, deforestation, agricultural and urban runoff, soil erosion and unprecedented flooding, which affected millions of Colombians in 2010.

Today, this basin generates 85% of the country’s GDP. Around 55% of its 200 species are endemic, only found in the Magdalena. It also provides drinking water to 30 million Colombians.

The Nature Conservancy has embarked on a major project: protecting the Magdalena River Basin. Today, the Conservancy is the only international conservation organization working in the Magdalena River Basin. With the help of the Ministry of Environment and the river’s environmental authority, Cormagdalena, the Conservancy is implementing conservation strategies throughout the basin.

Follow this ongoing blog series as we travel the Magdalena and keep track of the river’s pulse.

Day 1: the Llanito Lake

The team goes fishing with a group of local fishermen at the Magdalena River’s Llanito Lake, where fishermen still practice the “corral” fishing technique, a more sustainable and collective way of fishing.

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Day 2: Illegal Mining

Colombia wants to be a top mining country, but is this country really prepared to assume such challenge? We travel to an illegal mine to learn more.

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Day 3: Zapatoza

The Magdalena River team explores Zapatoza, the biggest freshwater marsh in Colombia, and spends a day talking to local fishermen about the loss of fish.

Read the full post >>

Day 4: Dique Canal

For our final stop along the Magdalena River, we sail along the Dique Canal, which connects Colombia’s interior with one of its most important ports: Cartagena. .

Read the full post >>

1. Have a cruelty-free holiday and adopt a (live) turkey.  (Green)
2. After burning for three+ months, the Great Dismal Swamp wildfire has finally been extinguished.  (AP, via Huffington Post Green)
3. A bathtub-sized sea sponge has been rediscovered after a century of extinction.  Wonder where it was hiding… (Mongabay)
4. This Friday isn’t just Black Friday, it’s also Buy Nothing Day.  (And don’t forget to celebrate Green Gift Monday next week!)  (Grist)
5. Who takes the longest showers?  Twelve-year-old boys, says a new survey.  (Treehugger)

I attended the Nature Conservancy’s 60^th Anniversary Dinner last week at a graceful old building here in Washington originally constructed to house the pension administration for Civil War veterans. The center of this structure, and the location of the Conservancy event, is a five-story tall atrium held up by huge stone columns. I sat at a table off to the side of the podium listening to the famous biologist, EO Wilson, speaking about the diversity of life on Earth and about the growing threat of species extinction. At a pause in the talk, I looked upward and was surprised to see the almost-full moon shining through a clerestory window. The moon was invisible to most of the audience, but the moonlight seemed to me a kind of benediction on Dr. Wilson’s remarks.

I turned my attention back to the next slide in the lecture– a map of the Gulf of Mexico coast of Florida and Alabama. Wilson talked about the exceptional variety of plants and animals found in the Gulf Coastal Plain. I know these places from my years of working for the Conservancy in the south–cypress-lined creeks, longleaf pine forests, unspoiled beaches and the wild delta of the Mobile and Tensaw Rivers close to the City of Mobile. Wilson, who grew up on the Gulf coast, advocated creating a connected corridor of protected forests, wildlife refuges, buffer zones around the military bases across the western panhandle and a new National Park in the Mobile Delta. It was interesting that after his many expeditions to the most exotic and biologically rich places on Earth, E.O. Wilson was advocating conservation of a natural area beside his own boyhood home.

With dinner over, I went with some Conservancy friends to a downtown bar where there is a small alcove in the back with paintings of marshes and ducks flying overhead. We sat and drank and watched out the window as a brief but powerful storm blew waves of rain down the street. As I was talking to Alabama State Director, Chris Oberholster, I recalled another celebration years ago for the creation of a new National Wildlife Refuge on the Cahaba River in central Alabama. It was a conservation achievement that, as in so many other places, would never have happened but for The Nature Conservancy. That afternoon, thunder rolled in the distance, an old time string band played, and Chris waded in the shallows and netted tiny, colorful darters, showed them to a circle of children and returned them to the river where the fish and their progeny would, then, be safe in the years to come.

Still later, I stopped at the office in Ballston to pick up some papers. The sidewalk was deserted except for a young woman sound asleep beneath a thin blanket beside the Conservancy’s front door. I tried not to awaken her in my coming and going—sleep seeming preferable to huddling wide-eyed on the pavement at midnight with no place else to go.

I thought about that young person, perhaps the same age as my own children, and the sense of regret and sadness that I would feel were she one of my daughters. It would not be dissimilar to the regret all of us would feel were we to leave our children an irrevocably ruined earth.

As I walked home, the moon re-appeared among passing clouds. I stopped to listen to a cricket in someone’s yard and felt not so far away from the pull of the tides in the marshes, the dark rivers winding their ways to the Gulf, and the night wind in the southern pines. The struggle for such places in the U.S. and around the world is far from over, but for the last 60 years, The Nature Conservancy, through its staff and volunteers, has provided tangible and lasting conservation accomplishment and a sense of hope for the future of the natural systems that support and enrich our lives. This is, in fact, cause for celebration.

1. A rumored compact Prius could get 94 MPH, but the biggest surprise is the price. (Clean Technica)
2. Marshall Islands creates a shark park so big that Mexico could fit inside.  (Mongabay)
3. Energy bills and emissions are still rising due to our gadget addiction.  (Guardian)
4. The city of Austin’s facilities are now fully powered by renewables.  (EcoGeek)
5. A severe water shortage causes a second island in the South Pacific to declare a state of emergency.  (BBC)

1. Al Gore doesn’t have very nice things to say about climate skeptics.  (Treehugger)
2. This historic one-year Texas drought will actually have ecological impacts for years to come.  (YaleE360)
3. What happened to the Long Island lobster?  (New York Times)
4. Get an update on Sanjayan’s Thelon expedition.  (Huffington Post Green)
5. Here’s how some DC-area bike commuters rode out the hottest July on record.  (Grist)

1. This year’s hurricane season has an 85% chance of being worse than average. (Green)
2. Do dams add to or help reduce climate change? A new study tips the scales toward … (Conservation Journal Watch)
3. This cool animation shows the widening drought across the southern U.S. (The Daily Green)
4. Trying to hold a conversation at a cocktail party isn’t easy… now frogs provide clues to why. (Mongabay)
5. SpongeBob Squarepants talks climate change, and some people aren’t happy about that. (HuffPost Green)

Last week, The Nature Conservancy made a difficult and unprecedented decision—we expressed our opposition to passage of the Interior Appropriations Bill for the Fiscal 2012 Federal budget when it comes before the full House later this month. Taking this step demonstrates the crisis facing conservation in our country; as well as the Conservancy’s evolution as a significant voice in the public debate about the future of America’s land, air and water.

Why did we do this, and, is our action consistent with The Nature Conservancy’s approach to legislative advocacy?

In the past the appropriations for land and water conservation have gone up and down, and while there have been some lean times, conservation has been accepted and funded as an important part of shaping America’s future. The Interior Appropriations Bill provides funding for several of the agencies most important to accomplishing The Nature Conservancy’s mission—the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency – and for many years we have been involved in the process because that’s where decisions are made about funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and other sources of money for conservation land acquisition.

More recently our interests in this part of the Federal budget have broadened as we have focused on improving fire management by the Forest Service, on programs to help private landowners manage habitat for listed species on their land, and as we have engaged in the restoration of large aquatic systems like the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay.

So the Conservancy has always supported passage by the full House of the Interior budget proposal that emerged from the appropriations process.

But this year is different. While the Chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee remains, I believe, a solid supporter of America’s conservation tradition, he has been given inadequate funding to work with, so the budget reported out of the subcommittee and approved by the full Appropriations Committee of the House included very deep cuts to programs of critical importance to The Nature Conservancy and to other conservation organizations.

The Interior Appropriations Bill going to the House floor would reduce funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund to the lowest level in the 45 year history of the program, $66 million–a 78% reduction from the FY11. It would reduce the highly successful Forest Legacy Program by 94%, the North American Wetlands Conservation Act by 47% the Cooperative Endangered Species Program by 95%, and the State and Tribal Wildlife Grant Program by 65% from 2010. These cuts threaten to put an end to longstanding conservation activities with a proven and tangible record of success.

Moreover, the bill contains riders (legislative add-ons) that prohibit EPA from reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and refineries, prohibit EPA from protecting all of the waters of the United States from pollution, and prevent the Department of Interior from protecting threatened and endangered species.

In anticipation of these drastic cuts, the Conservancy has spent months trying to convey a clear message: while the deficit must be addressed and conservation should shoulder its fair share of budget reductions, conservation and the environment should not be cut disproportionately. The deficit should not be used as an excuse to decimate the conservation programs so essential to America’s future. Three weeks ago we signed a letter to budget negotiators with 400 other organizations that pointed out that conservation and environmental programs together account for 1.26% of the Federal budget and have remained almost flat for 30 years while the rest of the Federal budget grew rapidly. Conservation, the letter said, did not cause the deficit and cannot fix the deficit.

But the results of the House Interior Appropriations process are still very damaging to conservation and the environment. So we were faced with the questions: should we still support or, at least, remain silent about, the final bill, or should we, for the first time in our 60 year history, express opposition? It came down to two tests set out in the Conservancy’s policies:

• Is this bill central to the success of our mission?
• Can we make a difference in the outcome?

There is little doubt about the first question. Funding for land conservation, for the restoration of forests and estuaries, to protect wetlands and to deal with climate change is critical to protecting the lands and waters plants and animals need to survive and to sustaining the human benefits of natural systems.

Answering the second question with certainty is more difficult, but as America’s largest conservation organization with a reputation for being measured, non-partisan, place-based, and constructive, one would hope that Congress would listen when we register unprecedented concern.

Mark Tercek’s letter to the leadership of the House says that conservation should do its fair share in the budget cutting and offers the Conservancy’s help in making conservation by Federal agencies more efficient and effective, but it makes clear that we believe the Interior Appropriations Bill now before the House is a breach in the obligation of each generation of Americans to pass on an America whose land and water are clean, healthy, productive, beautiful and accessible for recreation in the outdoors.

While some will disagree with our position, I expect that both supporters and opponents will respect The Nature Conservancy more for standing up for our beliefs at a critical time in our nation’s conservation history.

(Image: Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary. Image credit: Jerry and Marcy Monkman)

It’s official: For the first time in human history, more people are living in cities than rural areas — a trend that’s certain to accelerate. But with most freshwater systems already stressed, how will the world’s cities be able to supply water — and water that’s clean — to a projected 1.5 billion new residents over the course of the next 20 years?

That’s one of the questions Nature Conservancy scientist Rob McDonald set out to answer in a new study published in Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment. For the study, McDonald and his co-authors developed a geography of urban water supplies according to three major constraints: water availability, water quality, and water delivery:

• They calculated that water availability may be an issue for more than 500 million people worldwide living in arid areas of the world of the world likely to face water shortages, like the western United States, Australia, coastal Peru and Chile, North Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia. 
• Poor water quality may be an issue for 890 million people, particularly in cities concentrated in major river basins like India’s Ganges and China’s Yellow River.
• Finally, a whopping 1.3 billion people may be living by 2030 in cities with water delivery problems, particularly in fast-growing cities that lack resources and infrastructure.

So what’s the solution? McDonald and his co-authors note that the most common response to these challenges is to tap groundwater, a generally unsustainable approach. Other strategies include long-distance water transport, reservoir systems, rainwater harvesting, and purchase from private water sellers.

But there are strategies to use existing supplies more wisely, says McDonald, like using treated waste water, replacing old water intrastructure, and converting agriculture to less water-intensive use.

“The world is basically adding a city the size of Washington, D.C. to the planet every week,” says McDonald. “So that’s the real challenge if you’re an urban planner and trying to get water to your citizens.”

(Image: Reflections of New York City buildings in a puddle. Image credit: ShellyS’/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. Runway 4 at JFK airport closed to make way for reproducing turtles. (The New York Times)
2. And… jellyfish have shut down a nuclear plant in Scotland. (GoodCleanTech)
3. Water conservation efforts in the West are actually paying off! Sort of. (The Christian Science Monitor)
4. Can you guess which is the world’s most climate-resilient city? (TreeHugger)
5. Going to the beach this weekend? Check out the water quality first. (HuffPostGreen)

1. Bruins fans, keep rejoicing: the Stanley Cup finals were the first “water neutral” N.H.L. series. (Green)
2. Not to name names, but a former vice president isn’t too happy with a certain current president’s record on climate change. (The New York Times)
3. Green marketing suffers from a lack of humor and other ailments. (Green Biz)
4. One of the last male Hyacinth macaws is looking for a mate. (Species Extinction)
5. The Conservancy’s Jeff Opperman ranks the cities that can best adapt to climate change. (Grist)