Confused Animals Look Around and Sing: “This Is Where We Used to Live”

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

A shift in home range by a handful of bird species along an obscure ridge in the Peruvian Andes might once have seemed like sleepy stuff, even to ecologists. Instead, it made headlines last month when researchers reported that the birds’ uphill push for cooler terrain has already resulted in population losses for most species and the probable extirpation of five species that were common at the top of the ridge just 33 years ago.

It was some of the strongest evidence yet for the long-standing prediction by scientists that climate change will lead — is leading now — to widespread loss of wildlife. University of British Columbia ecologist Ben Freeman and his co-authors summed up their findings with a chilling metaphor: Mountain birds, they wrote, are “riding an escalator to extinction.”

The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, didn’t report any actual extinctions. The Cerro de

A cousin of the now-extinct Bramble Cay melomys. (Photo: Luke Leung/University of Queensland)

Pantiacolla rises to a maximum height of only 4,642 feet, and the birds that disappeared from the ridgetop persist on higher and larger mountains — in effect, on other escalators — elsewhere in the area. Reliable scientific evidence that climate change has caused actual extinctions is in fact scarce so far, despite projections by climate modelers that such extinctions are likely. The only known example is a marsupial called the Bramble Cay melomys, which vanished sometime after 2009 from a low-lying island off northern Australia, after sea level rise and extreme weather caused repeated inundation of its habitat.

But the new study from Peru lends support to the predictions being made by climate modelers. It also fits into a rapidly expanding body of evidence that plants and animals everywhere are on the move as they struggle to adjust to climate change. The ecological upheaval is “happening right now and it will almost certainly continue to happen,” says Freeman, lead author of the Peru study, and “there is an immediacy to something happening right before our eyes that’s different from a study saying, ‘this is what it’s going to be like in 2100.’”

When plants and animals move uphill, they can lose habitat, simply because mountains become smaller the higher you climb. A shift in range can also mean the loss of old partnerships, the introduction of

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Gaining Ground in the Fight to Stop Illegal Logging

Illegal logging of Spanish cedar along the Las Piedras River, Madre de Dios, Peru. (Photo: Andre Baertschi)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Strange as it may sound, we have arrived at a moment of hope for the world’s forests. It is, admittedly, hope of a jaded variety: After decades of hand-wringing about rampant destruction of forests almost everywhere, investigators have recently demonstrated in extraordinary detail that much of this logging is blatantly illegal.

And surprisingly, people actually seem to be doing something about it. In November, the European Court of Justice put Poland under threat of a 100,000-euro-per-day fine for illegal logging in the continent’s oldest forest, and last month Poland’s prime minister fired the environment minister who authorized the logging.

In Romania, two big do-it-yourself retail chains ended purchasing agreements with an Austrian logging giant implicated in illegal logging there. And in this country, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, normally dedicated to free trade at any cost, has barred a major exporter of

Thank the Conquistadors for South America’s First Big Mining Pollution

Pizzaro: Massey Energy Co. role model?

A few years ago in Suriname, I was struck by how the most remote and undeveloped areas are now polluted with mercury, from gold mining.  Now it turns out that the large-scale poisoning of South America got started by the Conquistadors. And you thought Pizarro and Cortés were only responsible for torture, religious persecution, genocide, and other such crimes.

Here’s the press release:

In the 16th century, during its conquest of South America, the Spanish Empire forced countless Incas to work extracting silver from the mountaintop mines of Potosí, in what is now Bolivia — then the largest source of silver in the world. The Inca already knew how to refine silver, but in 1572 the Spanish introduced a new technology that boosted production many times over and sent thick clouds of lead dust rising over the Andes for the first time in history.

Winds carried some of that pollution 500 miles northwest into Peru, where tiny remnants of it settled on the Quelccaya Ice Cap.

There it stayed — buried under hundreds of years of snow and ice — until researchers from The Ohio State University found it in 2003.

In the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report discovery of a layer within a Quelccaya ice core that dates to the Spanish conquest of the Inca, contains bits of lead and bears the chemical signature of the silver mines of Potosí.

The core provides the first detailed record of widespread human-produced