Wednesday, 13 Feb 2002

Bang Dugong

The animal that inspired seafarers to tell tales of mermaids is disappearing from the planet, according to a report released this week. The dugong, a large sea mammal that is a cousin to the famous manatee of Florida and the Caribbean, was thought by ancient sailors to be half-woman, half-fish, perhaps because of its habit of holding its young with one flipper when nursing. Because dugongs are highly sensitive to changes in their environment such as pollution and loss of food sources, they are the canaries in the mine of underwater habitats. According to the report, produced with funding from the U.N. Environment Programme and the World Conservation Union (IUCN), dugongs have already vanished in many places, and most populations are in decline.

Banned, on the Run

The FBI's top domestic terrorism officer yesterday called the Earth Liberation Front and its companion, the Animal Liberation Front, the largest and most active U.S.-based terrorist organizations. According to the FBI, the two organizations have perpetrated a total of 600 attacks since 1996 costing $43 million in damage. The bureau acknowledged, however, that no one has ever been killed in the attacks, meaning the organizations are not as dangerous as others tracked by the FBI. Congressional efforts to investigate the groups have been frustrated by the refusal of former ELF spokesperson Craig Rosebraugh to testify. Meanwhile, Mark Warren Sands, the Phoenix man who committed eight acts of arson in the name of protecting the Earth, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison and $2.8 million in restitution.

Grants' Tomb?

The U.S. EPA has awarded more than $2 billion in grants to nonprofit organizations since 1993 through a process that the agency's internal watchdog says is seriously flawed. Many grants were awarded without competitive bids, and some groups may have received preferential treatment. Some of the awards went to organizations that subsequently sued the EPA -- although presumably with separate funds. (Grants haven't just gone to left-leaning groups. For example, the National Association of Homebuilders, which received $2 million in research grants, sued the agency to eliminate a rule barring developers from excavating in swamps, bogs, and marshes without approval.) According to the Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that sued to obtain the EPA records and turned them over to the Associated Press for analysis, very few of the grants have been audited. The General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency, has also raised concerns that the EPA's money has been used to fund impermissible lobbying activity.

Sting Operation

Okay, everyone knows you can't take so much as a nail clipper on an airplane these days -- but how about a scorpion? Last month, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors in Miami impounded a shipment of 600 of the critters, plus 2,000 reptiles and other invertebrates. That's a lot of crawly things, but the shipment was just one of untold others that are, well, fishy -- or downright illegal. The economy might be sluggish, but the exotic pet trade is booming, and the commodities include chimps, tigers, wolves, bears, tarantulas, and just about every other creature you can't imagine wanting to own. The legal trade amounts to tens of billions of dollars annually, and Interpol estimates that the black-market counterpart runs to $12 billion per year -- second only to drugs. Environmentalists say the real figure is much higher, since the dollar signs don't reflect the ecological, social, and health cost of extinction, ecosystem disruptions, non-native species invasions, and other woes.

As the World Turns Differently

You think your days are already long? Just you wait: Scientists in Belgium have determined that days may become even longer as global warming occurs. In a study published in this month's Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists, who hail from Belgium's Royal Observatory and the Catholic University of Louvain, said that increasing levels of carbon dioxide both warm the atmosphere and slow the Earth's rotation. Using computer models based on a 1 percent annual increase in CO2 levels, they determined that changes in the ocean and the atmosphere in a warmer world would affect the planet's angular momentum. But don't schedule a longer lunch break just yet; the changes are on the order of 11 microseconds per decade, or 11 hundred-thousandths of a second over the century.