Walruses, polar bears living on the edge
It’s no secret that I love animals, all of them. It’s also no secret to the Natural Resources Defense Council that I occasionally donate to the welfare of animals caught in dire circumstances. Sometimes, I have to remind NRDC that I have limited funds and must choose beneficiaries carefully.
When I can’t give money, I write about the plight of wildlife, hoping those more flush than I might take up the slack. And I do the other stuff, like calling or writing legislators.
An e-mail from Francis Beinecke at NRDC reminds me to call Sen. Jon Tester to support the Climate Security Act scheduled for debate in the U.S. Senate this week. The bill (S.2191) may be the most promising, bipartisan global warming bill ever considered. This could be good news for polar bears and other creatures caught in a rapidly warming environment.
The Interior Department did throw the bears a lifeline by listing the species as “threatened” after a federal judge ordered the administration to decide its status under the Endangered Species Act by May 15. The original January deadline had been ignored and while the administration stalled for time, it rammed through oil and gas leases in some of the polar bear’s most important Arctic habitat. The issue is headed back to court this summer to have the listing changed from threatened to endangered, which would mandate protection of the bear’s habitat from the effects of global warming.
The Climate Security Act would give the bears more protection than they have now by restricting greenhouse gas emissions to slow warming. Columnists of all political stripes are putting in their two cents worth.
Conservative columnist George Will decries the bear’s “threatened” status as a subversion of the Constitution, giving the government “authority to regulate almost everything.” He says the “green left” preaches “pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitats, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing” through the “stigmatization of carbon.” This from one who proudly drives an SUV to and from work in D.C.
On the other hand, a retired chief of the U.S. Forest Service and a regional director of the National Wildlife Federation champion the Climate Security Act as an “economy wide” approach to cap runaway global warming pollution that won’t unduly penalize any sector of the economy. It recognizes the role of working farms and forests to help reduce emissions 2 percent per year by 2050. These gentlemen say the conversion (to development and agriculture) and loss of forests (from climate-related increases in pest outbreaks and fires) make up more than a fifth of total global emissions, considering forests can store as much as 150 tons of carbon per acre.
The Climate Security Act helps forests and farms through carbon offsets, pollution credits and new funding from the sale of credits to natural resource agencies and specific programs. Sounds okay to me.
At the same time that senators debate the Climate Security Act, the administration has substantially cut the USDA budget by $8 million, forcing the agency to abandon publishing its national survey tracking pesticide use. Farmers and consumer advocates have relied on this data since 1990. The EPA also uses the report to figure out how chemicals should be regulated and which pesticides pose the greatest risk to public heath. Convenient for Dow; not so much for us.
Meanwhile, a beautifully written piece by Natalie Angier in the New York Times introduces us to another animal threatened by global warming. The walrus, that tusked and bewhiskered amphibian of undulating blubber, is in almost as much trouble as the polar bear.
It seems walruses, native to the Arctic, are neither long distance swimmers nor deep-sea divers. They hunt in shallow waters around the continental shelf, rarely descending below 100 feet and resurfacing often to catch their breath. Adult males leave the ice shelf to summer along the coasts of Siberia and Alaska, but females and their young stay on the floes year-round.
Researchers, who put walrus populations at about 190,000, mostly in the Pacific half of the Arctic, say that figure is on a downward slide as the polar ice sheet, on which depend for every stage of life, thins and retreats. As the ice sheet in the Chukchi Sea retreats farther north each summer, it now moves off the continental shelf entirely and ends up over the deep Arctic basin in waters too deep for walruses to forage.
So, in an election year and a time of soaring fuel and food prices, how do we get our senators to brave up and support climate change legislation? Cute photos of pudgy walrus pups and cuddly white bear cubs probably won’t do it.
Would we pay for their junkets to see the devastation first hand? Well, in case they go, I have some advice for the pols: If you get stranded on a retreating ice floe, try not to look like a seal.