WWF – Conservation Games
It’s so good when learning about our world involves fun. World Wildlife Fund International, headquartered in Gland Switzerland, has a webpage that features seven fun little games related to conservation.
All most of the games require is some basic skills, such as hand/eye coordination. Trying to get the Seagull to poop at the right time so it lands on the evil fishermen and saves the fish takes a certain talent! I enjoyed it, even though I confess that my first game’s score was just 12. We get better at this game apparently, because the highest score is around 6,700!
If you are or ever have been a Tetris fan, you will most likely enjoy Bycatch Bonanza, and successfully avoid catching the good sealife when you’re trying to catch just fish.
The Earth Hour Game matched my “The Seagull Strikes Back” game in being simple fun. It’s entertaining making the little character run along, turning out lights along the way. Be careful you don’t make him fall off the planet!
Toxic Blaster was fun once I caught on how to play it (Hint: the spacebar helps!).
Rescue the Russian Leopard and Poacher Peril both need to be downloaded, which I haven’t yet done - the online games are keeping me happy enough.
Basic conservation messages are embedded in the games, such as when fishing people should just catch what they’re trying to, and avoid bycatch. As with most things that WWF do, these games although simple are both fun and high quality.
Happy Friday!
Tags: Conservation, Earth Hour Game, fishing game, hand/eye coordination, online games, Tetris, Toxic Blaster, WWF
Energy Sustainability, Olympics-Style
Dancing on a sustainable power floor that lights up when dancers move on it, a film that connects the dots between Olympic athletes and powerful electrical energy, and an environmentally-friendly home – that’s BC Hydro’s Power Smart Village pavilion at the Olympics.
Hello from Vancouver, home to the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. BC Hydro is using their role as the Official Supplier of Electricity to the Games as a platform to promote a message of conservation, Simi Heer explained to me. Simi is BC Hydro’s Power Smart Media Representative.
BC Hydro provides electricity to 94% of British Columbians, and is the third-largest electric utility in Canada. Their Power Smart program has been delivering a sustainability message for years, encouraging British Columbians to consume less electricity.
It was fun to dance on the electricity-generating floor at Club Energy, and watch as the colored lights beneath the floor turned on and flashed with my dancing speed. The floor is also part of BC Hydro’s message of how we impact and are tied to energy. According to Simi, 1.1 million watts of electricity were generated the first two days from people dancing on the floor. She told me that the floor has generated around six kilowatt hours of electricity in just over a week, enough for six loads of laundry. That’s a lot of dancing. “The message we’re trying to show is that it’s hard to generate electricity, so we should be wise in how we use it,” Simi commented. Electricity doesn’t excite everyone, so the dance floor “makes it more interesting.”
Also at the Power Smart Village pavilion is a short film that draws parallels between athletes using their bodies efficiently and people using energy wisely. Sometimes people need to be trained in conservation messages, just like athletes require training to become skilled in their sport. Lack of knowledge can be a major stumbling block in getting people to live more sustainably.
Another onsite display is the Home of the Future, which is made of two recycled shipping containers. The outside is made of B.C. cedar board siding and pine beetle wood. Inside, a Smart Washer & Dryer and Smart Refrigerator monitor energy levels and do their most intensive work when the energy demand is low. Part of BC Hydro’s Olympics effort is to recruit British Columbians to become members of Power Smart, and reduce their energy consumption by 10%, reports Simi. It’s one step along the road to living sustainably.
Tags: 2010 Olympics, BC Hydro, Climate Change, Club Energy, Conservation, dance floor, generating electricity, Home of the Future, Power Smart, Power Smart Village, sustainability
Weather and Wildlife
Do you ever read a news item that makes you go “hhmmm”? Recently, several news items from the world of wildlife had that effect on me.
The first was from CNN online, about Kenyan wildlife officials rounding up and moving thousands of zebras and wildebeest from a northern park to Amboseli National Park to feed starving lions and hyenas. The lions and hyenas have started going after local livestock, because the drought that Kenya recently suffered from has killed many of their prey animals in the park. This also impacts tourism – Amboseli is one of Kenya’s top parks, and most tourists go there to see the animals.
Then, halfway around the world, another item that has been in the news caught my attention. Partly because it’s important, and partly because when combined with the above story all I could think at first was “hhmmm”.
As various news outlets have recently covered, animals and plants have been dying in Florida due to a bout of unusually cold weather. Animals such as the endangered manatee was featured for several nights on evening broadcasts as they huddled in springs trying to stay warm. The New York Times In Transit Blog mentions that thousands of “cold-stunned” sea turtles were rescued. Sadly, animals died from the cold, including manatees, sea turtles and crocodiles.
What struck me is that both of these stories exist due to drastic weather changes, and yet stories appeared around the same time in other media outlets announcing that the number of people who “believe” in climate change has gone down since Copenhagen. How can people not believe in climate change, or be concerned about what is happening in our world, when they learn stories like the above?
The other thing that struck me about the stories is what a strange world we’re living in now, and it’s likely to become even stranger.
What did the two news stories make you think? Other than simply, “hhmmm”?
Tags: Amboseli National Park, Climate Change, Conservation, Copenhagen, Endangered Species, Florida, Kenya, lions, Manatees, sea turtles, Wildlife, zebras
Protecting Whales and Dolphins
The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, (WDCS), along with eleven other groups, have gone to court to try to stop the US Navy from building a US warfare training site east of Jacksonville, Florida. The area happens to be the only known calving area for endangered North Atlantic right whales. So I called Erich Hoyt, Senior Research Fellow and Programme Head for Critical Habitat/MPAs for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, to find out more.
Erich reports that the Navy and the National Marine Fisheries Service have acknowledged that the training site may impact right whales and other species in the area. (The National Marine Fisheries Service manages marine sites and marine mammals and is responsible for enforcing the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Erich told me.) In spite of this, however, the Navy has decided to construct the site. Promises that they will evaluate the impacts after the site has been built do not satisfy environmentalists who can’t imagine the Navy spending that kind of money and then not using the site.
The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, along with the eleven other groups, feel that these impacts must be addressed first and that mitigation plans need to be developed before the site is constructed.
The US Navy has acknowledged that their sonar caused Cuvier’s Beaked Whales off the Bahamas to strand. Training exercises involving sonar have also caused whales to strand elsewhere, including the Mediterranean and off the Canary Islands. The US Navy is interested in these results, and apparently are trying to find out more about the impacts of their sonar. I like to believe that many US Navy people enjoy the sea so much that they also care about whales and dolphins.
The problem is that underwater, “noise travels so fast and far that something that might not seem to be a problem on land is quickly a big problem under the sea,” Erich reflected. I remember as a child, swimming off an island beach, hearing what sounded like the engine of a motorboat almost on top of me. I burst to the surface, expecting to see the boat and was surprised when I couldn’t locate it. It was not yet within view. I continued my swim but looked up every few minutes until finally the small boat came into view. I can only imagine how unnerving the noise must be to whales that can’t understand what’s happening.
Further, whales and dolphins are very dependent on sound. The background noise of the container ships that are on the ocean has doubled every decade since the 1950s as the number of ships grew. Scientists, Erich told me, have found evidence of whales communicating using louder sounds and blue whales using lower noises. The supposed link is being investigated.
This is not only an American issue. It’s a Canadian issue as well, Erich pointed out. North Atlantic right whales migrate north and feed in summertime off of the Bay of Fundy and the coast of New Brunswick. They go to Florida to breed. So they summer in Canada and winter in Florida – sounds like they do their own version of snowbirding!
Erich has written several books, including one about marine protected areas. Entitled Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises (Earthscan, 2005, 516 pp), it is in its second edition and is available on Amazon.com. It features protected areas around the world which include marine mammals. “There are about 600 of them existing or proposed worldwide,” Erich commented, but many of them “are too small to be really effective”. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society is campaigning to establish 12 representative, large, highly-protected areas or networks. Some of these are actually networks of several marine protected areas that protect migrating whales.
More details about Erich and reviews of his books can be found on his personal website at www.erichhoyt.com. To find out more about the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, visit their website.
Tags: Caribbean, Conservation, dolphins, Erich Hoyt, National Marine Fisheries Service, sonar, US Navy, whales, Whales and Dolphins
NOAA, NOS and Coral Reefs
The Technical Part:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an agency of the US Department of Commerce. NOAA’s goal is to enrich life through science, and to keep Americans informed about the changing environment around them from the sun’s surface to the ocean’s floor. NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) is the nation’s premier science agency for oceans and coasts.
The Educational Part:
NOS has a section on their website called Five Things You Should Know About Coral Reefs. It is both nicely presented and educational.
Page One advises that coral reefs are the ocean’s version of land-based rainforests. With rich biodiversity and thousands of creatures, coral is one of the largest living structures on earth.
Next, think about the number of people who depend upon reefs. Do you think the number of people who are totally dependent on reefs is 5 million? 15 million? 20 million? Or 30 million? Then guess how much money is generated annually by coral ecosystems? Both answers can be found on Page Two on the website.
Then NOS invites us to consider the sad news that around 20% of the world’s reefs are damaged beyond recovery, and about 50% are seriously at risk. Both manmade and natural threats exist, from climate change to marine debris to invasive species. Check out Page Three for more information.
Page Four mentions the activities of NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program. The program also helps international reefs since, similar to other animals and plants, reefs don’t know what a border is.
Page Five wraps up the section with what you can do to help reefs. Awareness is step one, so check out this section and other parts of their website. And managing your impact is important, so follow their invitation to check out their Coral Reef Conservation Program.
The Fun Part:
Check out NOS’s fun section. In particular, The Migration Game is a fun way to learn about topics including shipping lanes, animal migrations, and other ocean facts. The game has a few technical twists to learn, but soon you’ll be zipping around the board.
The Ocean Guardian Activity Book is fun for younger kids, while Nim’s Island teaches about special ocean places such as national marine sanctuaries.
If you like seeing storms, the Tornado section shows some fascinating photos.
And so on. This website is worth poking around. It is very multi-layered and one trail will lead to another. Have fun checking it out!
Tags: Conservation, coral, National Ocean Service, Nim, NOAA, NOS, oceans, reef
Wildlife Call Ringtones
Ringtones are available that sound like the calls of endangered wildlife and are one way to show what you care about. One of the greatest selections of wildlife ringtones available is written about in the Friday File (which you can access through either this link, the menu bar at the top of this page or the link at the side).
Tags: Bald Eagle, Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation, Grizzly Bear, Mexican Gray Wolf, Prairie Dog, ringtones, Wildlife
Wildlife Ringtones
In this age of ringtones which vary from James Bond music to grand opera, it’s fun having a ringtone that reminds us of the wildlife we care about. One of the best selections of wildlife ringtones that I’ve found is on the Center for Biological Diversity’s website.
As the website suggests, the Center for Biological Diversity works through science, law, and creative media to secure a future for all species on the brink of extinction. They tend to focus on species in the United States, with some in Canada, the Far North and further south in the Americas.
The Center’s ringtones offer an international variety. Their six categories of free, downloadable ringtones include the calls of rare and endangered frogs, mammals, owls, other birds, and some sea mammals. Among my personal favorites are the Bald Eagle, Gunnison’s Prairie Dog, and the Mexican Gray Wolf. A few of them, such as the Grizzly Bear and the More Spectacular-Sounding Wildlife selections may startle your fellow bus travelers!
Overall, many of the animals presented have calls that lend themselves well to ringtones. Most readers are likely to find one that matches their own personality and just how much attention they want to receive every time their phone rings.
If you’re happy with your current ringtone and don’t want to change it, this website is still worth visiting. A fun afternoon or evening can be spent listening to the different ringtones and learning what the animals sound like. At the end of your fun, please remember that the Center is a nonprofit organization that needs support, and pay them something for the entertainment.
Tags: Bald Eagle, Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation, Grizzly Bear, Mexican Gray Wolf, Prairie Dog, ringtones, Wildlife
Palm Oil and Rainforest Destruction
In Guatemala just over a year ago, I flew in a small plane so low over the rainforest that we could see some large birds circle and land in a tree. For the first time in my life, I witnessed what I’ve read about tropical rainforests for years – the grassy sections where the forest has been chopped down, the dirt areas where now nothing will grow, and the little clumps of forest that are too small for anything larger than a coatimundi to live in. “What was there before?” I wondered. “What animals have we lost? What medicinal plants?”
“What you saw in Guatemala is not very different from what you see flying over the Amazon, [or] over parts of Southeast Asia or Africa,” Leila Salazar-Lopez of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) told me today. “Anywhere where there’s rainforest, they are literally on the chopping block.”
Agribusiness is responsible for much of the destruction. RAN’s Rainforest Agribusiness campaign is focused on trying to protect tropical rainforest from the alarmingly fast expansion into rainforests. One of the commodities responsible for this is palm oil.
Palm oil is in about 50% of our consumer goods, including snack foods, cereals, detergents, cosmetics and even biofuels. Most people don’t know that, Leila told me. The reason palm oil is such a globally-expanding commodity is that it’s cheap – it’s the least expensive source of vegetable oil in the world.
Unfortunately, palm oil is a tropical plant, originally from Africa, and can only be grown in the tropics. About 90% of it is from Indonesia and Malaysia. “The highest rate of deforestation in the world is in Indonesia. They got a Guinness Book of World Records acknowledgement – they’re destroying 20 square miles of rainforest every day – that’s about three football fields,” Leila explained. Indonesia has destroyed around half of its rainforest already, over the last few decades. Due to increased demand for palm oil, the Indonesian government has already announced plans to convert another 18 million hectares into palm oil plantations by 2020. That’s “approximately the size of Missouri,” as Leila put into perspective.
So much rainforest land has been cleared, burned or drained; people have been evicted from their homes; and it’s negatively affecting our climate. Animals are being displaced from their habitats and don’t have anywhere to live, including some incredible species such as the orangutan, Sumatran tiger, Sumatran elephant and the sunbear. “These animals are very, very threatened from palm oil plantation expansion,” Leila added. As well, up to 20 million Indonesians depend on forests for survival. If “forests are cut down, [the people] can’t harvest food, they can’t hunt, they can’t live in the way they’ve been living for thousands of years.”
RAN is campaigning to stop the destruction of any more rainforest for this commodity. They suggest that companies that are using palm oil should research their supply chain and find out where the palm oil is coming from. They need to let their suppliers know that they “only want socially and environmentally responsible palm oil, [and] don’t want palm oil that comes from destroyed rainforests that displaces communities and destroys the climate. We don’t want that kind of palm oil,” Leila advised.
There’s a Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) that has principles and standards that companies should follow, at a minimum. Companies should act responsibly and source palm oil only from suppliers who protect high conservation value forests and get the free consent of forest communities.
RAN is speaking with global companies such as Cargill, trying to get their message understood and adopted. More information is available on RAN’s website.
Leila also suggested that you download Green: The Film – a documentary that shows through images and music what rainforest destruction due to palm oil looks like from the viewpoint of an orangutan. It’s a realistic portrayal of how the animals are being impacted on a daily basis.
Tags: agri business, agriculture, Cargill, Climate Change, Conservation, endangered, Green: The Film, Guatemala, Indonesia, palm oil, rainforest, Rainforest Action Network, rainforest destruction, RAN, RSPO, sustainable, sustainable palm oil
Happy New Year 2010!
Hopefully you all enjoyed a wonderful holiday season, and will have good health, much happiness and abundant prosperity in 2010. Let’s all work together to make 2010 a good year for our planet as well.
It’s fascinating how different organizations welcome in the new year. Today, I received several emails from groups that I support.
The David Suzuki Foundation sent an email out to its Community Leaders (I am one) including some information and a link to a survey. The survey involved questions about climate change, and it’s funny how pre-Christmas actions seem so long ago once it’s a new year!
Conservation International sent an email listing their goals for 2010. Some of their goals are the same as those of other organizations, such as working to secure a stable global climate (both CARE and the David Suzuki Foundation were among the many NGO’s involved with Copenhagen). Conservation International’s goals are wide-reaching, and involve things like saving our oceans and helping to feed people.
Other organizations emailed out their thanks for a successful 2009 and their hopes for 2010. As well, many groups have posted a note on their website recognizing the contribution their supporters (including you?) made in 2009. Most of them are really nice, including the International Rhino Foundation which said it like it is in their Heartfelt Thanks:
IRF’s success is only possible because of your support. As 2009 comes to a close, we’d like to thank all of you who have contributed time, money, and enthusiasm to our work this past year. It’s your belief in IRF that makes our work possible.
Those are likely the words our planet and its animals would say if they had voices, and likely what many people say when humanitarian workers help them.
Let’s work together to make 2010 a great year (and the start to a great decade) for our planet and the animals and people we share it with. What groups are in your area that could use some help? It’s time to reach out to them. Make it a great year! Happy New Year!
Tags: 2010, CARE, Conservation, Conservation International, David Suzuki Foundation, International Rhino Foundation, rhinos, Wildlife
Conservation in Action – Friday File
Enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at Canada’s largest aquarium’s conservation activities – in the Friday File. You can reach the Friday File by either clicking on “Fridays” in the navigation bar up top on this page, or by clicking on The Friday File under Categories.
