photo by Hagerty Ryan, USFWS
The small dunes sagebrush lizard in Texas is on the verge of getting designated an endangered species, now that its habitat is being ripped up to mine sand to frack with. And God knows you don’t want to frack with the oil industry in Texas. Adios, small dunes sagebrush lizard!
Goodness, what a situation. We have hard-working timber families here hollering about having to leave a smidge of old-growth forest alone so some dumb little bird can nest in it, when we could get another twenty years of wages out of it before it’s all gone. In America, of course, over 96% of our virgin forests have already been mowed down. There’s a dab left in the Pacific Northwest and 80% of that is slated for the mill.
Well, we can’t even save the polar bears, but critters farther down on the charisma scale are truly screwed. Humans will flat howl about protecting the insignificant little bastards, if it interferes with the life they’ve always had. “Always” in this case might mean about two generations, tops, and not the kind of “always” that applied to the uncharismatic critter, who had been trundling happily along for a million years. But we’re Number One. Nobody can demolish the systems that maintain existence like we can.
It’s a nasty trick evolution played on us, giving us such fancy big brains along with the foresight of a mayfly.
Generally speaking when a legacy critter or plant is about to kiss off, there might be an attempt to justify saving it because it has a specific monetary benefit to people, and not just a right to life, to borrow a phrase. Maybe our dwindling lichen can be used to make a boner pill, maybe our rare bromeliad dries up zits. Maybe we can save our two-inch lizard in the Permian Basin if it can be marketed into shoes and pocketbooks for Barbie dolls. It might be valuable, in other words.
In the Permian basin we’ve already drawn down our fresh water reserves past replenishing, but we still have the technology to pull out the rest of it to bust up shale for fossil fuel that will ensure our own extinction. And why not? After all, we still have air conditioning and bottled water.
Ben Shepperd, a petroleum-industry shill and smarm merchant, said this: “I don’t believe they can tell you how many lizards there are today. How many lizards there were two years ago, 10 years ago, nor what distinguishes a healthy population.”
Ben Shepperd, you dumb shit.
Of course we know how many lizards there are. And were. There are people who go out and systematically count them, and monitor their environment. Yes there are, and yes they do. Just because you can’t imagine doing such a thing because it’s sweaty work without a lot of money in it, it still gets done. It’s how science works. It’s data collection. It’s a way of fucking knowing what you’re talking about instead of starting with your conclusion (“I like money”) and making up shit to get there (“Jewish billionaires invented global warming to destroy the economy”).
Ben Shepperd, honey, a few days ago we got a delivery of 4.5-billion-year-old rubble from an asteroid 50 million miles away. We sent out a spacecraft seven years ago to suck it off the asteroid and now that it’s dropped off its load in the Utah desert it’s going back out for another asteroid. Everything went exactly as planned, except the desert drop was three minutes early.
Scientists actually do know things. But it takes a special kind of stupid to have access to all this knowledge and throw it all away if it messes with your play date. Honestly, Ben, you and your kind would sell cherry-flavored cyanide if there was a buck in it.
The asteroid we got the rubble from is going to come so close to the Earth in 2182 that it might even crash into us, Ben. If you and your petro-pals don’t succeed in making our blessed planet into a moonscape by then, there might still be scientists around to fend it off.
I was one of those field biologist who used to go out and collect data. I still am, but no one’s paying for it now.
We collected data on colonization efforts in two salt marshes that had been reconstructed. The first was once a landfill mountain that got leveled off and landscaped with ponds and revegetated with approved plants that promptly got crowded out by plants that grew from seeds that blew in. The second was a perfectly fine salt marsh that was covered with unapproved Phragmites reeds which some pointy head claimed were exotic. They leveled it off, herbicided the shit out of it and replanted it with the proper species. Which promptly got eaten by Canada geese and crowded out by Phragmites reeds seeded by the wind.
We had survey plots that we used to check regularly to see what species were growing there. We collected insects, various invertebrates and fish. We watched birds and reptiles and I conducted a clandestine terrapin hatchery and headstarting project that returned twenty or thirty terrapins to the site.
I nearly drowned once and came very close to being buried alive and/or drowned on another occasion. The take home message is it’s hard to swim in chest waders and special footwear that straps on over said waders to let you walk on soft mud will also trap you in the waders and make it nigh impossible to pull yourself out once you’ve sunk in past your knees. I was saved respectively by a quick thinking field assistant and a more slowly thinking field assistant working in tandem with the tide that threatened to drown me. Giving new meaning to the phrase A rising tide lifts all ships.
We also conducted soil surveys, which is actually a whole lot more fun than it might sound. Basically you dig a hole as deep as safely possible and use a book of soil colors (like paint samples) to identify soil horizons.
And for two fabulous weeks in September we surveyed two blocks of dunes in Ocean City, NJ. We laid out a grid of one meter plots, then counted and identified all the plants and animals in those plots. We endured endless demands that we get off the dunes, stupid comments, including a bunch wondering if it was supposed to be a 911 memorial and beachfront homeowners who wanted the dunes leveled. They’d already successfully lobbied to have them lowered by twenty feet. Wonder how they felt about those view blocking dunes when Hurricane Sandy rolled through a few years later?
I myself have had the pleasure of thinking I was going to sink past my pertinent airholes while in the muck with chest waders. It concentrates the mind wonderfully. In my case, Dave, whose airholes are much higher, hauled me out. It wasn’t easy.
Once the tide came in enough that my field assistant could get our canoe in close enough for me to lean on, it took forty five minutes for me to get out. I was up to my nipples when he managed to stop my downward descent. My biggest concern as I sank was that my assistant would also get trapped trying to get me out. Turned out that was valid. I was much more composed about dying than he was about watching me die.
Actually, at this point, Bruce, I don’t see why you’re still alive.
Nearly dying is my shtick. I haven’t shared all of them.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention about the “exotic” Phragmites claim. A few years after the leveling and herbiciding of the reeds (because they were felt to be exotic weeds, whose fluffy seed heads had been used for packing, said seeds then released as trains carried those packages) one of my coworkers conducting pollen samples pulled up Phragmites pollen in core samples that were over one thousand years old.
yes, yes, yes. We have the same kind of arseholes and morons here, lots of them Today our unelected PM stated that there will be no completed railway infrastructure which has already cost billions but we’ll have some nice new roads instead, more money for cars too. Goody, that’ll help the environment no end.
I am glad that I am old.
We probably need a Queen with real power to turn this ship around.
Yeah, a famous environmental quote out of the Permian Basin from ol’ Claydie Williams , “If it’s inevitable, just lie back and enjoy it’. Oh, wait. That was a rape quote.
Same idea
I particularly liked the part about the Jewish billionaires; we get blamed for everything.
Damn, Steve, you a billionaire?
What?!! You didn’t know?
As a member of the World Jewish Conspiracy, I demand my cut! Just mail me the check.
I can’t say anything about being a data collector. Mosquitoes love me SO MUCH that I can’t even take the trash out without getting at least 3 bites. Paul can be out there ALL DAY with none! SMH!
What concerns me about Delaware is the over-development in this area. Paul is a bicyclist. One of the trails he loves runs by the C&D canal (the canal between the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River.) They had a swamp with lots of wildlife by the side of the trail. HAD being the operative word. They are razing it and filling it in to make developments. And, in the meantime, Paul comes across all these animals on the trail that have been displaced and are nibbling on whatever they can find by the side of the former swamp. And even in the suburbs we live in, they raze small forests, displacing animals, to put in a shopping center with town homes. For the record, the area I’m talking about already has FOUR shopping centers within walking distance of each other. AND vacant shops. WHY do they need to make MORE??? I hate people. Especially people with money trying to make even MORE money by destroying EVERYTHING!
That used to be a thing my dad would complain about back in the ‘Sixties, when people filled in wetlands for no particular reason (not shopping centers; just pavement and trying to keep down mosquitoes, probably) without any appreciation for the role of wetlands. I love swampland.
Once upon a recent time, cities and corporations actually had plans, approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to make San Franciso Bay into a narrow river by adding landfill and dumping anything they wanted into bay wetlands. That was stopped, thanks to Save the Bay, a group that started pushing back in 1961. But the bay fill that a lot of stuff had already been built on will still shake like Jell-O in a major earthquake. Should be exciting, if that’s the right word.
You don’t want to know what my dad thought of the US Army Corps of Engineers.
I’m just still chuckling at “fancy big brains along with the foresight of a mayfly.”
So true, so sad. The brain that was our secret evolutionary weapon and the foresight that is currently our downfall.
It was probably inevitable. We’ve had the evolutionary path of a bottle rocket.