Unconventional Sources

To be honest, I’m not that fond of the Barn Owl Cam over at the Barn Owl Trust. I am, however, quite impressed with the important work of the Barn Owl Trust.

They work in the UK to protect barn owls there. Barn owls are decreasing in numbers as their hunting habitat is developed for human use, and the places they roost in, barns and old snags, aren’t as common as they used to be.

The Brits have also got the Barn Owl Conservation Network.

Here in the US, for more information about the barn owl, you can visit the All About Birds online guide.

There’s bad news for bighorn sheep tonight, at least for the peninsular bighorn sheep that live to the south of Palm Springs in California. The Obama Administration just slashed their protected habitat to a third of its previous level.

Here are a few sources you can use to learn more about the peninsular bighorn sheep and the efforts to protect it:

- Bighorn Institute
- Center for Biological Diversity
- Desert Survivors
- Zip Code Zoo profile

One of the troubles in dealing with issues that have to do with Earth’s oceans is that human beings live on land. Even if we live near the oceans, we see the surface, which is unchanging. Except when there are extraordinary events, such as giant oil slicks, we don’t see what’s going on under the waves.

So, even though the oceans cover most of our planet’s surface, we can’t really see them. Marine ecology exists in a blind spot in our awareness of the world.

That makes the work of organizations like the National Coalition for Marine Conservation. That group, dedicated to confronting issues in the overexploitation of marine fish, seeks to open our eyes to what’s going on beneath the waters’ surface.

Please, take a look.

Okay, maybe it’s not just your MP3 player, and maybe it’s not just you, but the American appetite for cheap electricity has indeed destroyed mountains. That’s not a figurative statement.

I Love Mountains logs 470 mountains that have been destroyed through mountaintop coal mining.

In a particularly useful tool for encouraging accountability, the site allows a person to enter in their zip code and see whether their own local power company burns coal from mountaintop removal. Mine – NYSEG – does, at the AES Cayuga coal burning power plant.

That gives me information about how my energy conservation can make a real impact in reducing mountaintop removal, air pollution and global warming.

The hour of the Earth is not quite yet here… It’s on March 28th at 8:30 PM. That’s the time of Earth Hour this year.

During Earth Hour, people across the world will make a simple act: They will turn off the lights. Wherever they are, at home or at work, they will choose not to participate in the unsustainable economy of artificial energy.

Will this one hour make a big difference, in the economy or in the ecology of the planet? Well, for that one hour it will.

Think of it as a warmup exercise. Right now, the idea that we can exist without artificial lights after dark is perceived as something radical. In fact, it’s the most natural thing there could be.

With 6 billion people on Earth, an Earth Hour is something we need a lot more of. Maybe after this year, people could celebrate a true Earth Day, expending no artificial energy. In 2010, we could extend that to an Earth Week, and from there on in, we might start to actually make a difference.

One of the greatest challenges there is to marine conservation efforts is that most people don’t have much of a conception of what lies beneath the surface of the ocean’s waves. Most of us have never been diving – and a lot of people have never actually been to the ocean.

So, BlogFish does a simple thing. It familiarizes people with the creatures that live in the ocean, so that we can understand the need to conserve their habitat. Seeing is the first step toward appreciation, and appreciation is a step toward protection.

The blog is written by Mark Powell, a scientist by training, and Vice President for Fish Conservation at the Ocean Conservancy.