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The Climate Change Endgame

NY Time OP-ED Contributor

Thomas Lovejoy, Jan. 21, 2013

WHETHER in Davos or almost anywhere else that leaders are discussing the world’s problems, they are missing by far the biggest issue: the rapidly deteriorating global environment and its ability to support civilization.

The situation is pretty much an endgame. Unless pressing issues of the biology of the planet and of climate change generated by greenhouse gas emissions are addressed with immediacy and at appropriate scale, the matters that occupy Davos discussions will be seen in retrospect as largely irrelevant.

This week, in Bonn, out of sight and out of mind, international negotiators will design the biodiversity and ecosystem equivalent to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A full eight years have passed since President Jacques Chirac of France acted as host at a meeting in Paris to create this “Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.”

Progress has been painfully slow. Only now is the “platform” and its work program — to assess status, trends and possible solutions — being designed. In the meantime, rates of extinction and endangerment of species have soared. Ecosystem destruction is massive and accelerating. Institutional responsiveness seems lethargic to a reptilian degree.

It is abundantly clear that the target of …

Conservation Crusader Takes the Helm at Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation

August 7, 2012 sjoy — 1 Comment

August 6, 2012 at 3:45 pm

By Tara Laskowski

Alonso Aguirre, executive director of the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation, with a green turtle (Chelonia mydas) in a rehabilitation center in Kuroshima, Okinawa, Japan. Photo courtesy of Alonso Aguirre 

Alonso Aguirre’s first experience with sea turtles was eating them with his family when he was a child in Northern Mexico. Though the turtles were seen as a rare delicacy in that community, even then Aguirre didn’t feel quite right about it.

Now, many years later, Aguirre, executive director of the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation, has made a career protecting these marine reptiles and educating fishermen, veterinarians and others about the need for their conservation.

This spring, for instance, he got a call from Alan Zavala, a professor and collaborator with CIIDIR National Polytechnic Institute in Sinaloa, Mexico, to help with an urgent problem. A graduate student had found a female Hawksbill sea turtle stranded at Jaltemba Bay with a large fishing hook stuck in its throat.According to the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative, protection of the critically endangered Hawksbills in the eastern Pacific is among the world’s most pressing sea turtle conservation issues; only a few hundred females are estimated to nest along the entire …