What's new // Raincoast updates
Notes, details, updates and miscellaneous thoughts.
Send a letter to environment Minister Barry Penner. A disturbing number of grizzly bears are being shot as ‘control kills’ in BC’s Bella Coola valley. Most of these kills are as a result of humans who don’t secure bear attractants. Despite this, virtually no enforcement action is being taken against individuals responsible for the needless…
B.C.’s policy frameworks fail to take ethical issues into consideration By Chris Genovali, Special to the Victoria Times Colonist, January 21, 2010 A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia. The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting…
by Chris Genovali The Ottawa Citizen, December 18, 2009 Re: The myth of global warming, Dec 12. Columnist David Warren’s anti-science polemic reads like something Sarah Palin would have penned. Come to think of it, she recently had an opinion article in the Washington Post peddling the same kind of fringe theories on climate change…
by Chris Genovali The Ecologist The emails hacked from the servers of the University of East Anglia continue to cause controversy. But it was not a singular attack, says Chris Genovali,just the only successful one so far… Sceptics in Canada have used the so-called ‘Climategate’ controversy to call for a cautious approach at COP 15…
by Chris Genovali Truthout.org Dec. 18, 2009 Georgia Strait, Dec 17, 2009 Common Dreams, Dec 15, 2009 In the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen, an eclectic group made up primarily of corporations and media outlets put forward the notion of “Hopenhagen.” The following is extracted from their mission…
Toronto Star Re: Climate change: policy in the dark, Editorial Dec. 11 Kudos to the Star for its thoughtful editorial. Reflecting on the federal government’s continued foot dragging on the climate change file, as well as its predilection for “shouting down critics and environmental activists,” as your editorial points out, one has to wonder what…
Montreal Gazette, December 11, 2009 Re: “U.S. EPA moves on climate as Congress stalls” (Gazette, Dec. 8) Now that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ruled that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a threat to public health and welfare, will Canada follow suit and harmonize with this policy?
By Chris Genovali Calgary Herald, Nov 30, 2009 Re: “Climate plan will take 40 years: Prentice,” Nov. 21. Climate scientist James Hansen of NASA states we have already passed the threshold for “maximum permissible concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Scientific AmericanBy Anne Casselman Scientists are collecting hairs from live bears to prevent population declines as a result of declines in a principal food source: salmon. For most of May, Chris Darimont, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, poured liters of fermented cattle blood mixed with pureed rotten fish guts on…
Multiple conservation groups concerned about grizzly bears on the BC central coast have sent a letter to Environment Minister Barry Penner requesting a cancellation of the fall grizzly hunt. Anecdotal accounts of very low bear numbers on fall streams warrants an immediate cautionary response by the government. Since no population assessment or annual monitoring is…
Williams, R. and L. Thomas. 2007. Distribution and abundance of marine mammals in the coastal waters of British Columbia, Canada. Journal of Cetacean Research and Management. 9(1):15-28 Marine mammal abundance paper.pdf
Thomas, L., R. Williams, and D. Sandilands, D. 2007. Designing line transect surveys for complex survey regions. Journal of Cetacean Research and Management. 9(1):1-13, Survey Design Paper.pdf