Following nine months of failed negotiations with authorities, all Brazilian government environmental employees in 24 of the country’s 27 states agreed in June to strike in order to improve their pay. The walkout began on June 24 in four states, and was set to expand to 20 other states on July 1, including the federal capital of Brasília. Employees in the three remaining states were meeting as of June 25 and were expected to join the job action, the National Association of Environmental Career Specialists (Ascema Nacional), the labor group representing all 4,900 federal environmental employees, told EcoAméricas. Experts say the strike, which was preceded by a work slowdown launched on Jan. 2, could seriously undermine the efforts of President Luiz Inácio da Silva to crack down on environmental violations ranging from illegal deforestation to wildcat mining to animal trafficking. The strikers include employees of Ibama, the enforcement arm of...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
Four U.S.-based environmental organizations have filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue on the grounds that U.S. authorities have failed to protect the Sonoran Desert tortoise (Gopherus morafkai), a species that inhabits Arizona and the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. “It’s important because it’s a piece of the Sonoran Desert that has been here forever,” says Cyndi Tuell of the Western Watersheds Project, one of the organizations pursuing legal action on behalf of the tortoise. Represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, Tuell’s group and three others contend the tortoise is increasingly threatened by climate change, invasive species, habitat loss, livestock grazing, large renewable-energy projects, and other impacts that could lead the reptile to extinction. The tortoise, which can weigh up to 15 pounds (6.8 kilograms) and live as long as six decades, is listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
Topics ranging from zoonotic-disease prevention to crossborder wildlife-habitat conservation loomed large in discussions at a recent meeting in Mexico of the North American Intergovernmental Committee on Cooperation for Wilderness and Protected Areas Conservation (NAWPA). The committee, a collaborative in which Canadian, Mexican and U.S. natural-resource-management officials discuss conservation approaches that can be applied on a continental scale, met May 7 and 8 in Oaxaca, Mexico. Participants addressed an array of issues including grassland conservation, local-community involvement in protected-areas management, and protection of cross-border species including American bison (Bison bison), the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus), and the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Lizardo Cruz, a Mexican wildlife-conservation biologist, says discussion of collaboration on protected-areas management seemed to him particularly promising from the standpoint of biodiversity conservation. “By partnering natural protected areas and creating biological corridors, this trilateral [collaboration] offers a broad vision that...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
Peru’s biodiversity has been making news this year with a tiny deer, two wood lizards, a showy flowering plant and a tiger cat among the species newly described in scientific literature. In some cases, the new species were reclassifications based on a combination of morphology, or physical characteristics, and genetic analysis. Perhaps the most surprising was the discovery that the dwarf deer, known as the pudu, is three species rather than two. The northern pudu (Pudu mephistophiles) was thought to range from Peru northward through Ecuador and Colombia, while its southern relative, the southern pudu (Pudu puda) inhabited southern Chile and Argentina. But a study published in March in the Journal of Mammalogy found that the northern pudu is actually two species. The Pudu mephistophiles ranges from northern Peru northward, while the pudu found further south in Peru was determined to be the first new deer species to be described...
[ Log in to read more | Subscribe ]
