Quote of the Day (Jeff Goodell, on the EPA’s Appalling Scott Pruitt)

"There are plenty of other reasons [besides helping to junk the Paris climate change accord] to be appalled by {Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott] Pruitt. He is destroying the mission of the EPA. He is pushing policies that will make poor people poorer and rich people richer. And he is quite literally putting his own political career above the welfare of tens of thousands of people. While the air quality in many parts of America has gotten better in recent decades, air pollution still causes more than 200,000 premature deaths a year; even small increases in pollution mean more deaths. ‘He is sacrificing the health and welfare of children in order to give industry a few years of regulatory relief,’ says Jeff Carter, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility.”— Jeff Goodell, “Scott Pruitt's Crimes Against Nature,” Rolling Stone, Aug. 10, 2017

Quote of the Day (JPII, on Earth Abuse as a ‘Seedbed for Collective Selfishness’)

“In our day, there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened not only by the arms race, regional conflicts and continued injustices among peoples and nations, but also by a lack of due respect for nature, by the plundering of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the quality of life. The sense of precariousness and insecurity that such a situation engenders is a seedbed for collective selfishness, disregard for others and dishonesty.”— Pope John Paul II, “Peace With God the Creator, Peace With All of Creation” (papal message for World Day of Peace), Jan. 1, 1990

Photo of the Day: Reading Room, Roger Tory Peterson Institute, Jamestown NY

Over this past weekend, in an early-afternoon break in the rain, I saw a large group of bird watchers along the Palisades in northern New Jersey. I’m sure that more than a few of them realize the huge debt they owe to Roger Tory Peterson. After all, back in 1934, the upstate New York native published Field Guide to the Birds, and over the next half century he expanded on this achievement with still more in-depth guides to birds and other wildlife. “In this century‚ no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson,” the environmental Paul Ehrlich has claimed.

The image accompanying this post is of the Main Reading Room at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, N.Y. I took this photo while on vacation a month ago at the nearby Chautauqua Institution. 

The entire building was designed by the famous architectural firm Robert A.M. Stern, but, as a former librarian—and a continuing, inveterate library patron—I was especially drawn to this room. The combination of the light brown wood and the warm sunshine pouring through the windows gives the room the kind of inviting, natural feeling that Peterson would have valued.

Photo of the Day: Stormwater Park, Chautauqua Institution, NY

I took this image earlier this week of the Ryan Kiblin Memorial Stormwater Park. This garden trail is named in honor of  the Chautauqua Institution’s gardens, grounds, and landscape manager, who died during pregnancy a year ago.

This lovely stretch of land includes native trees, perennials and shrubs, but it also has a utilitarian and far-seeing purpose: to filter excess nitrogen and phosphorous from stormwater before it reaches Chautauqua Lake, the body of water that this Victorian Era community is located by.

Quote of the Day (Pope Francis, on the Earth as Our Trust)

"We are not God. The Earth was here before us and was given to us."—Pope Francis, Laudato Si (“Praise Be to You”), the encyclical letter on “Care for Our Common Home,” in the context of climate change

Photo of the Day: Ivory Crush in Times Square

I didn’t catch the major event later in the day, but on Friday morning on the way to work, I saw these tables –and cameras being set up—for Ivory Crush in Times Square. In a dramatic demonstration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crushed a ton of ivory. Most of this had been seized during undercover operations in Philadelphia and New York—the latter of which has the dubious distinction of maintaining ties to this trade.

How dubious is this trade? The best estimate, in a study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), is that more than 100,000 elephants were poached from 2011 to 2014. Or, think of it this way: an average of 34,000 elephants killed each day across the African continent.