Animal Rights

Animal Right Groups in Portugal,it is time to speak up & defend benefits of #animalresearch: http://eara.eu/?p=274 

EARA (@The_EARA) | Twitter:

CREDO Action — About

"CREDO is a social change organization that supports activism and funds progressive nonprofits. Our mobile telephone company, CREDO Mobile, generates revenue to support progressive nonprofits and our activism arm, CREDO Action.



CREDO Action, powered by CREDO Mobile customers, helps channel the power of its 3.4 million members to fight for progressive change.

Over the course of our history, CREDO has raised $75 million for progressive nonprofit groups like Democracy Now!, Brennan Center for Justice, Doctors Without Borders, ACLU, EFF, Planned Parenthood and 350.org.



 Through our activism, we’ve generated over 12.5 million letters and over 2.8 million calls to decision makers in Washington DC, at state and local governments, and in corporate headquarters across the country. Our members have submitted their signatures over 62 million times on CREDO petitions and official government agency public comments.



 2012 was a huge year for CREDO. We launched the CREDO SuperPAC, playing a major role in defeating five of the worst Tea Party Republicans in Congress. In the process, we rewrote the book on superPACs, raising $2.5 million from 70,000 small donors for a volunteer-driven campaign that went toe-to-toe with big money and corporate interests—and won.



We also helped win 24 key state initiative fights for marriage equality, the environment, human rights and sanity in election spending.

Besides our electoral work, we launched more than 500 advocacy campaigns in 2012, redoubling our efforts to hold the line as the strongest voice for uncompromised progressive positions.



We knew from the start we wouldn’t always win. But we fought for what we believed in, rather than concede from the start in the face of Republican obstructionism and hostage-taking. We took on Democrats and Republicans alike in our fight for progressive values



 Our 2012 Activism Report gives the size and scope of the change and impact that CREDO and our 3.4 million members made in the past year. We look forward to many more fights and victories in the year ahead.



Click here to read CREDO’s 2012 annual report:

http://www.credomobile.com/mission/political-victories-current.aspx"





CREDO Action — About:

Link: http://credoaction.com/about/

'via Blog this'

Degrowthers

The degrowth movement is a relatively new contender in the economic and political debates that swirl around humanity's future.  Degrowthers believe we need a more modest and sane alternative to the constant pressures of expansion that are destroying the ecological basis of our existence.  Author and essayist Richard Swift explores the degrowth alternative, in theory and in practice. IMO, This is one of the many great shows on the CBC radio  CBC IDEAS Schedule for September 29 - October 3 Listen online: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/listen/ Home Page: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/ .

PAUL HAWKEN - Regeneration | Bioneers

Published on Dec 3, 2013

Paul Hawken is a visionary social entrepreneur, the award-winning author of multiple landmark books including Blessed Unrest, The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism (co-author), and the Co-Founder of OneSun, a radically innovative solar energy technology company. In this speech, Hawken discusses his younger days, how and why he started a health food store in Boston in the 1970s, and our connection with nature and each other.



"We have invented an economic system -then and now- that doesn't just kill life, it depends on killing life."



This speech was presented at the 2012 National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, CA.



Learn more at http://www.bioneers.orgSince 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.



To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.



For more information on Bioneers, please visithttp://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

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  People & Blogs

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Source: http://youtu.be/q52WJjeara0

What a warmer planet means to the bottom line

Grist

Risk game: What a warmer planet means to the bottom line

By SMITH @strangerworks

How do we move beyond vague climate fears? 

Risky Business’ Kate Gordon is assembling hard data on what’s at stake for business. 

View on web  

Risk game: What a warmer planet means to the bottom line

Kate Gordon,  San Francisco’s Financial District, is managing Risky Business, an ambitious project that aims to quantify the financial risks that climate change poses to the American economy. 

The report, which is slated to be released this June, is headed by Tom Steyer, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and features input from an eclectic Risk Committee of former cabinet members and other political heavy-hitters.

 

Q. The first thing I’m curious about is, what kind of climate change data is out there? What do you have, and what would you like to see more of?

A. The climate risk data just isn’t out there. The reinsurance industry is the big exception. They were doing a lot of work around climate risk because they had to – they were insuring the insurers.

But most of the reinsurers – who have been talking about this since the ’80s – are based in Europe.

The reason we decided to do this project was to have a very U.S.-focused, business-focused, and investor-focused approach to climate risk, which wasn’t really available outside of some private institutions.

The five sectors we’re looking at are:
- agriculture,
- public health,
- energy systems, 
- coastal infrastructure, and then 
- labor productivity,,,

Of those, the ones that have been most studied from a risk perspective are agriculture and coastal infrastructure, and that’s largely because of private industry.

We have Greg Page on our Risk Committee, who just stepped down as the CEO of Cargill, and is now the executive chair of the board. Cargill positions itself as a risk management company in the agricultural space.

At Next Generation we’re not doing the research; we contract it out. 

We’re working very closely with a company called RMS, which is the big risk analyst for the insurance and reinsurance and hedge fund industries. 

One of their specialties is coastal risk. Coastal infrastructure is a big issue for insurers – the sea-level rise and the extreme weather events and the capital infrastructure falling apart. 

That’s something that private companies are looking into.

Energy systems are becoming a bigger deal. The Department of Energy put out a big study on risks to energy systems from climate change. But honestly, again, that’s been from the perspective of coastal infrastructure: flooding, hurricanes.

The area that we’re looking at that is the least studied is labor productivity. 

Q. And what will climate change do to labor productivity? 

A. Extreme heat. And precipitation. There are data on that, from extreme heat events in recent years — what happens to the construction industry, for instance.

Q. And then in terms of energy systems – aside from the effects of wind and heat on pre-existing systems, what else would be affected by climate change? 

A. With energy, we’re looking less at infrastructure and more at energy supply and demand. If you have extreme heat, what happens to energy demand? People use their air conditioners more. We’re looking at energy load and our lack of energy diversity.
 


We are not telling people how to react. We’re not dictating solutions. We are doing the work of a risk committee to highlight the catastrophic risks of climate change.

For Mike Bloomberg and for Tom Steyer and for Hank Paulson, this project speaks really to their backgrounds in taking the data and working with the data. They are all data-driven people.

Q. And they’re all finance guys.

A. They’re all finance guys. This project speaks to their desire to see a broadening of climate as an issue for a much larger set of people.

There’s a lot of intersection between this work and the other work that those guys are doing. We’re in conversation with Paulson about China, which is where he’s really focused. 

Risky Business is specifically not coordinated with anybody else’s efforts.

... everything we’re doing for this phase of the project is open source, so all the data and all the modeling will be open source. We like to think this will be a platform for a lot of people, not just for us.


We have four different temperature scenarios. We’re running all of the National Climate Assessment Models, which is 39 models, on each of those. 

Most of the climate modeling is already online – it’s part of the IPCC process or the National Climate Assessment Process. There are 16 terabytes of data going into this project.

... we are focused on extreme events. This is a catastrophic risk analysis. So we’re going up to pretty high temperatures.  

Q. So if this is open source, is it stuff that was open source before? Since you’re not generating all of your own data?

A...about 80 percent of this is existing research and 20 percent is new. The labor productivity stuff is new.

What is less common is, we’re not just saying “Here are the risks.” We’re quantifying it, sector by sector. That’s basically overlaying an economic analysis on top of a scientific analysis. That’s new.

The nuclear industry’s done a ton, because a lot of nuclear plants are on the water. So the nuclear industry is the perfect example of an industry that deals with very low probability, high-risk events and massive amounts of regulation.

And now they’re having to deal with the overlay of climate risk, because what used to be a 100-year flood zone is becoming a 50-year flood zone. 

And they’re having to deal with that. They’re in a lot of flood zones. There’s a lot – especially after Fukushima – about dealing with climate risk overlaying overall nuclear regulations.

Q. What if I’m a refinery on the East Coast 

A. That’s what the Department of Energy report is about. What they actually find is that the fossil fuel transportation system has huge risks – the grid infrastructure and the actual transportation infrastructure are both at risk, as well as the refineries that are along the coast. 

People understand the relationship between climate change and coastal infrastructure pretty well. Sea-level rise is one of those things that everyone’s agreed on in the scientific community.

  

Q.  Is there room for thinking about climate change in a hopeful manner? 

A.  We’re saying is: “Look. We know from experience — from the health sector, from national security, from the insurance sector – that when we understand the risks, the business community responds.”

...what we’re trying to do here, is bring this to a place where people think they really can act. Particularly in the business community, in this case.


 BMW has located their manufacturing plant in Washington state because they want cheap access to green power. They think of it as less volatile than fossil fuel power. That was a business decision. It didn’t have anything to do with carbon being priced.
 
People are out there the whole time doing smart risk analysis of things that are way lower probability than climate change. Our entire defense department does risk assessments based on the potential for another Arab Spring. Or for mass terrorist attacks.

Some of it is never made public. Shell, for instance, does war games and scenarios all the time based on climate change. We’re never going to see that. It’s all proprietary and internal. But we hear about it.

We did this project outside Washington, and outside the environmental community and the traditional NGO community, because we were basically saying: these are people from business backgrounds and public sector backgrounds who deal with risk. 

They have dealt with it in public conversations and private conversations for decades. And we need to bring that level of analysis to this problem.

We need to bring a similarly business-driven conversation about what those risks might be.
Only when you are on the same page about those risks can you talk about a solution.

That’s the long answer. But what I’m really trying to say is: There is hope.
 
We need to have a conversation first about why this is a problem to people. Why should we even be thinking about this? 

    
  
I continue to think – that clean energy is a huge economic development driver.  If we do commit to transitioning the economy to low-carbon sources, it’s a massive boon for our economy. 

And for local economies, in particular.

Economic Development 101 is that you start where people are. If you’re trying to do a plan for a city, you start with what the city’s assets are. If you look at Oakland, you start with the port, the universities. You start with access to San Francisco and Richmond.

You don’t come in flying with a one-size-fits-all plan.

The same is true for any economic opportunity.  

You start with what the region is actually dealing with, and what the sector is dealing with. 

So everything I’ve done with Apollo, or the Center for American Progress, to here, has been from that theory.

You don’t come to someone and tell them that climate change is the biggest issue they’ll ever have to deal with. 

You start with where they already are, and you talk about why this matters from that perspective. 

That’s what I did as an organizer, and that’s what I do now.

Risky Business is basically saying,


 “Let’s do the analysis and find out what the risk is to your industry.” 

Let’s not start with “WHY aren’t you people thinking about climate change?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heather Smith (on Twitter, @strangerworks) is interested in the various ways that humans try to save the environment: past, present, and future.

 

Read more: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy

 Link:  http://grist.org/climate-energy/risk-game-what-a-warmer-planet-means-to-the-bottom-line/

Vanishing animals

 Vanishing animals

Barbara Franco, Gianfranco Bologna, Simona Giordano, World Wildlife Fund
White Star Publishers, Oct 14, 2008 - Nature - 304 pages
 

A poignant chronicling of the vulnerability of the animal life supported by the world’s diverse habitats, this important book presents an overview of the principal animal species that are threatened with extinction. 

For each species, it presents the challenges involved in conservation and explores the actions WWF is taking in the field. 

Above all, it examines the connection between the protection of a certain species and the survival of the local populations. 

The animal species on which this book focuses are among the rarest in the world—and the best known to many of us for exactly that reason. 

The authors also examine less familiar species of equally high biological significance. Each chapter focuses on projects dedicated to the conservation of that species in different locations around the world. 

Among the animals highlighted are the African elephant—with particular attention paid to the extreme environment of Chad—the aye-aye of Madagascar, the short-tailed chinchilla of South America, and the bird of paradise of Papua New Guinea. 

Accompanying the insightful text of this meaningful book are hundreds of magnificent photographs that convey the unique qualities of each of the species featured. 

A wake-up call we can’t ignore, this volume demonstrates the severity of the plight of our endangered species and is a testimony to the good work being done to salvage this very serious situation.

 











Awesome light by Hengki Koentjoro pic.twitter.com/DwjtHpvptq RT @CGShark

Drones In Agriculture

Growing The Use Of Drones In Agriculture

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---

Rakesh Sharma Contributor

 

I write about technology, business, and Silicon Valley trends full bio →

Tech 11/26/2013 

Growing The Use Of Drones In Agriculture

Although news coverage around them is mostly focused on use in military operations, drones can be used across multiple industries. Using diverse payloads, ranging from GoPro cameras to professional cameras, drones can be used to perform a variety of tasks, ranging from reconnaissance missions in the military to, possibly, delivering pizza.

According to a study by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the drone, or UAV, industry in the U.S. could produce up to 100,000 new jobs and add $82 billion in economic activity between 2015 and 2025. Those numbers are pretty significant. However, the industry has a bit of a trek to get to them.

This is because privacy concerns balance the case for drone use.  A majority of countries in the world today use a loose set of guidelines to govern drone use.  A notable exception is Japan, which uses drones extensively for agriculture purposes.
With regulation governing drone use up for discussion in 2015, the United States could soon follow Japan’s lead.

About three weeks ago, I visited 3D Robotics, a startup that manufactures drones. As I mentioned earlier, commercial use of drones is limited in the States. As a result, approximately fifty percent of the startup’s customers are located outside the States.

According to Sue Rosenstock, 3D Robotics spokesperson, a third of their customers consist of hobbyists, another third of enterprise users, and a third use their drones as consumer tools. “Over time, we expect that to change as we make more enterprise-focused products, such as mapping applications,” she explains.

Started by former Wired editor Chris Anderson, 3D Robotics is an end-to-end solutions startup. It’s operations are spread across Berkeley (where Anderson is based), San Diego, and Tijuana in Mexico. It is vertically integrated (just like Apple ) and manufactures its own hardware and software. While vertical integration increases upfront development costs, it offers greater control for the company to market its products to specific industries, such as agriculture.

Drones In Agriculture

3D Robotics is already conducting tests with farmers to understand user needs and test custom drones for agriculture. “Our approach is to make a product that fits into a farmer’s actual equipment,” says Brandon Basso, lead researcher at 3D Robotics. “We want them to use drones the same way that they use their other farming equipment.”
In the absence of data regarding use of drones in agriculture, 3D Robotics is working off educated guesses and formulating use cases. These guesses break down typical cost structures for farming to incentivize farmers to use drones.

Brandon Basso

As an example, Basso says farmers spray pesticides uniformly over their crop to protect them from fungal infections. “It is not environmentally great or financially great,” says Basso. According to him, the use of drones can mitigate some of these drawbacks. For example, farmers can choose to not spray pesticides based on an aerial survey of their crop using drones. Alternately, they can selectively spray pesticides only on plants that need attention, thus minimizing environmental damage and saving money.

Drones, which are fitted with payloads such as cameras, enable farmers to get a bird’s eye-view of their crop by flying at low altitudes. Using Infra-red imaging, drones can also detect which plants are sick and which ones are healthy. Basso says healthy plants reflect more infrared radiation, as opposed to plants which have fungal infections.
3D Robotics has deconstructed its tests into a series of stages that are closely linked to an actual drone operation.

During the Mission Planning stage, Basso and his team discuss objectives and goals of a particular flight mission. Subsequently, they spend time drawing out an automated flight path for the mission. This path enables them to map out the best coverage area for the flight. Flight times for drones can vary from less than ten minutes to approximately forty minutes flight time. This time is a function of payloads and rotors used in that particular drone. Basso says drones used for agricultural purposes have a longer flight time but are unable to carry much load. Images and data are processed using imaging software once drones return to their original takeoff point.

Pablo Lema, Sales Director, flies Iris, the latest quadcopter from 3D Robotics

However, drones are, as yet, a fairly technical affair. While their operations have been simplified, data crunching and imaging processing from drones still require technical knowledge. As such, 3D Robotics is not selling its drones directly to farmers. Instead, the startup sells drones to crop analysts, who recommend them to farmers.

Privacy And Drones
As I mentioned earlier, drone use has come under increased scrutiny due to privacy concerns. The agriculture industry is no different. A majority of farms still rely on a number of manual methods for crop care. Licenses for drones are granted on a case by case basis. In the meanwhile, plans to grant access to US skies for drones by September 2015 are already delayed.

However, Rosenstock is not worried. “I would be surprised if there wasn’t distrust of new technology,” she says, adding that they (3D Robotics) are tech innovators and not police. “We leave regulation to the legislators,” she says.

 http://www.forbes.com/sites/rakeshsharma/2013/11/26/growing-the-use-of-drones-in-agriculture/

Frackers: Billionaire Wildcatters

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
Gregory Zuckerman of the Wall Street Journal

Moderated by Joel Kurtzman of the Milken Institute

February 6, 2014
4:30 p.m.-6:00 p.m.
Santa Monica

For decades, they operated on the fringes of the energy industry. Now the unlikely wildcatters who perfected fracking have moved from the fringes to the forefront of a revolution that has turned the United States into the world's fastest-growing energy power.

At this Milken Institute Forum, Gregory Zuckerman, a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal and the author of "The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters," will tell the dramatic tale of the ambitious and headstrong wildcatters who were determined to tap the massive deposits of oil and gas that the industry's giants had dismissed as a waste of time.

Their success with hydraulic fracturing--known as fracking--through extremely dense shale has transformed the U.S. energy landscape. Once dependent on imported energy, the U.S. is expected to pass Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's largest oil producer. The wildcatters' success has transformed their personal lives as well. Like the Rockefellers and the Gettys before them, they're using their newfound wealth and power to influence politics, education, entertainment, sports, and many other fields. The revolution the frackers are responsible for has transformed the U.S. economy, raised environmental concerns, and upended global geopolitics. In some ways, their impact is just beginning.

• Category - Nonprofits and Activism

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Book: The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters

Link: http://youtu.be/eWtkN44G9gM

U.S. Fish and Game Destroy Contraband Ivory

Is Destroying Contraband Items, the Best Way to Control Illegal Poaching

By Clayton Sandell

Nov 14, 2013 9:22am

Today near Denver, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will do something it says it has never done before: destroy six tons of ivory to highlight a booming illegal trade contributing to the slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants every year.

“We’re trying to tell organized syndicates and cartels who are now involved in the illegal ivory trade that we’re going to do whatever we can to take the value out of ivory and do whatever we can to put them in jail,” said Edward Grace, deputy chief with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement.

Elephant poaching is at its highest level in decades, killing an estimated 30,000 animals every year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF says the illegal ivory trade is valued between $7.8 billion and $10 billion every year.

“Blood ivory” may even be fueling terrorist activity. In a September report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said growing demand along with a limited supply is making ivory increasingly lucrative.

“Criminal elements of all kinds, including some terrorist entities and rogue security personnel, often in collusion with government officials in source countries are involved in poaching and movement of ivory and rhino horn across east, central, and southern Africa,” the report said.
Since a global ban was enacted in 1989, ivory seized by U.S. authorities has been piling up at a federal warehouse called the National Wildlife Property Repository near Commerce City, Colo. On Wednesday, federal officials and wildlife agents showed off a massive collection of elephant tusks, carvings and jewelry. Some of the tusks are small, a sign that poachers are killing both adult elephants and their babies.

“That tells you that poachers are indiscriminate,” Crawford Allan told ABC News.
“Poachers don’t care whether it’s a young or old animal,” said Allan, who monitors illegal animal trading for the World Wildlife Fund. “They are wiping out entire families.”
This afternoon officials will move the ivory stockpile outside to a giant blue industrial rock crusher, where it will be pulverized into millions of worthless pieces. Officials say the crushed ivory will likely be donated to a museum as part of a future exhibit.

The National Wildlife Property Repository is a veritable chamber of animal horrors, containing row after row of illegal products seized during criminal investigations, at border crossings and ports of entry. Shelves are lined with purses made from alligators, countless bear and tiger pelts (even a stuffed tiger embryo) and furniture made from turtle shells.
The Unites States and Asia are largely driving the demand in ivory, experts and federal officials say. China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are a few of the worst ivory-trade offenders, according to the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species.

Critics argue the “ivory crush”-like earlier events in Gabon, Kenya and the Philippines- will do little to stem the illegal ivory trade. Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, a conservation economist with the Property and Environmental Research Center, warns today’s crush could have unintended consequences.

“The ill-conceived [U.S. Fish and Wildlife] gesture could create the perception that ivory is an increasingly scarce commodity on illegal markets, leading to higher prices and further poaching,” he said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service disagrees.
“This ivory would never be made available to the market,” the agency said in a statement. “Its destruction has no impact on the overall supply and does not create any incentive for poaching. By demonstrating our commitment to combat poaching and illegal trade, and to arrest and prosecute people who engage in these activities, we are providing a strong disincentive to poachers and wildlife traffickers.”

In July, President Obama signed an executive order forming a cabinet-level task force to combat the illegal wildlife trade, pledging $10 million to tackle poaching in Africa.
“We’re sending a strong message out both to people who buy and trade illegal ivory to say ‘we aren’t going to tolerate this anymore’,” Allan said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will destroy six tons of ivory to highlight the illegal trade.Credit: Clayton Sandell/ABC News

Robert C. Stebbins, Chronicler of Western Reptiles and Amphibians, Dies at 98 - NYTimes.com

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October 7, 2013

Robert C. Stebbins, Chronicler of Western Reptiles and Amphibians, Dies at 98

By PAUL VITELLO

Robert C. Stebbins, who was considered by many to be the pre-eminent authority on the lungless salamander, the barking tree frog, the northern Pacific rattlesnake and hundreds of other amphibians and reptiles of the North American West, died on Sept. 23 in Eugene, Ore. He was 98.

His death was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor emeritus of zoology.

Professor Stebbins, a biologist who published his first book in 1951 and his last in 2012, was equally renowned as an illustrator, conservationist and advocate for the study of biology the old-fashioned way — by going outside and observing it. He was described by colleagues as a modern scientist with the heart of a 19th-century naturalist.

His best-known book, “A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians,” first published in 1966 and still considered the bible of the field, was illustrated with painstakingly detailed drawings he made during long treks in mountain and desert habitats at a time when most biologists were moving their research into the laboratory.

He had no quarrel with laboratory research. “The importance of studies at the level of molecules and cells is unquestioned,” he wrote in the preface to “A Natural History of Amphibians,” a 1997 book. “But it is equally important to study life at the other end of the spectrum of biological organization — whole organisms and their interactions in nature.”

The sudden decline of amphibian and reptile populations worldwide, beginning in the 1980s and ’90s, made it especially urgent “to obtain direct, on-site knowledge of what is going on,” he said.

Professor Stebbins’s 1966 field guide — written in longhand and typed by his wife, Annarose — filled a large gap in zoological research, said Joseph Mendelson, curator of herpetology at the Atlanta Zoo and a past president of the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. There had been field guides for amphibians and reptiles of the United States, he said, but none that gave more than cursory treatment to the hundreds of species specific to the North American West, defined as encompassing 11 states plus the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

Today a dog-eared, water-stained “Stebbins,” as it came to be called, is an indispensable tool in a herpetologist’s field pack, Mr. Mendelson said. “There is no herpetologist anywhere, at any level — amateur or scientist,” he said, “who does not refer to that field guide on a daily basis.”

Professor Stebbins became an active environmentalist in the 1970s after he noticed dune buggies and other off-road vehicles bouncing through the desert, destroying the surface crust that protects amphibians and reptiles and the vegetation they live on.

With support from the Sierra Club, he and a group of colleagues took on the recreational vehicle industry in a decade-long campaign to restrict the vehicles’ access to desert land. In California, their effort helped to establish limited protections in the East Mojave National Scenic Area and to elevate the Joshua Tree and Death Valley national monuments to fully protected national park status.

Professor Stebbins said he became convinced that the greatest threat facing the environment was human estrangement from nature. He proposed expanding science education beyond biology, chemistry, physics and the behavioral sciences to include the formal study of “natural history,” which he defined as the interaction of all of the above in the struggle of life on earth.

“To paraphrase George Gaylord Simpson,” he wrote in 1997, referring to the American paleontologist, “knowing all there is to know about a lion’s molecules and cells will not tell you why a lion roars.”

Robert Cyril Stebbins was born on March 31, 1915, in the Northern California town of Chico, where his parents, Cyril and Louise, farmed fruit and nuts and raised horses and sheep. His mother was an artist in her spare time. His father taught agricultural and nature studies at the Chico State Normal School for Teachers.

Professor Stebbins received his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D degrees in biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He centered his doctoral thesis — and much of his early work — on the Ensatina salamander, a genus found in the Western coastal mountains. He found its many species and subspecies useful in documenting speciation, the process by which one species evolves into another.

In 1945 he was named an assistant professor of zoology, and the first curator of herpetology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, where he remained throughout his career.

Professor Stebbins is survived by his wife; a son, John; two daughters, Melinda Broadhurst and Mary Stebbins; a sister, Rosalie Darling; 6 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

“Anyone can begin the steps toward a more nature-centered worldview,” he wrote in one of his last books,“Connecting With Nature: A Naturalist’s Perspective” (2009), which was equal parts memoir, guidebook and practical guide to helping children of the touch-screen era see the “insects in the leaves” and the “mushrooms in the lawn.” First, of course, he said, they should be encouraged to go outside.

Robert C. Stebbins, Chronicler of Western Reptiles and Amphibians, Dies at 98 - NYTimes.com

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/us/robert-c-stebbins-chronicler-of-western-reptiles-and-amphibians-dies-at-98.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131008&_r=0