Some say this is similar to the kind of gag orders issued during the Bush Administration.
(Photo by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House)
The Obama Open Government
Directive is supposed to open
government to the people.
Lester Graham reports everything
is not as open as you might hope:
Transcript
The Obama Open Government
Directive is supposed to open
government to the people.
Lester Graham reports everything
is not as open as you might hope:
Some agencies have posted new websites that encourage the public to talk with the government.
At the same time, officials in the government were telling their people not to talk to the public or the media and threatening disciplinary action toward some employees who posted on the web things they knew about government proposals.
Recent memos from Forest Service officials order their law enforcment employees not to talk to any national media or any local reporter covering a national issue without approval from the Washington press office.
Jeff Ruch is the executive director of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
“So, it’s hard to maintain on one hand you’re being transparent and on the other hand the people who know what’s going on aren’t allowed to speak.”
Ruch says this is similar to the kind of gag orders issued during the Bush Administration.
Elephants talk amongst themselves below levels we can hear. (Photo courtesy of the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park)
An image of a series of elephant calls. Researchers are using these calls to count how many elephants are in the wild. (Photo courtesy of the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park)
Project headquarters - the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (Photo by Emma Jacobs)
Biologists are always trying to
get a good count of the animals
they’re studying. You wouldn’t
think it’d be that hard to find
an elephant for a count, but even
some of the largest animals are
difficult to count in the wild.
So researchers are now trying new
methods. Emma Jacobs reports on
a Cornell University project which
is using audio recordings to learn
more about elephants:
Transcript
Biologists are always trying to
get a good count of the animals
they’re studying. You wouldn’t
think it’d be that hard to find
an elephant for a count, but even
some of the largest animals are
difficult to count in the wild.
So researchers are now trying new
methods. Emma Jacobs reports on
a Cornell University project which
is using audio recordings to learn
more about elephants:
Mya Thompsons sits down in her lab and pulls up a set of recordings on her computer. She helped tape these sounds for the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park in the Central African Republic. She plays a recording made in the forest, late at night.
(sounds of the forest at night)
“You heard some insects, you heard some sort of the din of a nighttime forest.”
But you probably don’t hear elephants.
Next, Thompson takes the same sound and speeds it up on her computer. Suddenly, you can hear something else.
“This is 4-times normal speed.”
(sound of forest at night, but with rumbles)
Elephants make those low rumbles. When she speeds up the playback, they rise in pitch. It’s kinda of like the voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
It turns out elephants talk among themselves below levels we can hear. Biologist Kaity Paine discovered these sounds in the 1980s. She realized that because elephant rumbles are so low, they travel long distances. This should make them useful to track elephants over wide forests, but Thompson remembers that in the field, it was hard to see how.
“We’re collecting all this information and we wanted to know what the calls were like, but because we can’t hear them, we were almost totally in the dark about what was going on.”
When she got back to New York, Thompson and the rest of the research team started combing through all the audio and video collected in Central Africa for elephant calls. It took thousands of hours.
But with time, they could nail down a pattern. The key was a relationship between the audio recordings and the video of elephants they had made in one clearing popular with elephants.
“This is a communication system. There are a lot of other variables other than, ‘Hi I’m here,’ but, overall, the more calling, the more elephants and that was good news for us.”
Now Thompson can monitor elephants over huge areas of this dense forest using these audio recordings.
In the field, the team hoists their recorders into trees attached to truck batteries. They can stay up there a long time, which has real advantages.
“Usually, when you take a survey, you go, you count, and you leave. For acoustics, we’re able to have this recorder up continuously without all this human effort and make repeated estimates over longer periods of time.”
With enough information, Thompson can estimate at the numbers of elephants in a forest with twice the precision she could have before.
Marcella Kelly teaches wildlife field techniques at Virginia Tech. She says, when you can track animal numbers closely, you can see how they respond to changes in their environment. This is a must for conservation.
“We really need effective ways to estimate population size, especially because decisions are made on management based on what those numbers tell us, over time.”
The Elephant Listening Project recently started monitoring elephants in the African nation of Gabon.
“The authorities had allowed gas exploration to see if there’s any petroleum reserves there, and so our project was asked to monitor the forest for elephant calls before, during, and after this exploration.”
Thompson can already say that things have changed. Elephants have started coming out more at night than during the day to avoid people. In the end, hopefully she’ll be able to see just how disruptive changes have been and to pinpoint the human activities causing problems.
She also wants to protect other animals making noise in the forest, and outside it.
“We’re really hoping that these methods that we’ve developed, will be developed for not only forest elephants but for other species that are hard to survey that we really need to know more about before we can protect them.”
For right now though, Thompson is still in her lab, listening for elephants.
President Barack Obama addresses the opening session of the first U.S.-China Strategic and Economic
Dialogue. Listening at left are Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan, center, and Chinese State
Councilor Dai Bingguo, left. (Photo by Chuck Kennedy, courtesy of the White House)
The Chinese are in Washington in high-level talks with the Obama administration about – among other things – energy and the environment. Lester Graham has more on that:
Transcript
The Chinese are in Washington in high-level talks with the Obama administration about – among other things – energy and the environment. Lester Graham has more on that:
Opponents of the climate change bill in the U.S. like to remind us that China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China likes to point out the U.S. didn’t even sign the Kyoto Protocol.
“We’ve been each other’s biggest excuse for the past five, eight years about not acting on international commitments.”
That’s Jennifer Turner. She’s Director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Turner says things are changing.
Recently China and the U.S. started talking about how they can help each other. And, she says, while China’s not talking about climate change a lot, it is talking about energy efficiency.
“China has actually been doing a lot over the past eight years on lowering their CO2 emissions, pushing energy efficiency more, for trying to ensure their own energy security and to lessen the health impacts of pollution.”
While the U.S. has been stressing climate change.
The governments have figured out they’re working on the same problem, just looking at it a little differently.
Flags of member nations flying at United Nations Headquarters (UN Photo by Joao Araujo Pinto)
Delegates from 190 countries are
meeting in Poznan, Poland for the The
United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change. Lester Graham reports
the delegates are concerned about the
economic costs of reducing the greenhouse
gases that cause climate change:
Transcript
Delegates from 190 countries are
meeting in Poznan, Poland for the The
United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change. Lester Graham reports
the delegates are concerned about the
economic costs of reducing the greenhouse
gases that cause climate change:
With the world in an economic slump, it might be difficult to come to a new climate
change agreement.
But, Yvo de Boer, who’s the Executive Secretary for the convention says, you think
this is bad, wait ‘til you see what happens if nothing is done about global warming.
“This result in an economic failure on the scale of two world wars and the great
depression combined.”
Most countries are looking to see what the U.S. will do.
Angela Anderson is with the Pew Charitable Trusts Environment Group and a
speaker at the climate change convention. She says there’s talk about what the
Obama administration might do.
“There has been a discussion of the ‘Obama Buzz’ as it’s being called here in
Poznan. And you do hear lots of people in the corridors speculating on what the
negotiations will be like next year.”
This time next year is the deadline for an agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto
protocol.
For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
Many Native American tribes say
they want to be part of the national debate
over climate change legislation. The
tribes at least have the attention of the
US EPA. Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
Many Native American tribes say
they want to be part of the national debate
over climate change legislation. The
tribes at least have the attention of the
US EPA. Chuck Quirmbach reports:
The tribes are worried about climate change. They think it might be affecting natural resources
like wild rice beds, fish habitat and animals they hunt to feed their people.
The tribes got some provisions into a major climate change bill that recently failed in Congress.
They’re now preparing their arguments for the next go-round on Capitol Hill.
Stephen Hartsfield is with the National Tribal Air Association. He says one thing the Native
communities want is more incentives to produce cleaner energy – such as solar power in the
Southwest US.
“ We have 300 days of sunshine a year – so it just makes logical sense for tribes and states and
communities in the Southwest to look at those opportunities.”
At a meeting with Great Lakes area tribes in Milwaukee, an EPA official said it’ll be up to
Congress and the Obama Administration to determine how much clout the tribes will have in the
debate.
Some say this is similar to the kind of gag orders issued during the Bush Administration. (Photo by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House)
