Brad Plumer of Vox on Wilderness and Costa Rica's Renewables

I think both of Brad's articles are excellent. I'm just adding comment and although some of it may come off sounding anti-renewables, let me just state for the record that I'm "not anti-renewables." No, seriously, I'm fine with rooftop solar, properly sited wind farms, and I think we should keep most existing hydroelectric. Nuclear certainly can't do it all.

We’ve wiped out 10% of Earth’s wilderness in the last two decades

Money quote:

A new study in Current Biology reports that Earth has lost 10 percent of its wilderness since the early 1990s —an area twice the size of Alaska. "The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering and very saddening," said lead author James Watson of the University of Queensland.

A wilderness area is, by definition, free of human industry (roads, agriculture, mining, etc) which includes the the sight of power stations on distant ridge lines and hilltops as well as the forest cleared to provide corridors for the power lines that lead from them.

The loss of wilderness is only part of the story. As was mentioned in Plumer's article, you can't recreate intact ecosystems once you destroy them, including those that are not part of a wilderness area. A case in point is the Ivanpah solar thermal power station that usurped intact desert tortoise habitat , and never mind that it may also be incinerating up to 6,000 birds a year.

Kudos to Plumer for including a link to a report from the Breakthrough Institute about using technology and innovation to shrink our environmental footprint (GMO-free organic gardening, grass-fed beef, wood stoves, and the 100 mile diet are not in the game plan).

Costa Rica Adventure--Part I

Eco tourism is great but doesn't scale well. There just are not enough tourists around to save the whole planet. I'm hoping effective carbon trading schemes will be worked out that will make it profitable to protect ecosystems. Time will tell.

My family took a trip to Costa Rica a few years ago. I was like a kid in a candy store and shot a lot of (poor) footage. Don't expect National Geographic quality. I have never posted it on the Internet so I thought it was time I did. I will be writing about the trip in sections with new wildlife footage in each post. Today's footage covers reptiles. I didn't see any snakes. All of the lizard footage was taken on the wonderfully overgrown grounds of the rundown hotel we stayed in. Eleven species were found on about a single acre of land. Biodiversity is a hallmark of tropical rainforests.

I didn't get a shot of everything I saw. For example, one day I was exploring along a road and picked up a dirt clod. I broke it open and found a very large, very lively earthworm. I was thinking, "Man, these Costa Rican night crawlers are spunky." It wasn't until it burrowed back into the soil that I realized I had just seen my first caecilian!

The people of Costa Rica recognize that tourists come to see animals. It is profitable to leave them alone but they draw the line with snakes, which may explain why you won't see many of them. This may also help explain why I saw so many lizards and frogs. There aren't many snakes (at least on hotel grounds) to eat them. I've talked to other travelers who say that animals get scarce when you get away from the tourist hot spots.

We really lucked out with our hotel selection. It must have been very popular in its heyday. The pool was clean but rundown. Everything, the weight room, squash court, outside bar, was in an advanced stage of disrepair and overgrown. I loved it. We were traveling with another family and were the only guests in the whole place. The night watchman would show up after dark, coasting with his motorcycle engine off down the winding road into the hotel complex and just disappear with his night vision binoculars.

We could walk down a concrete path through jungle and swamp to a fantastic uncrowded beach. I've never been on a better vacation.

Click here to see a list of my articles and to subscribe to future posts