A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1997:
Lethal as bombs and guns are, noman’s-land
designated for military training is
often the last refuge for wildlife, because sporadic
warfare disrupts habitat less than either
peaceful development or recreational hunting
and fishing, which inherently disturb the food
web. But wildlife use of no-man’s-land often
brings another kind of conflict, in the courts,
when the shooting starts.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1997:
Poorly educated women, often of ethnic minorities,
many of them immigrants, do the hardest, dirtiest, most dangerous
work––until their bodies fail them.
Pushers on almost every busy street corner stoke the
addictions that already kill more Americans than any other
cause, and have created the world’s deadliest drug problem.
Their suppliers rank among the global leaders in
dumping toxic waste.
Kingpins of this mob, some already convicted of
political corruption reaching clear to the White House, are now
muscling into position to siphon off the hard-won economic
gains of the developing world.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:
WASHINGTON D.C.– –
NASA and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration in late
March and early April recorded “the lowest
ozone values ever measured” by satellite
monitoring over the Arctic, according
to Goddard Space Flight Center
weather scientist Pawan K. Bhartia.
Bhartia reported that ozone levels
over the North Pole in March were
40% lower than the 1979-1982 average,
coming a year after levels that were 24%
lower than the 1979-1982 average.
Bhartia cautioned that, “These low
ozone amounts are still nearly a factor of
two greater than the lowest values” discovered
in the Antarctic, but ozone layer
depletion at either pole is already associated
with increased ultraviolet radiation
and global warming, leading toward
potential ecological catastrophe.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:
The 28th annual Earth Day celebration came and went, 10 days after the close of
the 14th Summit for the Animals, a convocation of animal rights organization heads that
perennially does nothing. Chances are, most ANIMAL PEOPLE readers were as unaffected
by either as the organizers were by one another, despite the stated intent of Earth
Day organizers to spotlight the Endangered Species Act, and of the Summit organizers to
court the thoroughly indifferent environmental movement, whatever is left of it.
Better potty training might have prevented this sibling schism, along with air and
water pollution, before the popular concept of the environmental cause came to be eliminating
waste. In a time when “environmentalist” is misleadingly synonymous to much of
the public with Big Brother, as much due to onerously mandated recycling as to wise-use
wiseguy machinations, and when some leading “environmental” organizations such as The
Nature Conservancy as aggressively extirpate nature and wildlife as any commercial developer,
it is worthwhile to recall that the first Earth Day, which the ANIMAL PEOPLE editor
helped publicize as a cub reporter in Berkeley, California, offered the notion of an
ecology-centered approach to living as a direct challenge to the environmental establishment
as much as to Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:
RALEIGH, N.C.––Forced to choose between fish
and pigs, North Carolina wants both––and got state fisheries
director Bruce Freeman’s resignation on February 13 as a
slightly early Valentine to himself. For $83,000 a year, he
decided, the job wasn’t worth the pfiesteria headache.
Freeman, a North Carolina native who previously
served as New Jersey fisheries director, was North Carolina’s
sixth fisheries director in 15 years, only one of whom stayed
longer than two years. He took office just four months before
the June 1995 destruction of the Neuse River by 20 million gallons
of hog slurry from a ruptured farm lagoon. That alone
killed as many as 40 million fish––and that spill was followed
by more than 100 others, both on the Neuse and other rivers.
There were hints that similar smaller spills had occurred for
years, to little notice, as the North Carolina hog industry rapidly
expanded over the past decade with strong government influence
at both the state and federal levels.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:
How far should habitat protection
go? How big is critical habitat?
A four-ounce common tern banded
at Helsinki University in Finland last June
gave a holistic answer on January 24 when
captured by ornithologist Clive Minton of
Victoria, Australia, having winged 16,000
miles, 125 miles a day, since she left
Finland on or about August 15. The flight
broke the record held since 1956 by an Arctic
tern who flew 14,000 miles, from White
Russia to Fremantle, Australia.
Swallow-tailed kites have been
known to make one of the longest migrations
of any raptor since the 1960s, when a kite
banded in southern Florida was shot in southeastern
Brazil, but their winter habitat was
discovered only this past winter, when ecologist
Ken Meyer of the Big Cypress National
Preserve tracked a kite from Florida to the
same part of Brazil through the use of a tiny
satellite transmitter, weighing just a twelfth
of an ounce, glued to the kite’s tailfeathers.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1997:
Four baby gray whales and a
young male pygmy sperm whale washed
up on California beaches between
December 17 and February 1––a possible
warning of a depleted food chain. The
pygmy sperm whale was only the fourth to
wash up in northern California since 1969,
but the third to beach in California during
1996. The other two beached far to the
south, in the same vicinity as the grays.
Sea World San Diego reported that the
one grey whale calf it was able to rescue
was recovering, and would be returned to
the wild when able to survive. Sea World
San Diego previously rehabilitated and
returned a gray whale to the wild in 1971.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1997:
TALLAHASSEE––Florida governor Lawton
Chiles on January 28 approved a plan to restrict fishing and
keep large ships out of the 2,800-square-mile Florida Keys
National Marine Sanctuary, created by Congress in 1990 but
stalled in debate over management plans ever since. The
agreement to ban fishing in 19 specific sensitive areas completed
a pact that also includes restrictions on reckless boating,
protection of the sea grass beds that furnish habitat to
manatees, and the funding of research to find out why coral
around the Keys, forming the only living coral reef in the
Northern Hemisphere, is fast dying off.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:
RALEIGH–Babe star James
Cromwell on November 12 asked to North
Carolina governor Jim Hunt to halt the construction
of yet another mega-hog farm in the
state, already the national leader in both pork
production and pollution from hog waste.
“No one has to be a vegetarian like
me to be repulsed by the suffering these animals
will endure, packed tightly indoors,
never seeing sunlight or feeling cool mud
beneath their feet,” Cromwell wrote.
Eight days earlier, the Hunt administration
relaxed pollution rules to let hog
farmers plagued by overflowing manure storage
tanks and rain-saturated fields pump more
slurry out onto the land, despite the likelihood
the slurry will contaminate waterways.