A rare Irrawaddy dolphin spotted in Indonesian waters. David Dove / WWF Greater Mekong

This is the first post in a new series that celebrates the extraordinary diversity of freshwater ecosystems around the world. Every Friday, we’ll present a new species, and examine what each can teach us about the importance of preserving, and in some cases restoring, freshwater habitats.

This week, we take a look at the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris), a rare species of freshwater dolphin that is highly vulnerable to extinction due to pollution, dams, and diversions in the rivers it calls home.

This week, the World Wildlife Fund reported that Irrawaddy dolphins have been seen for the first time in West Kalimantan, on the Indonesian island Borneo. WWF-Indonesia and the Regional Office for Marine, Coastal & Resources Management Pontianak  (BPSPL) saw the freshwater cetaceans while conducting a study in the narrow straits and coastal waters of the Kubu Raya and Kayong Utara regencies in the western part of Borneo.

Albertus Tjiu, WWF-Indonesia’s Conservation Biologist, said, “The results of this study indicate the importance of protecting the dolphins’ habitat, from the origins of the rivers in the Heart of Borneo, to the lower rivers of the island, including waterways of Batu Ampar mangroves and nypah forests, the narrow straits and the coastal areas of Kubu Raya, West Kalimantan.”

The scientists also saw Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins in the area.

Tjiu warns that the area is seeing increasing charcoal production, threatening the flooded mangrove forests that serve as key habitat to the Irrawaddy dolphin. WWF is calling on producers to avoid deforesting sensitive areas.

According to WWF, there are about 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins left in the wild, with about 5,800 of them living in Bangladesh. The remainder are scattered throughout Southeast Asia. The species is officially listed as “vulnerable” by the IUCN, although it is listed as critically endangered locally in some areas, including the Mekong River, the Ayeyawardi River, and the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan.

Intelligent and playful, river dolphins are charismatic animals. But they are unlikely to survive in large numbers unless countries get serious about protecting and restoring river habitats.

Brian Clark Howard is a writer and editor with NationalGeographic.com. He was formerly an editor at The Daily Green and E/The Environmental Magazine and has contributed to many publications, including TheAtlantic.com, FastCompany.com, MailOnline.com, PopularMechanics.com, Yahoo!, MSN and elsewhere. His latest book, with Kevin Shea, is Build Your Own Small Wind Power System.

Photo by Steven Depolo, Flickr Creative Commons

A couple nights ago, my family ate dinner at a restaurant. The silverware we used was in someone else’s mouth at lunch — those forks and spoons right on some stranger’s tongue.

Last week, I stayed at a hotel. The linens I slept on, the towels I used after my shower, had been against the skin of strangers a day or two previously.

We aren’t grossed out by the silverware in restaurants or the towels in hotels, and for good reason. We all wash dishes. We all do the laundry. We know what clean dishes and clean towels mean — and if anything, we know that restaurants and hotels use a temperature of hot water that makes their silverware and their linens cleaner even than those we offer guests in our own home.

So what’s with all the squeamishness about re-using water?

Why does water that’s been explicitly cleaned for re-use conjure images that the forks and wash cloths don’t?

The real problem is that almost none of us ever clean our water, or know anything about how water gets clean.

Today’s New York Times has a story by Felicity Barringer that declares — with the kind of culture-flipping flourish the NYT’s front page can still muster — that the era of squeamishness over recycling water is over.

The headline, across four columns on the front of the print edition and prominently on the nytimes.com home page, declares, “As ‘Yuck Factor’ Subsides, Treated Wastewater Flows from Taps.”

Today’s story focuses, yet again, on Orange County, California’s, impressive system for cleaning wastewater to drinking water quality, then returning it to the aquifer from which 2.4 million people draw their drinking water, including Anaheim and Santa Ana.

But the story misses at least two of the most dramatic and long-standing examples of re-use in the country — examples that have been going on for years and show how valuable re-use is, and how having the political courage to put systems in place changes public skepticism to public support.

Orange County, the NYT story says, cleans 70 million gallons of water a day for return to its aquifer (enough for about 700,000 people).

Las Vegas, in fact, recycles 94 percent of the water that hits a drain anywhere in the Las Vegas metro area. The Las Vegas water — from kitchen sinks in Henderson, from hot tubs along the Strip — is cleaned to just-below drinking water standards (tertiary cleaning, it’s called), and returned to Lake Mead, the reservoir from which Las Vegas draws virtually all its drinking water.

How much water does Las Vegas clean and return each day? Over the last decade, the city has averaged 180 million gallons of recycled water a day, more than twice what San Diego is recyling (although slightly less clean).

All the water Las Vegas cleans and recycles flows into Lake Mead through a stream called the Las Vegas Wash. You can stand on the banks of the Wash and watch Las Vegas’s water being returned to its source.

Across the country, in Central Florida, they’ve been re-using wastewater for 26 years. Orange County, Florida, is one of the few places in the nation where, for most residents, it is illegal to water their lawns with potable drinking water. (PDF)

In 1986, Orange County, Florida, the county that surrounds Orlando and includes places like Universal Studios, created wastewater recycling plants, and it created the customers for them. The county mandated that going forward, all new construction — homes, schools, soccer fields, office parks — would have to use recycled water for outdoor watering. The county did not mandate retrofitting — every home and shopping mall and office was grandfathered. But every new subdivision and theme park would have to include a purple pipe system.

The results, 25 years later, are astonishing.

Today, Orange County delivers 59 million gallons of potable drinking water a day.

And, separately, Orange County cleans and delivers 53 million gallons of recycled water a day.

That’s 53 million gallons of water a day — enough for a half million people — that doesn’t have to come out of Florida’s shrinking Floridan Aquifer.

It’s not just water, of course, it’s attitude. In Central Florida, there’s a whole generation of builders, public officials, residents and school children who think it’s silly to water the lawn with purified drinking water.

In Las Vegas, home to more water ostentatiousness than any U.S. city, residents know that the only way to survive in the desert is to reuse the water you’ve already got.

Just two weeks ago, National Geographic’s Ker Than highlighted the same National Research Council report on the safety of recycled water cited in today’s NYT story.

And Water Currents’ Sandra Postel wrote last month about how Australians have discovered that water-cleaning technology has advanced so far that businesses don’t need to wait for their communities to start re-using wastewater. Small systems can be installed on a golf course, for instance, that tap wastewater pipes and clean and reuse the water before it can even get back to the municipal treatment plant.

In fact, the real problem has been attitude and presentation, not technology. The conversation about reusing water has been consistently hijacked by that mindless three-word phrase “toilet-to-tap.” And water people — great at pipes and pumps, but not so great at marketing — have been completely stumped.

Here’s a clue: It’s not wastewater. Even the waste, utilities are discovering, is a valuable resource. And the water itself certainly is.

What makes the phrase particularly dumb is that all water is, in fact, toilet to tap. No geology on Earth is making “new water.” All the water we’ve got is all the water we’ve ever had — your pristine Evian was pee at some point.

We’re not all using disposable silverware and towels. And our water is equally cleanable — and not disposable at all.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst.

Celeste Ray has spent the past decade studying Ireland’s saints and visiting hundreds of sacred sites associated with them. A recent National Geographic grant allowed her to return to the field once more, on a year-long expedition to learn more of Ireland’s fearless females, many of whom stem from pagan tradition, and to visit as many as 250 their holy wells.

The Project

Holy wells are springs, ponds, or even lakes that are the focus of spiritual devotion. Part of local tradition in Ireland for thousands years, wells are each assigned a saint and are the sites of daily individual prayer and annual celebrations.

Celeste sought to map early saint cults in Ireland though enduring well dedications to determine how well female saints have fared the test of time. During the Anglo-Norman invasion, wells previously dedicated to Irish female saints were rededicated to the Virgin Mary. That practice, combined with the movement of people, changes in land ownership, and religious battles, threatened to erase all trace of the ancient traditions.

After interviewing over 200 individuals and poring over copies upon copies of unpublished primary documents in county libraries and the National Folklore Collection in Dublin, Celeste successfully confirmed her theories on existing wells dedicated to female saints. The result: Women saints are alive and well in the minds and hearts of the Irish, and the location of wells today paints a picture of faith in the past.

St. Finnian's Coffin Trough Well in Ballinvalley, Carlow County. Photo: Celeste Ray

Saint Gobnait’s Day

Not much is verifiably known about Gobnait, but she is said to have lived in the 6th century, to have founded churches, and to have kept bees. She is held as a patroness of health and fertility and of bees and bee-keepers. Annually on February 11th a feast day is held in her honor and hundreds of people gather to attend mass, visit her shrine and drink from the holy wells.

In 2011, Celeste attended the annual holiday event. Roughly 120 people gathered to begin making the “rounds” on the eve before the saint’s day when the well waters are believed to be most potent. Nine stations are prepared around the holy well and shrine taking about an hour and a half to visit all of them. At each station one says a set of prayers: 7 Paters (the Our Father), 7 Aves (the Hail Mary), 7 “Glorys be to The Father”, and 1 Creed (the Apostles’ Creed).

Celeste describes the experience with rich detail: “…the landscape at once vibrates with the clicking of rosary beads and the murmur of voices repeating familiar and comforting words. The sounds coalesce like the steady and intent hum of St Gobnait’s bees.”

The pilgrims then gather around a statue of Saint Gobnait standing atop one of her beehives to reflect upon their prayer requests. The procession drinks from the well (uncovered in 1952) and proceeds to the cemetery to visit Gobnait’s grave (possibly a prehistoric structure), circling the mound twice while speaking the applicable prayers. The somber crowd then moves on to several other stations to complete additional sets of prayers.

Map showing Ballyvourney, Ireland, where St. Gobnait is said to have stopped the spread of plague. Map Credit: National Geographic Society and Esri

Surviving Catholic and Protestant Reorganization

Celeste’s project was particularly interested in learning how well certain saints endured this time of tumultuous change. Before the introduction of Christianity, Ireland was largely pagan. However, with the arrival of early Christians, missionaries preached where people already worshiped and folded pagan places of pilgrimage, including holy wells, into a new faith. Saints replaced pagan deities and existing places of prayer were given a Christian flavor.

Despite Anglo-Norman attempts to replace veneration of Irish female saints with the veneration of the Virgin Mary, dedication to the saints persisted, and the eventually became protectors of local kingdoms and regions. The endurance of particular saints became connected to the success of dynasties that were attached to certain territories and their endowment of land for churches and abbeys. For example, Saint Gobnait stopped the spread of the plague to her people in Ballyvourney by drawing a line with her staff along the east end of the parish.

All go to the final station, St Gobnait’s well, where they may leave a votive offering on the tree over the well (most commonly in the form of a ribbon) like these gifts left at St. Brigid's well. Photo: Celeste Ray

Faith and Science

For many wells, their mysticism extends beyond their connection to a saint. Known for their healing capabilities, some wells were believed to specialize in treating diseases such as tuberculosis and whooping cough. Today they are sought out more for maladies like sore throats, head, back, stomach, and tooth aches, warts, and other skin-related problems, anxiety, and even cancer.

To explain why, researchers looked for answers in the water. Their studies determined that some wells are rich in specific chemicals; for example, waters associated with skin remedies are often high in sulfur, an effective ingredient in acne medication. Wells connected with “strengthening weak children” are generally iron-rich. The wells in County Kerry’s “Valley of the Mad” contain lithium and were effective in treating mental illness.

On a Cold Winter’s Night…

While traveling extensively through Ireland, Celeste recounts the many nights she frequented the homes of local families, on days where the nights were long and the winter, frigid. There she asked them to relay stories surrounding the folklore of saints, wells, and holy places. Celeste describes the scene as an onlooker:

“On St Brigid’s Eve, a few hours into the dark of night, an intergenerational crowd encircles a large, smoky bonfire near the sites of two holy wells dedicated to the saint. Just over 100 participants have gathered outside Kildare town for an annual event celebrating both the ancient Celtic holiday of Imbolc (the beginning of spring) and St Brigid’s day (February 1^st). Led by sisters of the Brigidine Order, they bring lanterns and candles to welcome “the light of Brigid” and the end of an unusually cold winter.

Quite literally in spite of the cold, the crowd is sprinkled with water from St Brigid’s nearby healing well. A woman sits by the fire and begins weaving a large St Brigid’s cross of local rushes. As the crowd falls silent— her actions are explained as symbolic ritual labor; she weaves into the cross the dreams and worries of those present.

Chanting the saint’s name, the company stumbles along through the dark and someone loudly calls ‘Brigid?’.  Thinking it is a spiritual invocation, I am surprised when my nearest neighbor replies ‘I’m here’ then winks at me and adds ‘I’m Brigid, but not an apparition.’  This is not the usual wellside event I had come to expect in Irish fieldwork.”

Celeste’s research in the field of Irish folklore stands to be one of the most thorough in her field. Her work has edged the world towards a greater understanding of Ireland’s traditional knowledge on saint cults, pagan history, and sacred natural sites. Celeste doesn’t plan on slowing down anytime soon and continues to preserve ancient Irish history with her ongoing research.

Learn More

Traveler’s Guide to Ireland

Ireland Photo Gallery

Video: Winter Solstice at 5,000-Year-Old Newgrange Tomb

After a couple of hours we gave up on the rhinos and decided to kill time, and hopefully get some good ground level video of a big bull elephant.  But when we were within fifty yards of the elephant, Difficult spotted a black rhino in the bushes behind us.  We changed courses again and began trying to sneak up close to the rhino.  Once we were fairly close, Brad started making rhino calls hoping to get our rhino to stick her head out of the bushes for better pictures.

As you’ll see in this video she not only stuck her head out, but her whole body, and then decided to come in for a really close look at us.  That’s a nice way of saying, “she charged us.”  Yes I have now been charged by a black rhino and lived to tell about it.  It does make for an entertaining video, but the real story here is what’s happening to Africa’s rhinos and we tell that story this week on my radio show, “National Geographic Weekend”.  We also talk about the success of the Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve in protecting rhinos in Zimbabwe at the same time record numbers are being killed in South Africa.

Ireland's River Dodder is part of the lush ecosystem of the Emerald Isle. Photo by William Murphy, Flickr, Creative Commons

If you’re one of the 4.5 million people who live in Ireland, you pay no water bill.

Municipal water is free, no matter how much you use. And no one knows how much you use — not even you.

Ireland has no water meters and no water bills.

In fact, Ireland is the only country in Europe with no water meters. Indeed, Hanoi has water meters, and Mexico City and Delhi. Just not Dublin.

Without any data on consumption, without any pricing, there’s also no economics of water use in Ireland.

For those who think charging for water has no impact on how people use and manage it, two facts leap out from a just-released Irish government report on water:

• Per person water use in Ireland is about 37,000 gallons a year — between two and three times the average for the rest of Europe. (Per person water use in Ireland is almost identical to that in the U.S. — but the U.S. has one of the highest per person water use rates in the world.)

• Irish water utilities leak an astonishing 41 percent of the water they pump before the water reaches any customer, more than twice the leak rate in the U.K. or the U.S.

But water meters are coming to Ireland, along with water charges, quickly. And although there will undoubtedly be raucous protests from people who have never seen a water bill, the arrival of water meters and water bills is a good thing.

Understanding how much water you use, and paying for it, even a small amount, is critical to having a healthy water system and a healthy water economy.

The purpose of Ireland’s January report was to propose a radical makeover of the country’s water system, a makeover that is long overdue.

“Our current model of water provision, where unlimited quantities of an expensive product are provided at no charge, is simply not sustainable,” says the report.

“We have an abundance of water,” says Phil Hogan, the Irish environment minister pushing the program forward, “but we often take it for granted, and we need to protect it. We have no consumer protection, no economic regulation, and we have too much unaccounted for water.”

Hogan, in fact, is selling the water metering in part as a jobs program. Installing water meters nationwide should create 2,000 jobs, he says. And he expects installation of 1 million meters to begin this fall, and be fininshed in 2014.

The water meters and water bills — rates have yet to be announced — are part of a larger plan to create a single national water utility, Irish Water, consolidating the facilities and responsibilities of 34 local utilities.

You can’t have smart water use without knowing how much water you use, of course. The Irish report says Denmark saw a 13 percent decrease in household water use between 1996 and 2007, as water meters were installed and water was billed based on use.

While Ireland being completely free of water meters is an extreme example, there are surprising pockets of unmetered water, the legacy of an era when providing free water was regarded as a routine city responsibility.

Thames Water, the London water utility, charges everyone for water, but more than 70 percent of Londoners have no water meters and pay a flat rate. The largest apartment complex in New York City, Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town, with 11,232 apartments, also has no water meters for residents.

Part of Ireland’s water culture, of course, is abundance. And the report does pause to appreciate Ireland’s legendary lushness, in economic if not poetic terms.

“Ireland’s rich water resources will become of increasing strategic importance to the Irish economy as the value of water increases globally. … Ireland needs to exploit its competitive advantages and to attract more water intensive industries, and to explore all opportunities for using our water resources in a sustainable way to support economic growth and competitiveness.”

And those newcomers will get water meters. No charge.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst.

The sight of such small vessels riding the swells in Walker Bay off Africa’s southernmost point of Cape Agulhas is apparently not unusual. The poachers ply their trade quite openly, without any apparent concern about being apprehended, I was later told by some residents.

We were cruising around a cove on the southern lip of the bigger bay which the locals refer to as Shark Bay because of the large number of sharks, including great whites, that congregate there throughout the year. It is what makes shark-cage diving one of the biggest attractions of the inlet’s fishing village of Gansbaai, which translates into Goose Bay.

The small bay includes Dyer Island, where conservationists are fighting hard to save a breeding colony of the endangered African penguin. The rocky shallows around the island and an adjoining outcrop known as Geyser Rock that is home to a large seal colony, are the site of some of the most brazen abalone poaching.

It is not the only area where this is happening. Serious concerns have for some years now been raised over the plundering of the sea floor along South Africa’s entire southwestern coast, with conservationists increasingly fearing that stocks of the coveted shellfish, popularly known in the country as perlemoen, could soon be depleted. The danger is aggravated by the indiscriminate harvesting of small abalone, which take 13 years before they are grown enough to spawn the next generation.

The authorities’ handling of the situation has become such a serious bone of contention that they are now facing a court challenge by a group of abalone fishermen belonging to the official South African Abalone Industry Association.

The main complaint of these small operators is about the way quotas have been allocated in favor of big companies. Their spokesman, Scott Russel, have been quoted as saying that poaching was causing abalone stocks to collapse in some of the zones allocated to the big operators. And now these big rights holders were being rewarded for the mismanagement of their zones by allowing them to fish in other, more stable zones.

In addition, the small operators have sought, and been granted, an urgent interdict to stop the dozens of people and companies fishing in the zones allocated to them. These include the Table Bay area round Robben Island, the former prison island (and now a World Heritage Site) where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated for many years.

In terms of the interim interdict, the authorities must now see that those accused of intruding must keep out of the small operators’ areas. The court still needs to hear further evidence at a later date before deciding whether to make the interdict permanent.

But in a bizarre twist, the small operators in their main action are also accusing South Africa’s national minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, and her department of “secretly” selling more than R10 million (about U.S.$1.2 million) worth of illegally poached abalone that had been confiscated.

The department is said to annually sell much bigger quantities of confiscated abalone, using the proceeds to fund its operations. Though done officially and openly, it is nonetheless controversial. Such sales have now reached the point of the department being accused of practically needing the illegal activity to secure its income.

The implication of the small operators’ court action is that there is something smelly about the alleged “secret” auctions. According to reports, Russel says in his affidavits to the Western Cape High Court that these auctions are happening without prior public notice and without scrutiny of a certified independent forensic firm.

The court action has come in the face of Minister Joemat-Pettersson declaring herself and her department to be fully committed to fighting the shellfish-stripping scourge, which she has compared to South Africa’s deeply worrying rhino-poaching blight.

She last year launched five speed boats to go after the abalone poachers. The vessels are manned by military veterans and are able to get to the rocky shallows around islands and along the inshore areas where the poachers operate.

The large quantities of abalone seized, and subsequently auctioned, indicate that the security operatives are having successes. But much of this seems to be happening at the higher levels of the smuggling networks. Last year Chinese nationals found in possession of big abalone stashes they were intending to ship to the Far East  were sentenced to jail. Vehicles and even big boats have been seized in anti-poaching operations.

But conservationists and some residents of Gansbaai remain sceptical about what is happening at the lower levels. They point out that poaching is often carried on in broad daylight, as for example round Dyer Island in the cove they call Shark Bay. Some suspects, including three policemen, were arrested in Gansbaai last year. Still, some residents claim the illegal activity has practically become part of life in their village.

They prefer to speak anonymously, for fear of intimidation. They say the poacher gangs and their syndicates have become so ruthless that they do not merely threaten physical harm against those reporting them or publicly speaking out against them. They have taken to warning such people that they know where their children go to school or where their families go shopping.

The sinister methods of intimidation are by implication confirmed in the strategy adopted by one marine protection officer, who, in setting up a combined anti-poaching operation, has asked anglers to phone him, or better, send him an SMS on his mobile phone, with information about poaching. He would then relay the information to the operators, so ensuring that the identity of the whistleblowers remained protected.

But back in Gansbaai, some folk gave me another reason for what they consider to be a reluctance to act decisively against the poachers. They told me it was because of the extent to which the income from abalone poaching and smuggling was keeping the area’s shop tills ringing. It was big money that over the years had become part of the area’s economic lifeblood.

courtesy of Google Maps

These people work hard out here; the conservationists, the farmers, everyone.  The hot days of October dictate an early rise to reach the far-flung locations that entail research, data gathering and community outreach.

I’m in the central Kalahari region, just outside the town of Ghanzi in Botswana.  It’s hot, like… Africa hot… as the cliché goes.  Cheetah Conservation Botswana (CCB) has a camp here where a small permanent staff of six and two volunteers reside, as well as the giant guard dog, Murphy, and Cat, a small orange house cat with a taste for murdering smaller creatures.

Murphy after a roll in the mud on a hot day

In the night, jackals can be heard and Murphy sets to barking his head off and growling at them.  The jackal population has increased dramatically according to local Afrikaner farmers and as a result they are suffering losses of small livestock; sheep and goat.  This brings them into direct conflict with the predators in the region.  If they hunt the jackal, it could trigger a crisis in the pack and thus they will breed even more.  So what are they supposed to do protect their flocks from intense losses?

CCB Researcher, Jane Horgan is working on just this issue.  Livestock dogs such as our Murphy, an Anatolian Shepherd, local Botswana mix breeds and greyhound mixes are being tested at CCB Ghanzi camp and elsewhere as to their effectiveness in this particular climate of dry, intense heat.

Today, I’m in the car with Jane.  We’re in the ever-sturdy Toyota Hilux taking us over the bumpiest roads I’ve ever experienced.

Driving through dust and fences

Being in the passenger seat means that I’m on fence duty.  We’re in farmland, game farms and livestock farms and that means gates and lots of ‘em.  I open and close nearly a dozen gates throughout the day.  Some farmers work with CCB, allowing them to study play trees on their land, collect scat and set camera traps to analyze the cheetah population and its integral part in the ecosystem.

We are checking “play trees” on the Flattery’s farm, the term given to trees with low branches that cheetah love to scratch-mark, spray and hang about.  There is scat to collect and batteries in the motion sensor cameras to change.  A lot of cheetah are in the area, as evidenced by fresh scat and lots of fabulous self-portraits on the cameras.  I may as well retire as a photographer, the cheetah do it all on they’re own with compositional style and finesse.

image on loan from Cheetah Conservation Botswana

As we finish with the last marking tree, we drive past the main farmhouse where brothers Melcomb and Quinton are sitting under a shady umbrella having a rest.  We get out to chat and catch up.  The farmhouse is a lovely set of small buildings, gardens and cages with exotic birds, a few meerkats, three exuberant dogs ,and somewhere lurking about is a pet mongoose.

Melcomb and Quinton kindly agree to a video interview and go into great detail about their relationship with the predators on their land.

Melcomb & Quinton on the quad bike in search of the sheep carcass.

As we talk, Quinton looks over my head and into the distance.  Then Melcomb does the same.  What is it?  Vulture.  Seconds later, more vultures circling in the distant sky.  They know something is up, their sheep are in that direction.  Quinton sets off on the quad bike to have a look.  Minutes later he radios his brother, a sheep has been killed.

Jane and I jump in the truck and follow the brothers into the bush to find the sheep.

After a few minutes of looking around in the thick bush, the unmistakable sound of thousands of swarming flies lead us to a ravaged sheep carcass.  Although it is a fresh kill from that morning, there is not much left of it.  Quinton says it’s the work of three jackals that killed another sheep just days before.  Jane, Melcomb and Quinton point out the tell-tale signs of a jackal kill, specific bite marks and methods of taking down prey. An air of resignation takes hold of the scene.

taking a look at the evidence

I ask Melcomb if he will hunt the jackals.  “Yes”, he answers.  Quinton throws the carcass into a nearby tree so the hyenas can’t get to it (and come back looking for more, thereby creating a bigger problem).

What was a fairly relaxed chat about human-predator relations turned into a visceral example of the harsh realities of being a farmer in Botswana. But there are solutions that can mitigate losses.  Namely, livestock dogs for smaller animals such as goats, sheep and calves. Melcomb, Quinton and Jane talk in earnest about getting a dog to guard the sheep.  With more jackals in the area, there are more mouths to feed.  It’s important to take a stronger action.  I’m new to this topic, listen with an open mind and wonder about the efforts of hunting and energy expended, considering all the work basic farming involves vs. livestock guard dog solutions.

The Flatterys have been working this land for three generations and they are curious about new methods, but they also have a farm to run and new methods take time.  Building strong relationships with the farmers, who already allow CCB to set up motion capture cameras on play trees in their area, is a key factor.

Murphy in the bush at sunset

We return to the shady spot under the umbrella, have a slice of cake and a soda, play with the pet mongoose and chat about wildlife and old stories of the days when the water table was higher, there were no fences, when the cattle’s drives were on horseback, before setting off to return to cheetah camp.

More on livestock guard dogs in Namibia and South Africa coming soon…

all images & video Marcy Mendelson © 2012 / Cheetah-Watch.com

Supply and Demand on the Colorado River. Source: USBR

Much ado has been made in recent headlines about growing scarcity on the Colorado River.  Water supply, as reflected by what’s left in storage in the basin’s big reservoirs, has dropped from full just over a decade ago to 64% today, and the river hasn’t run regularly to the sea since the 90’s.

While some water users have the legal right to extract more water from the basin, it is evident that by adding new demands to this over-used system we will create shortages somewhere else.

The federal Bureau of Reclamation has started working with the seven states in the basin (AZ, CA, CO, NM, NV, UT and WY) to study the future of supply and demand on the Colorado, and to search for solutions that fill the ‘gap’ between them, as illustrated in the right hand side of the graph above.  Stay tuned for great debates about the merits of cloud seeding versus conservation, and desalinization versus re-use.

But what strikes me as most promising is the commitment from Reclamation and the states to consider the health of the basin’s rivers.  Their latest report discusses how they will assess the future status of ecosystem health, by looking at projected conditions for endangered species, river-based wildlife refuges, and even for a host of freshwater and riparian habitats on the mainstem and major tributaries.

They draw the connection between the health of the river and the health of the economy not only by measuring how well consumptive water demands can be met in all sectors, but also by discussing how they’ll measure future flows from the boater’s perspective, and how recreation-based economies may fare.

That a study of the future of the Colorado should include the health of the river itself might seem obvious.  Yet the vast system of pipes and canals we’ve built from the top to the bottom of this basin point to the Colorado’s central importance as a water supply to the arid Southwest, and too often we overlook the river itself.  How else can we explain the damage we have done to so many of the basin’s rivers over the last half century?

The future of this region promises to be more crowded, and likely hotter and drier, but that doesn’t have to spell the death of the Colorado River.  Reclamation and the states are facing the need to make decisions of great consequence about how to supply and manage water use in every sector.  Let’s hope their new commitment to look at impacts on the river gives them the wisdom to forge a path forward that meets our legitimate water needs and protects and restores healthy flows.

Jennifer Pitt is the Colorado River Project Director for Environmental Defense Fund.

His resignation followed weeks of protests and was apparently motivated by internal politics unrelated to his environmental views.

Global Warming behind Europe’s Winter

Global warming could be behind the Arctic blast that recently hit Europe, killing more than 200. The unusually small ice cover over the Kara and Barents Seas has changed wind patterns, pushing frigid air into Europe.

Meanwhile, most of the U.S. has been enjoying an especially mild winter—although Alaska has had one of the coldest and snowiest on record, and the Bering Sea’s ice grew to its second-highest on record in January.

Meteorologist Jeffrey Masters said it’s not clear if global warming is the culprit behind the U.S. weather, but “… over the last couple of years, it’s really not the atmosphere I know anymore.”

When the Los Angeles Times reported on the warm winter without mentioning the possible influence of global warming, climate scientist Michael Mann called it “journalistic malpractice.”

However, the media is too often the scapegoat, with politicians and the economy having a bigger influence on public opinion about climate change, according to a new study.

“Fracking” Study Raises Greenhouse Gas Worries

A new study, which sampled the air around sites where hydraulic fracturing is being used to extract natural gas from shale, revealed more gases—mainly methane—escape into the air than previously thought. Although natural gas is usually touted as being better for the climate than other fossil fuels, the study indicated these leaks could erase much of that benefit.

Geoengineering Gets More Scrutiny

Tycoons including Bill Gates and Richard Branson have funded research and reports on geoengineering—proposed planetary-scale projects to fight climate change—raising concerns about the power of vested interests.

Research into geoengineering is a small but fast-growing field. One recent study found that sunlight-blocking particles could cool the planet, but would change regional climate patterns, so would not be able to keep the climate as it is now. Another recent study found that such geoengineering could help food production by limiting heat stress, while retaining the boost in growth from higher CO2 levels.

Wind Power Struggles Ahead

Wind turbine installations in 2011 were up 6 percent over the year before, a slight increase compared with the rapid growth before the 2008 recession. Less than half of the installations were in Europe or North America, and Asia led the growth.

The world’s largest turbine manufacturer, Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, has been flagging: it lost $220 million in 2011—four times more than expected—and a number of senior officers left, most recently the chairman.

In the U.S., wind-power advocates have been fighting for offshore turbines along the Atlantic for decades, and now the federal government is aiming to speed permits after a positive environmental review. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said, “We’ll have those leases issued by the end of 2012.”

Hair, No—But Grass, Yes

Reports from a few years ago that Nepalese teenagers made a solar panel from hair was apparently a hoax, but now MIT researchers have done something that seems equally unlikely: making solar panels from grass clippings. The new study described how to fairly cheaply isolate a key part of the molecular machinery behind photosynthesis, and then apply it to a metal or glass surface to create a photovoltaic panel. The researchers are trying to make it simple enough that anyone can hack together a solar panel using grass clippings and a bag of cheap chemical powder.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

Video by Brendan McCarthy. Text by Leanne Younes

In a sweltering tin shed on the outskirts of Hanoi, 20 Asiatic black bears pant with thirst and gaze with despair through cage bars as they await the next onslaught of bile-extraction agony.

During this crude process, they will be subdued, tied down and will have long needles jabbed into their abdomens numerous times until the gall bladder is located and their bile extracted.  Given that this “farm” is reportedly one of the more humane, there may be the luxury of a portable ultrasound machine used to locate their gallbladder, thus sparing them the random, multiple needle jabs commonly used in the more “hit and miss” method of bile extraction.

Asiatic black bears, or moon bears as they are known because of the distinctive, yellow crescent-shaped marking on their chests, produce bile with the highest amount of ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA).

It is thought that the bears produce the bile as a natural protection for their liver and to prevent gallstones and other illnesses during the long period of hibernation. The bile is reputed to cure everything from bruises to cancer, and is notably regarded and consumed as a libido-enhancing tonic. This makes the bears, and their bile, a valuable business commodity, and a target.

Bear-bile farming is illegal in Vietnam and the Moon bear is listed internationally as a critically endangered species, but this has not halted or even slowed the rampant trade. The bile sells for exorbitant amounts and that means for many Vietnamese “farmers,’ giving up the bears they have trapped from the wild, is not an option.

For people such as Animals Asia Vietnam director Dr. Tuan Bendixsen, the situation is untenable and his bid to save the bears has become his life’s work.

The “farmers” we visited as part of this documentary have had these 40 bears as “pets” for several years now. In 2007, when the Vietnamese government first introduced bear-keeping regulations, those who had micro-chipped bears were allowed to keep them but had to abide by regulations that meant it was illegal to extract bile, sell it or any other bear product. They could not advertise bile or bear products, or engage in any other sort of trade.

The ‘gate-keeping’ process around these regulations is not upheld and that leaves all stakeholders in limbo. Bendixsen has been negotiating unsuccessfully for years with the owners of these bears; appealing to have the bears surrendered so they can be taken to the purpose-built sanctuary at Tam Dao – about two hour’s drive above Hanoi. The sanctuary provides a respite for abused and damaged bears rescued by Animals Asia from farms like this one.

The Animals Asia Foundation is a not-for-profit organization and relies exclusively on donations and sponsorship. At present they have rescued close to 100 but there are still an estimated 4,000 bears on farms throughout Vietnam; trapped in cramped cages, starved, dehydrated and suffering repeated bile extractions. For most, this is the only life they have ever known.

Brendan McCarthy’s website.