Tmbl nthn

In the battle against climate change, one tactic is to improve how oceans and forests store harmful greenhouse gases. That’s because emissions like carbon dioxide can get into the atmosphere and drive up global temperatures.

Scientists call this tactic “carbon sequestration.” Oswald Schmitz, a professor of population and community ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental studies, says forests and oceans can be good at it. 

But an environment’s ability to store carbon is only as strong its individual ecosystems. And the health of many ecosystems is directly related to the efficacy of its top predators. WNPR spoke with Schmitz about how conservationists can leverage predators to help keep carbon emissions in check.

When folks like me think about global warming we’re often thinking about plants or microbes and the role they play in capturing carbon emissions. But you’re saying, in addition to that, we probably should be thinking of animals and predators, too – why?

The reason why it matters – top predators and the impact they have on herbivores – is because the herbivores can change what they consume. It’s actually these multiplier effects that happen because one species is interacting with another and the effects of that propagate as you go down the food chain.

Pull out an example for me where we can talk about a specific predator and the impact it can have on an ecosystem – and how that can affect carbon emissions.

Wolves can prey on moose. And the moose, which normally eat vegetation, then have a changed impact on the vegetation. In a boreal system, for example, the boreal forest is a really important sink for carbon. Mainly because it’s a cold environment. As trees shed their bark, needles, and branches, – it just stays in the soil as organic matter. It’s slow to become decomposed because it’s a cool environment.

If herbivores are highly abundant, like moose or deer, they can eat up a lot of the vegetation, so it doesn’t end up in the soil. If you add wolves to that story, then wolves keep the moose populations in check – the moose eat less and so more of that biomass ends up in the soil. The wolves, by virtue of affecting what the moose do to the vegetation, can change how much carbon is actually stored in the boreal forest.

We have to be careful not to run with this idea yet. There’s a lot more science that needs to be done to really calculate how much carbon [gets sequestered] - and what the benefits are. But it’s certainly pointing to a huge untapped potential – in a sense, using animals as geoengineers - rather than relying solely on technology.

You gave the example in a paper you wrote for Yale Environment 360 about sea otters and the impact they’ve had on kelp forests. Talk a bit about that.

You’ve got kelp forests on the western sea coast running from southern United States all the way up into northern Alaska. In the absence of sea otters, sea urchins explode in abundance. Sea urchins are herbivores that eat up the kelp forests.

That was discovered sort of by accident because sea otters were over exploited in the fur trade. The loss of the sea otters led to a loss of kelp forests that could sequester the carbon.

People like Jim Estes actually discovered that [by] reintroducing sea otters, you actually saw luxuriant growth in the kelp forests. It’s the sea otters feeding on the sea urchins and lowering their abundance, which then lowered how much damage the urchins caused on the kelp forests.

This was one of the early examples showing top predators could even affect ecosystems, and it’s been the impetus for doing more and more work exploring the top predator effects in ecosystems.

How do you translate a finding like that to the conservation community? To get that message to them that while animals can be victims of climate change, they are also drivers of it …

I think part of the problem in conversation right now is we’ve focused on iconic species. Wildebeest. Sea otters. Lions. Tigers. We try to protect those, but we tend not to think about how they’re interdependent with other species as part of an ecosystem.

I think the fundamental message is that these species belong to something bigger. Conservation needs to move away from just thinking about protecting species to protecting the interdependence those species have with other species. Because that’s what keeps ecosystems resilient. It’s what protects those important services like carbon sequestration. So it’s shifting the mindset in conservation from one of thinking about species to one of thinking about the environmental services that come with a collection of species that are organized into a food chain.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

One of the biggest challenges in treating brain cancer has been getting drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier and attack tumours where they’re needed.

But scientists say they’ve now developed a truly soluble liquid aspirin that can make its way into the brain, and, in the lab at least, kill cancerous glioblastoma cells without harming healthy brain tissue.

“When I listen to old field recordings, maybe you’ll hear a dog barking way off in the background. You realize the house it was recorded in is torn down, the dog is dead, the tape recorder is broken, the guy who made the recording died in Texas, the car out front has four flat tires, even the dirt that the house sat on is gone—probably a parking lot—but we still have this song. Takes me out when I listen to those old recordings.

Recording for me is like photographing ghosts.”

Neil Young & The Promise of the Real - Live Earth

Shakey’s got a new live LP coming out next month: EARTH. Here’s his official statement: 

We made a live record and every creature on the planet seemed to show up. Suddenly all the living things of Earth were in the audience going crazy. Then they took over the stage, letting their wild sounds mingle with the Vanilla Singers perfect corporate harmony. Earth’s creatures let loose, there were Bee breakdowns, Bird breakdowns and yes, even Wall Street breakdowns, jamming with me and Promise of the Real! The show was non stop bliss for 98 minutes, no breaks. EARTH does not fit on iTunes. It breaks all their rules (and couldn’t all really be heard that way anyway) No one who was there will ever forget the love, wonder and beautiful madness of EARTH. I know I won’t. Neil

OK! So here’s a preview of the record via Big O, made up of audience tapes, but featuring the same tracklisting as the official release. No Bee breakdowns of any kind, as far as I can tell. 

Neil and the Promise of the Real (still have trouble typing that name out) are touring this summer, and just finished a quick US jaunt, where they played “Revolution Blues” for the first time in almost 30 years, not to mention a 40-minute “Down By The River.” Exciting stuff. 

Gene Krupa Jam Session, 1941

Drummer Gene Krupa playing drum at Gjon Mili’s studio.

New York, NY

To our loyal and dedicated audience :

Once more, there has been a copyright claim made against material that Grass-Tops had planned to issue to the public in the form of a CD and digital download. This time, it involves the final vocal album that Robbie released, entitled Bouquet.

The first-time reissue of this long-lost and forgotten gem was slated to be published on GTR sometime early this year. The complete stream of the album reissue premiered on AdHoc earlier this month.

After investigating the copyright claim, we don’t believe it to have any merit. But out of precaution, Grass-Tops has made the decision to protect our company by not offering this material for sale. Instead, we’re releasing Bouquet (and all corresponding bonus tracks) as a free download to the public (link attached).

We want all of our loyal fans and customers to understand that very little financing has gone into this reissue, since the physical production of the CDs had not yet begun when we received the claim. The time and energy that was spent on the curation and restoration of this project would have been invested regardless of whether or not the reissue was to be offered for sale. So in that sense, nothing has been lost.

While we feel this music is obviously worthy of a proper physical edition, and lament the fact that this will not be happening, we have to appreciate that this recording even exists at all in such clarity! Everything else is bonus. And while we’re disappointed that some people choose to make difficult these efforts to give Robbie his proper due, our core objective to simply get the music out into the world has not been hijacked.

To put it simply, if Robbie were here today, he would want the music to be heard first and foremost. And that time has come. We are not vigilantes. Grass-Tops is simply making the most educated decision given the circumstance before us. We are allowing the world to hear what Robbie created for the world, while keeping open the possibility for a future physical release.

Now, over thirty years after it’s original publication on cassette (1983), Robbie Basho’s Bouquet is available for the whole world to have in its collection. We ask that you help propagate this beautiful work of art throughout the earth for every ear to hear!

Hear it. Share it. Love it.

So sad to hear of #SteveYoung’s passing. The brilliant songwriter and musician has finally crossed that seventh bridge.