I'm a tree hugger!

Todays laugh,

A Liberal and a Genie
A liberal came upon a genie and said, "You're a genie. Can you grant me three wishes?" The genie replied, "Yes, but only if you're feeling generous enough to share your good fortune." The liberal said, "I'm a liberal. I'm always happy to share." The genie said, "O.K., then, whatever you wish for, I'll give every conservative in the country two of it. What's your first wish?" "I would like a new sports car." "O.K., you've got it, and every conservative in the country gets two sports cars. What's your second wish?" "I'd like a million dollars." "O.K., you get a million dollars, every conservative gets two million dollars. What's your third and final wish?" "Well, I've always wanted to donate a kidney."
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Todays Quote
How far must suffering and misery go before we see that even in the day of vast cities and powerful machines , the good earth is our mother and that if we destroy her, we destroy ourselves.
Pliny!
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By ELEANOR RANDOLPH
Published: December 30, 2006
Almost anybody who loves wandering in a quiet wood — minus the all-terrain vehicles or snowmobiles or cellphones — owes a lot of that uncommon silence to Bob Marshall, who helped create the Wilderness Society. Marshall, who died suddenly on a train trip across the country almost 70 years ago, was a United States forester who made Washington understand that woodlands were not simply large green opportunities for the logging industry. They were museums, he said, primeval woodlands to be preserved like ancient Greek treasures. He was so influential in making a nation stop, take a breath and save its forests that a million-acre wilderness is named for him in northwestern Montana.
Now, a group of Marshall’s admirers back East are trying to name a smaller wilderness area after him in New York’s Adirondack Park. While the park as a whole is protected from many kinds of development, only patches of it are granted the special status of wilderness. The Eastern Bob, as it regulars would undoubtedly call the area, would contain over 400,000 acres of uninterrupted nature. To stitch it all together, the state would have to buy up or protect 77,000 acres now open to logging, roadways and even some forms of development. But some upstate communities — where tourism caters to people who come from the congested world to see the natural one — are not yet sufficiently enthusiastic about the idea.
Gov. George Pataki, who did a good job of preserving land across New York, never managed to complete the Bob. (One critic has written that even the idea of a Bob in the western Adirondacks “causes me gastric problems.”) That means environmentalists will have to persuade the new governor — a very urban Eliot Spitzer — not just to care about the outdoors but to share Bob Marshall’s kind of passion for the deep woods and mountains of New York State.
One thought: Start by introducing Mr. Spitzer to July 15, 1932. On that one day, Bob Marshall, who had been climbing the Adirondacks’ higher peaks since he was a youth, marched out of his lodge at 3:30 a.m. Then he climbed (or bagged) 13 certified Adirondack peaks plus one slightly smaller mountain before he quit around 10 p.m.
Mr. Marshall did not hike up these mountains, according to witnesses. He ran up them, ascending over 13,000 feet in almost 19 breathless hours. Mr. Spitzer, who has promised to start revolutionizing Albany on Day One, can certainly recognize the impulse.
“He was not just a pair of legs; he was also a brain,” Phil Brown, editor of Adirondack Explorer magazine, said recently, making it clear he was talking about the wilderness lover, not the incoming governor.
A wilderness named after Bob Marshall in New York would also help claim this famous naturalist as a native. Born in New York City in 1901, Marshall and his family spent summers near Saranac Lake.
In “Bob Marshall in the Adirondacks,” a book edited by Mr. Brown, we can see how Marshall expanded his Saranac experience to other interests. He liked data so much that he once calculated the average time it took the old lumberjacks in Idaho to eat (the average supper consumed only 13 minutes). He took notes on one evening with Albert Einstein at Saranac Lake in 1936. (“It’s wonderful how many foolish things you must try in order to find one good idea,” the great man is quoted as saying.) And his diaries of 30- to 40-mile hikes or racing up Adirondack mountains in winter now read like a challenge for today’s hard-charging athletes.
He took on some of the biggest political adversaries of his day. Robert Moses wanted voters to allow the state to build cabins and other buildings in the Adirondack forest preserve in 1932. Mr. Moses almost always got his way. Not this time. Bob Marshall was among those who campaigned successfully that wilderness should stay wild.
Although they are decades apart, Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Marshall would seem to be a good spiritual match. Speed, raw intelligence, nervous intensity — the new governor should be the perfect one to establish a wilderness in Bob Marshall’s name and in his home state
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Whaling

Overexploit, cheat, deplete. The cycle of greed behind the global whaling industry drove one whale population after another toward oblivion. It is still not known if some species will ever recover, even after decades of protection.
The statistics say it all. The blue whales of the Antarctic are at less than 1 percent of their original abundance, despite 40 years of complete protection. Some populations of whales are recovering but some are not. Only one population, the East Pacific grey whale, is thought to have recovered to its original abundance, but the closely related West Pacific grey whale population is the most endangered in the world. It hovers on the edge of extinction with just over 100 remaining.
Facts and figures
Recent DNA evidence shows that the impact of commercial whaling may be even worse than previously thought. Most estimates of historic whale population size have been extrapolated from old whaling figures, but this method is often very inaccurate, argues marine biologist Steve Palumbi of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in California, USA.In 2003 Palumbi and his colleagues used DNA samples to estimate that humpback whales could have numbered 1.5 million prior to the onset of commercial whaling in the 1800s. That number dwarfs the figure of 100,000 previously accepted by the IWC based on 19th century whaling records. Humpback whales currently number only 20,000.Japanese delegates to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) constantly refer to a 1990 estimate of the Antarctic minke population of 760,000. But that figure was withdrawn by the IWC in 2000 because recent surveys found far fewer minkes than the older ones. The new estimates are half the old in every area that has been resurveyed. The IWC’s scientists do not understand the reasons for this and so far have not been able to agree a new estimate
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And then there is this nonsense!!

Park Service Can't Give Official Age Of Grand Canyon For Fear Of Offending Creationists...
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Posted December 29, 2006 03:53
AP
Due to pressure from Bush Administration officials, the National Park Service is not permitted to give an official age for the Grand Canyon. Additionally, a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood is for sale at the National Park's bookstore.
The sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View was scheduled for review over three years ago, but no such review has been schedule or even requested. The creationist book was the only item approved for sale in 2003 (22 other items were rejected).