Friday, August 08, 2008

NRDC vs. Me   [Greg Pollowitz]

The NRDC is mad at me for snarking about how the WCS "found" 125,000 extra gorillas in Africa. An excerpt:

Now, as should be apparent to even a casual observer, estimating the population of any two organisms, much less large mammals as different as jungle-living gorillas and ice-dwelling polar bears is a vastly different exercise and one has very little do to with the other. But even that’s somewhat besides the point. Pollowtiz isn’t even making a coherent argument. It was WCS that found the additional gorillas, so the fact that they contributed data which informed the polar bear population estimate should, if anything, bolster it’s credibility not subtract from it. And besides, what is the larger point Pollowitz is trying to make here? That the biologists who did the original gorilla estimates weren’t real “scientists” because there turns out to have been an undiscovered population? That population estimates of wildlife are never to be trusted?  In that case no endangered wildlife populations could ever be protected . . . oh, well maybe that’s his point after all.

No, that's not what I was saying. I'm saying that up until a few days ago, the settled science was that there were only 50,000 gorillas left in the world. I'm saying that millions of dollars have been spent in a way that might have gone to better use, for both the gorillas, and more importantly, for the humans that live in Africa. I'm saying that the WCS, when helping to look for polar bears "studied 28 years of satellite images of sea ice and contributed key data to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that helped inform the USFWS decision." I'm saying that maybe the WCS should stop looking at their computers and, like they did in Africa, actually try to count the polar bears with something other than a 50-year ice model.

I'm also saying that this is a pattern. Take this article from last year on the vast herds of wildlife found flourishing in Sudan, despite nearly every scientist's prediction to the contrary:

The project provides the first reliable data from Southern Sudan since fighting halted nearly all conservation work there in 1983. Since a 2005 peace accord, Southern Sudan has been an autonomously governed region within the country of Sudan.

The findings are better news than some scientists had expected. In the absence of access to the troubled region, experts had speculated that poachers and rebel forces hunting for food would have completely wiped out the local animals. (Related video series: "Sudan, Country in Crisis".)

"Seeing thousands upon thousands upon thousands of white-eared kob streaming under the aircraft, day after day, was like I had died and was having the most unbelievable dream you could ever have," said J. Michael Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence who helped lead the survey. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society).

"All my life I have been watching wildlife, and when I saw the kob in Sudan I said to myself, You can die now, Fay, you finally saw what you could have never imagined you would ever see on this planet."

Kob, a type of antelope, are believed to number between 800,000 and 1.2 million in the region. Their movement through Southern Sudan rivals the great wildebeest migration of the Serengeti.

Also found during the survey were many other antelope species, including beisa oryxes, which some Sudanese officials said were extinct in the region; 4,000 Nile lechwes, thought to have been nearly wiped out; 250,000 Mongalla gazelles; 160,000 tiangs; and 13,000 reedbucks.

The survey also reported 2,800 ostriches and at least 8,000 elephants in the region, which was immortalized in Peter Matthiessen's classic of nature writing, The Tree Where Man Was Born.

Some 5,800 elephants were in the Sudd, the vast swampy area where the Nile disperses before taking up its course again through north Sudan to the Mediterranean Sea (map of Sudan).

The discovery fills in a major gap in the world's knowledge about elephants. The World Conservation Union's 2007 elephant survey, for example, said that "virtually all of Sudan's range remains unassessed" and listed what it called an informed guess of 280 elephants.

So what I'm saying is: Stop reporting what is in effect an "informed guess" as if it were something more than that.

08/08 10:30 AMShare