State of the Wild 2008-2009
A Global Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands, and Oceans
With a special section:
Emerging Diseases and Conservation: One World-One Health
Series Editor
Kent H. Redford
Volume Editor
Eva Fearn
Table of Contents
By the Numbers
22 facts about emerging diseases and conservation
Foreword: The Value of Conservation
Ward Woods, chair of the board of trustees of the Wildlife Conservation Society and a director of Bessemer Securities, assesses why real financial investment in wildlife conservation is critical.
Introduction: Future States of the Wild
Kent H. Redford, series editor and WCS vice president for conservation strategy, points to the importance of our memory of biodiversity abundance as we plan for the future.
Part I: State of the Wild
Tipping Point: Perspective of a Climatologist
James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the first to bring climate change to the attention of the US government, writes of the climatic feedbacks that will amplify global warming and push the planet to the point of a cataclysmic shift.
Global Conservation News Highlights
Updates on conservation victories and losses since 2006 for Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, Central and South America, Europe, North America, and the Oceans.
Discoveries
Margaret Kinnaird, WCS senior conservationist and director of Mpala Research Centre, Kenya, reminds us of the richness of species still being discovered.
Rarest of the Rare
Catherine Grippo, Taylor H. Ricketts, and Jonathan Hoekstra highlight some of the Earth’s rarest animals and places.
Continuing to Consume Wildlife: An Update
Elizabeth L. Bennett, director of WCS’s Hunting and Wildlife Trade Program, provides an update on the spread of the illegal trade to Central Asia’s vulnerable species. Hunting and Wildlife Trade was the featured topic of State of the Wild 2006.
Part II: Focus on the Wild
Emerging Diseases and Conservation: One World-One Health
Dr. Robert A. Cook, director of WCS’s Living Institutions, and Dr. William Karesh, director of WCS's Wildlife Health Sciences, underscore the need for a more holistic approach to protecting the health of humans, domestic animals, and wildlife as global challenges—such as climate change and population growth—alter our environment.
Little is Big, Many is One: Zoonoses in the Twenty-first Century
David Quammen, one of America’s top nature authors, stitches together the links between isolated outbreaks of diseases that are transmissible between wildlife and humans (zoonotic) and the overall ecosystem disruption that might be causing them.
Land-use Change as a Driver of Disease
Jonathan A. Patz, Sarah H. Olson, and Jill C. Baumgartner of the University of Wisconsin’s Global Environmental Health Program analyze how land-use change affects disease prevalence with a focus on deforestation and malaria.
Transboundary Management of Natural Resources and the Importance of a "One Health" Approach: Perspectives on Southern Africa
Steven A. Osofsky, David H. M. Cumming, and Michael D. Kock of the Animal Health for the Environment And Development program explain that, as protected areas and the land in between them are reconnected in transfrontier conservation areas, the dismantling of barrier fences may allow the movement of disease, interlocking conservation and development interests.
An Ounce of Prevention: Lessons from the First Avian Influenza Scare
William B. Karesh, director of WCS’s Wildlife Health Sciences, and Kristine Smith, Field Veterinary Program, explain what avian influenza is, how H5N1 developed, and highlight the opportunities for viruses to mutate and spread.
Why Wildlife Health Matters in North America
John R. Fischer, director of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the University of Georgia, describes the circumstances that foster diseases of major economic consequence, such as Chronic Wasting Disease and bovine tuberculosis, and how wildlife managers deal with them.
Warming Oceans, Increasing Disease: Mapping the Health Effects of Climate Change
Rita R. Colwell, Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, outlines the climatic conditions that support cholera outbreaks and considers how warming seas will affect infectious and vector-borne diseases.
Conservation Controversy: To Cull or not to Cull?
Journalist Barry Estabrook looks at the challenge of controlling wildlife disease via culling animals. Animal behavioralists, biologists, and epidemiologists illuminate gaps between theory and practice from disease control efforts in badgers, raccoons, bison, and foxes.
Part III: Emerging Issues in the Wild
Conservation of Wildlife
Last of the Great Overland Migrations
Joel Berger, conservationist with WCS and University of Montana’s chair in wildlife biology, illustrates the magnificent phenomenon of long distance migrations of antelope, caribou, wildebeest, and saiga, and how these are being eroded by infrastructure development.
Downward Spiral: Catastrophic Decline of South Asian Vultures
Todd E. Katzner, director of conservation and field research at the National Aviary, tells a story of the near-loss of vultures and the international team that coordinated a lifeboat for the broad-winged scavengers.
Conserving Cold-blooded Australians
Richard Shine, reptile expert at the University of Sydney, describes how toxic invasive toads in Australia—a long-isolated continent famous for its endemic species—change the composition of native reptile communities.
Settling for Less: Disappearing Diadromous Fishes
John Waldman, author and professor at Queens College, details the journeys of salmon, sturgeon, eel, and striped bass between seas and rivers, and the compounding threats that dilute effective conservation.
Conservation of Wild Places
Mapping the State of the Oceans
Eric W. Sanderson, associate director of WCS’s Living Landscapes Program, describes how mapping the combined threats to the oceans—from offshore pollution to overfishing—helps measure the state of the oceans and guide conservation.
Africa’s Last Wild Places: Why Conservation Can’t Wait
J. Michael Fay, conservationist with WCS and the National Geographic Society, spent his career in remote regions of Africa in both a natural and political wilderness. He returns to the Central African Republic to find the slaughter has spread beyond elephants to other African species, and is mirrored by lawlessness in the region.
The Deep Sea: Unknown and Under Threat
Les Watling, biological oceanographer, shares the benthos—the deep sea—and its variously adapted corals, microorganisms, and fishes miles below the surface.
Climate Change in the Andes
Carolina Murcia of Colombia’s Fundación EcoAndina postulates how the biodiverse tropical Andes will fare as the world warms and alpine species shift their ranges.
Grazers and Grasslands: Restoring Biodiversity on the Prairies
James H. Shaw of Oklahoma State University shows how grazing herds of bison and elk defined North American grasslands. While most of the prairie has long been converted, the forces that created prairies—fire and grazing—can inform their restoration.
People, Culture and Conservation
Conservation and Human Displacement
Arun Agrawal, University of Michigan, and Kent H. Redford and Eva Fearn, Wildlife Conservation Society, analyze how the creation of some protected areas has forced human communities to move, and what conservation organizations should do in response to human rights criticisms.
Conservation Psychology: Who Cares about the Biodiversity Crisis?
John Fraser and Jessica Sickler of the WCS Public Research and Evaluation Program take a psychological viewpoint on why alarming news about the environment does not change behavior, and the emotional ties to wildlife that could improve conservation communication.
Biogenetics and Conservation: Celebrate or Worry?
Stephen C. Aldrich, futurist thinker and founder of bio-era consulting, looks at the advancing capacity for gene sequencing which will allow us to create new life forms, potentially challenging our notions of what is natural.
The Art and Practice of Conservation
Conservation in Conflict: Illegal Drugs versus Habitat in South America
Liliana Dávalos and Adriana C. Bejarano explain the impacts of cocaine trafficking on protected areas in Colombia, Bolivia, and parts of Peru.
Rewilding the Islands
C. Josh Donlan, restoration expert and director of Advanced Conservation Strategies, illustrates the big thinking and determination required to restore unique island ecosystems ravaged by invasive rats, cats, goats, and foxes, from New Zealand to the Galápagos.
Addressing AIDS: Conservation in Africa
Judy Oglethorpe of the World Wildlife Fund and Daulos Mauambeta of the Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi document the alarming wave of HIV/AIDS mortality in sub-Saharan Africa and how this compromises conservation capacity and natural resource management, and intensifies poverty.
Conservation as Diplomacy
Steven E. Sanderson, president and CEO of WCS, explains why wildlife biologists brave Iran, Afghanistan, and Myanmar to help preserve rare species, creating a new category of diplomacy.
Final Thoughts
Profession: Awajun
Walter H. Wust, a Peruvian nature writer, weaves a story about connections to wild places and tells of his friendship with remote indigenous communities during a river trip in the jungles of northeastern Peru.
By the Numbers
550
58
371
5000
