Save Eco Destinations

As noted in Eco-Yucatán, the 24^th annual International Coastal Cleanup will take place on September 19, 2009. (You can schedule a clean-up on an alternate date, too.)

Here’s a video with some gorgeous footage (um, for the first 19 seconds) that succinctly sums up what the Intl Coastal Cleanup is about:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/TX5WAEeqwYU&rel]

Last year, nearly 400,000 volunteers collected more than 6.8 million pounds of trash in 104 countries and 42 US states during the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup — the world’s largest volunteer effort of its kind.

Surf on over here to find a clean-up site in your area and register for the one you want to attend. If no events are going on in your area and/or Sept 19 does not work for you, you can propose a clean-up here. Very flexible for optimal efficiency. Woo!

You can “sign up to clean up” debris such as plastic bottles (plastic everything, really), used condoms (yup – I had to clean these up once at a beach clean-up in Los Angeles), seaweed, and other junk from beaches and waterways here.

For clean oceans and to prevent the unnecessary, grisly death of marine life. photo by www.genetologisch-onderzoek.nl

This event is extra sweet because it’s international and we absolutely need this kind of activism worldwide. You’d think federal or at least state governments would sponsor this sort of thing. But no. Governments just take us to war (hi, U.S.!), take away all funding for domestic violence shelters in the entire state of California (hi, Gov. Schwarzenegger!), and other awesome stuff. (By the way, you can oppose the governor’s grand move by following the link to Stop Family Violence’s action alert, also at the above link, if you’re in CA, or passing along the link to a CA resident.)

P.S. Is anyone else bothered by the fact that corporations are sponsoring this event? I guess they just want consumers to think they don’t suck 100% of the time.

photo by Lyndon Douglas via the Barbican

1) Londoners: Visit the art exhibit Radical Nature at the Barbican through October 18 and/or read about it here. The Barbican is also hosting other events about nature.

2) Grist article about climate change art

3) Take a slideshow tour of eco-ish museums

4) View some stunning photographs of birds in the wild

Puffin, Northumberland, UK. Photo from telegraph.co.uk

5) New York: Visit the Design for a Living World exhibit at Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum through January 4, 2010. Read a blog post about it at supereco.

6) Play to Stop – Europe for Climate is a collaboration between MTV and EU Climate Action to get the “young’uns” to give a damn. Because I’m not in the mood to tell you about it, I’ll let someone else do it:

The campaign will involve three concerts, TV spots, webcasts and games, and editorial content about the battle against climate change.

The concerts will be connected with major events related to climate change. The first concert, by Moby, will be in Stockholm and will be linked to World Water Week. The second and third concerts (entertainers yet to be announced) will be in Budapest linked to Mobility Week and in Copenhagen linked to the Climate Conference.

Other famous celebrities involved in the campaign will be the Bulgarian tennis player Magdalena Maleeva, Danish singer Anna David, Italian TV star Paola Maugeri, Polish entertainer Michal Pirog, and Romanian climate activist Serban Miron Copot.

So you go, make an account, and watch videos and so on. There is a knowledge test and games you can play to go to the concerts. This is open to people 18 years old+ in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Read more about it at PlanetSave.

7) See NASA’s sexy, first-ever images of “night-shining” clouds possibly linked to global warming. They were captured by the AIM, or Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, satellite at different dates.

8 ) Holy Jezeus it’s an office atop a tree! And it is gorrrgeous.

photo by inhabitat

9) Check out photos of living, growing furniture. ‘Nuff said.

10) Get crafty with ideas to make throw pillows, homemade lava lamps, and more by reusing stuff you already have.

Hoatzins

Tourists’ noise pollution doesn’t only harm endangered sea turtles—it also harms hoatzins. It’s to be expected, right? …Except this noise pollution comes from ecotourists.

Bird watching can have its perils, it seems, since even quiet conversation among bird watchers can cause extreme stress to some species of wild birds. Daniel Karp of Stanford University has researched three species of hoatzins (Opisthocomus hoazin) in areas surrounding various eco lodges within the Peruvian Amazon.

Even library conversation-volume chats induced defense mechanisms in the birds, causing them to cluck and defecate. Wow. The birds were found to climb and fly away as well. The hoatzins’ behavior was contingent on how loudly people spoke.

What’s most troublesome is the fact that stress disturbs these birds’ rearing capabilities, thwarting the chicks’ training to become self-sufficient and leading to “heightened mortality rates.”

To gather information, Karp approached hoatzin habitats by canoe and experimented between being silent and playing recordings of conversations at different volumes from different distances, keeping track of when birds became stressed enough to fly away. Karp first tried playing the conversations at 50 decibels (library conversation volume), then at 60 (actual volume of typical tourists’ chats in bird watching zones), and at 70 (the loudest conversations he was able to record). The study was conducted last year and lasted one month.

While Karp says “ceas[ing] all conversation” and staying far enough away should be sufficient to prevent freaking out hoatzins, behavioral ecologist and conservation biologist at UCLA Dam Blumstein says that, although we think being ecotourists is awesome, we’re being careless and irresponsible anyway.

Moral of the study: ecotourism is not as green as we may have thought.

No kidding. (Yes, I am bitter.)

Apparently, even when quietly hiking through undergrowth, [eco]tourists cause wildlife extreme stress. Bird watching, wildlife watching, and hiking are all harmful to carnivores’ survival and/or reproduction rates. The victims are dolphins, dingoes, penguins, and polar bears, among many other species.

Well, crap.

Not only should we keep from being destructive when in natural areas, but we should also not even go there.

Well, at least now I have evidence to back up my theory that ecotourism and eco hotels within fragile natural areas do more harm than good.