July 2010

Protected areas are important to each person in their own way.  Be it a special spot, a rare habitat or unique ecosystem, we all have our reasons for caring.  While I care deeply about the intrinsic value of protected areas, I also care about the data that helps us catalog these places.  One of CBI’s recent projects is PAD-US 1.1 (CBI Edition) dataset, a national inventory of protected areas.

Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University scientist who served on the international research panel on global warming that shared the 2007 Nobel Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, has died. He was 65.

Dr. Ben Santer has said, "We honor the memory of Steve Schneider by continuing to fight for the things he fought for – by continuing to seek clear understanding of the causes and impacts of climate change. We honor Steve by recognizing that communication is a vital part of our job. We honor Steve by taking the time to explain our research findings in plain English. By telling others what we do, why we do it, and why they should care about it. We honor Steve by raising our voices, and by speaking out when powerful “forces of unreason” seek to misrepresent our science. We honor Steve Schneider by caring about the strange and beautiful planet on which we live, by protecting its climate, and by ensuring that our policymakers do not fall asleep at the wheel."

The science of climate change adaptation was created before its practitioners existed. International bodies working to identify the effects of climate change and to create legal frameworks for solutions deemed it to exist. Today, there is no time for a methodical evolution of the field as the count-down for the world as we know it has started. Of course the planet is not going to blow-up when it reaches zero but there will be an increasing number of changes with fewer and fewer opportunities to choose ways to adapt to them.

The truth about conservation is that some of the best work is done by intelligent folks sitting in front of computer screens, tied to a global community by a tangle of phone and internet lines, or in a board rooms surrounded by like-minded Patagonia- and Carhartt-clad colleagues. Several years ago I made the commitment to surrender to the requisite technology, frequent meetings, plane trips and long days indoors that are needed to make effective conservation happen; however, I also vowed to live within the wild archetypal landscapes I work hard to conserve.