Currents

Last week, scientists from around the world kicked off the Amphibian Ark project, a global campaign to protect the world’s vanishing amphibian species from a ravenous killer fungus, widespread habitat loss and exposure to pollution and global warming. Project organizers are asking zoos, botanical gardens and aquariums around the world to each take in at least 500 frogs from a threatened local species to protect them from the killer fungus, chytrid.

The National Park Service (NPS), looking for new dollars to support its research and conservation initiatives, has proposed "bioprospecting" for a fee. Environmental groups have joined together in opposition, claiming that bioprospecting undermines the mission of the national parks.

Ripples of calamity from Darfur are reverberating across the border into Chad. With more than 200,000 refugees living in camps there and 90,000 East Chadians now displaced by increased violence, mass displacement has wreaked havoc on the already-fragile ecosystem.

Four Greenpeace activists locked themselves together in the Canadian headquarters of Kimberly-Clark last week, demanding that the U.S.-based paper company stop using virgin pulp from Canada’s boreal forests in its popular products.

The troubled Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is set to expire in 2012. With American sentiment for action on global warming building rapidly, environmentalists are focusing on drafting a follow-up agreement on which even holdouts like the U.S. and Australia can agree.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced last December that the agency will likely approve the sale of cloned foods this year. The FDA’s action flies in the face of widespread scientific concern about the risks of food from clones, and ignores the animal cruelty and troubling ethical concerns that the cloning process brings. What’s worse, the FDA indicates that it will not require labeling on cloned food, so consumers will have no way to avoid these experimental foods.

The natural alliance between religious and secular environmentalists is happening in thousands of local contexts where secularists and people of faith work together to resist climate change, toxic waste disposal and destructive economic "development." Facing the same environmental crisis that their secular counterparts do, people of faith have been changing their basic attitudes towards nature and seeing the moral connections between our treatment of nature and our treatment of people.

Illegal logging across parts of Southeast Asia, including in national parks, is decimating wildlife populations. The orangutan is at particular risk. According to a recent report by United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), 98 percent of remaining forests on Sumatra and Borneo could be gone by 2022, with serious consequences for local people and wildlife.